homage to dystopias: why Orwell never goes out of style

    Glover, Dennis. The Last Man in Europe: A Novel. Overlook Press, 2017.   
    Lynskey, Dorian, The Ministry of Truth: the Biography of George Orwell's Nineteen Eight-four. Doubleday, 2019. (Contents: History stopped -- Utopia fever -- The world we're going down into -- Wells-world -- Radio Orwell -- The heretic -- Inconvenient facts -- Every book is a failure -- The clocks strike thirteen -- Black millennium -- So damned scared -- Orwellmania -- Oceania 2.0 -- Afterword.)   
    Orwell, George. Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays. Compiled and with an introduction by George Packer. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
    Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. With an introduction by Lionel Trilling. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1980.


“On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” – George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." – first sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four

     George Orwell is one of the few creative artists, even fewer writers, to have an adjective named after him. ‘Orwellian’ went into the zeitgeist long ago, thus placing him in some pretty fast company – Wagnerian, Kafkaesque, Hitchcockian, et al. An elite group indeed. Part of the explanation may be that the word rolls off the tongue in such a pleasingly mellifluous fashion. Consider for example the possible adjectivization of other creators of dystopian classics: Huxleyian, Burgessian, Dickian, Koestlerian, Bradburyesque, Macaulayesque [1]. They don’t have quite the same magic. To be fair, Wellsian is pretty good, though it comes with the unfortunate peril of being confused with ‘Wellesian’ (relating to all things Orson Welles), a term that entered the lexicon some time ago. But a pleasing aural quality and ease of pronunciation can’t be the only reasons the term has stuck. Indeed, and only appropriate given Orwell’s egalitarian worldview, the word has a utilitarian, all-purpose quality and has been used, abused and misused mightily by all sides of the ideological spectrum: like the man himself, the word ‘Orwellian’ has been appropriated by both the Left and the Right. Perhaps most revealing, and most ironic, is that there’s no real consensus on what the word actually means.
    Be that as it may, and despite the ubiquity of the word, and more so, the plethora of dystopian novels, television programs, and movies today, it all serves to underscore, three quarters of a century on, that Orwell really had no successors. Even in his day there were few who could be mentioned in the same breath. Perhaps a useful comparison is the eccentric American film critic James Agee, who was an almost exact contemporary of Orwell, and who, uncannily, also passed on at the untimely age of forty-six [2]. Like Orwell, he was something of a literary polymath, and, also like Orwell, a bit erratic and unpredictable in his views. In addition to his film critiques, Agee also wrote poetry, letters, essays, novels, short stories, journalism and a work of quasi-documentary non-fiction. Like Orwell he sometimes ventured into politics, but the emphasis was reversed: Orwell wrote mostly about politics and sometimes dabbled in film and theater reviews. Both were prolific writers, and a close reading of their work sometimes reveals a grinding it out in the salt mines quality at odds with their supposed profound utterances. Unlike Orwell, Agee’s fame doesn’t rest (mostly) on one work, and in an age when we prefer the specialist over the generalist, it’s Orwell who has endured, but not Agee who, despite being revered in cinematic circles, is mostly unknown to the general public.
    It's interesting to theorize whether the two men knew each other’s writings. There’s no evidence but considering their respective prominence it’s hard to imagine they didn’t. In any case, like Orwell, Agee’s work holds up well, and after languishing in semi-obscurity for decades, he’s enjoying a modest second wind these days. Like Orwell he always stuck to his guns and had little regard for trends or fashions. As a result he had a small if loyal following in his own lifetime. And like Orwell he was frequently prescient in his assessments [3]. Some films he championed that were initially met with indifference or disdain have over time assumed the status of classics, examples being Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Val Lewton’s psychological horror films. Also worthy of note is his anticipating the auteur theory that emerged full blast two decades later.
    Agee, like Orwell, was wrong sometimes, well, often really, but like Orwell, he was nonetheless unfailingly fascinating and forthright in his wrongness. But in certain respects the two men were different. The prose style in particular is a study in contrasts. Orwell’s tightly focused, not-a-word-too-many prose contrasts with Agee’s twisty-turny writing style, which has a certain charm but is often maddening to read, and even more difficult to divine exactly what he said, or meant, never more so than when he set his critical pen to the field of politics [4]. After reading an Agee paragraph, even a sentence sometimes(!), it’s unclear whether his sympathies were with the Left or the Right. And it’s impossible not to mention the stunningly self-evident fact that Orwell, for all his progressive bent, was at heart old school British in his outlook while Agee was quintessentially American. Finally, despite both men’s forward-looking visions, both were creatures of their time. Agee did most of his film criticism in the 1940s and was a product of that era, while Orwell, as alluded to above, for all his egalitarian bent, never completely shed his old boy attitudes and their attendant social and cultural biases.
    But getting back to Orwell’s more progressive strain, one of the great ironies of his opus maximus, Nineteen Eighty-Four [5], is its pervasive presence in our modern world, along with the invoking of the term ‘Orwellian,’ a kind of Big Brother-is-watching effect, with Orwell looking down from the heavens and shaking his head in disapproval, even disgust. The simple fact is that Orwelliana — not just of the literary type in the form of biographies, letters, critiques, memoirs, tributes, graphic novels, comic books, parodies and homages, but also plays, movies, operas, musicals, ballet, blogs and heaven knows what else — runs rampant in our world. Some of it is insightful, but much of it not so insightful, or, perhaps even worse, blandly hagiographical (one might even cite this essay as being an example of the latter).
    The other irony is that, befitting his real calling as a journalist, Orwell was an essayist at heart, this despite the indisputable fact that his two novels are by far his best-known, and thus most influential, works. Still, the essay was a good fit for Orwell, and he used this eminently flexible format to opine on an impressive range of subjects. Which brings us to the present collection, appropriately titled Unpleasant Facts, a combination of memoir, autobiography and social commentary. In his sprightly introduction, George Packer points out that:

   “ … Orwell, who produced a staggering amount of prose over the course of a career cut short at forty-six by tuberculosis, was a working journalist, and in the two volumes of this new selection of essays you will find book, film and theater reviews, newspaper columns, and war reporting, as well as cultural commentary, political criticism, autobiographical fragments and longer personal narratives. In Orwell’s hands, they are all essays. He is always pointing to larger concerns beyond the immediate scope of his subject.”

    Unpleasant Facts then has a remarkable variety, as well as an unapologetic tendency to subjectivity, though sometimes a reading between the lines is necessary to flesh out Orwell’s real message. Nonetheless each entry reflects Orwell’s great compassion and insight, whether he describes the sordid living conditions in “Marrakech;” recollects wistfully, if wryly, his experience in “Bookshop Memories; or recounts with great pathos "Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War." My personal favorites are “Wartime Diary,” “Why I Write,” and the aforementioned “Bookshop Memories.”
    For the Orwell novice or casual reader of the novels, this stellar collection is about the perfect and painless introduction to his nonfiction works. One quibble: there’s no index, usually an inexcusable sin in such a name- and concept-rich book. However, since Orwell is the author, and the content so good, I’ll overlook the omission. Aside: both in tone and content I prefer Unpleasant Facts over All Art, thus its inclusion here as the subject of a review. Interesting that I initially thought the reverse would be the case.
    But to move on to arguably weightier material: written in 1948, published in 1949, and originally titled The Last Man in Europe, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel for the ages, well, at least the Twentieth Century, for which it’s probably the definitive work of fiction. A work that’s always resonant and stubbornly all too contemporary, the novel has ensconced terms like "Big Brother," "doublethink," "newspeak" and “thought police” so much they’ve become embedded in all forms of discourse, not just the political.  
    As described by Orwell, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a Hadean cauldron of newspeak and doublethink in which history is rewritten at the convenience of, and always friendly to, the all-powerful ruling class, which is comprised of members of The Party. Reality and accuracy don’t exist in this thick forest of fog and mirrors, drowning in a morass of slogans and approved phraseology. The similarities to today’s world have not been lost on commentators, not least of all author Lynskey when he states in his introduction to The Ministry of Truth that: “Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the book we turn to when truth is mutilated, language is distorted, power is abused, and we want to know how bad things can get.”
    In any case the rigidly-controlled society of Nineteen Eighty-Four features the aforementioned Ministry of Truth that distorts reality, and with the ever-watchful eyes of Big Brother, keeps tabs on citizens' behavior. The ruling society is also engaged in perpetual wars – war is peace, peace is war – that take place in vague, far-flung frontiers. Citizens receive frequent reports, all positive, on the progress of said wars. The world presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four has particular resonance in our current culture which is plagued by the misinformation, disinformation, outright lies and propaganda that lards all forms of media these days (especially the infamous social media), in both state- and non-state controlled societies. To be fair, there is also a goodly amount of accuracy and reliability online these days, at least in ostensibly free countries, if one takes the time to look hard enough.
    As prescient as he was in the political realm, Orwell didn’t get everything right. His dismissive attitude toward gay males and the ridiculing of vegetarians seems wrong-headed, even reactionary, in light of Twenty-first Century sensibilities. Similarly, he missed the eventual primacy of the mega corporations and the totalitarianism of the dollar. And he couldn’t possibly have foreseen what would have been deemed high tech miracles in his day that today we take for granted.
   Suffice to say that such technological miracles have come with a price, literally, an Orwellian bargain if you like. And not just in the rampant, some would say inevitable, commercialization and commodification of the internet, but the sad reality that anyone online is constantly being Big Brothered by companies wanting to push their products, not unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four’s low-tech peeking into the lives of ordinary citizens. Today’s mega-companies, however, with their ever more sophisticated technologies and ready supply of cyber gurus, are far more expert at collecting data than Big Brother’s clunky machines ever were. As Thomas Pynchon wrote in the foreword to a 2003 edition, the internet is "a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about."
    In The Ministry of Truth, author Dorian Lynskey does an admirable job of discussing the origins of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the social and political culture in which Orwell resided, and the book’s publication and subsequent reception and influence in high and low culture. It’s Lynskey’s thesis that Orwell’s six months fighting in the Spanish Civil War was the defining influence on the basic philosophy of the novel, not necessarily the fighting itself but the Stalin sympathizers’ manipulation of the facts. Lynskey isn’t a great literary stylist and he jumps around a lot, and those looking for an in-depth analysis or review of the novel itself will be disappointed. As the subtitle implies this is a history of the book itself, in particular its impact, and not an exercise in literary criticism. The Ministry of Truth then is a welcome addition to the Orwell deluge: it should fascinate and delight devotees and Orwell beginners equally. Index, precis, and extensive notes, but, alas, no general bibliography.
    Fast backwards a decade or so and we get Orwell’s far less well known but no less profound, and arguably best book, Homage to Catalonia, his account of his fighting on the Loyalist (Republican) side in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. The war was a magnet for journalists, novelists, leftists, adventurers, grifters, idealists, and not least, two very interested client state benefactors, Stalin on one side and Hitler and Mussolini on the other. However, few chroniclers can claim to have actually fought in the war, as did Orwell on the Loyalist side. Seldom has the outright futility and stupidity of war been portrayed so unflinchingly and from the standpoint of the ordinary soldier. Especially unforgettable is the dismayingly detailed account of the very moment a bullet fired by a sniper pierced his neck, barely missing a major artery.
    Orwell was a member of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) militia, one of several socialist groups in Spain that grew out of the Great Depression. The POUM was essentially a workers’ party, and its main focus was working conditions in Spanish factories. The POUM had little interest in the power structures in Moscow and little sympathy for the communism practiced by Joseph Stalin. Therefore it’s fascinating to read Orwell’s multi-layered discussion of the various groups and political factions fighting on the Loyalist side, not always co-operating amid their ever-tenuous relationships with their would-be masters in Moscow. It’s illuminating to read the evolution of Orwell’s initial infatuation with communism and subsequent gradual disillusionment, brought about by his observations in the war, the result being his savage lampooning in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The 1980 edition also benefits from Lionel’s Trilling’s perceptive if trifle long-winded introduction.
    Toward the end of the book Orwell writes eloquently, even affectionately, about his experience in the war which left him with perhaps ambivalent emotions. Moved by the little kindnesses he observed and experienced while put off by the larger social and political systems present, nonetheless in the end he survived, and not with a totally jaundiced view of humanity: “This war, in which I played so ineffectual a part, has left me with memories that are mostly evil, and yet I do not wish that I had missed it. When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this — and however it ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter and physical suffering — the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading.”
    It should be no surprise that Orwell’s life and work have inspired several fictional accounts, and one of the most recent, and best, is Dennis Glover’s novel The Last Man in Europe, which covers Orwell’s life from 1935 to his untimely death in 1950. As much as Last Man ostensibly focuses on the great man’s magnum opus, which (co)incidentally was originally called The Last Man in Europe, only about a third of the book actually covers the last years at Barnhill on the Scottish island of Jura and the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Among other things these sections include unvarnished accounts of the primitive living conditions and Orwell's progressively failing health, complete with unsettling details of treatments for his tuberculosis at hospital. Glover has a smoothly readable prose style and is an expert storyteller. It’s been said some nonfiction works read like fiction but here the order is reversed: Glover’s quasi-academic yet eminently reader-friendly narrative, along with his undoubted command of the facts, are so compelling we’re convinced that it’s a true story we’re reading and not a fictionalized account. Much as Glover draws his material generally from actual real-life events, he creatively embroiders and enhances the story in interesting and entertaining ways. Perhaps this accounts for more background and ‘telling’ in this version than snappy repartee, though I did like the dinner party with H.G. Wells and both men’s edgy back-and-forth.
    But Last Man is ultimately a serious work: the book is more a meditation of concepts and philosophy, specifically Orwell’s, than sparkling dialogue. As Glover writes so perceptively in his afterword, “ … Orwell’s nightmare future was not an imaginative work of science fiction (a genre he often criticized) but an amplification of dangerous political and intellectual trends he witnessed in his time.” Last Man in Europe will certainly appeal to Orwell buffs and especially those who have read Nineteen Eighty-Four and is a welcome addition to the vast Orwell literature.

    Further reading: Richard Rhodes, Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made, Simon & Schuster, 2015; Amanda Vaill, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. 2014; James Agee, Film Writing and Selected Journalism, Library of America, distributed in the U.S. by Penguin Putnam, 2005; Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses, Viking, 2021.

    1 ‘Macaulayesque’ is a term I've coined in honor of Rose Macauley, whose 1919 dystopian novel What Not is said to have anticipated, and possibly influenced, both Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. Macauley also penned a book about the Spanish Civil War, And No Man’s Wit, which has an uncanny parallel to Orwell’s memoir Homage to Catalonia, discussed herein.
   2 One might have thought the obvious choice was Christopher Hitchens, who wrote at length on Orwell and was an accomplished essayist himself. But Hitchens has a certain sharp edge and almost self-conscious sense of irony, along with a tendency to pomposity, none of which are present in Orwell’s writing. Thus I thought Agee would be the more interesting, and more apropos, choice for comparison.
   3 And sometimes he missed the boat, his lack of interest in film noir being a prime example.
   4 As was the case with many writers of the Thirties and Forties, there’s a leftist tilt in the writings of Agee and Orwell. However, they were not always consistent or predictable in their views.
   5 Orwell invariably insisted on the full spelling of the novel’s eighteen letters as the book’s true title, not the digits ‘1984’.
  6 The two volumes Packer refers to are Unpleasant Facts and its companion volume All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays.

the good war that never ends

    Collingham, E. M. (Elizabeth M.)  The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. New York, Penguin, 2012.
     Kempowski, Walter. Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich. Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside. Foreword by Alan Bance. New York, Norton, 2015. [Originally published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2014 as Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary from Hitler's Last Birthday to VE Day.] "Original German edition first published in 2005. Walter Kempowski: Das Echolot. Abgesang '45 Ein kollekitives Tagebuch. Copyright © 2005 by Albrecht Knaus Verlag, Munich."
     McConahay , Mary Jo. The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin America during World War II. New York, St. Martin’s 2018.
     McMeekin, Sean. Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II. New York, Basic Books, 2021.
     Schmid, Walter. A German POW in New Mexico. Translated by Richard Rundell; edited by Wolfgang T. Schlauch. Albuquerque, NM, University of New Mexico Press, 2005. [Published in cooperation with the Historical Society of New Mexico]. [First published in Germany in 2000 under the title Einer unter Vielen: ein Bericht über Kriegseinsatz in Tunesien und Gefangenschaft in Amerika und England 1942-1947 (W. Schmid [Libri Books on Demand], Hamburg, [Norderstedt], 2000)].
     Selby, Scott Andrew. A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer. New York, Berkley Books, 2014.

    For professional historians as well as amateur enthusiasts (like myself), World War II is a source of never ending fascination and discovery, as is witnessed by the continuing deluge from the major publishing houses, small presses, and do-it yourselfers: every year new information is discovered or a new take on the events surges forth.
    As for myself, I enjoy the offbeat and even eccentric approaches to the conflict: studies that consider a specialized aspect or offer a different perspective, in contrast to the Allied-centric narrative we’re presented by pop culture venues like the History Channel, Story, A&E, Hollywood, and the many popular histories. Thus the six, relatively recent, entries considered here, presenting as they do aspects of the war that haven’t been covered so thoroughly, are especially welcome.
   Selby’s account of a serial murderer in Nazi Berlin at the height of the war, and Schmid’s POW memoir, while the slightest entries, are in their different ways the most remarkable, certainly the most novel, of the six volumes considered herein. McMeekin’s hefty Stalin tome, even with its revisionist vibe, is the most conventional in content and treatment, and moreover has considerable academic sheen. Collingham's analysis of food and the war similarly takes the familiar historical approach. The two remaining titles, Tango War and Swansong 1945, fall somewhere in-between.
    Kempowskli’s volume, however, is practically sui generis and thus deserves primacy as it is indeed a unique historical document. Swansong delivers the goods primo as it portrays the multi-dimensional, collage-like nature of the war as experienced by a wide swath of individuals. Swansong is the final entry of Kempowski’s ten-volume, 7,000-page opus maximus, Sonar: A Collective Journal (1993-2005). For two decades Kempowski collected newspaper articles, diaries, letters, memoirs and documents written by people on all sides of the fighting and from every level of experience and life during World War II. Swansong 1945 covers the final conflagration and ultimate end of Nazi Germany and the war in Europe. It covers four fateful days in Spring 1945: Hitler's birthday on April 20, American and Soviet troops meeting at the Elbe on April 25, Hitler's suicide on April 30, and finally the German surrender on May 8. In the Sources section the vast majority of the cites are of German texts, giving a primary source verisimilitude to the mix.
    The various persons quoted run the gamut from heads of state to civilians, prisoners-of-war, ordinary soldiers, refugees, and artists and writers caught up in the conflict. Indeed for some of us, such first-person historical accounts of the type we get in Swansong are the best barometers for what really happened, even if in some cases the memories must be treated with care. Still, one is tempted to invoke the cliché compulsively readable, because this book is exactly that. It’s tough to put down because there’s something compelling on every page.
    Especially fascinating to read is Joseph Goebbels’s unintentionally ironic entry from 20 April (perhaps not so coincidentally Hitler’s birthday), in which he poetically – and presciently – waxes on about a newer, brighter Europe that will emerge after the war. Just such a Europe did emerge, but perhaps not in the way Dr. Goebbels envisioned. Then there’s an SS officer recalling a dinner at the fashionable Hotel Adlon in Berlin on April 20, where “waiters in tuxedos and maîtres d’ in tailcoats went on solemnly and unflappably serving purple pieces of kohlrabi on the silver trays meant for better days.” And there are the chilling first-hand accounts of the activities at the Führerbunker during the last days of the war.
      One quibble: I would have preferred some photographs of the individuals. If that wasn’t possible then a few photos of the various diaries, newspaper clippings, letters, notebooks, etc.. to give a flavor of the originals. But a quibble is only a quibble. Swansong 1945 is a work of signal import and is highly recommended to all serious students of WW2.
     Sean McMeekin’s ponderous Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II is not so much a new history – most of the chronologies and events discussed have been covered at length elsewhere – as it is a new emphasis and interpretation, actually more of individuals than events themselves. Most historical accounts of WW2 describe it as Hitler’s war and make Hitler the central protagonist and ultimate villain in the conflict. McMeekin, however, argues that the war that emerged in Europe in August 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler, also that the Pacific War was due at least in part to Stalin’s maneuverings and schemings. McMeekin covers in some detail the massive aid in materiel offered to the Soviets by the United States. Apparently egged on by “Soviet assets” in his orbit, President Roosevelt went out of his way to appease the Soviet dictator, perhaps too much so. If Roosevelt didn’t exactly give away the store, he gave way a lot. The ultimate result was that Stalin emerged as the major beneficiary of the war, and that the Soviet Union was in a much stronger position, albeit at horrific cost, at the war’s conclusion than when the war started.
     McMeekin doesn’t go so far as to overtly endorse the controversial Suvorov theory that Stalin was planning to attack the West in 1941 or 1942, and that Hitler simply beat him to the punch by attacking the Soviet Union first, a classic case of a preventive, rather than preemptive, assault [1]. But if one reads carefully between the lines we can see at least a certain sympathy for and receptivity to this revisionist view. That McMeekin had access to documents in Russian archives and reads Russian adds strength to his arguments, be they controversial or conventional. Stalin’s War includes index, photos, and 120 pages of notes and bibliography.
     Similarly Mary Jo McConahay’s The Tango War, if not quite revisionist history, refreshingly takes on an aspect of WW2 that’s largely ignored in conventional histories, that is, the struggle between the U.S. and Germany for allegiances – and resources – in Latin America during World War II. Indeed McConahay’s opus may well be the first popular survey of what was going on South-of-Border during WW2, and for the most part the book succeeds admirably.
     McConahay’s approach is journalistic rather than purely historical, and she concentrates on the human element in the form of the wide array of colorful, often shady characters on both sides of the conflict. Perhaps most entertaining are the descriptions of the Good Neighbor efforts by the Office of Inter-American Affairs, which sent not-so-secret weapons – Hollywood celebrities like Errol Flynn, Orson Welles and the Walt Disney troupe – south to garner good will for the American cause. In the case of Welles and Disney, some legitimate cinematic products resulted, specifically Welles’s ill-fated documentary It’s All True and the Disney films Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. On the other hand, the shameful, forced internment in the U.S. of "dangerous" individuals being extended to Central and South America was one of the more cringeworthy episodes recounted in the book, especially so since some of the internees were exchanged for American prisoners-of-war. Likewise compelling is the chapter on espionage activities. There’s also a section on the infamous ‘ratlines,’ the escape routes that helped Nazi fugitives escape to South America.
     In the final chapter McConahay discusses the sinister parallels between European fascists of World War II and Latin American dictators of the 1970s and ’80s, many of whom were unrepentant fans of Mussolini and Hitler. These regimes had the sometimes public, sometimes covert, backing of Washington, so long as they were anti-Communist and friendly toward American economic interests. A mild weakness of Tango War is that McConahay eschews the chronologic for the topical, and as a result there’s some jumping around in the narrative. On balance, however, a good read, also replete with lots of photos. Tango War is a long overdue examination of a little-known aspect of the war.
     Scott Andrew Selby’s A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin is more noteworthy for the book’s subject matter than its treatment or style. For all that there’s plenty of works in English on Germany’s war effort, both military and civilian alike, little has been written on crime and criminals in the Third Reich amongst ordinary civilians, much less about serial murderers. And as has been pointed out, it’s a concept awash in contradiction: that such a regime specializing in state sponsored mass murder would spend so many resources tracking down a lone killer of a few women is difficult to understand. Indeed the dynamic is not unlike that depicted so provocatively in Hans Helmutt Kirst’s novel Night of the Generals, later adapted into a popular film, which told the story of a Polish prostitute murdered in 1942 by a high ranking German general, and of a certain Major Grau’s subsequent quest to track down the culprit. One can’t help recalling Grau’s maxim, ‘let us say what is admirable on the large scale is monstrous on the small. Since we must give medals to mass murderers, why not give justice to the small entrepreneur.’
     Serial Killer covers the case of Paul Ogorzow, the S-Bahn Killer. He had a family, a job with the railroad, and was a member of the Nazi Party. Since Ogorzow worked on the railway he found that the air raid blackouts at night provided good cover for him to do his deeds. Ogorzow murdered eight women total, attempted to murder six others, and assaulted many others. Wilhelm Lüdtke, head of the Berlin police’s serious crimes division, emerges as the story’s hero as he was tasked to hunt down the monster in the midst, and eventually he did. Lüdtke had the, albeit discreet, support of the likes of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, who “wanted to project an image of Nazi Germany as a place free from such problems as the predations of a serial killer.” Lüdtke’s rather florid afterlife following the war is covered in some detail in the epilogue. In addition to his other activities, Lüdtke worked as an asset for the CIA in the 1950s.
     Ogorzow was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed – by guillotine – two days later. The book offers plenty of detail about the S-Bahn and investigative techniques of the German police, but little on the psychology of the protagonist. Thus the story that emerges is rather dry. For those of us accustomed to the backgrounds and especially psychology of serial killers, we sense something is lacking.
     The case was such a sensation that a series of crime novels emerged, most prominently Death Rode the Train (Der Tod fuhr im Zug). Its author was Wilhelm Ihde, writing under the name Axel Alt, and the killer’s name was changed to ‘Omanzow,’ but the fiction didn’t fool anybody, and the book was a big seller in Germany during the war. An even more bizarre detail is that Ogorzow’s widow was charged a fee for the use of the guillotine during the execution. Serial Killer includes a detailed S-Bahn map as well as photos of S-Bahn carriages, stations and towers.
     Walter Schmid’s A German POW in New Mexico offers a different take on the war experience. There are any number of WW2 personal narratives out there, written by those on all sides of the conflict, among them quite a few prisoner-of-war memoirs. Most of these are from the Allied point of view, but there aren’t many accounts of the German POW experience, written by a German, published in English, no less. In fact, A German POW is the only one I know of, though indeed there could be others.
     Walter Schmid was a member of Rommel's Afrika Korps and had fought only five months before he was captured in Tunisia. Schmid was one of 380,000 German POWs sent to prison camps in the United States. He was first sent to Oklahoma and soon transferred to New Mexico in July 1944. Schmid worked in southern New Mexico near Las Cruces as a farm laborer. His primary duties were picking cotton and harvesting melons. A German POW in New Mexico is based on his diary and the letters he sent home to his German girlfriend, whom he later married. Schmid's memoir was published in Germany in 2000, and the the abbreviated English version that’s A German POW in New Mexico benefits from the translation of Richard Rundell. Special mention must also be made of editor Wolfgang Schlauch’s introduction, as well as his commentary interspersed throughout. Includes vintage photos, bibliography and appendixes.
     Collingham's hefty opus, Taste of War, was an eye opener for me in many ways. Even as a (admittedly amateur) WW2 buff, truth be told I never thought much about the importance of food production and delivery in the context of the conflict. There have been many books on the personalities, battles and strategy of the war, but the present tome may well be the first scholarly (more or less) treatment of how something so basic as the supply of food and the feeding of soldiers (and civilians) was central to the prosecution of the total war that was World War II. Includes photos, maps, extensive notes and bibliography. Much recommended.  

   [1] Suvorov, Viktor.The Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to Start World War II. Annapolios, Md., Naval Institute Press 2008.

hitting all the right notes: Diva (1981)

Diva. Irene Silberman présente un film de Jean-Jacques Beineix; adaptation, Jean-Jacques Beineix et Jean Van Hamme; dialogues, Jean-Jacques Beineix; une co-production Les Films Galaxie, Greenwich Film Production avec la participation de Antenne 2. Santa Monica, Calif., Lions Gate Entertainment, 2008. Director of photography, Philippe Rousselot; editors, Marie-Josephe Yoyotte, Monique Prim Adapted from the novel by Delacorta. Originally released as a motion picture in 1981. Performers: Frederic Andrei, Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, Roland Bertin, Richard Bohringer, Gerard Darmon, Chantal Deruaz, Jacques Fabbri.
    Summary: Jules, a young mail courier, is an impassioned fan of Cynthia Hawkins, a legendary, and determinedly unrecorded opera star. He smuggles a tape recorder into a performance and tapes her singing. At the same time, a prostitute hides a tape recording that details the career of a French mobster in Jules' delivery bag. Dizzying chases and bizarre plot twists follow, as Jules is pursued through Paris, aided by his two eccentric friends, Gorodish and his Vietnamese mistress, Alba.

    When it first came out all those many decades ago, well, four decades actually, I was fortunate enough to see Diva in the theater and enjoyed it very much. Only recently I’ve had the good fortune to catch it again on DVD and am delighted to say it’s even better than I remember. It seems to be a mixture of many styles and genres – thriller, art movie, comedy, surreal fantasy, film noir (albeit in color). But whatever the pedigree Diva is eminently, inevitably French. Indeed I see it as a kind of Frenchified Fellini, especially suggesting Roma and in particular the chase scene which recalls the last scene in Roma with all those motorcycles in their va-va-voom vroom glory. By the way, the DVD transfer looks like a million dollars, which further emphasizes Diva’s modern look and feel. Likewise, Diva’s slyly implied critique of commodified consumer culture seems more on the money today that when the film originally appeared.
    Wilhelminia Wiggins Fernandez is terrific in the title role. I’m a bit of a classical music – but not necessarily opera – buff and I don’t know much about Miss Fernandez’s subsequent career, as an opera singer or actress. In any case she’s just perfect here: her vocal timbre strikes me as very Callas-like – now there’s a lady who knew a little about being a diva. And at least in her public appearances, whether in recital or being interviewed by pesky reporters, title character Cynthia Hawkins, played by Miss Fernandez, seems to be channeling much of the Callas polish and hauteur. Indeed the film’s signature tune "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana" from Catalani’s opera La Wally, sung so expressively by Miss Fernandez, was a Callas specialty.
    Diva is a wild ride of textures, images and moods, and who cares if the plot’s a little shaky? Quite a bit shaky actually. Indeed if there ever was a film in which style triumphs over substance, this is it. But Diva has other merits. Best of all perhaps is the assortment of grifters, low-lifes, prostitutes, corrupt cops, good cops, aesthetes, journalists, bootleggers and various hangers on that pop up throughout, and of course we can’t forget our nominal hero Jules. But among the supporting cast and bit players pride of place must go to the drug cartel’s brutal, if slightly incompetent, assassins L’Antillais and Le Curé, two of the sleaziest characters you’ll ever see anywhere.
    Diva then is absolutely sui generis. I can’t think of anything like it, before or since. However, for all the film’s exuberant panache and historical significance, the one downside is that Diva’s director Jean-Jacques Beineix never quite found his voice so harmoniously again.

why do writers write?

    Why do writers write indeed? Suffice to say the question is a complex one as it touches on matters psychological, philosophical, ethical and teleological, with no clear-cut answers. It’s like asking what motivates football players to submit themselves to such, literally mind-numbing, violence (no comparisons to writers intended), or why do stand-up comics want to do their schtick (here perhaps the analogy is more to the point). In any case  as the question applies to writing greater minds than mine have weighed in on the subject, and there seems to be no consensus. But as for me it’s a constantly fascinating topic that won’t go away, and I thought it worth a look, though truth be told I have little new or original to add.

    Thus to invoke the analysis of one of my favorite thinkers, which we might dub The Orwell Thesis. Aside: was it Hemingway who famously said that anyone who writes for a reason other than money is a fool? [1] As for Orwell’s take on the matter, there’s much to admire and little I can take issue with. Like Orwell I would argue that the motives are more complex and subtle than the purely financial, though this is a consideration. Orwell’s comments below apply equally to those who love – or hate – to write, but in either case feel compelled to do so. And while I find much of Orwell’s digression on writing a bit too, well, digressive, his basic points are well-taken and never go out of style. I offer a condensed version of his thesis below.

     “Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
   (i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity … gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
   (ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story … The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons.   
  (iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
   (iv) Political purpose. Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

“ … Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

    I just love all those one’s. So British. And while the passage is a little overwrought, to my way of thinking it’s still very much on the money. Orwell says it all so well it’s hard to find anything of value to add. The urge, compulsion some would insist, to write, say, a mystery novel is a mystery. [2] It’s not necessarily borne out of pleasure or financial motives. The inspiration, or malady, strikes some of us, present writer included, in varying degrees over time. I confess after penning several books, reviews and more blog posts than I care to remember, the motivation of my compulsion to write eludes me. Not for fun, certainly. Some have opined that what all writers must have in common is a tendency to the masochistic, especially considering the vagaries of the audience and critical response.
     Film director Billy Wilder quipped that directing a movie is a lot more fun than writing the script, that writing is hard labor, going so far as to famously have inscribed on his tombstone ‘I’m a writer but nobody’s perfect.’ As for me the drive to writing goes way back, at least to high school years, when I enjoyed the essay parts of my English classes. I wasn’t very good but took to the assignments like catnip, and was always flattered when the instructor chose one of my pieces to read in class. It culminated in my being co-editor of my high school yearbook, and as the saying goes, the rest is history. Getting back to Orwell, I especially like and identify with this passage: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand.” [3] As Orwell might say, hear, hear.

    [1] Further research suggests the quote, or something like it, was actually said by Dr. Johnson, though no doubt others have expressed the same, or similar, sentiment.  
    [2] Especially so given the subsequent critical reception if one has the courage to go public with a literary creation. Perhaps the comparison isn’t totally felicitous but I recall a quote about war attributed to Queen Elizabeth I, which might well apply to creating a book: “I do not like war. It is costly and the outcome uncertain”
    [3] To be sure, there are dissenting voices to the writing-is-a-horrible-torture point of view. See here, para. 3, for one example.

the girl who got away ... twice

   Vertigo. Cast: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, Henry Jones, Raymond Bailey, Ellen Corby, Konstantin Shayne, Lee Patrick. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay: Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor, from the novel D’entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Cinematography: Robert Burks (colour by Technicolor, Vistavision). Art directors: Hal Pereira, Henry Bumstead. Costumes: Edith Head. Editor: George Tomasini. Music: Bernard Herrmann. Special effects: John P. Fulton, Farciot Edouart, W. Wallace Kelley, John Ferren. Production: Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions. Restoration: Robert A. Harris, James C. Katz, 1996. USA, 1958, 127 minutes.

Style ****   Substance ****

Take it from Scottie Ferguson: If you’re not careful, an affair can make life shorter still. Need a painkiller? See Vertigo again. – Julia Szabo, “Why Vertigo Beat Citizen Kane to Become the Top Rated Film”

In a post elsewhere online I opine that Ernst Lubitsch’s frothy Trouble in Paradise may well be my favorite movie. However, a recent viewing of Vertigo may make the result more like a tie [1]. Anyhow fascinating to note that in both films the central character has broken the rules and  fallen in love with the mark, but how different the treatment: with its intense emotional content, Vertigo may be seen as the dark mirror to Trouble in Paradise’s ebullient, quasi-screwball comedy feeling, the latter film nothing more and nothing less than a Cole Porter tune come to life. But where we might shrug our shoulders and simply say ‘it was just one of those things’ when referring to Trouble in Paradise, we’d never indulge ourselves in such an offhand dismissal when considering Vertigo.

Kim Novak resplendent

It was a sometimes surprising experience to see the great film again, the first time I’d caught it on the big screen since its mid-80s re-release [2]. So many praiseworthy things about it: Herrmann’s haunting score, the phantasmagoric colors, Edith Head’s costumes … one could go on and on; critics and devotees have gone on and on. This time I was struck by its incredible, and incredibly complex, emotional content, and most of all, by the sadness and desperate longing embodied in the character of Judy/Madeleine, brought so spellbindingly to life (or is it death?) by Kim Novak in her wondrous performance. Up until the scene at Ernie’s in which Miss Novak enters the movie, it’s a fairly bland, and talky, mystery story set-up. But once the mysterious Madeleine makes her unforgettable entrance, the film really takes off and never lets up. Indeed, and with no disrespect to the great James Stewart, a terrific actor, from this point forward it’s really a Madeleine story.

As for our nominal hero Scottie, he’s already a broken man long before he meets Judy/Madeleine, the acrophobia and his back injury a metaphor for his irreparably damaged psyche. Although we're given few details about his past and as a result mostly in the dark as to his psychological history, we're thrown a nugget of a clue early on when it's revealed that Midge broke off their engagement twenty years or so prior, for reasons not revealed. Even so, he continues to needle her about it and protest too much that he’s still available (‘available Ferguson’). Another viewing helps me appreciate Barbara Bel Geddes’ touchingly sensitive portrayal – much overlooked in light of Stewart’s showy performance and Kim Novak’s more subtle, enchantress-like presence. In spite of all this Midge still loves him, treating him much like a mother, even referring to herself as such.

This time around I wasn’t quite so upset by Scotty’s heavy-handed treatment of Judy; the guy’s not a monster, he’s just hopelessly misguided and obviously unbalanced, more to be pitied than vilified. And we have to remember that Judy, sympathetic and beautiful as she is, is herself at least accessory to murder, just one step away from being a murderess. Indeed, unpleasant as Scotty may be, Judy is arguably technically the more evil of the two. Which reminds me: a fussy plot complaint (one of potentially many) – why didn’t Judy simply leave San Francisco, and for that matter why would Elster abandon someone so ethereally beautiful, to say nothing of the fact that she has the goods on him? And another thing … well, as you see, Vertigo isn’t about plot – a Golden Age puzzle mystery where all the pieces fit comfortably and logically together it most certainly is not, quite the contrary. And that’s rather the whole point: that life, and love, doesn’t always come out right in the end.

But, as intimated above, Vertigo is ultimately about Madeleine/Judy, and Kim Novak is utterly convincing in assuming the personas of two very different women. Moreover, everything about her performance is absolutely flawless; it’s a no brainer that it’s her best role ever. And, reports to the contrary that Hitchcock didn't like her as an actress, one could make a case that she's the ultimate icy Hitchcock blonde. I’d go one better and declare that her incredibly nuanced reading, revealed only though repeated viewings, is the best single performance by any actress in cinema history, or close to it. It’s almost fantastical to think she was all of 25 years of age when she delivered such a rich portrayal. Vera Miles? Grace Kelley? In this role? Gimme a break. It all inspires me to up the ante even further and suggest that, based on this performance alone [3], she has a strong claim as the best film actress of all time, though I do confess a great fondness for Gloria Swanson, especially her incomparable turn as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. In either case: take that, Kate Hepburn!

Interesting to consider Ms. Novak’s recent comments on her bipolar disorder :

“I was very erratic. I did suffer from mental illness. I didn’t know it at the time. At times I was focused. Other times, the press would come on the set and I’d feel the energy of people laughing at me or not approving of my style of acting. You could pick up those feelings. I was distracted. I couldn’t perform as well. I was erratic in my performances, I feel.” 

It goes a long way toward explaining her wafty, slightly unfocused acting style. To a certain extent this is present in Vertigo, but somehow this time she was able to magically transform this disability into a positive with her multi-layered, enigmatic performance. Curiously, she considers Vertigo not one of her better films. Sorry, Kim, I beg to differ, in a big way. It’s also fascinating to recall the possibly spurious stories that she could be glimpsed during subsequent visits to San Juan Bautista Mission, where she would sit on the wooden benches and stare across the large lawn at the church, lost in her own meditation. A penny for her thoughts. Somehow, even if apocryphal, it’s an irresistible image.

Things we do for love

Officially anointed the greatest movie of all time, Vertigo is easliy Hitchcock’s most written about work. And inasmuch as critics and film historians have explored its aesthetic depths more fully, Julia Szabo’s above-referenced essay is perhaps my favorite, as it comes closest to the bone in getting to Vertigo’s fear of falling (in love) message for today’s chatroom gestalt, especially for those of us of a certain age who feel especially susceptible to the seductive, but alas, elusive, and often illusory, allure of the perfect love. We may not be as damaged, or obsessive, or legally culpable as the characters in Vertigo, but in our ways just as imperfect.

Case in point: the one ‘normal’ character, Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), is at best a flawed heroine. Nonetheless, how beautiful – and passionate – the character, and actress; Scotty was a fool to reject her, and perhaps she’s as much a fool in her obviously hopeless quest to win his affections.

Indeed, what strikes me upon re-visiting the film is not the incredible visual flourishes, or great detail [4], to mention only a couple of its virtues, but its compassion and humanity, for Vertigo is not really about romantic obsession per se, and it’s absurd to call it a murder mystery. Ultimately it’s of the human impulse, and, yes, need, to connect with others, to love and be loved, and the sometimes heavy toll said impulse takes on the spirit and psyche, even when things work out well in the end. At its core then Vertigo is a love story, however offbeat.

But as for the vehicle and style to express such a story: as mentioned above Vertigo is not a conventional romance and even less a mystery, but rather, a mood piece, a meditation, similar in tone to the Forties supernatural romantic fantasies like Portrait of Jennie, The Uninvited, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. And for all of Vertigo’s much discussed extravagant colors and luxuriant on-location San Francisco photography, it has a remarkable similarity in mood and treatment to the low budget RKO Val Lewton supernatural noir thrillers of the early Forties, however different, at least in purely visual terms, its saturated look is from the stripped down studio bound aesthetic of the Lewton films.

As if in an attempt to restore all the illusions and hopes Vertigo so cruelly thwarts, Stewart and Novak were paired again the same year in the much more feel good if arguably artistically inferior Bell, Book, and Candle, which might be seen as a sunny sequel, or even the happy ending version of Vertigo, in which Kim Novak  reprises, or to be more precise, offers a lightweight variant of the enchantress Madeleine in the form of a looking-for-love Greenwich Village witch, who, like Judy/Madeleine, becomes mortal when she falls in love. One is tempted to invoke the film’s memorable closing line: “who knows what magic really is.” But, as Ms. Szabo gently cautions us in her aforementioned essay, this soothing balm in Gilead doesn’t even come close to exorcising the psychic demons which Vertigo conjures up.

The greatest film?

Much has been made of Vertigo’s bumping Citizen Kane as the #1 film of all time [5], at least according to the critics (Sight & Sound poll, 2012). A separate S&S directors’ poll places  Ozu’s Tokyo Story as #1, with Kane second, actually tied with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Vertigo placing a respectable seventh. In any event, we have a split decision of sorts, though the critics’ poll has gotten a lot more ink.

For me, however, it’s the great emotional and, if you will, spiritual, content of Vertigo that sets it apart from other masterpieces or near-masterpieces, whether directed by Hitchcock or not. We can cite two examples : Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Welles’s Kane, both eminently watchable, and impressive technical achievements, but both of which have barren emotional/metaphysical cores.

Even so, Vertigo divides viewers and critics to this day. There’s still lots of debate about whether Hitchcock was right to reveal Judy’s secret to the audience two thirds of the way through. My feeling is that he was correct, absolutely, because, on a simplistic level, this creates suspense, and yes, discomfort, for the rest of the film, rather than relying on an Agatha Christie-esque scenario in which the surprise is revealed only at the end.

But one can bend a reader’s ear only so long …. I’ll conclude with a minor criticism: I never much cared for the dream sequence in which James Stewart literally goes off the deep end. Hitchcock gets his message across, yes, but it’s clunky compared to the incredible elegance & beauty of the rest of the film. It just goes to show that even a masterpiece of masterpieces can have a flaw or two.

[1] Two recent viewings actually, one of them in HD no less – incredible.

[2] I remember watching Vertigo on TV in the 60s and 70s, 'Saturday Night at the Movies', I think the program was called, and the narrator portentously intoned “Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” And I was hooked for life. Then the film went into its legendary out of circulation status, to re-emerge in the mid-1980s when I last saw it in the theatre. I also caught the expert 1996 restoration and its commentary a couple of times on DVD.

[3] To say nothing of her other, not so well known roles: Of Human Bondage, Middle of the Night, The Man with the Golden Arm.

[4] Just the art works and antiques alone in Scottie’s and Midge’s apartments merit especial praise. Ditto for Elster’s office and its scrumptious carpet and furniture. And still more  kudos for the gossamer lighting effects at Mission Dolores. But for all its detail, there’s an artificial quality to Vertigo, which, combined with the great washes of color and the dreamy San Francisco landscapes and environs, that suggests a quasi-surrealist feeling akin to films like the aforementioned Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

[5] Oops! In the 2022 poll, Vertigo slipped all the way to second place, being supplanted by Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the current critics' choice as the 'greatest movie of all time.'

Further reading: Brandie Ashe, Kim Novak in Vertigo: A Hypnotic Presence; Death and the Detective : Vertigo Revisited; A Month of Vertigo : the Boggers and Their Posts; Vertigo (no. 2) ; Rhik Samadder, My Favorite Hitchcock : Vertigo; An Inconsequential Yarn: Writing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; The Critical Transformation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Tricky, the Dragon Lady, the gumshoe and the shrink

  Graff, Garrett M. Watergate: A New History. Simon & Schuster, 2021.
  O’Donnell, Lawrence. Playing with Fire: the 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics. Penguin, 2017.
  Robb, David L. The Gumshoe and the Shrink: Guenther Reinhardt, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, and the Secret History of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon Election. [includes: appendix, Reinhardt’s confidential report on Dr. Hutschnecker]. Santa Monica Press, 2012.

     Confession: somewhat reluctantly I admit to be of sufficient certain years to remember the goings on during the Watergate Affair. With more than casual interest I followed the always fluid developments. Glued to my television, I reveled in a bespectacled John Dean as he spoke of a cancer on the office of the president; read somewhere that Martha Mitchell opined that rumors to the effect that she’d been confined to a mental hospital were “… as crazy as can be”; and remember a news item that let us know Gordon Liddy saluted someone (McCord?) when he walked into the courtroom. I’m even old enough to remember the rancorous – even by today’s standards – 1968 presidential campaign, and even recall, though just barely, and hazily, the 1960 campaign, my introduction to electoral politics.
     Thus my personal association with the trifecta of books cited above and the eras they so vividly capture. I actually did some time (the phrase is not coincidental) volunteering for one of the sides in the 1968 presidential contest (I’ll not divulge which side), but haven’t been much of an activist since. In any event, as of the writing of this post, the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in is upon us, give or take a few weeks, and a think piece on the break-in and -like events of the era, focusing on three books that caught my attention, seems apropos. Of the three books listed above two are (semi)-scholarly and one is popular. All the books have a progressive slant, Graff only mildly so, O’Donnell and Robb not so mildly. What is surprising is that, while the slightest, the Robb volume is in its way the most remarkable, and surely the most entertaining. But I get ahead of myself.
     O’Donnell’s compulsively readable account of the dramatic events of the late Sixties (an era uncannily similar to our own), focuses on the ’68 election and compares favorably with Theodore White’s magisterial The Making of the President 1960. The book in particular gives strong coverage to the nuts and bolts of the presidential campaign (almost too strong in some cases, the detailed accounting of the primary season and the nomination process being one example). Other tumultuous events of that year are chronicled extensively, but the overarching idée fixe throughout is the Vietnam War, which drives so much of the narrative both as foreground and background. If there’s a hero in O’Donnell’s thesis, it’s Senator Eugene McCarthy (Bobby Kennedy ranks a close second). McCarthy cheekily challenged President Johnson for the Democratic nomination and ran against him in the New Hampshire primary as the anti-war candidate, and almost won. There are plenty of villains in Playing with Fire, but it’s no surprise that Richard Nixon emerges as the principal bad guy though LBJ is always lurking in the shadows.
     Correctly or no, O’Donnell credits McCarthy more than anyone else with shortening the war and saving lives. But he gives us the real kicker in the last chapter, aptly titled ‘The Perfect Crime,’ in which he details what came to be known as the Chennault Affair, the short version of which is: four days before the election President Lyndon Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam as a strategy to end the Vietnam War. But there was a problem: operatives in the Nixon campaign were secretly communicating with the South Vietnamese government in an attempt to scuttle the peace talks taking place in Paris. They told the South Vietnamese to just hold out a little longer and Nixon would give them a better deal if he became president. The principal go-between for the Nixon campaign and the South Vietnamese delegation was Anna Chennault, a Chinese-born Republican fundraiser, widow of U.S. WW2 Major General Claire Chennault, and general woman-about-town in Washington. A nice bit of ironic trivia is that she lived at the Watergate, in the penthouse no less.
     When he learned of the underhanded communications, President Johnson described the skullduggery as "treason." But he never went public with his knowledge, for fear of damaging the office of the president and needing to disclose that that he used government agencies, arguably illegally, to spy on Chennault and the South Vietnamese. Moreover, Johnson admitted that he lacked “absolute proof that Nixon was involved” (revelations in recent years present a clearer picture, i.e. that Nixon was very much involved).
     Nixon won the election against Hubert Humphrey, barely, and his ‘better deal’ for the South Vietnamese ultimately extended the war another six years, cost an additional 21,000 American lives and untold tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, or more, Asian lives, and when the war finally ended in 1975, a year after Nixon’s resignation, the terms were essentially the same as those negotiated by Johnson in 1968 but never realized due to Nixon’s interference in the peace talks.
     But perhaps the most long-lasting result of the 1968 campaign was the ascendancy of one Roger Ailes, Nixon political consultant and architect of the modern, mass media driven political campaigns and eventual chairman of Fox News. There’s also the, eerily prescient, politics of fear and divisiveness that drove, well, both campaigns really, but the Republican campaign used it especially effectively (remember Nixon’s law-and-order mantra and the Southern strategy?) with attendant electoral dividends.
     There’s not a lot that’s new in Playing with Fire, but it’s presented in such a literate, cogent fashion that history buffs and politics junkies will take notice and find much of it little short of catnip. Still, how one reacts to O’Donnell’s take will in large part depend upon political sympathies. Like other things, good history, and good politics, is in the eye of the beholder.

"When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal"
     
     We fast forward a few years, though not that many really, to 1971, where Garrett Graff’s Watergate: A New History begins. The mindset that led to the Watergate break-in and similar actions are covered in highly detailed, well-organized fashion in Graff’s densely packed account. Indeed, with Watergate: A New History, Graff has produced the most complete and thorough one-volume history of the Watergate Affair to date, and it should stand as definitive for some time, at least until new information, lots of new information, and new perspectives, are uncovered.
     Depending on how one defines the origins of Watergate, the beginnings may go as far back as 1968, the year of the above-discussed Chennault Affair. But the true underpinnings of Watergate as a political operation didn’t take place until the summer of 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to various newspapers. Nixon initially was nonplussed about the Papers but, egged on by his advisers, eventually went ballistic. ‘The Pentagon Papers’ was a top secret Department of Defense study of American involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, focusing on the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The papers included the various lies and deceptions committed by the government. But here is the great irony: the word Nixon barely appears anywhere in the 7,000 pages and 47 volumes. As much as anything else the reason Nixon reacted so violently to their public dissemination was the top secret classification. In a word, Nixon was afraid. The main reason for the fear was the possibility that Ellsberg or someone else might leak additional documents that would reveal Nixon’s then undisclosed, potentially criminal, actions, such as the secret bombing of Cambodia. But even worse, somewhere in the Vietnam deluge might be evidence of the above-discussed Chennault affair and Nixon’s treachery. Thus Nixon became obsessed with leaks and created the infamous White House Plumber’s Unit, whose various extra-curricular activities included the break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, the planned break-in – on Nixon’s orders – of the Brookings Institution (never carried out), illegal surveillance and wiretaps, and eventually the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Thus what we today know as ‘Watergate’ was only part of a larger umbrella of clandestine activities orchestrated by the White House at Nixon’s behest or done on his behalf. In his new study Graff lays out this thesis in excruciating (in a good sort of way) detail, employing updated sources but relying mostly on contemporary accounts. The inescapable conclusion is that the Watergate break-in and cover-up was really just the tip of the iceberg, and not necessarily Nixon’s worst crime [1].
     As Graff points out, had there been no Watergate, Nixon may well have been considered a towering and positive figure in twentieth century American history, right up there with FDR as one of the great presidents [2]. Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, transformed the Post Office into a quasi-private government entity, hiked Social Security payments, extended unemployment benefits, declared war on cancer, signed Title IX to give women opportunities in academia and on athletic playing fields, was an early supporter of civil rights (he advised then-President Dwight Eisenhower to sign the 1957 Civil Right Bill.), signed arms control treaties with the Soviet Union, re-opened diplomatic relations with China, and was the first American president to visit a communist bloc country, this despite his being a lifelong rampant anti-communist. Speaking of anti-communism, it must be mentioned that his handling of the Vietnam War is another, more complicated matter, perhaps less deserving of praise [3].   
     There are additional, personal qualities one can cite. Nixon was always loyal to his family; he was an outstanding law student (he was offered a full scholarship to Harvard, but declined); he was something of an intellectual and an avid student of history; he was loyal to a fault to his workers and advisers (and later abandoned them); Nixon established a scholarship at the Duke University law school; he served honorably in the U.S. Navy in WW2; he was a classical music buff and a fair amateur pianist, and had even once considered a career as a musician.
     However, and it’s a big however … all the positive accomplishments were largely negated by a one-word scandal that led to congressional impeachment hearings and his eventual resignation from office. For better or worse, ‘Watergate’ and all its lurid associations would be forever symbiotically connected to Richard Nixon, overshadowing all other facets of his political life.
     Graff’s writing style is fairly dry but he gets high marks for organization, especially so considering the Watergate Affair’s many intersections and cross currents. The detailed index and extensive notes section are first-rate but there’s no general bibliography. A welcome plus are the footnotes Graff inserts within the text that clarify and elaborate upon the basic narrative. Graff also fleshes out a few more details of the unsavory Chennault Affair but more or less treads the same ground as does O’Donnell [4].
     Graff admits that even today a half century later, despite the myriad of information available, there’s still no definitive answers to the basic questions: who ordered the Watergate break-in; what was its purpose; did some of the participants have their own private agendas; how did it fit in with the other dirty tricks of the White House Plumbers; how much did the participants know, both before and during the break-in [5]. 
     Amid the sordid, untidy nature of the whole affair, there are compensations: one of the great joys, if that is the word, of Graff’s telling are the insights he provides into the various characters involved in the Watergate business, their glories, foibles and absurdities. There’s the near pathological, single-minded intensity of Gordon Liddy and his highly imaginative – and expensive – ideas for sabotaging the operations of political enemies; the outrageously politically incorrect pronouncements of Martha Mitchell (among other things Martha alleged she was held hostage and drugged when she tried to talk to the press); a near senile J. Edgar Hoover and the Nixon administration’s attempts to lessen his influence as FBI director; CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, author of spy novels and later his own autobiography, appropriately titled American Spy. Then there’s the baroque convolutions in the arranging of the ‘hush money’ campaign funds used to pay off the Watergate burglars for their silence.
     Of course the inescapable main character is Richard Nixon, and what emerges is a somewhat complex but mostly unflattering portrayal. The White House tapes alone reveal him to be one vile, sneaky, thin-skinned, vindictive, anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, racist, paranoid, foul-mouthed piece of work. But what we get, from all three books really, is a more complexly nuanced, if not exactly sympathetic, view of the man. In a word, Richard Nixon was a complicated guy. Moreover, in his own idiosyncratic way, he actually loved his country [6], but the great tragedy is that he loved power more, and as these three books remind us, he would do (almost) anything to attain power and hold onto it. And because of his conspiracist vision of the world, saw enemies everywhere – the press, judiciary, anti-war protestors, Daniel Ellsberg, leftists, hippies, intellectuals, and of course Democrats – intent on taking that power away from him [7].

     We go back to 1960 with David Robb’s The Gumshoe and the Shrink, which basically tells the story of eccentric private investigator Guenther Reinhardt and his connection to the 1960 presidential campaign. Reinhardt was hired by Frank Sinatra (acting as intermediary for Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father) to dig up dirt on Kennedy’s opponent Richard Nixon, especially if he could find evidence that Nixon was seeing a psychiatrist. Indeed he was [8]. Nixon started seeing Arnold Hutschnecker in the early 1950s and continued to do so intermittently throughout the decade. Hutschnecker’s checkered career included the revocation of his license to practice medicine for a year, but he rebounded by writing a best seller titled The Will to Live, one of the first self-help books to reach a mass audience. Austrian born, Hutschnecker received his medical degree in Berlin and practiced medicine in Germany until 1936, when he fled the country to escape the National Socialist regime. He set up his medical practice in New York as an internist but his specialty narrowed and he focused more and more on psychosomatic illness and depression. His high powered patients included Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor and the author Erich Marie Remarque.
     With The Gumshoe and the Shrink, we’re propelled into a different, what shall we say, literary, universe. I hesitate to say a different moral or ethical, even political, universe, since most of the dirty tricks and duplicitousness we find in the 1968 election and Watergate, covered so well by Graff and O’Donnell, were around in abundance in 1960, the difference being that they were less visible, or, perhaps more to the point, less covered, actually less discovered, by the press. In any event, the difference is really one of style: despite their smoothly digestible prose and friendly organization, Graff and O’Donnell still have a scholarly patina. Not so Robb’s breezy page turner. Gumshoe not only flows like a novel, a good one, but the content seems more fiction than fact. Indeed, much of it reads like a whodunit, and some of the stuff in it seems so fantastical that it must be fiction. But the claims are documented with sources and when one checks them out they come in positive.
     Gumshoe is also enjoyable for the depiction of the various and sundry, sometimes oddball characters who flit in and out of the story: Westbrook Pegler, depraved reactionary columnist and radio personality, who penned near-psychotic missives against Roosevelt, Truman, unionists, and imaginary communists [9]; Senator Joseph McCarthy, who makes an appearance in an especially appalling scene of drunken violence; Drew Pearson, muckraking journalist, Pegler nemesis, and the first to report the Nixon-Hutschnecker connection; India Edwards, ground-breaking political operative and the sacrificial pawn in the JFK Addison’s Disease imbroglio.
    Given that there’s something juicy on just about every page of Gumshoe – incidents recalled, documents quoted, quasi-bombshells revealed – somehow this modest entry into an admittedly crowded field has managed to stay under-the-radar. Indeed, I’d never heard of the book till I stumbled upon it a few years ago at the local public library. Moreover, one can only wonder why a cinematic treatment hasn’t been done. I can’t help visualizing in my mind’s eye our two main protagonists in the story, and no, they aren’t Kennedy and Nixon but rather Guenther Reinhardt and Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. For me the inevitable choice to play the dodgy, amoral Reinhardt would be Walter Slezak, an Austrian émigré and prolific 1940s actor who specialized in slippery characters, albeit with a philosophic, intellectual bent. Appropriately enough, he played a private detective in two of his best films, Cornered and Born to Kill. The role of Hutschnecker is a little more problematic, but an initial choice might be John Hoyt, character actor with an exotic edge who appeared in countless 1950s and 1960s television programs and films. Horror and sci fi buffs probably best remember him as the mad scientist in the cult classic Attack of the Puppet People. In any case, what the heck, while we’re talking movies, for the other two, more historically significant principals of Gumshoe, to play JFK I’ve got to go with Bruce Greenwood of 13 Days, and for Nixon, a tougher call, since lots of actors have played him, and done so very well. But my choice is Dan Hedaya, who with the obvious physical resemblance, also comes with the distinction of previously essaying Nixon, brilliantly, in the Watergate spoof Dick.
     While Robb’s book is vaguely pro-JFK with its mostly positive portrait, Joe Kennedy cuts a pretty poor figure. Power hungry, absolutely ruthless, and more than willing to use his huge financial resources to further the political ambitions of his sons, his ambitions really, Joseph P. Kennedy actually had a lot in common with Richard Nixon. And JFK doesn’t emerge totally unscathed: during the runup to the 1960 Democratic convention, doubtless with his knowledge and approval, subordinates and surrogates repeatedly and categorically denied that he had Addison’s disease. This was a blatant falsehood, since he’d been diagnosed with the condition as far back as 1947. But Lyndon Johnson emerges as an even more unsavory character. A consummate old school politician and exponent of the win-at-all-costs philosophy, Johnson was a master of dirty tricks at least at the level of Nixon himself.
     Gumshoe is admittedly not a perfect work: the chronology jumps back and forth and thus detracts from the real narrative – the 1960 election, and especially Reinhardt’s various machinations – which is the crux of the story. Still, the book is a thoroughly enjoyable, fast-paced read, and should appeal to a wide audience, from history buffs to pop culture enthusiasts to fans of cloak and dagger intrigue on the margins.

    It seems nary a year goes by and a new Nixon biography or Watergate analysis, memoir, or tell-all exposé isn’t released. Each one peels back a few more layers of the Nixon psyche and reveals just a little bit more – the conniving schemer, frustrated social climber, criminal dissembler, misunderstood genius, tragic hero. Yet if the politician is an open book, solved long ago, the man remains an enigma, as mysterious and inscrutable as ever. We may not have Nixon to kick around anymore, but we still have the specter of ‘Watergate’ and all its after-effects, manifested mostly in the profound distrust of government and disdain for politicians generally. We may be finished with Nixon, or hope we are, but as the three books cited above remind us, he isn’t quite finished with us.   
        
    [1] To be totally equitable it wasn’t only Nixon who was held accountable for all things Watergate. Scores of cronies, subordinates, and other operatives, as well as dozens of big corporations, were charged with crimes. Several served substantial prison sentences, and their Watergate afterlives are a curious combination of obscurity and semi-celebrity: right-wing radio hosts, actors, political and business consultants, best-selling authors (predictably, several memoirs emerged), political columnists.
    [2] Similarly, it must also be mentioned that, had there been no Vietnam War, today Lyndon Johnson would be considered one of our greatest presidents.
    [3] I leave to others, i.e. professional historians and legal scholars, to determine whether Nixon’s directives in the Vietnam War qualify as war crimes. At the very least the horrific Christmas bombings in 1972 and the above-referenced secret bombings of Cambodia are sufficient to give one pause.
    [4] Rumblings of the scuttling of the Paris talks had trickled out in the press as early as 1969, but nothing stuck, and by the early 1970s the story had all but disappeared from the political radar. Ironically enough, the next substantial mention in the public record of the backchannel negotiations may well have come from a most unlikely source: Anna Chennault. In her 1980 memoir The Education of Anna she describes communications she had with Nixon, John Mitchell and the South Vietnamese government. This appeared at least two decades before more details, the proof, if you will, emerged, and the Affair began to seep into public awareness, culminating in books like Ken Hughes’s Chasing Shadows and Don Fulsom’s Treason: Nixon and the 1968 Election. For an exceptionally detailed analysis of the Chennault Affair see: John A. Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life (Doubleday, 2017), pp.342-44; 637n-640n.
   [5] Almost to the point of tedium, Graff methodically takes us through the most commonly put forth theories on the actual motivation for the break-in. The scenarios range from the mundane to the downright absurdist. The official theory, probably the correct one: incompetent burglars broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate to bug the office or phone of party chairman Larry O’Brien, the ultimate goal to find incriminating or embarrassing information. A second, related, almost sub-theory, one that naturally alarmed the ever-paranoid Nixon, is that the burglars were looking for any incriminating information the Democrats might have on Nixon and the Republicans. And the theories get more creative: the burglars were looking for information about an alleged call-girl ring organized by the Democratic headquarters to arrange hookups with visiting supporters and VIPs. A different scenario, quintessentially Nixonian in its unsavoriness, is that of illegal foreign contributions to the Nixon campaign from the brutal Greek military junta in power at the time. These were said to total half a million dollars, and the Nixon campaign was concerned that the Democrats might have knowledge of such contributions. Then there’s the CIA connection: did James McCord and Gordon Liddy, former Agency employees, have their own, CIA-friendly agendas in the burglary? A final sub-theory is that the Democrats somehow had advance knowledge of the break-in and set a trap for the burglars. It’s also feasible that various overlapping elements of some or all the theories are correct. As the fellow said, we’ll probably never know the whole story.
     Curiously, concern that the Democratic office might have the goods on the Chennault Affair seems not to have been an issue, at least as far as the conspirators were concerned. It’s very possible that Nixon considered the information so sensitive that he didn’t even entrust it to his redoubtable Plumbers.
   [6] And truth be told, he did some good things. His most enduring, forward-looking accomplishments were in domestic policy, another Nixon irony, since he considered himself a foreign affairs specialist – a president is always judged by what he did in foreign policy, he often said. Nixon is also quoted as saying history would be kind to him, but historians would not, because most historians are leftists. A strange logic, perhaps, but there it is.
  [7] Nixon’s paranoia was at least partially justified in that there were plenty of people intent on doing just that: taking power away from him.
  [8] The ever Machiavellian Nixon may have been seeing Dr. Hutschnecker to learn psychological tricks to use against political opponents. This may have been the true motivation for Nixon’s visits. Then again, the insight into political psychology may have been an unintended benefit. We’ll never know for sure: in the eight books he authored, Nixon never once mentions Dr. Hutschnecker.
   [9] Guenther Reinhardt wasn’t above doing a little communist hunting himself. In 1952 he authored a book titled Crimes Without Punishment, which Robb describes as ‘a masterpiece of guilt-by-association.’ In the book’s 322 pages Reinhardt alleges that Soviet agents or sympathizers have infiltrated all elements of American life. Hundreds of individuals were named. Most of the charges lacked any documentation or proof.

Further reading

Farrell, John A., Richard Nixon: the Life, Doubleday, 2017.
Greenberg, David, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, Norton, 2003.
Hughes, Ken. Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate, Univ. of Virginia Press, 2014.
Lane, Penny, director. Our Nixon [videorecording (DVD)]; producers, Brian Frye, Penny Lane; Cinedigm, 2014.
McGinniss, Joe, The Selling of the President 1968, Trident Press, 1969.
Summers, Anthony, Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, Viking, 2000.
Wine-Banks, Jill, The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President, Henry Holt & Co., 2020.