Found Pages: The Remarkable Harold Ernest (“Darcy Glinto”) Kelly, 1899–1969.

And you all know security
Is mortals’ chiefest enemy.

Between 1900 and 1913 no fewer than forty heads of state, politicians and diplomats were murdered, including four kings, six prime ministers, and three presidents.

propaganda postcards showing a soldier in an Austrian uniform bending a woman backward over a bed; the figures were impressionistically drawn; very attractively depicted and had nothing in common with actual rape in which the woman’s skirts are pulled over her head to smother her, one comrade sometimes sitting upon the head.

Dishevelled girls staggered from the private quarters of the Crown Prince of Germany who raped his way across Belgium, while his officers tortured civilians behind haystacks. The Kaiser himself was busy gloating over Zeppelin raids, the chopped-off hands of little children, and the worse-than-death fate of nuns and nurses.

1. 1899 to 1928

In 1928, serious gangster fictionalizing begins.

2. 1929 to 1939

James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish appears in 1939, a month or two before Britain enters the war against Germany. Darcy Glinto’s Lady—Don’t Turn Over comes out the following year.

3. 1940 to 1945

Britain’s exhausting six-year war ends in 1945, leaving a mulch of frustrations and yearnings out of which the paperback Mushroom Jungle will sprout.

Hector and Harold Kelly may already have begun preparing to launch Robin Hood Books, with Harold as its principal author, busy creating a reservoir of titles

4. 1946 to 1955

Robin Hood Books ceases publication in 1955. Control of the name “Darcy Glinto” is transferred to Stephen Frances (“Hank Janson”)

5. 1956 to 1975

Harold Kelly dies in 1969, four years after the last of a number of Hank Jansons that he himself may have written.

A key-setting 20^th-century text, demonstrating that under the right circumstances—power untrammeled by moral or legal accountability—, the “civilized” are as capable of atrocities as the “natives” to whom, in the progressive view of history, they are bringing enlightenment. “All Europe” has contributed to the making of Kurtz, that brilliant, vastly aspiring orator with an interest in the arts, who dominates his subjects with a mixture of applied terror, pagan rites, and a quasi-supernatural awesomeness, descends into cannibalism, madness, and a 180-degree rejection of his original vision of a brave new society, and nevertheless continues to command the respect accorded extremism. “’He made you see things—things.’” Like the narrating Marlow, Conrad himself had been part of King Leopold’s civilizing “mission” a few years earlier.

In the steady buzz of flies the homeward-bound agent was lying flushed and insensible, the other, bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions, and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still-tree-tops of the grove of death.

Let’s not be too pedantic about dates, In the previous year, 1898, Wells provides in The War of the Worlds the still-resonating fable of the fragility of the externals of Western civilization and the possibility of our precious individual selves being, insofar as they don’t simply vaporize us, squirming bundles of protein and salts for the invaders.

And three years before that, even more paradigmatically, Wells’s downsized, pacific, gently hedonistic, vegetarian Eloi in The Time Machine enjoy their anxiety-tinged time in the sun, courtesy of the sinisterly toiling and cannibalistic Morlocks below ground.

In the fictions of Wells’ great years, there were a lot of others who were indeed Other. The speeded-up civilizings of vivisectionist Doctor Moreau didn’t take hold, and you could get devoured by intelligent octopods in “The Sea Raiders” and by a new race of super-ants up the Amazon in “The Empire of the Ants.”. The narrator of that story reflects, “I fix 1950 or ’60 at the latest for their discovery of Europe.”

Like Mistah Kurtz, Wells could make you see things—things.

A semi-anarchic counter-image of the English public-school, system, in which staff and classes are largely invisible, there is no prefect system or sermonizing about the school spirit, and attention is focused on a trio with little interaction with or interest in other students, who in an episode that outraged H.G. Wells, torture and tame two bullies who have been making their study a hell for a smaller boy.

Kipling, 1902

“Order” in Kipling’s heyday fiction in the Eighties and Nineties is stretched thin. “Native” peoples have their own strong identities. A young British Civil Engineer in India is hounded to his death by a phantom that shows up on a photographic negative. A leper’s curse and touch turn a drunken white man into a near beast for temple sacrilege. Channels of communication open up disturbingly to the past. Sea beasts are cast up to the surface by a volcanic explosion. Tigers, cobras, and packs of wild dogs are lethal in his children’s books.

If Kipling despises the muddied oaf at the goal (soccer-playing working-class), he also despises the flannelled fool at the wicket. His imperial administrators include more than their share of fools, snobs, and incompetent careerists. A lot in “native” India, in contrast, is offered for our admiration.

A major analysis, absorbed by Lenin, who said, “I made use of the principal English work on imperialism, the book by J. A. Hobson, with all the care that, in my opinion, that work deserves.” It ends with the words:

Imperialism is a depraved choice of national life, imposed by self-seeking interests which appeal to the lusts of quantitative acquisitiveness and of forceful domination surviving in a nation from early centuries of animal struggle for existence. Its acceptance as a policy implies a deliberate renunciation of that cultivation of the higher inner qualities which for a nation as for an individual constitutes the ascendancy of reason over brute impulse. It is the besetting sin of all successful States, and its penalty is as unalterable in the order of nature.

In his introduction to the 1965 paperback, Philip Siegelman calls it “a powerful—and in some cases definitive—influence on Lenin, Hilferding, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Bakunin, and on virtually all later significant treatments of the subject.” He also says:

No part of [Hobson’s] early intellectual struggles may seem at first glance to be vitally or directly correlated with a work like Imperialism. But we may, perhaps, assess its relevance indirectly by noting that much of the tone of Hobson’s early intellectual struggles reveals a familiar leitmotif evidenced in the thought of numerous contemporaries. To be sure, their skepticism about the established order was to take radically different directions. Yet, such diverse thinkers and writers as Ibsen, Havelock Ellis, Tolstoi, Freud, Nietzsche, Shaw, and Frank Harris were unnerved, each in his own way, by a sharp sense of disparity between the real and the ideal, between the formal, official, surface view of things and the disorderly, irrational, selfish reality of events. (pp.vii–viii)

Conrad, greatest political novelist of the century in English, is way ahead of the “enlightened” view of human nature and an ultimate utopia.

A piece of string and a ramrod; a few muskets in combination with a length of hide rope; or even a simple mallet of heavy, hard wood applied with a swing to human fingers or to the joints of the human body is enough for the infliction of the most exquisite torture. [Dr. Monyghan] had been a very stubborn prisoner, and, as a natural consequence of that “bad disposition” (as Father Beron called it), his subjugation had been very crushing and very complete. That is why the limp in his walk, the twist of his shoulders, the scars on his cheeks were so pronounced. His confessions, when they came at last, were very complete, too. Sometimes on the nights when he walked the floor, he wondered, grinding his teeth with shame and rage, at the fertility of his imagination when stimulated by a sort of pain which makes truth, honour, self-respect, and life itself matters of little moment.

And he could not forget Father Beron with his monotonous phrase, “Will you confess now?” reaching him in an awful iteration and lucidity of meaning through the delirious incoherence of unbearable pain. (Part 3, ch. 4)

Contain some of the scariest moments in any ghost stories, their power coming in part because of the urbane and circumstantial flow of the narratives, often involving gentlemanly scholars engaged in seemingly harmless researches, out of which they erupt.

You never know what lurks in the supposedly distant past, ready to enter the present with undiminished energy. James’ at times lethal or would-be lethal manifestations have the concreteness of the detailed episodes from which they emanate— specific crimes, specific dealings at times, back “then,” with the supernatural.

Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon (1957) will be made from “Casting the Runes.” The story is creepier, as are stories like “Count Magnus,” “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook,” “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” and “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”

A translation, published in Paris by Charles Carrington (the Maurice Girodias of those days), of a 1902 historical novel about the Mahdi’s revolt in the Sudan in the 1880’s. A proud aristocratic English girl discovers through her rape-relationship with a black Emir, and occasional whippings in an environment of atrocious cruelties, that, as she puts it in the final paragraph of the book when she explains to her rescuer, General Kitchener, why she prefers to remain where she is,

“Do what a woman may, she cannot alter her fate. She cannot even govern her own heart. The man who forces her to bow to his will is her master! She loves the despot who can make himself obeyed.”

The nadir or apex of late-nineteenth, early-twentieth-century sadistic erotica, extrapolated fictionally from a recent legal affair, and leading the French scholar Louis Perceau to opine in his Bibliographie du roman érotique au XIXe siècle (1930) that the blurb writer may not have been exaggerating much when he called it “assuredly the most horrible [work] that has issued from a human pen.” (Vol.II, p.42)

Forster, who had experienced and hated bullying, could extrapolate from boyhood to the psychology of intenser tormentings and the will to dominate.

A powerful satirical pamphlet in which Belgium’s King Leopold II, reputedly the wickedest man in Europe, comments on various passages taken from attacks on his private domain of the Congo Free State, where Conrad, in desperate need of a command, had captained a river-boat in 1890.

The speaker, Leopold, veers between outraged nobility of purpose and cynical callousness, all under the mantle of his being in that area an absolute monarch unanswerable to any laws except his own.

His operation, begun with international approval as a civilizing mission and then for over twenty years furnishing him with immense personal wealth, is the first great modern example of a total disjunction between a façade of progressive rationalism and hideous on-the-ground actualities, and massive unblushing PR lying.

This was on the library shelf. By a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society,

483 pages of primary text, 130 pages of smaller font Appendices. Maps, statistics, texts of treaties, accounts of improvements, reports by missionaries and other visitors, detailed refutation of accusations, proffering of alternative explanations for alleged atrocities, accusations of vested commercial and missionary interests on the part of the crusaders, acknowledgments of some things done wrong by individuals that are subsequently rectified, reminders of the Belgian suppression of slave trading, reminders of barbarism and (native) cruelties in adjoining states. Literate prose.

Adam Hochschild comments in King Leopold’s Ghost (1998),

Apparetly this was one of a number of works commissioned and/or subsidized by Leopold’s PR team. But one can be in the pay of a good cause. This isn’t obviously hack work. Indeed, it is more solid than the couple of books by E.D. Morel that I’ve read.

There will be more twentieth-century tremors like this in the edifice of reason when two political accounts of something, each bearing the rhetorical marks of veracity, are utterly irreconcilable.

A sardonic and in places lastingly funny deconstruction of the idea of an objective, rational, and supra-personal socio-political order, plus a typology of anarchists and terrorists, one of them a walking human bomb. When the little “Professor” runs into Chief Inspector Heat on the street, he

beheld all his enemies and fearlessly confronted them all in a supreme satisfaction of his vanity. They stood perplexed before him, as if before a dreadful portent. He gloated inwardly over the chance of this meeting affirming his superiority over all the multitude of mankind.

This appears to have been effectively the first publication of this brilliant work in Britain. According to a scholarly bookseller’s note, “This edition … is a turning point for the popularity of Nietzsche in the UK”—and no doubt an intensifier of the horror that his name evoked for many, like Machiavelli’s in Shakespeare’s day.

Christy Mahon is admired by fellow peasants in another village when he tells them (and believes) that he has struck his father dead with a spade (hoe?); basking in which admiration he swells to twice the (Irish)man he was.

Over-the-top Sadean outrageousness in modern settings, not all of it self-evidently tongue-in-cheek.

Literal sexual slavery in Hong Kong.

For more, see Note 47

The horrors of world-wide aerial warfare are witnessed, mostly from above, by “little” lower-class Englishman Bert Smallways, ill-educated but shrewd, who becomes hardened, adapts to the emergent new order of things, and learns to shoot first and take what he needs. America, early on, is attacked by a German air fleet as if by Martians:

There are notable hand-to-hand violences in Wells’ earlier novels and stories. “To smash” is a frequently recurring verb. The Time-Traveller in The Time Machine sensibly equips himself with a broken-off lever that he wields against Morlocks. The Invisible Man smashes silly obstructive bobbies and others. A jealous husband in “The Cone” throws his rival onto the movable cone that closes off the top of a blast furnace.

By the major campaigner against the horrors of rubber-gathering in the huge private Congo estate of financially brilliant but rapacious King Leopold II of Belgium, Europe’s very own robber-baron, tall and bearded like Kurtz, sexually voracious, and described by some as the wickedest man in Europe. In the Congo “system,” agents are paid by results and left free as to the means. “Lazy” natives are flogged, hands of “rebels” are cut off, tribal areas are laid waste, the death tolls mount, and on one occasion tardy workers are compelled to eat raw rubber, their killers escaping punishment on the grounds that there is no medical evidence that raw rubber is harmful to ingest—these widely attested-to horrors all blandly or indignantly denied by Leopold’s “whited-sepulchre” PR operation.

Estimated dead in the Congo Free State, 1886–1908, 8 million.

An autobiographical narrative by George Ponderevo, looking back on a career in which he emerges literally from below-stairs (his mother, like Wells’ own, is the house-keeper in a big country house). He obtains an education by force of talent, figures out the hollowness of the English class system (“a feudal scheme overtaken by fatty degeneration and stupendous accidents of hypertrophy”), throws himself full tilt into the American-style marketing of his uncle’s phony cure-all tonic, takes up aeronautical inventing, goes on a Conradian trip to Africa for radioactive mud, and leaves England exhilarated by the power and rush of the destroyer that takes him down the Thames.

During the African expedition (Camus must have read the book), he kills a native whom he runs into in the jungle.

That night it suddenly comes to him that this was murder.

Disruptions of a yearned-for idyllic, asexual male stasis.

Feckless, bi-polar (“American”?) Sir Toad (at least Sir, if he’s Lord of the Manor the way he’s presented as) is lured away by the automobile’s roar and the endless highway, only to land in the Deepest Dungeon of Olde England.

The sinister lower orders, sharp-fanged denizen of the Wild Wood, occupy the manor house, until martial order is restored under the leadership of crusty old Tory patriarch Badger. Toad takes his medication and becomes indeed an altered Toad.

Along the way, Rat fantasizes about Getting Away from It All in the wide world, but stays sensibly at his City desk, reserving the all-too-brief weekends for comfortable old clothes and messing around in boats.

The first English translation of this problematic compilation made by Nietzsche’s sister from his notebooks after his death and lacking the buoyancy and concreteness of The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil. These notebook entries are ones that he didn’t publish, and in which he is struggling, largely unsuccessfully, to codify and move beyond his own best earlier insights, becoming in fact less grounded in the process.

Since the unresolved gives more employment to commentators, because allowing more room for their own ingenuity, this would become the seminal text for post-1950 French philosophy. But it is a dangerous text.

The instinctive interpretation of the title misrepresents what seems to have been, in Nietzsche’s principal reading, the innate tendency in all things to reach towards their own potential fullness of being. But there are other and ominous elements there, given the multiperspectival nature of his rhetoric.

On the one hand, there’s the nihilistic collapsing of values that he feared and attacked but which he himself, in his undercutting of conventional Platonic/Christian values, contributed to. On the other (since who and on what principle is to legislate the limits of another’s expansion?) there’s the will to power over others that the title suggests. (See Note 49).

Readers, including National Socialist readers, could take from the book, or even simply from the title and selected passages, what they wanted.The Nazis and other fascists were men impatient with philosophical cobwebs and qualifications and subtle distinctions. Their values—their, yes, philosophies— were values in action. The plenitude they sought for “their” Germany involved the subordination and at times elimination of others. Was it Goering who said, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my revolver”?

A powerful exposé of the tyranny of the Porfiro Díaz regime, backed by the U.S. Government. The virtual slave-labour camps that will figure in B. Traven’s “Jungle” novels (1931–1940) are particularly atrocious.

The first installment appears of the 32-volume serial series (1911–1913) about the master criminal Fantômas, in his innumerable disguises, who directs a vast criminal network engaged in crimes of great audacity and at times great cruelty.

Magritte, “The Return of the Flame” 1943

In his fascinating Paris; The Secret History (2006), Andrew Hussey reports that his activities included

The books derive their power not only from the expressive movie-like images that delighted the Surrealists, and relative erotic candour, but also from the knowledgeable-seeming presentation of strongly individuated low-life denizens of the Paris underworld in their native habitats, in Montmartre and elsewhere, speaking their own argot.

It is as if there were a series set in the States that included Yale and Princeton graduates, Fifth Avenue hostesses, hold-ups at the Metropolitan Opera, dinner-party massacres at Newport, and an abundance of low-life figures from the New York described in Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York.

The books don’t seem to go well into English, chiefly perhaps because of the difficulty of finding equivalents for the argot. But Jack Nicholson’s Joker vandalizing the Museum of Modern Art in Batman is obviously a full-blooded, if less gentlemanly, descendant of Fantômas.

An austere embodiment of traditional high culture is sent into terminal moral paralysis by the discovery of hitherto unsuspected sexual proclivities in himself, keyed to the supposedly ennobling ideal of Classical beauty.

A detailed analysis of a corrupt system in which the leaders of the two main English parties, Conservative and Liberal, tacitly collude in order to avoid the unwelcome expenses of elections forced by defeats of the Government in the House of Commons, individual members being kept in line by the party Whips.

The book comes out in the same year as the Marconi Scandal,

A major Syndicalist text celebrating the power of workers, as deployed through trade unions, to overthrow the existing system by means of industrial sabotage and the ultimate weapon of the General Strike. Not a celebration of violence in the conventional sense.

Rebellions breaking out in Mexico result in the resignation of President Porfirio Diaz the following year, ending a 35-year rule.

White Slavery #1

The blurb on the title page obviously isn’t designed to repel readers, and it is easy to feel condescending.

Step right up, folks!

White Slavery #2

But the 448-page book by the principal crusader and a number of associates is an unhysterical presentation of a lot of facts about how young girls, at a time when they are expected to do long hours of “straight” work for three or four dollars a week can be enticed or tricked into prostitution, with its dangers of venereal disease, drug addiction, and alcoholism.

“White slave”=prostitute, particularly one who has trouble getting out of that life. “White slave traders”=procurers, pimps, and madams, at times in extended networks, who do in fact trade girls with one another, at times sending them along pipelines extending from Poland and France to the Americas.

White Slavery #3

There is very little about outright coercion and captivity. But the eyes of some would no doubt light on the passage by John B. Hammond of Iowa City in which

In his 1910 “The Terror of Blue John Gap,” Doyle’s narrator postulates a literal underworld below the Derbyshire limestone region, such that “For countless aeons the internal and the external creation had kept apart, growing steadily away from each other.” Faced with the possibility that someone too venturesome has been carried underground by a monster, the narrator confides to his journal, “What an inconceivable fate for a civilized Englishman of the twentieth century!”

Two years later, Doyle marvelously imagines the persistence of a parallel, time-warped environment in which his quartet of explorers are at risk from dinosaurs hungry for their flesh and blood and ape-men who want to toss them off the edge of the plateau onto the bamboo shafts at its base. The black-and-white illustrations by Harry Rountree cannot be improved upon,

A short paranoid novel that ages well, despite the sketchiness of the vast subversive organization master-minded by polymathic, gentlemanly, Establishment-honoured old Mr. Lumley. (“The nameless brains that he spoke of, working silently in the background, now and then showed their power by some cataclysmic revelation,.”)

Hitchcockian evocations of upcoming lawyer and Member of Parliament Edward Leithen’s nightmarish isolation in a summer London where the streets and parks are full of people going about their ordinary business—except for Lumley’s seemingly scores of agents dressed as workmen, beggars, men-and-women-about-Town, and so forth seeking to capture or kill him.

Knives are drawn at one point in Soho by “foreign” members of the gang. Leithen and an associate share a revolver between them, Facing a gang member, “Now was the time when, as they say in America, I should have got busy with my gun; but alas! I had no gun [with me].” Back then, schoolboys could buy revolvers for a few shillings.

The book is creepily prescient in the dinner conversation of the two men before Leithen knows in whose house, thanks to a car accident, he is an overnight guest

The first scholarly expedition into the underworld of the library’s collection of banned books.

A brilliant, wide-angle, detailed presentation of a complex society and its historical evolution that demonstrates the benefits that can come, as they do with biographies, when a writer is speaking from inside a culture and responding to living forces and attitudes within it.

It includes four pages about individual cruelties and sexual domination in mid-nineteenth-century Russia paralleling their equivalents in the antebellum American South and demonstrating the frenetic sadism that can accompany unchecked power. There are also a couple of pages about then recent torturing by the authorities. (See Sidebar 13)

An AbeBooks description says:

Feuillade’s serial, only a part of it accessible now in Juve contre Fantomas. Lovely free filming, an easy shifting between levels of stylized reality, a lot of it on location. One has the feeling that Feuillade simply puts his camera wherever he wants—a busy boulevard intersection, a train depot, a train corridor, an overgrown villa garden. Passers-by ignore or dodge the camera as characters tail one another, chase in cabs. So something new and odd (“cinema”) is going on in Paris, which itself, reduced to shots, becomes slightly theatrical in the way it does in Atget’s photographs, where empty streets and courtyards feel like sites where interesting things can go on.

Gentry are better dressed, less broad in gesture and make-up than in American movies at the time. Viewers (French) will be familiar with social codes in a decent restaurant, not immigrants and hicks on whom finesse will be lost. So the strange, the unusual, l’insolite, when it occurs—masked gang-members swarming a rich man in a train compartment, a gunfight among empty wine barrels on a Paris quai, etc—emerges from the familiar and shows that the taken-for-granted is not the only game in town.

Things are going on elsewhere, too, off camera. Where is the gang’s base? What else is it up to? Who is Fantômas? What is the relationship between Gurn (Fantômas?) and Lady Beltham? What will happen next?

No wonder the Surrealists loved it all.

A curious and, in the long run, very influential novel, in which Wells predicts major conflicts, but misses the one impending in the year in which the book appears, with its zone of barbed wire, excavations, and carnage snaking its way down through the continent of Europe.

War with atomic bombs is followed by an even scarier novelistic vision of a world being managed, for its own good, by a scientific and science-minded elite tucked away in the Himalayas beyond the reach of sentimental muddle and parking tickets.

Set among upper-class characters (one of them is even called Cecily) and obviously written before the guns of August opened up, this isn’t a Hate Germany polemic but, rather, a wake-up call with little evidence in it of a belief that the call will be heeded.

Having allowed itself to lose control of sea and air, island Britain has surrendered after a three-day war and become (its King now sidelined in Delhi as Emperor of the East) a province of Germany, which has been managing it with a well padded velvet glove over the iron. Munro is mordantly persuasive about the dynamics of accomodation, adaptation, collaboration on the part of England’s now nominally ruling class, and about the process of Germanification by which German civilians move in, peacefully, to fill the gaps left by the numerous professional-class Britains who have chosen to emigrate.

In his mid-forties, Munro, a one-time foreign correspondent, and best known for his snap-ending short stories as “Saki” (oh those period pseudonyms!) answers his own call, volunteers, and dies in the trenches in 1916.

An inarticulate young peasant conscript gets fed-up with being brutalized by the officer he serves as orderly and kills him in the woods when they are out on manoeuvres.

Sloan, “The Beating” in The Masses 1914

Well, at least they’re face to face.

Celebrates the revolutionary and at times cruel spirit in Mexico as embodied especially in the forces of Pancho Villa.

Finished, according to Conrad, in May 1914. A brilliant analysis of the workings of ironical self-emasculation.

On April 14, 1912, near midnight, the aquatic Grand Hotel RMS Titanic, on her maiden transatlantic voyage to New York, has a gash torn in her unsinkable hull that results in her going down with the loss of over 1500 souls, including the rich, the famous, the beautiful, as well as bog-Irish emigrants in Third-Class, and crew members, an allegorical event that elicit sfrom Hardy a weightier poem than he would write subsequently about the Great War, giving the iceberg an equal partnership in the encounter.

It is as if a piece of the indifferent kingdom of Nature, growing for several thousand years, and breaking off from what had been conceptualized as something to be explored, charted, flown over, had reared up and affirmed its own irreducibility, all the more ominously because of its virtual invisibility (it wasn’t photographed) and the sensed presence of those irregular four-fifths of its mass below the surface.

A widely distributed and very influential work, consisting of an almost 300-page compilation of individual testimonies and a sixty-page report signed by seven respectable figures—historians, lawyers, a newspaper editor—who examined the collected documents.

Here is a complete testimony by an anonymous Belgian soldier.

For more on this subject, see Sidebar 14.

Forty-four detailed fine-point ink drawings present the Kaiser, natty in his helmet, breastplate, and high polished boots (and occasionally his weakling son “Little Willie”), in the company of a variety of unsavoury beings from Europe’s darkside collective imaginings—fortune-tellers, devils, Circe, semi-human apes (one huge one in a German helmet is about to dismember a boy angel on a butcher’s block), drunken revellers, vultures, wild boars, strutting or simpering skeletons.

Aubrey Beardsley, James Ensor, Felicien Rops, Laurence Housman are strong stylistic presences—the reveries of the Nineties become flesh, in a manner of speaking. The genuinely wicked and much caricatured King Leopold II has left the stage, and the Belgium that profited from his Congo depredations now figures as a nun and a, yes, naked angel.

According to an e-Bay note, Sullivan

The Klan’s Knights of the Bedsheets save White Southern Womanhood from fates worth than death in one of the most racially pernicious movies ever made.

Who am I to disagree with the enthusiasts? For them, the doings of the groups of crooks and crime-fighters in various guises are wonderfully subversive and poetic. But the seven-hour movie, serials stitched together, didn’t work its magic for me. Maybe it would be better as a serial, taken in small doses?

As it was, far too much of it seemed, in memory, to display people dodging in and out of rooms in a handful of sets with the same camera set-ups, so that indigestion set in. Because it was shot in wartime, the Feuillade team couldn’t take us into those lively Paris streets and boulevards and railroad stations that made Feuillade’s Juve Contre Fantômas, recalling the photographs of Eugene Atget, such a treat.

Musidora as the head “vampire” is gorgeous, of course. But Marcel Levesque, providing supposedly comic relief, is an egotistical stage—well, stagy— comedian out of his element and mugging egregiously for his no doubt adoring fans.

When, oh when, are we going to get all five of the Fantômas movies? It’s there, I’m sure, that Feuillade’s oeuvre is to be seen at its most inspirational.

But those, as they say, are just-my-personal-opinions. For a very different take, consult the Amazon.com commentaries.

Over 600 pages of documents assembled (and checked for reliability) by young historian Arnold Toynbee. Mostly neutral observers, a number of them American—missionaries, doctors, teachers, consular personnel, travellers—as well as Armenian survivors. Ponsonby and Lasswell (see below) for whom reports of atrocities were just propaganda word games, with one side as bad as the other, prudently refrained later from impugning their veracity.

Grosz, “Married Life,” 1916

Massacre after local massacre, all obviously following directives from a Turkish government (and ally of Germany) using the pretext of wartime security to cleanse the area south of the Black Sea of (Christian) Armenians.

Tortures to find out supposedly hidden arms—a hundred, two hundred crippling blows of bastinado, nails torn out. Village after village, town after town, emptied of Armenians, usually at too short notice to permit of preparations for the journey. Adult males killed off in batches. Women and children marched away—cripples, the sick, the elderly, women who’ve just given birth or do so en route, all driven forward by mounted police with whips and clubs and bayonets. Rapes and kidnappings. Babies killed by their mothers to end their suffering. Women going mad. The heat, the cold, the stony roads, and always the ravenous hunger. Psychological torment of being deposited outside a town until the (Muslim) inhabitants are sickened by the stench, then whipped on to another one, always en route to death in the desert.

The heroic hold-out at Mousa Dagh is in there, for real. Franz Werfel, in his novel about it in the early Thirties (see below), would discern obvious analogies with the potential fate of Jews under the Nazis.

Armenians, who had been in the region for over two millenia, were merchants, craftsmen, professionals—and Christians. Individuals, offered the chance of reprieve if they would convert to Islam, heroically refused.

For a few quotations, see Note 56.

For a substantial, lucid, authoritative, and appalling summarizing of a complicated sequence of events, see “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” on the Web. HYPERLINK: www.hyeetch.nareg.com.au/genocide/ambassador_p1.html

Lots more on the Web. Fascinating to see polemics against the Bryce/Toynbee volume and others, fuelled by the evident assumption that if a work is propaganda (that is, designed to propagate information and ideas and influence opinion), what’s said in it must necessarily be false. But there is far too much evidence in the book for it to be deniable, except by dint of not reading it at all.

“Documentation of a high order.” (Times Literary Supplement, quoted on back cover.)

Murder. Rape. Looting. Arson. Etc.

See Sidebar 14.

A book—factual? fictionalized? at any rate in the French realist mode—that must have had a considerable impact at the time and turned some British stomachs. A succession of stretches and moments in the trench life of the platoon of which the narrator—but it’s Barbusse, Barbusse—is a member. Not a conventionally “protest” book, though there’s a great deal in the way of the horrors of war to protest against.

Dix, “Bombing of Lens”

The book seems aimed at the kind of French civilian (one or two make their appearance here) who think of war still in terms of Napoleonic gloire. It’s saying, “No, this is what it’s actually like now,” but not in any way trying to diminish the spirited, stoical decency of the French poilu. The men grumble about the things that soldiers in uncomfortable circumstances grumble about, but there’s no general protesting, until almost at the end, about the war, or War, as such. They talk about a variety of things, but accept without indignation the fact that soldiers, themselves included, die in battle. It’s what a battle is.

And the narrator, with his present-past-tense narration (“I’m sitting on the fire-step and Louis comes up to me and…”) isn’t alienated, but on the contrary wide-angle attentive, so that the chatting soldiers, the at times beautiful landscapes, the dramatic bombardments, and even the dead, including recently dead companions, at times making still the gestures of the living, have a kind of vitality to them. This is all life, one might say.

Barbusse cheats a little, I think, in downplaying the man-to-man killing by his lot. I’m not sure that he himself ever kills anyone. But in any event the descriptions of the dead of both sides are remarkable (see Note 46) and would have been impossible in a British novel at the time, as would the relatively wide-ranging and serious conversations among the “common” soldiers.

Barbusse seems to have a photographic memory, and be studying things around him as though he were inside a realist novel.

Shaw’s most would-be scarifying vivisection of a degenerated “traditional” British ruling class contains some irritating sleight-of-pen with respect to the supposed new-style man of power, “Boss” Mangan. In his own self-presentation near the end, he is no “industrial Napoleon” but simply the agent of “syndicates and shareholders and all sorts of lazy good-for-nothing capitalists,” meaning people living off capital.” (“It’s a dog’s life; and I don’t own anything.”) If no-one has real power and no-one can be blamed, what’s to be done?

Alcoholic Captain Shotover’s exhortation to “learn navigation” looks empty (but ominously capable of being filled by fascist or communist supposed expertise) beside his summatory prediction that the ship of England “will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?”

The twenty-three-year-old aristocrat and war veteran Sir Owald Mosley, who in 1931 will launch his own beyond-politics New Party, and the following year convert it into the British Union of Fascists, no doubt enjoyed the play.

In 1920, D.H. Lawrence, making his own wide-angle socio-cultural diagnosis in Women in Love (an earlier title Dies Irae, day of wrath) is much more intelligent about the dynamics of mechanistic and supposedly efficient industrialism.

The first hundred or so pages of this almost four-hundred page novel are nothing much—upper-class figures with problems, the mysterious murder of one of them, an eccentric police inspector, an undercover investigation in progress, a wife behaving erratically.

With chapter 13, though, it changes gear as it concentrates on the erratic wife, Rita, a musical comedy star who’s introduced to opium at a credible-sounding intimate party hosted by the Cuban-Jewish wife of Limehouse-based drug lord Sin Sin Wa.

Refreshingly and surprisingly, since the book came out in 1919 and a number of the events are pre-war, there’s nothing here about mysterious evils or unspeakable rites. Rohmer, who pretty obviously knows what he’s talking about, understands the landscape of narcotics and the dynamics of addiction, including the escalating prices. But there’s no conventional moralizing about Rita’s entrapment and deterioration. Nor is Sir Lucien, active in the business, a moustache-twirling villain, but a slightly melancholy observer.

Sin Sin Wa, too, despite his eye-patch and talking one-eyed raven, is a rogue, not a Fu-Manchu embodiment of Wickedness. And the bobbies aren’t all paragons of British virtue. When a couple of them drop in on Sin on a cold damp night.

And when a raid is mounted to locate Sin’s warehouse and the vanished Rita, the upper-echelon guardians of the Law find themselves fumbling around in a literal Limehouse fog and confronted for awhile with rooms bearing no criminal traces.

And Sin Sin Wa gets away clean at the end.

It’s a novel that couldn’t have been published before the War to End Wars, a war in which a lot of narcotics had been required for the wounded. But if the drug-addiction part of it is true of the pre-war period (as it obviously was of the post-war one), there’s something reassuring about encountering something recognizably “modern” and subversive in those almost too wholesome and would-be hygenic Edwardian and early Georgian years, and treated without any of the Nineties fussing about the mystery of Evil.

A truly poisonous work, both in the accretion of texts around it and in an inner emotional truth (but not about Jews) beneath all the lies.

The thumbnail from Wikipedia shows the front page of Julius Streicher’s infamous antisemitic weekly The Stormer (presumably “storm” as in “storm trooper”) which apparently was too rank even for some Nazi high-ups. but which Hitler (reportedly) enjoyed. There’s a bitter irony to this warning about the Jewish Peril, accompanied by its classic image of the evil alien Jew, appearing in a year in which the gas chambers had almost completed their infamous work.

Books can kill.

For more, see Note 57.

A hugely popular edulcifying of elements in Jean de Villiot’s Woman and Her Master (trans.1904), made into the even more popular Rudoph Valentino movie the same year. The book is still in print, and, despite the scrupulous avoidance of “objectionable” specifics, is quiveringly erotic.

Fiercely independent virginal English aristocrat Diane Mayo, venturing too rashly into the desert, is seized by Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan and treated with total imperious dominance by him, in an environment in which violence always hovers, until, after various attempts at resistance and escape, she loses all sense of self and realizes that she adores him and his savage embraces.

Alas, like Tarzan he turns out to have been born an English aristocrat himself, and apologizes for having been beastly to her. But this is obviously tacked on to satisfy the claims of public morals and racial purity.

See also Note 4.

A novel about masochism (heterosexual male masochism), rather than a novel for masochists, the way J.-K. Huysman’s A Rebours (1884) is a novel about decadence, rather than the decadent counter-bible that Oscar Wilde presents it as in The Picture of Dorian Gray(1891). Touches all psychological bases, including an inescapable element of fictiveness.

The second and best of the Bulldog Drummond novels.

A black-hooded vigilante group of ex-officers administer “justice” to persons whom the Law is unable to touch, such as the two Jewish pimps (“white-slavers”) who at the outset are sent off to be flogged “to within an inch of their lives” with a cat-of-nine-tails, or the “fifty or sixty rabid anarchists” who at the end of the novel are found in a private proto-Dachau where their activities are supervised by “twenty large demobilized soldiers commanded by an ex-sergeant-major of the Guards.” We aren’t shown those things, but as they say, it’s the thought that counts.

Oh, and Phyllis and Hugh Drummond, bound and helpless, come close to being brained by the swung rifle butt of one of the killers of the Russian Royal Family.

But I’m being a bit glib.

Drummond and his ex-service (officer-and-gentleman-class) chums are insufferable when they’re simply being bored philistine men-about-town and Drummond unendearingly bellows “Beer, fool,” at his long-sufferting batman/manservant.

But when MacNeile’s darker currents well up in the first four Drummond books with their major villain Carl Petersen, we have a Fantomas-like richness of atrocities. A man is reduced to gibbering terror with thumbscrews, a baddie goes into a bath of acid, an employee of Drummond is blown to bloody rags by the hand-grenade that Drummond barely escapes, there’s a paralyzing drug like curare and Drummond’s near drowning, and the Bolshevik with his cherished rifle is an atrocious figure who richly deserves being skewered to the wall by his own bayonet.

For a bit more, see The Final Count

A repulsive book by the then most belligerent Catholic polemicist in Britain, all the more unpleasant because it’s dedicated to his secretary, “the best and most intimate of our Jewish friends” and includes a chapter on “The Anti-Semite,” which, naturally, don’t get him wrong, he himself isn’t. But he is.

The book is about the Jewish Problem, meaning why “everyone” dislikes Jews and what might be done about it. Jews are, it emerges, just too pushily successful. They are everywhere in finance, they have “swarmed” (he’s a charmer) into Parliament, the Civil Service (except the Foreign Office), the Universities, they are secretive, they made a revolution in Russia, they Christianize their names, they owe no loyalty to their host countries, they are A SEPARATE NATION.

An acceptable solution? For both parties, gentiles and jews, to explicitly acknowledge that fact. Fascinating!. So presumably, when (having spent the War in London writing government propaganda yourself) you’re chatting at a party with a young Jewish lawyer who volunteered in 1914 and lost a leg as a Lieutenant at Paschendaele, you’ll both feel much better if you tell him right out that though he isn’t really an Englishman and you suspect that Greenbaum. not Greenwood is his real name you don’t think any the less of him and you sympathize with “his people’s” desire for a state of their own in Palestine.

I wonder how many Jewish friends the Bellocs had? Belloc’s comrade and co-religionist G.K. Chesterton was no better. Chesterton’s brother Cecil, who died in the War, was apparently worse.

By themselves, these facts wouldn’t make the book worth mentioning. But in the chapter sketching the Anti-Semite, we learn that

Early-warning signals.

The first and most influential sympathetic account, with Lenin’s blessing, of the revolutionary take-over in St. Petersburg.

Lawrence’s surrogate, author Richard Somers, experiences the seductiveness of the leader of an emergent Australian fascist movement, but finally rejects it in the name of intelligent individualism.

Famous, scandalous, expressionistically jagged intermingling of lightning sketches (mostly “candid”), imagined scenes (mostly sexual or/and violent), and finished-up watercolours (mostly hallucinatory), with more female genitalia than could have been seen before by Anglo-American eyes (and “decent” German ones?) except in backroom porn, and a gallery of odious arrogant rich male “winners,” flabby/flaccid would-be erotic oldsters, and a variety of females on the sexual make, or about to be unenthusiastically made. With some crippled and unemployed vets thrown in. Down below, crimes of violence are plotted, murders carried out. Above, the powerful, who have profited from and helped drive the war, dominate the weaker.

Written in 1924 and published ten years later in the New Statesman.

Contains the true inauguration of gangster narrative:

Jay Gatsby, alias Jimmy Gatz, bootlegger, is a man of whom one of his female guests comments, “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.” His wealth is consistent with the bootleg fortunes made almost overnight after the Volstead Act comes into effect at the start of 1919.

The first of a very popular series of twelve British horror anthologies with individual titles. Apparently a hundred of the 170 or so stories that appeared in them came from Weird Tales.According to the British Museum online catalogues, all the ones in Not at Night did.

See Note 44.

Creation matters little to us. We profoundly hope that revolution, wars, and colonial insurrection will annihilate this Western civilization whose vermin you defend even in the Orient … We take this opportunity to dissociate ourselves publicly from all that is French, in words and in actions.

Not as good as Eisenstein’s Strike but worth the price of admission many times over for the Odessa Steps sequence (jackboots, bayonets, baby-carriage, sabred face of pince-nez woman). Apparently the actual massacre took place at night and involved a drunken rioting crowd. Apparently, too, the crew of the ship, not getting enough comradely support, took it to Roumania, whence it was returned to Russia after they abandoned it.

Ultra-transgressive erotica by the most problematic twentieth-century French man-of-letters. Barely a hundred large-type pages.

Intensely erotic in the first section, with the delirious transgressions of the three young people, two of them enjoying (credibly?) a sexual freedom that would have been utterly impossible across the Channel.

Becomes infected with Significance in the bullfight section, with its Bataillesque identifications of eyes, eggs, and the peeled testicles of a slain bull.

In the third and, in intention, most outrageously Sadean section, Bataille is too obviously dehumanizing the degraded and murdered young priest, at least for readers who don’t already view priests as vermin. Memorable uses of an eyeball that would be unbearable with more realistic backgrounding.

Susan Sontag singled out this and Trois filles et leur mère for special praise.

The young and virile narrator becomes involved with a mother and her three daughters in his Paris apartment building, all of them whores, all of them thrusting themselves at him and confiding in him. It’s a trip in which he finds barrier after barrier with respect to the sexually permissable broken or dissolved by them, without guilt feelings or jealousy, but with a lively awareness that transgressions energize eroticism. The activities are largely without cruelty, but the self-degrading compulsions of the eldest daughter Charlotte lend a darker dimension to them.

The original handwritten manuscript carries the statement: “This little book isn’t a novel. It is a true story, down to the smallest detail. I haven’t changed anything, either in the portrait of the mother and her three young daughters or in the circumstances.”

The characters are not just Pornland arrangements of apertures and protuberances. They have character.

Privately printed limited edition. Flogging, massacres. See 1936 public edition below and Sidebar 13.

The translation of a book that had appeared in Germany the previous year by a distinguished Russian historian and mobilizer of liberal opinion, now exiled from the new Russia. A horrific detailing of Bolshevik atrocities, 1918–1922

For a quotation, see Sidebar 13.

Big History, with its big generalizations, complicated nests of categories, and insistent parallel-drawing requires too much knowledge from a reader in order to test it out, particularly when the idea of inevitability is involved.

Josephine Baker

But Spengler’s book, or simply the postcard-sized popular idea of the book, is very influential in the dumbed-down Twenties and Thirties, after so many gifted future leaders have been among the millions upon millions of dead in the 1914–18 madness.

When a society whose willing has been a function of its belief in a benign progress begins to doubt the inevitability of that progress, internal erosion and powerlessness in the face of purposeful violence, or simply the ruthless pursuit of individual power, will result—as Conrad and others have been seeing before the War.

Louis-Ferdinaand Céline,, the greatest 20^th-century French novelist after Proust, with his nauseated sense of the mediocrity of public figures now—political, military, literary—will be seeing things in terms of an irreversible decline of the West in relation to the Eastern hordes.

In a footnote the historian Niall Ferguson remarks,

My own amateur sense of things is that decadence sets in when a body is no longer willing to go on making the sacrifices that enabled it to achieve the level of comfort that it has come to enjoy.

This could have been a British noir before its time, if the prose had been crisper and Armstrong’s ear for speech better.

Three of Jimmy Rezaire’s four dope-peddling operators are collared, leaving Rezaire with well-dressed and coarsely handsome Long Sam, who tells him that if anyone tried to double-cross him,

After some up-and-down stuff in and on Rezaire’s shabby building off the Strand, with Sam and the coppers having no qualms about using their revolvers, the two of them go very filmically on the run in the West End.

In the second half, having dumped Sam, as he hopes, Rezaire is out of London and working his way, by various means, down towards a boat that’s waiting for him on the coast near Southampton. The landscape of flight is very different from American ones, or from Buchan’s Scotland, what with villages, narrow winding roads between hedges, and bobbies popping up at every crossroads, almost.

A nice tart ending. Was the book filmed, I wonder?

[ Al ] had propped open the slit that dishes passed through into the kitchen with a catsup bottle. “Listen, bright boy,” he said from the kitchen to George. “Stand a little further along the bar. You move a little to the left, Max.” He was like a photographer arranging for a group picture.

“Talk to me, bright boy,” Max said. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

George did not say anything.

“I’ll tell you,” Max said. “We’re going to kill a Swede.”

A richly detailed, non-polemical account of the pre-bootlegging underworld, largely Irish and Jewish, of a city that in the nineteenth century had a more than Dickensian vitality and excess, and a galaxy of colourful characters, of which Martin Scorsese’s movie presents a segment.

Influential. Too influential. See Sidebar 14

Its criminal types packed into a basement speakeasy bring us much closer to the milieu of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op than do subsequent movies like Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface. But this is a drama of sexual jealousy, rather than a study of gangs.

George Bancroft is brilliant as a big, exuberant, physically powerful alpha-male gangster, mortally dangerous when angered, and childlike in his mood swings between open-handed generosity and acute sexual jealousy.Wallace Beery could also have played the part, but Bancroft is fresher.

The movie suffers from the presence of British actor Clive Brooks, representing “class” and conveying emotion by compressing his raised eyebrows, turning unfocused eyes slightly upwards, and moving his stiff head slightly from side to side. Strong German-style photography and non-formulaic editing.

See comments below.

A nerve-weary, thirty-three-year-old American wife is kidnapped by Mexican Indians, carried off to their pueblo, kept doped till the time is right, and stabbed to death in a ritual that she accepts.

The reclusive and, from some viewpoints, slightly ridiculous Lovecraft has the benefit, in addition to being a saint of artistic poverty, of writing with seemingly complete conviction about events emerging from contexts that are large, ominous, and never quite as clear as they appear to be. (I still have NO idea what is going on in his long At the Mountains of Madness), and which fit in somewhere into, in the case of Cthulhu, a deep-space, deep-time mythos. Also, of course, there are some very nasty unnatural beings out there or under there and trying to get in.

Influential. Too influential. See Sidebar 14

The eye cut open by a stroke of a straight-edged razor at the outset was probably not perceived at the time as an animal’s, maybe a cow’s. The impact must have been considerable.

A scopophile’s delight. Non-formulaic frame compositions, movement within frames, progression from frame to frame. Not Russian-type montage. An intensification from art-deco sparse apartment at the outset, vie a wedding party and crowded backstage doings, to the density of the shipboard gambling salon.

Superb directing of actors, Brooks included, her Lulu the ultimate object of desire, much more than Marlene D’s Lola two years later for poor Professor Unrath—desired by the Schoens, father and son; by Countess Geschwitz; by the state prosecutor; ultimately, by Jack the Ripper.

A (spoiled) child’s seductive gaiety, wheedling, impulsiveness, indifference to others’ disapproval, indifference to decorum, at times a child’s petulance and cruelty, at times its generosity Compelling rich Berliner- Jewish Dr. Schoen—his intended “political” marriage wrecked, along with his reputation—to promote her from mistress to wife, but most comfortable with shabby little petty-criminal Schilgoch from poverty days, almost an antisemitic caricature.

In his little book on Pabst, Freddy Buach, who opines that Schilgoch was almost certainly her first lover, reports that the censors, cutting and scouring, made him her adoptive father. In the DVD release, she simply says “my father.” It seems unlikely, though. In Nazi eyes, a destructive, subversive, incorrigibly antisocial rodent-like creature, everything that a good S.A. man isn’t. But he isn’t an over-rigid and internally weak hypocrite like Schoen. The good citizens don’t come off well here.

All that is before Schoen, driven half crazy by her unfaithfulness and contempt, forces her into shooting him and she goes on the lam from the courthouse.

On the gambling ship where she and wimpy Alva, along with Gershwitz, Schilgoch, and strongman Rodrigo are hiding out,, she’s diminished, subdued, her black helmet of hair gone. With a wry sense of the superior power of a non-sexual desire, she ministers to Alva as he compulsively loses their money at the table. And she’s rightly terrified at the prospect of being sold to an Egyptian brothel owner because of their debts.

She dies in foggy London from generosity—gives herself tenderly on Christmas Eve to a tragic-eyed penniless lonely stranger (Jack the Knife, as we learn) rather than to someone who’ll pay the badly needed money that she’s now earning on her back. Jack’s compulsion to destroy overwhelms his yearning to love.