Portia Podsnap

Margot Metroland

Deborah Cohen
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial:
The Reporters who Took on a World at War
New York: Random House, 2022

Kathryn S. Olmsted
The Newspaper Axis:
The Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022

Did you ever have to write a book review, but when the time came you really weren’t that into it, so you decided to wing it, and just write a few thousand words on some tangential subject that was mostly unrelated? I’ve never dared to do that myself, but it sounds like something George Orwell would do on a bad-hair day. Or better yet, the windy, orotund Thomas Babington Macaulay. [1]

Anyway, foreseeing a long day at the courthouse, I brought along a copy of the London Review of Books to sit out the waits. It’s a pretty good issue (January 19, 2023). I had already devoured John Lahr’s piece about his father’s friend Buster Keaton, as well as a massive, irresistible Geoffrey Wheatcroft review of the scandalous diaries of Sir Henry “Chips” Channon (three big doorstop volumes!). But there was still plenty of meat left on the bone. I settled in with a review of two intriguing books about 20th century journalism. One is called Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, a group biography of mostly American foreign correspondents, 1920-1960. The other is The Newspaper Axis, ostensibly about “press barons” who were isolationist or Nazi-friendly, but really a denunciation of nationalist journalism in England and America, from about 1900 to the recent age of Brexit and Donald Trump.

However the reviewer, an LRB staffer named Deborah Friedell, chose not to really review the books at all, but rather to spend 4000 words gushing about Dorothy Thompson, a character who has a small part in Last Call. Sometime wife of Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson was one of the highest-paid, most controversial columnists-broadcasters-social crusaders of the era. Dorothy interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1931 for the Saturday Evening Post, and seemed rather to like him, while sagaciously predicting he’d never come to power. “When the article was republished as a short book [I Saw Hitler] it included Thompson’s suggestion, barely veiled, that Hitler was probably gay,” writes reviewer Friedell. Perhaps she was peeved that Adolf didn’t make a pass at her. To continue: “When she returned to Berlin in 1934, she knew better than to expect a warm welcome from the new chancellor.” She settled in at the Hotel Adlon for a few weeks and filed a few local-color stories. Then a courteous young Gestapo guy in a trenchcoat met her at the hotel and handed her an order to leave Germany within 24 hours. Dorothy assumed this was all Goebbels’s doing. But no, this turned out to have been ordered by Adolf himself. “By the time she got back to the US, Thompson had been transformed into the most famous anti-Nazi writer in the country. She made a thirty-city lecture tour and began a column in the Herald Tribune, opposite Walter Lippmann.” [2]

A large-bodied, boisterous woman rather in the Eleanor Roosevelt mold, Dorothy seemed for years a flaming liberal, decrying “fascism”—she gave her husband Mr. Lewis the background and inspiration for It Can’t Happen Here. She raised money for Jewish refugees, taunted America Firsters and Bundists. By Pearl Harbor, though, she was calling herself a conservative, and at war’s end she was denouncing the Morgenthau Plan and blaming the war on the Jews. And that’s how she faded out. But she’d had a good run. Dorothy Thompson may have her points as a historical curio, a popular punchline in gag cartoons [3] but she appears, in passing, in only one of these two books being reviewed. I suppose reviewer Friedell has read a lot of books on Dorothy, maybe is writing one herself, and chose to go with her strengths. I don’t think she gave either book more than a cursory flip-through. This is too bad, because it shortchanges the other nine or ten  characters in this book, most of them stars in the (mostly) American journo firmament in the interwar and war years…yet mostly forgotten today.

There’s John Gunther, with his 25-year series of geopolitical bestsellers, perennial cash-cows for the Book-of-the-Month-Club (Inside Europe, Inside Europe Today, Inside Asia, Inside Russia Today, etc. etc.); his wife Frances Fineman, a diminutive, neurotic Jewish blonde with serial enthusiasms for Indian nationalism, Jawaharal Nehru, and the violent Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky; as well as the Gunthers’ son, Johnny, the Deerfield Academy student who died of galloping brain cancer in 1947, thereby giving his father subject matter for the classic Death Be Not Proud (the only John Gunther book still in print). Then there’s John Gunther’s fellow University of Chicago alumnus James Vincent Sheean, known as Vincent to family and booksellers, otherwise invariably called Jimmy; the preeminent journalist/spy of the era, and the only one to have a memoir (Personal History) turned into a Hitchcock movie (Foreign Correspondent, starring Joel McCrea, whom Jimmy slightly resembled till he lost his looks through boozing). Then H. R. Knickerbocker from Texas, who moved to Munich to study psychology, published several books in German, and eventually got in tight with the Nazi hierarchy, at least until they got tired of his jokes and gave him the heave-ho. And Wiliam Shirer, the bespectacled, mousy, longtime CBS correspondent from Paris and Berlin. And of course Dorothy Thompson and her sometime husband Sinclair Lewis; Rebecca West the libertine and her longtime paramour H. G.Wells; and Wilhelm Stekel, the platitudinous Viennese psychoanalyst (whom the unctuous Mr. Antolini in The Catcher in the Rye memorably quotes to Holden Caulfield before he tries to seduce him). Minor characters include Sigmund Freud, Clare Boothe Luce and husband Harry; Harold Nicolson and his brother-in-law, the sinuous aesthete Eddy Sackville-West, who apparently had a fling with Jimmy Sheean; Ben Hecht, H. L. Mencken, Putzi Hanfstaengel, and a dozen other distracting cameos.

If it seems the author of Last Call, Deborah Cohen, has bitten off more than can be comfortably chewed and digested, well, that is a fair estimate. But she is trying to give a portrait of a forgotten age and idiom, along with her mostly forgotten cast of characters, who were often longtime colleagues, friends, rivals and cuckolds. When they weren’t getting drunk, or drying out, or having breakdowns, or filing their foreign-correspondent stories for their newspapers in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia or London, these people were usually sleeping with their friends’ wives, husbands, and spare lovers. I suspect Last Call at the Hotel Imperial will be mainly useful as a reference book, particularly for screenwriters and novelists who want to recreate the flavor and idiom of the celebrity-correspondent world during the 1920s through 1950s.

Much more approachable and better organized is the other book, Kathryn S. Olmsted’s The Newspaper Axis. It has a much more limited cast (mainly the McCormick-Patterson cousins, W. R. Hearst, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothmere), and all the characters are intrinsically interesting, and politically powerful too. They do more than get drunk, sleep around, and scribble nasty columns (though they do those things as well). In addition Olmsted has an insight or two that will warm the heart of any researcher who spends a lot of time with old newspapers. Our knowledge of journalism and popular opinion from the 1920s-50s is limited and skewed because only a few major newspapers—the Washington Post, the New York Times, maybe the Times of London—have been adequately digitized. If you wish to research a lively and opinionated paper such as Cissy Patterson’s Washington Times-Herald, you have to find a library that has it on microfilm spools, and spend hours and hours scrolling—whirr-whirr-whirr-whirr—through the scratched and blotchy page images. [4] Eugene Meyer’s Washington Post bought the Times-Herald many decades ago in order to take over its features and put it out of business. There’s no question that the Times-Herald was a far better paper, so i have to wonder if WaPo is not at least partly responsible for pushing the Times-Herald–the biggest paper in DC during the 30s and 40s—down the memory hole. When WaPo reviewed this book, they accompanied it with the ugliest (no doubt heavily retouched?) photo of the 57-year Cissy Patterson they could come up with. Old grudges die hard.

Alas, The Newspaper Axis is made unnecessarily lurid on a number of levels. There’s the name, which Olmsted apparently took from Marshall Field III’s far-Left newspaper in New York, PM. In the early 1940s, PM would refer to the Patterson-McCormick papers (NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Washington Times-Herald) as the “Newspaper Axis” … because they were purportedly pro-Axis! Then there’s the cover, an impossibly lurid design of a newspaper-strip swastika against a background of garish, Blutfahne red. So over-the-top it put me in mind of Alan Coren’s Punch collection, Golfing for Cats, back around 1974. I gather the publishers decided this was all a bit much, so they removed the swastika for the Audible and Audio Books versions.

But there’s more. The author addresses us in a insistent, hyperventilating manner. On just about about every page she’s denouncing antisemitism or calling someone an antisemite. She manages to do this even though there are practically no Jews whatever in the whole book. This sort of obsession should always be a red warning light to the reader.

On the other hand Olmsted makes a pretty good case for some of these personalities, as lovable, opinionated eccentrics. Jolly old-fashioned, upper-class Jew-wise raillery runs like a thread through the whole book. Newspaper proprietor Eleanor “Cissy” Paterson being introduced at luncheon to a Jewish guest: “Oh I know all about Jews, I was married to one for four years!”—while her friends sit and cringe. Reputed to be a mean drunk and a bully, she made a lot of enemies before and after she became a “newspaperman” (as she described herself). She was quoted telling TIME, “The trouble with me is that I am a vindictive old shanty-Irish bitch.” Cissy was once married to an Austrian-Polish count who beat her and then kidnapped their daughter (William Howard Taft and the Tsar had to intervene to get the child back), after which she bought a ranch in Jackson Hole and became an avid hunter. She was easily the most interesting person in her family, though followed close behind by first cousin “Col.” Robert Rutherford McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. The Colonel liked to practice his polo shots on a mechanical horse at the top of the Tribune Tower, all the while lecturing his senior editors. Then there’s Cissy’s older brother Joseph, who wrote pro-socialist novels before founding the NY Daily News with part of the family fortune, and making it the biggest newspaper in America in five years.

When she got to age 48, Cissy persuaded her friend William Randolph Hearst to let her edit one of his failing Washington DC newspapers, the Herald. She took it and turned it into the liveliest, most popular daily in town. Some years later, nearing bankruptcy, Hearst sold both his Washington papers to Cissy. She merged them into the Times-Herald and ran them until her death in 1948.

Hearst himself is sort of the odd man out here, as no one ever accused him of being anti-Jewish, and he spent much of his career presenting himself as a populist progressive. Apparently he makes the team because he was a) a nationalist, b) a non-interventionist in the prewar period, and c) paid both Mussolini and Hitler to write columns for his papers. The columns, generally ghostwritten, weren’t very good and often arrived late, but for a while Hearst was paying them $1000-$2000 a shot. Il Duce supposedly used the money to buy himself a summer estate in Romagna.

The English press lords, literally Lords, don’t really qualify for Olmsted’s swastika badge either. Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, gets slammed mainly because he was “pro-appeasement” and anti-intervention in the late 1930s. And because his biggest newspaper, the Daily Express, continued to be anti-Europe long after he died, so that when the Brexit vote succeeded in 2016, that paper cheered and credited the shade of old Max. Harold Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, was basically just a buffoon, despite his slavish praise of Hitler, and his cheers in the Daily Mail for Sir Oswald Mosley and company in 1934 (“Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”).

Much more amusing is Lord Rothermere’s connection to “Princess” Stephanie Hohenlohe, a Viennese adventuress whom Rothermere kept on a fat retainer as a go-between to Nazi hierarchy and other European notables. Stephanie was Jewish, a fact that apparently did not bother Rothermere (or Hitler either). Olmsted doesn’t mention that (could she not know it?) even though she gives Stephanie a lot of ink. But it surely is relevant to the denouement of this story. After some years, with war clouds gathering, Lord Rothermere ended the retainer, whereupon Stephanie decided to blackmail him by threatening to expose all the smarmy letters he had written to the Führer. Rothermere didn’t give in, so she sued for breach of contract. Stephanie ended up losing the suit; it turned out she didn’t really have access to that embarrassing correspondence. However, always a gentleman, Lord Rothermere paid her court fees.

Olmsted often misses out on a good side story because she doesn’t think the tale would be of interest or more likely because she’s missing information. Just a few examples here:

She repeatedly mentions a 1930s foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune named Donald Day, and excoriates Col. McCormick of the Tribune for employing him as the paper’s representative in Eastern Europe. She tells us again and again that Mr. Day was sympathetic to the German National Socialists, and even became a propaganda broadcaster in Berlin toward the end of the war. But what’s equally intriguing, and what Olmsted leaves out, is that his sister was Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker. So here we have two siblings, both resourceful and idealistic radicals, marching to somewhat different drummers. [5]

Then you have the story of John O’Donnell, longtime “Capitol Stuff” columnist for the New York Daily News and Washington Times-Herald, whom Lefties variously called a pro-Nazi, a Naziphile, and an antisemite. One of his fiercest enemies was a newspaper publisher named J. David Stern, who roundly slandered O’Donnell in a Philadelphia Record editorial after O’Donnell reported in 1941 that Navy and Coast Guard ships were being used, illegally, to guard convoys of food and equipment going to Britain. This name-calling led to $50,000 libel suit against Stern, which O’Donnell eventually won, though the judgment was whittled down to $8000 after five years in litigation. Olmsted completely leaves out Stern’s name and the tale of the libel suit, which was big news at the time. [6] This looks to be deliberate, and dishonest.

Then there’s the story about Cissy Patterson and the comic-strips war. The Washington Post went bankrupt in 1933 and was sold at auction to Eugene Meyer (father of Kay Meyer Graham). Cissy’s family owned the Chicago Tribune – Daily News syndicate that distributed some of the most popular strips in the Post. (They actually concocted some of the most legendary ones in-house, eg Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy.) However the Post‘s bankruptcy voided the syndicate contract—according to the syndicate. So Cissy picked up these strips and ran them in her paper, the Herald. Meyer meanwhile insisted the Post still had valid rights to them, and sued. So for the next year and a half these rival papers in Washington were running the same comic strips, while a bitter legal battle went on. Finally a settlement was reached, with Meyer winning the rights to run the syndicate’s comic strips. Olmsted skips over most of these details, but is careful to tell how the furious Cissy reacted: she sent Meyer a gift box with a pound of meat inside. But it was more exciting than that. It was a hunk of hamburger meat gift-wrapped like an orchid, with a card that (allegedly) said “Here’s your pound of flesh, Shylock.” [7]

Olmsted makes errors that a quick check in reference books, or even an internet search, would have avoided. In discussing Col. Robert McCormick and his cousin Joe Patterson she mentions they both went to Groton and Yale, and while doing so she reveals that she is under the impression that the Groton School is in Connecticut. Which is pretty funny, seeing as this book is published by Yale University Press where, as I recall, they used to have fact-checkers and proofreaders. (There is indeed a place called Groton, Connecticut, but it is renowned for submarines, rather than Endicott Peabody’s austere boarding school in Massachusetts). And once or twice she refers to the Independent Labour Party in Britain as an offshoot of the regular (or “Parliamentary”) Labour Party. No, it’s quite the other way around: Keir Hardie’s ILP came first, and the other Labour Party came about a decade later, in the early 20th century.

But now I am just being pedantic and paying too much attention to this enjoyably silly book.

Notes

[1] Macaulay once chose to review a three-volume Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome, during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1840) by the German scholar Leopold Ranke. He wound up writing a 16,000-word essay on a subject that had almost nothing to do with Ranke’s book. Macaulay disposes of Ranke’s work in short order (“It is hardly necessary for us to say that this is an excellent book excellently translated…”), then jumps onto his hobby-horse, which is, basically: “Why is Protestantism failing us? Why does the Catholic Church keep growing, and why do they nurture their eccentrics and enthusiasts so much better?” This was during the time of the Oxford Movement, so the question was very much on the mind of Macaulay, a vaguely Evangelical low-churcher who found both High Anglicanism and Catholicism suspect. Macaulay almost certainly didn’t read all three of Ranke’s dense volumes about 16th and 17th century popes—he was in the government at the time, as War Minister—but this busy fellow nonetheless managed to turn out a mighty monograph on a distantly related subject; and I don’t know that anyone ever complained.

[2] Because I have a subscription, I can share this archived LRB review with my friends: here you go. You might also check out this piquant bit on the Red Lewis – Dotty Thompson marriage in the zombie-like revival of SatEvePost revival:”‘What a Woman!’ The Story of Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis.”

[3] I recall Thurber’s angry-man-at-typewriter, with his wife going, “He’s giving Dorothy Thompson a piece of his mind.” Or another cartoonist’s gag, with the doctor telling his middle-aged patient in the examining room: “And no more Dorothy Thompson!” Some real knee-slappers!

[4] Tom Tryniski at fultonhistory.com has done a valiant one-man job of digitizing old 19th and 20th century newspapers from New York State and elsewhere. But the lacunae are vast and deep. I tried to search for Washington Times-Herald and mainly got denunciations of the Patterson-McCormick “triumverate” (Times-Herald, NY Daily News, Chicago-Tribune) from 1942 issues of the crazy-Lefty PM newspaper. No Times-Herald itself.

[5] Donald Day also joined the Finnish army for a while, much against the objection of the Tribune.

[6] I wrote about this feud back in 2015, in my series on Fortean Society weirdoes. Stern was one of the society founders, while O’Donnell was a friend of the eccentric 1940s chairman, novelist Tiffany Thayer. Almost Fortean!

[7] Women’s Wear Daily, Oct. 26, 2011: https://wwd.com/business-news/media/the-art-of-accuracy-5334867/#!

On April 10, 1955, Easter Sunday, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin collapsed and died of a heart attack in a friend’s Manhattan apartment. He was 74 and had done nothing more strenuous that day than take a stroll through Central Park. At this time Teilhard was known mainly as a paleontologist and geologist, albeit one who also produced some odd and controversial theological writings.

However, in the decades since his death, the controversies surrounding Teilhard have reshaped themselves. Now he’s usually described as a French Jesuit who wrote some speculative theology incorporating human evolution; while also promoting some dangerous, rather verboten, scientific theories. He believed in eugenics. He persistently wrote about the natural inequality of the races. Unfriendly writers today describe him as a racist, a Nazi apologist, a transhumanist, a believer in sterilization of the unfit.

The reason for this redefinition is very simple: different eras come with different political biases. When Teilhard was doing scientific expeditions in China and elsewhere in the 1920s, race differences were a perfectly acceptable field of investigation. No scientist—surely no anthropologist or paleontologist—could blot his copybook by discussing them. Such discussion went with the territory.

But that was then. Nowadays the anti-Teilhard crowd get the vapors over a little anodyne remark he put in a letter in 1929, around the time he was helping to excavate the various skeletal remains that became collectively known as Peking Man:

Do the yellows [«les jaunes» i.e.,the Chinese] have the same human value as the whites? Licent [a fellow  paleontologist] and many missionaries say that their present inferiority is due to their long history of Paganism. I’m afraid that this is only a “declaration of pastors.” Instead, the cause seems to be the natural racial foundation… Christian love overcomes all inequalities, but it does not deny them. [1]

By “declaration of pastors” he meant sweet-nothing mutterings of missionaries: empty words, groundless explanations. Teilhard the Man of Science wasn’t having any of it. As he saw it, it was almost certainly due to race, genetics, evolution.

In 1951, when he was living in New York and working for the Wenner-Gren Foundation [2] (because the Jesuits had exiled him from France and then wouldn’t let him accept an appointment at Columbia University), Teilhard was raging against UNESCO. In 1950 UNESCO had issued an utterly vapid declaration, “FALLACIES OF RACISM EXPOSED: UNESCO Publishes Declaration by World’s Scientists.” No scientists are quoted, no cogent explanation given. They’re trying to lay down political correctness by fiat. (Read it here.)[3]

A modern pearl-clutching critic of Teilhard comments, aghast:

In his letter [to UNESCO] Teilhard argued against “the scientific uselessness as well as the practical danger” of this document, noting that “it’s not a question of “equality,” but of “complementarity in convergence”…which does not exclude the momentary prominence of certain of its branches over others.” Such a public argument points to a deeply held and seriously considered belief in inequality among humans. [4]

Then, in 1953, we find Teilhard similarly taking on the poltroonishness of the Roman Curia:

Why is it that in Rome, along with a “Biblical Commission” there is no “Scientific Commission” charged with pointing out to authorities the points on which one can be sure Humanity will take a stand tomorrow—points, I repeat, such as: 1) the question of eugenics (aimed at the optimum rather than the maximum in reproduction, and joined to a gradual separation of sexuality from reproduction); and 2) the absolute right (which must, of course, be regulated in its ‘timing’ and in its conditions!) to try everything right to the end—even in the matter of human biology. [5]

There’s another controversy that followed Teilhard for most of his career: the suspicion that he was a paleontological fraudster. He was present at the digs for two of the most famous hominid fossils of the 20th century: Piltdown Man (c. 1912) near Uckfield, Sussex, England; and Peking Man (1929-1930) in China.

The Piltdown find was always suspect, although tentatively accepted by authorities at the Natural History Museum in London and the Geological Society. Piltdown Man was conclusively declared a hoax in 1953. It was fabricated out of a Cro-Magnon skull and an orangutan jawbone, by Teilhard’s friend and neighbor Charles Dawson. Dawson was lawyer and amateur paleontologist apparently over-eager to find some “missing-link” pre-human fossils in his very own corner of England.

Doubts about Peking Man are more elusive. Teilhard was with a large group of scientists from research foundations, and a skull he found was identified as a specimen of Homo erectus, from about 500,000 years ago. Eventually there were other skulls, and 200 bones in all. However, the collection never made it out of China, and was lost in the early 1940s. [6]

Ergo, we have no Peking Man bones to examine. Some people doubt they ever existed, and it’s just Teilhard doing another Piltdown hoax. A current theory is that the box of bones is buried under a Peking—that is, “Beijing”—parking lot. [7]

Early-Life Check

Marie-Joseph Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born the fourth of eleven children on 1 May 1881 at his family’s country house in the Auvergne, just outside Clermont-Ferrand, in the dead-center of France. (“Chateau de Sarcenat, par Oreines, Puy-de-Dôme,” is the address he later provided for the family manse.) During the winter they lived with relatives in a townhouse in Clermont-Ferrand. Land of volcanos and Michelin tires; where in 1095 Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade, and where, in the late 1960s, Marcel Ophuls collected wartime stories from locals for The Sorrow and the Pity.

The family’s complicated double-barreled surname (pronounced, more or less: TAY-yahr duh shar-DAHN) is the legacy of two lines of ennobled ancestors. His father’s family had lived in the area at least since medieval times. His mother, though, was from Picardy; she was the great-grandniece of François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire. [8]

At 12 young Pierre was sent off to boarding school in Villefranche-sur-Saone, north of Lyons, after which received his baccalauréat in mathematics, before entering the Jesuit novitiate in Aix-en-Provence. [9] The Jesuits were expelled from France in 1901-1902. In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, France was going through another of its radical-Left, anti-Catholic fits. Teilhard would have to complete his seminary education on the island of Jersey, just off the coast of Brittany, and then in Hastings, Sussex, where he was ordained in 1911.[10]

1905-1908, he taught physics and chemistry at a Jesuit school in Cairo. He also went fossil-hunting and discovered an unknown ancient species of shark, which was later named for him (Teilhardia). Back in England, he finished seminary, crossed paths with Piltdown Man, then went to Paris to study at the Museum of Natural History. In the Great War he was a stretcher-bearer. Then, more studies at the Sorbonne, and finally the chair of geology at the Institut Catholique in Paris, where he infused his lectures with discussion of evolutionary thought.

Off to China

Presumably Teilhard would have stayed in France most of his life, apart from occasional expeditions. But the Jesuits were discomfited by all his talk of evolution. Simple minds might possibly imagine that all this evolution talk somehow fitted into Christian Doctrine; that seems to have been the concern.[11] For the Jesuits, this was not the time to stir up trouble with the Curia. The Society of Jesus was once totally dissolved, and banned entirely, for 40 years (1773-1814). On top of that, the Jesuits had been expelled from France 20 years ago and only been let back in, in 1914, for the sake of morale and the so-called “Union sacrée” during the Great War.

Teilhard attracted too much attention and speculated too openly. He needed to cultivate a lower profile.

The easiest solution to this was to send him far, far away. And so he went to China, and spent most of the next 23 years there, joining another Jesuit paleontologist named Fr. Emile Licent, who kept a fossil museum in Tientsin. One reads that Teilhard didn’t really like the Chinese, didn’t like the poor—I assume that means poor Chinese—and in all that time he never bothered to learn the language. This last part beggars belief; surely he picked up a little kitchen Chinese here and there?

Racist eugenic practices! Nazi experiments!

A recently minted PhD in theology at University of Notre Dame, one John P. Slattery, has carved out a kind of academic specialty in his takedowns of Teilhard. These began with a lurid attack on him in the Philosophy and Theology journal in 2016. Writes Slattery in the article’s abstract:

[F]rom the 1920s until his death in 1955, Teilhard de Chardin unequivocally supported racist eugenic practices, praised the possibilities of the Nazi experiments, and looked down upon those who he deemed “imperfect” humans. These ideas explicitly lay the groundwork for Teilhard’s famous cosmological theology, a link which has been largely ignored in Teilhardian research until now. [12]

Quite an aggressive opening sortie there. Racism! Eugenics! Nazi experiments! Imperfect humans!

Slattery kept these salvos up for another few years, with online debates and articles. One in particular quotes offending passages at length, from Teilhard letters and biographies. I will quote one more passage here, beginning with Slattery’s commentary:

Besides their obvious objectionable nature, Teilhard’s views withstand two troubling tests: first, he defends them boldly in the face of his respected Christian colleagues who disagree; second, he persists in such views despite the shocking revelations of what took place in the concentration camps and death camps of Nazi Germany. One of Teilhard’s early biographers recounts a 1947 public debate with Gabriel Marcel, the famous French Catholic existentialist, where Teilhard persists in arguing for forced eugenical practices:

“Once in a debate with Gabriel Marcel on the subject of ‘Science and Rationality,’ [Teilhard] shocked his opponent by refusing to permit even the appalling evidence of the experiments of the doctors of Dachau to modify his faith in the inevitability of human progress. ‘Man,” [Teilhard] asserted, ‘to become full man, must have tried everything’ …He added that since the human species was still so young…the persistence of such evil was to be expected. ‘Prometheus!’ Marcel had cried…’No,’ replied Teilhard, ‘only man as God has made him.’” (From Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas, Teilhard (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1977: pp. 237-8.) [13]

I don’t know what the doctors of Dachau are supposed to have done. But Teilhard’s response is admirable: The human species is young, so the persistence of evil is to be expected. This makes sense within the schema of Teilhard’s cosmogony: the Universe, or Creation, is continually evolving, continually perfecting itself.

Anti-Dysgenics = Transhumanism?

Not as emotional as Slattery, but much more far-fetched, is the anti-Teilhard diatribe that appeared in the “Strategic Culture Foundation” blog. In a 2021 essay, a writer named Matthew Ehret describes Teilhard as a “racist” and a founder of “transhumanism.”

If the latter term had a father, it wasn’t Teilhard but his friend Julian Huxley, and Huxley certainly did not intend it in the deviant sense with which the word is bandied about today. It meant improvement of the race, avoidance of dysgenics. Teilhard is quoted discussing it in 1951:

So far we have certainly allowed our race to develop at random, and we have given too little thought to the question of what medical and moral factors must replace the crude forces of natural selection should we suppress them. In the course of the coming centuries it is indispensable that a nobly human form of eugenics, on a standard worthy of our personalities, should be discovered and developed. Eugenics applied to individuals leads to eugenics applied to society. [14]

Well, that looks quite reasonable. What’s not reasonable is the way Ehret makes hash of the salient facts of Teilhard’s life. He astoundingly claims that Teilhard himself concocted the “Piltdown Man” hoax in 1912 in England, and then pulled a similar hoax with “Peking Man,” which he calls Piltdown Man 2.0. Then, switching tracks, he implies Teilhard is to blame for such degeneracies as “Liberation Theology” and the absurd declarations of the current pope:

When he died in 1955, Chardin’s works were still largely banned as heresy by the Vatican. His work continued to spread as a sort of Soviet-era samizdat recruiting ever more converts to his particular “new and improved Christianity.” [15]

Who is Chardin? If you mean Teilhard, his writings were never “banned” by “the Vatican” or ever even placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. As a Jesuit priest, he was required to have approval from superiors before publishing (a particularly sticky problem with the Jesuits, as they often had friction with the Curia). Yes, Teilhard was prohibited from publishing some of them, just as he was prohibited from teaching—in Paris, in New York, and elsewhere—because that’s what sometimes happens when you become a soldier in the Society of Jesus. Or the Trappists, for that matter. Maybe the Carmelites. Never mind the specific, arbitrary reasons.

Ehret’s basic facts are all wrong, to the point where I suspect he’s just ginning us up with a fun conspiracy theory. He claims Teilhard was on “holiday” from schoolteaching in Cairo when he conjured up Piltdown Man in Sussex in 1912. In reality Sussex is where Teilhard lived; he hadn’t been to Cairo for four years. He’d been in England or Jersey for most of the past decade, ever since being expelled from France.

And of course Teilhard did not concoct Piltdown Man or promote it to the Geological Society, or the Natural History Museum in South Kensington; that presenter was his friend Charles Dawson. As for Peking Man, several research institutes and foundations participated in those excavations in the 1920s and 30s. Teilhard was just one of maybe a dozen prominent scientists who had a hand in them.

In the matter of Stephen Jay Gould

I suspect Ehret has fallen prey to the pixie dust scattered by Stephen Jay Gould many years ago, claiming that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was the prime instigator in the Piltdown hoax, with Dawson merely his sideman.  Prof. Gould wrote several essays, with follow-up commentary on the matter, collected in his books, The Panda’s Thumb (1980), and Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (1983), arguing that Teilhard was at the very least complicit in the perpetration of the Piltdown hoax. [16]

Stephen Jay Gould (son of Leonard S. Gold and Eleanor Rosenberg) was a first-generation Jewish-American, a paleontologist and historian of science who worked at both the American Museum of Natural History, by the west side of Central Park in New York City, and Harvard University, where he spent most of his career as professor of geology. With this background he had a particular interest in the story of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was also affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History when Gould was a kid. Perhaps the adult Gould had personal agenda against someone who advocated eugenics and the study of racial differences. Regardless, the Teilhard issue became an obsession with him for many years.

Gould’s main argument for Teilhard’s guilt is that he didn’t talk or write much about it once the hoax was suspect. Gould gives evidence that Teilhard even rewrote an autobiographical essay, deleting a reference to his early association with Eoanthropus dawsons (Piltdown Man). Rather than empathizing with a potentially embarrassing association, Gould’s peculiar mindset insists that Teilhard was just afraid of getting caught.

I doubt many people today (excepting perhaps Matthew Ehret) still buy Gould’s confusing argument in favor of Teilhard’s guilt. Since his death in 2002, Gould himself has turned out to be a most unreliable narrator. He based an entire book (The Mismeasure of Man), in which he accused a 19th century physical anthropologist of “racism,” on false data. As so often happens, the person who’s quick to accuse others of bias turns out to be heavily biased himself.

Notes

[1]  Matthew Ehret, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Transhumanism,” October 2021.

[2] “The Wenner–Gren Foundation is a private operating foundation dedicated to providing leadership in support of anthropology and anthropologists worldwide,” says a current website. Founded in 1941 by Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish Electrolux tycoon, philanthropist, and longtime friend of both Hermann Goering and King Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor. When the Duke was exiled to the Bahamas as Governor, 1940-45, Mr. Wenner-Gren was a steady friend, with his Southern Cross yacht anchored nearly. This immediately attracted the scrutiny of British intelligence, as both the Duke and Wenner-Gren were regarded as Nazi sympathizers. Source: the hyper-sensationalistic Traitor King by Andrew Lownie, 2021. Needless to say, none of this Andrew Lownie scandal-mongering reflects on the Wenner-Gren Foundation, but it’s curious that the anti-Teilhard crowd haven’t yet homed in on this piquant connection.

[3] Despite this lamebrain document, UNESCO cannot have been all bad. After all, its co-founder and first director-general was Teilhard’s good friend Julian Huxley. However, he was gone well before 1950. It appears Huxley was given the heave-ho for public relations reasons, inasmuch as he openly supported birth control and eugenics. (Wikipedia link.)

[4] John P. Slattery in Religion Dispatches, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Legacy of Eugenics and Racism Can’t Be Ignored.”

[5] Teilhard letter, quoted in Slattery, Ibid.

[6] The loss and various theories are described in The Jesuit and the Skull, by Amir C. Aczel (Riverhead Books, 2007).

[7] Smithsonian Magazine, 2012. “Mystery of the Lost Peking Man Fossils Solved?”

[8] American Teilhard Association, “Biography of Teilhard de Chardin.”

[9] Robert Speaight, The Life of Teilhard de Chardin, 1967.

[10] Miscellaneous tie-in to George Orwell: Around the time Teilhard was in seminary in Hastings, little Eric Blair was starting primary school in Henley-on-Thames, 80 miles to the northwest, being taught by French Ursuline nuns. The Ursulines were in England for the same reason Teilhard was: they’d been thrown out of France.

[11] Simple and not-so-simple minds sometimes imagine that Teilhard’s difficulties with the Jesuits and the Holy See recurred because he was thought to be propounding heresy. Amir C. Aczel, in his otherwise enjoyable The Jesuit and the Skull (2007), keeps repeating this misapprehension. The real issue was politics and public relations, as well as maintenance of discipline.

[12] John P. Slattery, “Dangerous Tendencies of Cosmic Theology: The Untold Legacy of Teilhard de Chardin.” Philosophy and Theology, Vol. 29, Issue 1, 2017:

[13] John P. Slattery in Religion Dispatches, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Legacy of Eugenics and Racism Can’t Be Ignored.”

[14] Ehret, Ibid.

[15] Ehret, Ibid.

[16] Stephen Jay Gould’s confused and convoluted screeds on this subject remind me of those partisan writers of 30 or 40 years ago who kept cranking out books arguing, against all common sense, that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and acted alone. A brief dip into “The Piltdown Conspiracy,” and “A Reply to Critics,” at the beginning of Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, will reveal an academic controversialist desperately spinning his wheels.

London days, c. 1940. René Pleven looking deceptively mousy.

The Fabulous Pleven Boys

P. J. Collins

Many many years ago—say, during the Nixon Administration—I was peripherally involved with kiddy television. Kiddy TV was very hot just then, particularly up in Boston, where they had at least four “educational” kiddy shows running concurrently.

There was an Englishman named Chris Sarson who came up with the idea of having a kiddy show that was entirely written by kids. That sounded like a pretty rotten idea to me—a TV show written, and sort-of produced, by 7-to-12-year-olds. But what did I know? Not only did this ZOOM thing attract a steady following, there were all sorts of people lining up, trying to conceive and produce their own shows along similar formulas.

I recall one old guy, maybe thirty but looking forty, who didn’t even own a TV, had never seen ZOOM, in fact hadn’t watched much television since the Spin and Marty days, and had no connection at all to modern kids (not on any normal, healthy level anyway). Yet he nevertheless promoted himself as a producer/writer of his own forthcoming educational kiddy show: “just like ZOOM but more intellectual”—and it would be called Tops for Tweens!

“Sounds like a t-shirt fashion show,” a lady friend told him. So he came up with other names, equally silly, though none with the same sizzle. I believe he was unemployed at this point.

But our aspiring producer wasn’t entirely without professional experience in the kiddy-show realm. Oh no. For three or four weeks he’d been a staff writer for a children’s “science show” on the educational channel in Boston. The presenter was a hokey old “cowboy” host who’d been doing this sort of thing since 1947. Our new staff writer’s contributions were thought to be quite weird, but that was the point: he’d been brought in to come up with new and offbeat ideas. He proposed that Cowboy Duke’s Science Show do a segment on astrology. He’d invite an astrologer onto the program to show how it all worked. This horrified his midwit colleagues, because their high school teachers had taught them that astrology “wasn’t true” because “there are only twelve signs and there are more than twelve kinds of people.”

A debatable point. Anyway the contretemps amused rather than alarmed Cowboy Duke. Because, as I say, Cowboy Duke was looking to shake the show up a little. [1] And then the new writer proposed bringing General Patton’s daughter onto the show—because, he said, he’d met her and she was a witch. Or at least she said she was a witch—she lived in Ipswich, after all—and the kids at home would surely love to learn all about witchcraft.

It was at this point that the co-producers took Cowboy Duke aside and told him he had hired a madman. And so ended a promising career, so far as I know.

Down in New York we had Sesame Street, which had sort of kicked off the whole educational-kiddy-TV rage in 1969. It was nationally broadcast via PBS, but it was born and bred in Manhattan, hence its charming conceit of having a studio set that looked like a tenement block in Harlem, with a lot of colored people. As you know, Sesame Street was initially conceived as a kind of “Head Start”-style learning boost for poor “inner city” (i.e., black) preschoolers. But it became quickly accepted as a variety program for kids and stoners of all ages. (Oh man, THIS is near…and THIS is far! Dig it!) [2]

The producers eventually cleaned up the slum aspect, at least a little, and also fired Its star Muppet personality, Kermit the Frog. They said Kermit was “too commercial.” It seems he’d made one TV commercial, in Canada. That went against the PBS brand, I guess. [3] Like a blacklisted filmmaker, Kermit took refuge in England, where he eventually found his footing when he compèred The Muppet Show.

The Electric Factory

Meantime the Sesame Street people, Children’s Television Workshop, cloned the basic format—rapid-fire segments mixed with song and humor, just the sort of thing kids with ADHD like (or is that what caused ADHD in kids?)—and came up with a program that was neither set in a slum nor aimed at preschoolers. Six-to-twelve-year-olds were now the target audience. Like Sesame Street, this new show was shot in a commercial videotape facility way up on the Upper West Side, on Broadway near Zabar’s. When I visited the studio I’d refer to the new show as The Electric Factory, which was almost its name, but not quite. The assistant producer, Pat, would always look at me quizzically when I called it that. He’d smile, and correct me. So I kept doing it. I assumed that my position in such enterprises was sort of like being a one-kid “focus group,” an expert on what modern pre-adolescents were thinking. A subject on which I did not have a clue, as I’d put those days behind me.

Pat was a good-looking, slender, dark-haired fellow in his 30s. Great wife, cute kids. He had a very slight foreign accent, hard to identify. He was, or had been, French—Breton, actually. It was an accent so subtle you might not notice it at first. He’d grown up largely in New York. I guess he’d lived in Paris during the War, after which his widowed mother married an American songwriter. By happenstance the songwriter was Cole Porter’s first-cousin-once-removed, though Ted was scarcely as famous, rich or talented as Cole. However he was a pretty normal guy, so it all balanced out.

Anyway they came to America, where Pat went to prep school and college. After that, his career was entirely in television production and film distribution. He produced a “circuses of the world” prime-time show that you may remember. It was hosted by Don Ameche. Then he worked in soap operas and daytime programming. Memorably he was on the production team of that famous “gothic” soap opera of the late 1960s. That show was sort of the Law & Order of its era, in that just about any aspiring actor could get a chance to appear in it. I look down the cast list today and I see Marsha Mason, Harvey Keitel, Abe Vigoda, Conrad Bain…even Wilmot Robertson’s first cousin Cavada Humphrey, daughter of his mother’s sister and a one-armed Romanian nobleman.

A couple of Pat’s friends or colleagues had an off-putting way of taking me aside and telling me that there was a Big Secret That You Must Never Tell Another Soul. I suspected The Big Secret was cockamamie rubbish, although it took me 30 or 40 years to sort it out. The really creepy aspect was: how come, if it’s such a hush-hush Big Secret, you are now telling it to me, a fourteen-year-old near-total stranger? Although I met Pat and his family a few times, and even went with his wife and kids to pick out a Christmas tree one December, way the hell up Fifth Avenue, I didn’t know them well and I was hardly deserving of dark confidences from third parties.

The “Big Secret”

So now we come to the Big Secret which, I again remind you, is untrue. Pat’s father had purportedly been Minister of the Interior in the Vichy France government during the War, and “they” shot him afterwards, after so-called “Liberation.” Only it’s not so; didn’t happen. He died, but he didn’t die that way.

Today you say, “What the hell, why would anyone care to make up stories like that?” Well we were still only 20-something years after the War, you see. Imagine that someone today was telling you about a dark secret from 1997.

The Big Secret was impossible to verify. Back in the early 1970s, it was much harder to research things than it is today. Especially information about obscure things like the various ministries of the Pétain years. Today you can go to Google or Wikipedia, and be fed all kinds of disinformation, but at least that disinformation generally has a trail of references you can chase down. For Pat’s father there was nothing at all. Nothing. You couldn’t look him up in the encyclopedia or in The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature; he was too obscure. Besides, I didn’t even know what his name was. It was like being Inspector Lebel in The Day of the Jackal.

The closest thing to useful information was something I got from a French movie that had just opened at the Little Carnegie movie theater on West 57th Street. French movies were big that year. This one was called Le Souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart). It’s a semi-autobiographical film by Louis Malle, set in spring-summer 1954. This was the time of Dien Bien Phu, when the French finally gave up the ghost in Indochine. The movie’s mainly about adolescents, but at dinner adults are talking politics: “You know what’s happened? Pleven’s seized L’Express. You think the government will fall?”[4]

This Pleven would have to be René Pleven, at that time France’s defense minister. A highly verifiable name: he was at other times finance minister or foreign minister, or minister for colonies…as well as being prime minister twice. Definitely in the encyclopedia, however sparsely. As these were ministries during the musical-chairs governments of the Fourth Republic, René held some of those posts for only six months.

He was on the outs with Gaullists when the Fifth Republic came in, but during the Pompidou era, 1969-73, he turned up as justice minister. He distinguished himself early in that term by signing a pardon for Henri Charriere, the escapee from French Guiana prisons whose “creative nonfiction” memoir, Papillon, had been topping the bestseller lists.

René Pleven was in all the reference books, but none of them ever said he had a brother, let alone a nephew. And, strangely for a public figure and prominent statesman, he neither wrote a memoir of his public life nor saw a biography published during his lifetime. Even now, his travels and adventures are best gleaned from biographies of Charles de Gaulle or histories of the Fourth Republic. Most eminent people donate their private papers to a public archive or university library long before they die, but René Pleven did not. There doesn’t even seem to be much at the Archives Nationales.[5]

So if the figure of René Pleven has never been on your radar, that’s probably the way he wanted it.

And we must assume René was being careful and cagey all along, destroying most of his papers, or at least embargoing them till after his death. I am put in mind of June 1940, when the Germans were approaching Paris, and at the Quai d’Orsay the Foreign Ministry was busy incinerating decades’ worth of confidential documents in the courtyard. Leave no incriminating scraps or bordereaux behind! This instinct must have become embedded in French officialdom.

The only biography of him that I know of was published in 1994, a year after he died, age 91: René Pleven, un français libre en politique, written by a fellow Breton, Christian Bougeard. The author tells us at the front of the book that this is indeed the première biographie. Although it’s a rather circumlocutory and speculative biography, we do finally locate the mysterious brother. His sad story erupts briefly in Chapter VII, when René finally returns to France in late August 1944.

At this point René has spent the last four years with Charles de Gaulle, Jean Monnet and the other Free French in London, as well as in America and Africa. René now pays a visit to his mother in Dinan. He learns that his younger brother Hervé has been arrested and is in prison at Fresnes, south of Paris. A few weeks later, Hervé Pleven meets with misadventure. He is beaten to death or crushed by a crowd until he suffocates.

How Ya Fixed for Ciné Film, Monsieur?

So Hervé had indeed been in a government ministry, though he was hardly high-profile. He was an under-secretary at a minor Vichy ministry, the Ministry of Information. Not literally in Vichy; it wasn’t actually down south with the spas and casinos. Like most ministries and administrative offices, it was based in Paris.

In spring 1942 we find the following notice in a number of newspapers: «M. Hervé Pleven est nommé chef de cabinet au secretariat general a l’information.» So, he was chief of staff to the secretariat of information, the Information ministry. Some papers add the additional information that “M. Pleven, who is also a lawyer, has specialized for many years in matters pertaining to the cinema.” Hervé had in fact been a prominent film executive. We’ll come to that. In 1942-1944 he was merely a bureaucrat and thus very small fry indeed.

Hervé’s remit at the ministry was ostensibly film distribution and censorship, but I doubt he needed to censor anything. French cinema during the Occupation was not only apolitical, it tended to be fantastical, otherworldly. [6] Besides, according to a colleague in the ministry, Leon Gaultier, M. Pleven’s job actually consisted mostly of helping filmmakers who all had the same problem: they couldn’t get any film. [7]

And now…as the late Paul Harvey would say…the rest…of the story:

Bousculade

Biographer Christian Bougeard explains that the Minister of Information, Paul Marion, was a notorious “ultra,” a former member of Jacques Doriot’s PPF (Parti Populaire Français), a hard-right pro-Milice collaborationist faction. Not only that, but Marion actively promoted recruitment of Frenchmen into the Waffen SS, and at least one member of his ministry (Leon Gaultier) joined. All this would help explain why Hervé was rounded up in the épuration.

The circumstances of his death are explained in Bougeard as «Il mourut tragiquement en prison à l’automne 1944, “étouffé dans une bousculade”»: “Died tragically in prison [27 September 1944], ‘suffocated in a stampede.'”

Presumably that’s taken from the prison death register. Was it during a prison riot? A targeted killing? The screws at Fresnes, probably under Red control in September 1944, wouldn’t say or didn’t know. And René and his mother are unlikely to have investigated Hervé’s tragic end. After all, Hervé had been one of the “Vichy people” (as de Gaulle would say), and in 1944 and 1945 they were shooting people like that. The less said the better.

Action Française and RKO France

Hervé’s career can be assembled only from the tiniest scraps and oddments, mainly from newspapers, film journals, and Ancestry-dot-com. Born in Rennes in December 1903, buried at Père-Lachaise c. October 1944. Like his brother he had been a fan of Charles Maurras and Action Française when he was young. But while René is (suspiciously) insistent in the Bougeard biography that he never joined AF, younger brother Hervé became quite active in the student arm of the society. In an early 1921 issue of the AF student paper, L’Étudiant français, we learn that “In Le Mans, Hervé Pleven will be speaking at the next conference, 13 Feb 21.” Hervé was then seventeen. [8]

His prewar career was an impressive one. Like René he went to law school, became an avocat, then worked as a business executive, mostly for American corporations. During the 1930s Hervé was head of, or at least general counsel for, RKO France. We can only speculate about how this happened.

In America, RKO was a movie studio and theater chain that Joseph P. Kennedy and David Sarnoff assembled in the late 1920s, RKO Radio Films. JPK bought up a chain of 700 vaudeville houses so they could be wired for Sarnoff’s Photophone optical sound system. Thus, almost overnight, around 1928, the industry converted to talkies.[9]

And this American consortium apparently lucked into finding a very young Breton lawyer, fluent in both French and English, to help set up RKO France operations.[10] RKO France was producing films at least by 1931 (e.g., L’Aviateur, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and a mostly French cast) but they seem to be few and far between. Perhaps their main business was distribution, not production.

There is no clear record of how Hervé met RKO. But his brother’s business connections suggest René had a hand in it. For a few years after law school, René worked with Jean Monnet for an American investment bank called Blair & Co. [11] [12] Eventually this led to René taking a job with a London subsidiary of one of Blair’s clients, the Automatic Telephone Company. [13] Meantime Blair & Co. was also financing motion-picture industry offerings and acquisitions for Joseph P. Kennedy and associates in Hollywood. While Blair as a company name was absorbed into Bank of America and Transamerica in 1929, by that point RKO Radio Pictures (or RKO Pathé as it was sometimes styled) was up and running. So it’s reasonable to assume Hervé became acquainted with RKO through the Blair/René connection.

Big Brother, Little Brother

Having no real facility for languages, I find a deeper wonderment in how the Pleven brothers gained fluency in English. I can barely stagger through Christian Bougeard’s biography of René, and that’s written in perfectly clear French. Presumably the Plevens learned English while growing up in Little Britain (Bretagne), where I presume the folk instinctively keep a weather eye out against the Paris-French hordes. Remember what they did to us in 1793, lads! You love your land, but you never know when you might have to jump the Channel («La Manche»).

Anyway, when René had to write his thesis as a final qualification for his law degree, he was persuaded to write it on—and I quote—”the social policy of the Lloyd George government as demonstrated by the situation of agricultural laborers in England during and after the [1914-18] war.” [14] What an odd and dreary topic! I gather his advisor was a professor of rural economics and wanted a fluent English reader to tackle this recondite subject. Same old story of professors getting their grad students to do hard research for them!

René versus Hervé: the two brothers appear to have been very dissimilar physically. If you see a picture of René where he’s seated, he looks like this little mousy, milquetoast character. “Oh, he’s the minister of economics and finance? Yes, I can believe that.” Then you see him standing, and it turns out he’s built like a linebacker: big-headed, big-boned, nearly as tall as the 6’5″ Charles de Gaulle (that’s about 195cm in French) himself. I have no pictures of Hervé and would never have the gall to ask his relatives. But from a 1929 passenger manifest I find him to have been doll-like in comparison, a mere 5’8″ (173cm), scarcely taller than most of the officers and ministers you see here, whom René Pleven and Charles de Gaulle just tower over in 1940s photos. From 1943:

Last session of French National Committee in London before departure for Algiers, May 1943. The unmistakable and unusually merry Charles de Gaulle and René Pleven tower over most of the others.

With the fall of France in June 1940, René joined his old mentor and colleague from Blair & Co., Jean Monnet, and headed for London, to manage the nonexistent finances of General de Gaulle’s new cause. Monnet found de Gaulle difficult and impractical, so he soon shoved off to Washington DC, where he was a popular advisor to President Roosevelt and his administration.

For René, things were different. De Gaulle kept him very busy, sending him off to America to help raise awareness and maybe funds for the newly christened “Free French.” The excursion was not a total disaster, but neither was it a shining success. While FDR liked Jean Monnet very much, he refused to meet René because he perceived him as basically a drum-beater for de Gaulle. Which, Lord knows, René was at that point. President Roosevelt was appointing a very capable ambassador to Vichy France (Admiral William Leahy, later to be FDR’s chief of staff), and relations with the Pétain people were stable and good. Pétain’s government, from any reasonable diplomatic perspective, was the legitimate government of France. Objectively FDR was right. Meantime, most of the possible recruits whom René met were cranks or otherwise unworkable. [15]

After Liberation, René’s public career is pretty much a matter of public record, and I’ve summarized most of it above. Minister for colonies, for economics and finance, premier (or president du conseil—literally, head boy at the ministers’ table) twice; foreign minister, defense minister, etc. etc. A Swiss Army knife of a politician or bureaucrat. His major initiative is remembered as the “Pleven Plan,” a western European defense community that the American State Department, and certain British politicians (mainly Winston Churchill), had been encouraging. Unlike NATO, this “European Defence Community” would not include the USA or UK. France would be the dominant nation. Nevertheless the plan was rejected by the French Assembly in 1954, not long after Dien Bien Phu and the fall of the government in which René had been defense minister. As the Gaullists had turned against him because of Indochina, René went into eclipse for the next 15 years, till Pompidou made him justice minister in 1969.

Meantime…his nephew, Hervé’s son, continued to work in television and film production and distribution. By the 90s he wound up as an executive, or bureaucrat, with the New York City Mayor’s Office for Film, Theater and Broadcasting. Mainly it was all about facilitating film-making in the city. Doing pretty much what his father was doing in Paris fifty years earlier. Making sure movie-makers had access to locations. And, I suppose, enough film.

Notes

[1] Cowboy Duke’s Science Show was not actually the program name, but people familiar with the Boston educational channel in those days will know what I’m talking about. Tops for Tweens! is also a made-up proxy title, as silly as the real ones. ZOOM of course was a real name for a real show that ran 1972-1980 and then was revived in 1999.

[2] And inspired the second-most brilliant comedy show I ever saw on Broadway, Avenue Q.

[3] TIME magazine, November 23, 1970 (Stefan Kanfer cover story): “Kermit the Frog is being canned for commercialism”

[4] Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber at L’Express published a secret report about military operations in Indochina, whereupon the magazine’s operations were suspended and all copies of the offending issue were seized. Servan-Schreiber was a persistent opponent of the war in Indochina. A court later ruled that the publication had not violated the penal code. (Source: New York Times, 10 July 1954.) And yes, the (Joseph Laniel) government did fall, in June 1954, as a direct result of Dien Bien Phu.

From René Pleven’s obituary in the Independent, 16 January 1993:

Pleven was Minister of Defence at the time of the fall of the French army base at Dien Bien Phu to Vietnamese guerrillas in 1954. He was manhandled by Gaullists at the Arc de Triomphe and was referred to dismissively as the ‘Duc de Dien Bien Phu’ for some time after.

[5] Archives Nationales has papers from René’s late-career stint as justice minister, but they didn’t come from René. Their inventory date is 1995, with a note that these papers were entered into the Archives by “donations from Michel Worms de Romilly and Louis Andlauer and Patrick Pleven” (nephew and in-laws).

[6] Notable French films of 1940-44 include La Nuit Fantastique, Le Corbeau, and Les Enfants du Paradis.

[7] Leon Gaultier, Siegfried et le Berrichon: Parcours d’un “collabo”, 1991. Gaultier served in the Information ministry with Paul Marion and Hervé Pleven, joined the Milice, later the Waffen SS.

[8] L’Etudiant français (Action française student paper), issue date of 15 Feb 21.

[9] Kennedy himself soon sold off his interest in RKO and got out of the film business by 1930, except for occasional advisory work for Paramount and others. The story is told in many places; one is Cari Beauchamp’s Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years (2010).

[10] I cannot tell when Hervé joined RKO France. However in 1935 we find him as general counsel, on a business trip to New York, in a trade publication: Film Daily for Friday, April 5, 1935.

[11] Jean Monnet (1888-1979) was a polymath financier, diplomat, politician, often called a founding father of the EEC/EU.

[12] There seem to have been many financial institutions with the approximate name Blair & Co. This one, a New York-based investment bank, merged with Bank of America/Transamerica in 1929. Like J. P. Morgan & Co., Blair specialized in international loans to foreign governments. As an interesting aside, biographer Bougeard notes that the young John Foster Dulles advised Blair & Co. (including Jean Monnet and René Pleven) when negotiating a loan to Warsaw. Dulles and Pleven would again meet up during the Fourth Republic, when Pleven was variously prime minister, foreign minister or defense minister, and Dulles was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. There is a famous but unsubstantiated legend that in 1954 Dulles offered «deux bombes atomique» to foreign minister Georges Bidault, who refused the offer on the grounds that the bombs would kill the whole French garrison. M. Bidault claims this in the Peter Davis documentary, Hearts and Minds (1974).

[13] Automatic Telephone Company, Europe, was the London-based subsidiary of an American firm that pioneered telephone switching equipment for direct dialing. I have read that René also worked in Canada, and perhaps America, but the record is unclear whether he worked in situ or simply reported there or attended business meetings.

[14] Christian Bougeard, René Pleven: Un Français libre en politique. Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1994.

[15] William R. Keylor, Charles de Gaulle: A Thorn in the Side of Six American Presidents. Rowan & Littlefield, 2020. A good description of what proved to be René’s fool’s errand in America 1940, in one of the few books on de Gaulle that give more than brief mention of René Pleven.

Writing at American Renaissance, Peter Bradley rejoices in a grand new party game:

The game sells for $26.95 on Amazon and arrived a day or two after ordering. It is also available on sites such as Walmart if you don’t want to support Amazon, which censors dissidents. The game is independently produced, but is polished and professional; it looks like a game you would buy in a store. Right or Racist is meant for 3-to-10 participants and comes with 300 stereotype cards, 100 player cards and 100 debate cards. You can also buy expanded packs to augment the game.

Stereotype cards present a statement, and players decide if it is right (true) or racist (false).

 

Read the whole thing, or just enjoy this funny graphic:

Lynching stories hold a central place in the history of American race politics. They are a genre of folklore, occupying a place somewhere between “urban legends” and tales of atrocities in wartime. When we see references to Emmett Till, or Ahmaud Arbery, or George Floyd, or Willie McGee [1] as “lynching victims,” it’s easy to dismiss the hyperbole as just one more tiresome invocation of victim culture.

But I am going to argue that there is a deeper significance here. Narratives that describe extreme cruelty meted out to a black victim—torture, immolation, mutilation—have really been the main driver behind American race politics of the past century. “Justice,” “equality,” “Civil Rights”—those goals are merely the noble-sounding face of black activism, a movement that will never be satisfied (there’s never enough justice; never enough equality). Because what the movement is really all about—what it’s always been about— is anger and destructiveness, fueled by a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle of Lynching Porn.

In calling it “porn” I don’t mean to imply that there’s an erotic component to lynching stories (though for some people, who knows?). Rather I’m comparing the genre to such things as “snuff films” and “torture porn.” As you’ll see in grisly examples below, the resemblance is striking. And now let me make another analogy. From a financial angle, pornography in general was the main driver of the World Wide Web 20 years ago and probably is even now. (Here’s an amusing and informative BBC business story from 2019.) Meanwhile, even a cursory survey of the past 160 years finds Lynching Porn as the main fuel for race politics and Civil Rights agitation. Anyone who doubts this needs only to stroll over to the prurient-minded Equal Justice Initiative. The EJI is one more organization full of cant about fighting “racial injustice” and “racial inequality.” Yet to judge by its website, it’s mostly obsessed with celebrating violence and victimhood.

Lynching Porn as a phenomenon first occurred to me in early 2020, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Bill was before the House of Representatives. I thought I’d do a little research on the past century of failed anti-lynching legislation. I ran across a really lurid little book that came out in 1962, called 100 Years of Lynchings. But what really stood out for me was not the garish “bloody America” cover on my Kindle version, but the author’s name: Ralph Ginzburg. Because Ginzburg was a man of many interests and careers, but what he’s mainly remembered for is being a—well, a pornographer.

Ginzburg was even sentenced to five years in Federal prison for “obscenity” (specifically, sending an erotically themed magazine through the U.S. Mail, usually postmarked from places like Intercourse, Pennsylvania, or Middlesex, New Jersey). He ended up serving only eight months in 1972, at the minimum-security Allenwood prison farm, soon to be home to Watergate co-conspirators. Ginzburg turned his experience there into a memoir, charmingly titled, Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison. Ginzburg loved the sensationalistic and suggestive, and it’s no surprise that he was successfully sued for libel by Senator Barry Goldwater, after his “satirical” investigative magazine Fact described Presidential candidate Goldwater as a raving paranoid. (“1189 PSYCHIATRISTS SAY GOLDWATER IS PSYCHOLOGICALLY UNFIT TO BE PRESIDENT!”)

But before all his erotica and freewheeling libel, Ginzburg came up with 100 Years of Lynchings, a messy little cut-and-paste number that he published and distributed himself. In sixty years it’s never been out of print, but as the material has been mostly in the public domain (cuttings from old newspapers) we’ve seen several publishers and many editions and typefonts. Ginzburg’s 1969 reissue put a photo of an armed, afro’d black man (a model) on the cover and plugged the book as “The Shocking Record Behind Today’s Black Militancy.”

The news clippings are often highly exaggerated or downright implausible. We’re shown sessions of torture, mutilation, immolation that surely would kill anyone within a few minutes, but somehow go on for an hour or two. Sometimes you get reports from two or more papers, and it becomes clear that the scribes were competing with each other to come up with ever-more-gruesome descriptions. For example, in early 1904 a wealthy Mississippi planter named James Eastland was shot in cold blood, along with his negro field-hand, by a black couple. The miscreants were eventually captured by a posse of 200 men and two packs of bloodhounds, chasing across several counties. Wire-service reports merely reported that the two were “burned at the stake…by a mob of 1,000 persons” in Doddsville, Mississippi. (“Negro and Wife Burned,” New York Press, February 8, 1904.) But the down-home Vicksburg Evening Post did the story up proud:

An eye-witness to the lynching of Luther Holbert and his wife, negroes…today gave the Evening Post the following details concerning retribution exacted from the couple prior to their cremation yesterday:

“When the two Negroes were captured, they were tied to trees and…forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off… Some of the mob used a large corkscrew to bore into the flesh of the man and woman. It was applied to their arms, legs and body, then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn.” (“Lynched Negro and Wife Were First Mutilated,” Vicksburg Evening Post, February 8, 1904.) [2]

That “quivering flesh” is an interesting touch, a 19th century phrase from the days when newspaper wags called whores “nymphs of the pave,” while well-dressed negresses were “notorious colored courtesans.”  Some people evidently believed that hunks of severed flesh would twitch and squirm like a wiggly-worm. Strangely, this “eye-witness to the lynching” does not tell us whether he got a body-part souvenir to take home. I’m joking, of course. Such stories are reminiscent of the pulp-fiction and newspaper tales about the so-called New York Draft Riots of 1863, when white people supposedly caught hundreds of negroes and subjected them to diabolical tortures before hanging them from lamp poles. [3]

When Ginzburg started to compile these newspaper stories in 1960, little original research was necessary. Most of the negro-lynching reports had long since compiled and annotated by black writers Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, and DuBois’s colleagues at the NAACP, for whom lynching stories were the main expression of Civil Rights activism. Wells rode to fame in the 1890s by telling America, and the world, that lynching of negroes was epidemic throughout the South. She hunted down reports of alleged lynchings of negroes, and published them in a book called A Red Record[4], meanwhile haranguing editors, politicians and rapt audiences with her findings. People might not care to listen to a colored woman banging on about segregated railroad cars or literacy tests…but what about tales of hangings, burnings, horrendous torture and mutiliations? That got their attention, and they came in droves to hear more.

Much in the same way vast crowds would turn out for horrific lynchings, such as this one in Paris, Texas in 1893. The mangled body of a missing four-year-old girl had been found, “torn limb from limb.” The only suspect was her father’s negro employee, who fled on a freight train before being apprehended:

Curious and sympathizing alike, [the crowds] came on train and wagons, on horse, and on foot…the victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body. Commencing at the feet the brands were placed against him inch by inch until they were thrust against the face. Then, being apparently dead, kerosene was poured upon him… The child’s father, her brother, and two uncles then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh… Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons… Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat. (From Wells, A Red Record.)

And there’s that “quivering flesh” again, and a body that lives for fifty minutes while being roasted alive.

As for DuBois, he followed Wells’s lead when editing his NAACP journal, The Crisis (1910-1934). He stuffed the magazine with year-by-year enumerations of “extrajudicial killings” of blacks, often reprinting gory newspaper accounts of burnings and mutilations, including the one with the corkscrews from the Vicksburg Post.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People officially stood for justice, equality, and the negro voting franchise, but those abstract causes would never have the drawing power of Lynching Porn. Conveniently enough, the NAACP made passage of a Federal anti-lynching bill their premier political cause from the 1910s through the 1930s. The campaign accomplished nothing, of course (lynching was already illegal everywhere) and can’t have aided the Advancement of the Colored People, but it provided an excellent excuse to keep publishing grisly tales.

Like Wells, DuBois and his editorial staff preferred to emphasize the most violent and repulsive accounts, preferably where one or two black individuals—people with names and histories—were set upon by a white crowd. This personalized the victims, while making the white mob into a nameless, pullulating mass. The cruelty had to be heinous in the extreme; average lynchings wouldn’t do. As Prof. Dwight Murphey pointed out in his 1995 monograph, Lynching: History and Analysis, most lynchings were simple hangings, with no mutilations or body-roasting, and perhaps a quarter to a third of people lynched in the 19th and early 20th century were white. (The book was reviewed here in 2019.) But the NAACP wouldn’t bother describing those; it wanted sensationalism and outrage.

Besides their dubious details, a bigger weakness in the DuBois/NAACP version of lynching history is that they fudged and padded the numbers. For 1917, for example, The Crisis magazine claimed 222 negroes were killed by lynchings and “mob murders” (e.g., race riots). But the breakdown is 178 “mob murders” and only 44 cases of anything that could truly be called a lynching. Further, the “mob murder” numbers are mere guesstimates. If there was a race riot in Philadelphia or Chicago or Houston or Tulsa—and there were many more in the Teens and Twenties—any negroes not accounted for afterwards were thrown into the “mob murder” totals, regardless of whether there was ever a body found. The same thing continues today, with the NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative both playing fast and loose with their numbers. The EJI claims about “4,000 victims of racist terrorism” at their lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, but close scrutiny of that count shows that many of the victims are nameless, and the vast majority are said to have actually died in a riot or “massacre“—or “mob murder” as The Crisis would say.

My argument, that black Civil Rights activism was never really an constructive initiative for Justice, Equality, etc., may look radical to some people, or unnecessarily antagonistic. (Was not Doctor King sincere? Did he not say, “I have a dream”?) But it is merely noticing the obvious. For most people it constitutes a paradigm shift. We’ve seen political paradigm shifts before. Up until the late 1940s, it was very difficult to attack Communism directly, because in the Stalinist era propagandists had so successfully positioned it as a well-intentioned, if sometimes badly managed, economic system. Repression, terror, torture—these were explained away as unfortunate byproducts of the coming Utopia, when there would be Freedom and Democracy for all.

The person who finally cracked that nut was political philosopher James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians, Suicide of the West, etc.). In his 1947 book, The Struggle for the World, he stated the obvious. The torture and terror we saw in Communist regimes were not growth pains or temporary discomforts, they were the essence and purpose of the regimes themselves. The insight had enormous impact on Burnham’s Partisan Review colleague George Orwell, who reviewed the book for the New Leader, just as he was settling in to complete the dystopian novel that became Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell had no trouble depicting the oppressive atmosphere of a Big Brother society, but as a good socialist he could not find an explanation for the cruelty and oppression. Burnham provided him with the answer. Bolshevism never was about Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, or Freedom & Democracy. No, none of that window-dressing. It was a self-perpetuating terror regime, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Notes

[1] None of these were actual lynchings, but they’re often described that way provocatively. The Till incident (1955) was a bawling-out and beating that got out of hand. Arbery (2020) was shot while “jogging” away from a burglary scene. The heavily drugged Floyd (2020) died of heart failure while under arrest, while Willie McGee’s “lynching” (1951) was a legally ordained execution in an electric chair for the crime of rape.

[2] Planter Eastland was uncle and namesake of U.S. Senator James O. Eastland, who in the 1950s and 60s had a decided point of view on racial matters. Senator Eastland was born nine months after his uncle was killed.

[3] (As I pointed out a few years ago, only a handful of blacks were killed in the “riots,” usually after shooting firearms at crowd of white people.)

[4] A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings In the United States. Online here.

Céline . . . and Houellebecq.

You don’t have to dig too deep through the past two decades of reviews to find that the French novelist-critic Michel Houellebecq is often compared to the late Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Some of the reasons are facile and superficial, but we have some reasonable ones too. Both writers are provocateurs. They’re both anti-Leftist, suspicious of democracy and progressivist cults, though neither slips neatly into any recognizable category of Right-wing. Both have a penchant for getting themselves in trouble with the law—or more precisely, with the political faction in control of government and information channels.

After the Second World War, the exiled Céline was sentenced in absentia to a fine and imprisonment (though later amnestied) for anti-Jewish writings and (rather sullen) collaboration during the German occupation.

In a curious parallel, Houellebecq was accused and tried for racial hatred in 2001, for supposedly expressing anti-Muslim sentiments in a novel and press interview. He was acquitted and, like Céline in the 1950s, went on to greater notoriety and literary success.

Two literary martyrs . . . almost!

7 Jan 2015 cover of Charlie Hebdo.

At the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacres in January 2015, it was Houellebecq himself who was caricatured on the cover of that fortnightly comic as a sort of Nostradamus. You see him here predicting that he’ll lose his teeth in 2015 . . . and celebrate Ramadan in 2022!

And then the massacre happened—killing all the Charlie cartoonists except this cover artist “Luz” (who soon resigned).

Houellebecq kept his teeth (I believe) but went into hiding, under police protection.

This was an unlikely plot-twist worthy of his novels. His just-published book, Soumission (Submission, reviewed here), described the eager and willing Islamicization of the French ruling caste. Though set in the distant future of 2022 (!), it cut just a little too close to the political reality of the moment. The story’s target was not Muslims but rather the parties of the French Left, who in this not-too-unlikely dystopic fantasy would rather usher in Sharia Law than endure a nationalist government under Marine LePen.

Getting back to Céline, here is another parallel between him and Houllebecq. Both have done a lot of interviews, but they treat them as performance art. Talking to their interviewers, the characters “Céline” and “Houellebecq” are essentially fictive creations, complete with pseudonyms, as though speaking through puppets. The real self isn’t the pen name, it’s the puppeteer behind, who won’t reveal more than he wants to. Céline’s puppeteer was a physician named Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, while Houellebecq’s is a fellow named Michel Thomas, who took his grandmother’s maiden name as a nom-de-plume. They both like to tease and outrage their interlocutors, acting out the more inflammatory aspects of their fiction. [1][2]

And as my montage at top suggests, Houellebecq looks more and more like Céline as he gets old and gnarly. I tell myself this can’t be accidental. And yet—now that I’ve dragged you this far—it appears Houellebecq doesn’t have a particularly high regard for Céline at all.

He doesn’t diss him, exactly. But in his recent book of essays, Interventions 2020, Houellebecq makes a penetrating observation about our modern regard of collabo writers of the early 1940s. We cut them slack. He thinks the collabos‘ reputations are overestimated:

Don’t get me wrong. Céline is not without merit, he’s just ridiculously overrated. And Brasillach’s Poemes de Fresnes are very beautiful, surprisingly beautiful even in such a poor author. But all the others . . . Drieu, Morand, Felicien Marceau, Chardonne . . . a rather lamentable raggletaggle of mediocrities, after all. Well, it seems to me that their strange overestimation stems from a perverse emphasis on the aforementioned adage, which could be worded as: “If he’s a bastard, he’s probably a good writer.” [3]

What’s being criticized here is not politics or opinionatedness, but clarity of style. The fact is that Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and definitely Louis-Ferdinand Céline (I don’t know about the others) can be very hard going to begin with, whether you’re translating them or just trying to read them in the original. Houellebecq doesn’t think they’re good writers, and I’m going to guess this is because they don’t take care to state their case and develop it in simple declarative sentences. This isn’t a 1940 problem, so far as I can see; it afflicts French journalism and criticism to this day. If Houellebecq sees it too, we have to take his word for it.

Meantime, Houellebecq’s own prose is crystal-clear, a breeze to read in French and in English translation. So clear that this sort of transparency must a major determinant of his style. Houellebecq doesn’t like evasion, muddy thinking. He comes up with a phrase or observation, and it is often so blunt that it looks like a provocation. But meanwhile he draws you in.

Interventions 2020, just published in English translation a few months ago, is a mixed bag, mainly interviews, published criticisms and essays, and an awful lot of funny little pensées that Houellebecq scribbled into a notebook and then triple-distilled into something you and I can easily read.

Thus the first essay in Interventions 2020, a mere three pages, is titled, “Jacques Prévert is a jerk.” That’s it. That’s the title. Looks the same in French or English. The rest of the text merely develops this theme. It appears that, as with French classes in America, French literature classes in France cram this shallow pop poet/lyricist down kids’ throats. Because he sort of . . . non-controversial?

Or at least they did in our day, back in the 1970s . . .

If Jacques Prévert writes, it’s because he has something to say; that’s all to his credit. Unfortunately, what he has to say is boundlessly stupid; sometimes it makes you feel nauseous. [4] [5]

Attacking Jacques Prévert, the shallow schoolroom poet, is small potatoes. It’s way down in the book that you realize you’re being trolled. Or somebody’s being trolled. If anyone’s reading this book in fifty years, it’ll be for the premier essay, “Donald Trump is a good president.”

What does he say? Nothing that a gilet jaune or Charles DeGaulle himself could ever take issue with:

Donald Trump was elected to defend the interests of American workers; he is defending the interests of American workers. We would have liked to see this kind of attitude more often in France over the past fifty years. [6]

*   *   *

You could say Céline began his writing career as a medical student, doing his required dissertation on Ignaz Semmelweis and the crusade against sepsis in hospitals. Foul, disgusting disease and decay always riveted his attention, as a writer and as a doctor who usually worked among the poor. Reviewing his memoir Castle to Castle a few years ago, I noted how fantastically grotesque was his imagination, describing in detail how a hotel lobby’s toilet was forever overflowing, with rivers of urine and excrement flowing down the stairway. For visceral disgust there’s no one like Celine (except maybe Orwell at times).

Houellebecq started from a different imaginative world entirely, that of the science fiction he enjoyed in his youth. He particularly liked H. P. Lovecraft’s dystopias of multiracial fearfulness. His first published book was H. P. Lovecraft : Contre le monde, contre la vie (1991). And therein lay the template for most of his fiction since.

And non-fiction, too. In Interventions 2020 he recalls the time twenty years ago when he learned he’d won a prize for his first book of poems—the Prix de Flore!

So there he is, down in Saint-Germain-des-Prés . . . sitting in the Café Flore, very revved up . . . waiting for the prize festivities to start . . . and he imagines he might want to give a little speech when he takes the award. Something like: poetry has been asleep—but now it’s “emerged from its brutish slumber.” “Iä Iä Cthulhu fhtagn!” (Cthulhu awakens!) [7]

He accepts the award, but never gives his Cthulhu talk. He goes to the post-awards party and thinks his life will be much calmer from here on in.

Notes

[1] Chloé Chourrout, Performing Authorship: The case of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Michel Houellebecq. MPhil thesis, 2014, University of London. URL: https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/31764/1/ENG_thesis_ChourroutC_2022.pdf

[2] Chourrout, above, cites a typical article from The Independent (London) by John Lichfield in 2002: “Michel Houellebecq:  Drunken racist or one of the great writers? . . . Prophet;
pornographer; fascist; racist; trouble-maker; drunk; nihilist; moralist; self-publicist;
misogynist; martyr to freedom of speech; one of the greatest living writers. Which is
the real Michel Houellebecq?” 

[3] Michel Houellebecq, “Emmanuel Carrière and the problem of goodness,” in Interventions 2020. Translated by Andrew Brown. Cambridge, England and Medford, Mass.: 2022.

[4] Houellebecq, “Jacques Prévert is a jerk,” in Interventions 2020.

[5] The Prévert craze began in the latter 1940s, and presumably annoyed Terry Southern, who was then taking a potted course in French Culture & Civilization at the Sorbonne on the Gl Bill. Southern’s Doctor Strangelove script has the Keenan Wynn noncom accusing Peter Sellers’s RAF Group Captain of being a “prevert.”

[6] Houellebecq, “Donald Trump is a good president,” in Interventions 2020.

[7] Houellebecq, “I’m normal. A normal writer,” in Interventions 2020.

Moscow claims Kiev handed out counterfeit money infected with tuberculosis to children in a village in the Lugansk People’s Republic in 2020

Moscow claims Ukraine tried to infect the pro-Russian population in the Lugansk People’s Republic with tuberculosis (TB) and allowed the Pentagon to carry out human experiments at Kharkov’s psychiatric wards.

During a briefing on the findings of the Russian Defense Ministry’s investigation into the purportedly US-funded bioweapon labs in Ukraine, Chief of Russia’s Radioactive, Chemical, and Biological Protection Forces Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov claimed that Russian forces had obtained evidence suggesting Kiev attempted to infect residents of the Slavyanoserbsk district of the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) with a highly pathogenic strain of tuberculosis in 2020.

“Leaflets made in the form of counterfeit banknotes were infected with the causative agent of tuberculosis and distributed among minors in the village of Stepovoe,” Kirillov said, adding that the organizers of this crime took into account the behavior of children, which includes “putting things in their mouth” and handling food without washing their hands.

Read the whole thing.

Gummi Bears in “Grateful Dead” colorway.

German confectioner Haribo has reportedly announced plans to suspend supplies to Russia, as its recent economic difficulties there have been seriously aggravated by the military conflict between Moscow and Kiev.

“An already tough economic environment” in Russia has been recently exacerbated by the Russia-Ukraine strife, sending prices for primary produce soaring, supply chains changing and prices for logistics increasing, according to a message sent by the company to retail chains, as quoted by Russian business daily Kommersant.

Russia’s daily need of Haribo’s Gummi Bears will soon need to be satisfied by domestic production, say media analysts.

“The company’s management decided to suspend production for the Russian market until further notice,” the message, signed by Haribo CEO Walter Nikolaus, reads.

Recipes for Gummi Bears may be found on the interwebz.