September 30, 2009

LRB on D-Day

A Formidable Proposition

R.W. Johnson

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor Buy this book

In his account of D-Day Antony Beevor comes to many surprising conclusions: that the Germans were by far the better soldiers, more experienced, disciplined and confident; that their weapons were generally better, not just the Tiger and Panther tanks and the 88mm anti-tank gun but even their MG42 light machinegun, which was far superior to its British and American equivalents; that the Allies shot many prisoners and committed all manner of atrocities; that French civilians caught in the middle often suffered more from the Allied onslaught. On the other hand, very little of this would come as a surprise to anyone teaching at Sandhurst or West Point.

Even the relentless sand-bagging Montgomery receives for his arrogance, dishonesty and peacockry is no more than the conventional wisdom today. As Beevor says, he was always more popular among civilians than soldiers, and it was only the great gale of civilian adoration that shielded his reputation in the postwar years. By far the greatest military figure wartime Britain produced was Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the victor of Taranto and Cape Matapan, whose remit it was, as commander in chief of the Mediterranean theatre, to protect the British army in North Africa. Yet there is no mention of Montgomery in Cunningham’s autobiography, A Sailor’s Odyssey: his views, I assume, were unprintable. Eisenhower saw Montgomery as a psychopath while Beevor believes that his huge conceit derived from an inferiority complex: both are quite mild in their criticism by comparison with almost anyone who had to work with him.

Mercifully, Beevor is keen to allow more modest spirits their moment of glory. Front of stage is initially given to such little-known figures as Dr James Stagg, the chief weatherman on whose forecasts everything rested. Faced with a mass of conflicting data (and many doubting colleagues), Stagg finally called it right, scrubbing 5 June for 6 June, thereby avoiding the worst ever Channel storm. Rommel, in charge of the Atlantic sea wall, thought it safe to leave his post on 6 June. Stagg, crucially, had access to data from weather ships further out in the western Atlantic.[*] Another unknown, or hardly known, is Captain Scott-Bowden, who reconnoitred Omaha Beach by midget submarine under the nose of German sentries, and on his return to London warned his superiors that there were bound to be tremendous casualties: the beach, he said, was ‘a very formidable proposition’. That wasn’t an exaggeration, but Omaha was the only plausible invasion beach once Utah and Gold had been selected.

Given the superiority of their weapons and the quality of their soldiers (almost none exhibited the symptoms of battle shock common among the Allies), why did the Germans lose? First because the Allies caught them off guard and weeks after D-Day they were still holding troops back in expectation of a landing in the Pas-de-Calais. And second, because Hitler’s ‘sea wall’ strategy was fundamentally flawed: 200,000 troops were wasted garrisoning huge coastal fortresses like those in Lorient and St Nazaire, which the Allies simply bypassed, receiving their surrender only at the war’s end. Rommel warned that the decisive battles would take place on the beaches themselves, but Hitler again refused to listen. Instead key German units waited for a major counterattack and then, exactly as Rommel had predicted, found that Allied air superiority had not only cut bridges in their rear, making it hard to bring up reserves and supplies, but also taken a tremendous toll of the panzer units as they attempted to advance towards the coast – the tormentor in chief was the rocket-firing Typhoon fighter-bomber. Thanks to the almost complete absence of the Luftwaffe throughout the battle for Normandy, Allied commanders could call in Typhoons and Thunderbolts in close tactical support without any risk of a German counter. The widespread deployment of Allied artillery reconnaissance (Piper Cubs were able to land on ordinary roads or fields) allowed offshore naval batteries to be targeted by the vast armada still sitting in the Channel, whose huge guns could reach far inland, with no German riposte possible. Finally, once the beach-heads were established, the Allies poured in enormous numbers of men and huge quantities of matériel. Sherman and Churchill tanks may have been no match for the Tiger but there were far, far more of them and that was the telling factor.

On 30 July the Allies took Avranches but the battle went on into August as frantic German counterattacks were first held and then crushed. Avranches was the key, however, for with this crossroads town in their hands the Allies could unleash Wood’s Fourth Armoured Division and Patton’s Third Army to break out towards Brittany and the whole of central France including Paris. In fact, the situation had been plain long before then. Just ten days after D-Day, Hitler summoned Rommel and his superior, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, to Margival, near Soissons, the specially constructed base from which the Führer had planned to direct the invasion of Britain. It was to be the last time he left Germany. Rommel told him the situation was already hopeless, given Allied air and naval superiority and the number of new Allied divisions landing every week. The only solution was to pull back to the Loire and the Seine and defend new lines there. Rundstedt concurred. Hitler was furious. They were not to surrender an inch, he commanded, confident that the V-weapons were about to turn the war in Germany’s favour. Not long afterwards, Rundstedt, perhaps the finest military commander of the war, was sacked. Hitler would have liked to sack Rommel too but was constrained by Rommel’s huge domestic popularity in exactly the same way that Churchill, facing multiple pressures both from his other service chiefs and the Americans to sack Montgomery, worried about the domestic reaction were the victor of El Alamein to be dismissed.

In the days before D-Day, Allied commanders seemed to compete among themselves in terrifying their troops with horrific casualty estimates. Nothing was too scary: average life expectancy was just three weeks; of every three soldiers, two were likely to be killed, etc. British troops were even told not to worry if they fell on the beaches because others would immediately be sent in on top of them. Quite what such talk was thought likely to gain is obscure, though there is no doubt that the high command was expecting the worst. Haunted by the disastrous Dieppe raid two years earlier, and aware that failure might well mean that the invasion of Europe would be postponed indefinitely, the Allied high command was determined that the operation succeed even if all the beaches were as ‘formidable’ as Omaha, and planned accordingly. In the event, and despite heavy casualties in the first 48 hours, the actual figures fell far short of what had been predicted.

Thereafter, however, the fighting was appallingly bloody: indeed, losses on both sides exceeded those for any comparable period on the Eastern Front. Hitler’s policy of fighting for every inch of ground was only part of the reason: the Allies faced a number of crack divisions of the Waffen SS who were far superior as a fighting force to any they had previously encountered, and many former Desert Rats got a dreadful shock when they realised they were up against battle-hardened, ideological Nazis, often with long and horrifying records of atrocities against Jews, partisans and enemy POWs. These included Sepp Dietrich’s Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler panzer regiment, the Hitler Jugend panzer division, the Deutschland, Führer and Götz von Berlichingen panzergrenadier divisions and the Das Reich panzer division. Das Reich was particularly monstrous; its commander, Heinz Lammerding, had played a leading part in the massacres of Jews round Minsk. Transferred to France, they saw no reason to change their ways and carried out a series of major atrocities against French civilians as they advanced north towards the beach-heads, the worst being at Oradour-sur-Glane, where they shot and burned alive 642 men, women and children, including refugee children they simply grabbed off a train and consigned to the flames.

A great deal of the drama of the Normandy campaign, well brought out by Beevor, derived from the clash between these hardened fanatics and the Allies’ collection of butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers, men longing to be back in civvy street, often desperately hoping for a convenient flesh wound that would get them invalided out. Such men had little real appetite for battle, and the British, in particular, amazed their allies by stopping to brew up a mug of tea on every possible occasion and by refusing point-blank to do tasks that might possibly be designated as someone else’s duty: the postwar world of I’m All Right Jack was already clear in embryo.

The collision between these very different subcultures was brutal. The Canadians quickly discovered that 187 of their colleagues, taken prisoner, had been executed by the Hitler Jugend division – 30 mutilated Canadian bodies were found by a French civilian. Reports such as these – there were more – travelled like wildfire through the armies and many Allied soldiers, not only Canadians, had as little compunction about killing SS men as they would have had putting down rabid dogs. Beevor tells stories of wounded German prisoners refusing transfusions of Jewish blood, of others tearing off their bandages and demanding only to be allowed to die for the Führer, and others taunting GIs with stories that New York had already been destroyed by V-weapons.

To most Allied soldiers the Germans’ behaviour was mad, even subhuman, and reports of Nazi atrocities merely confirmed them in their view. Some Jewish soldiers in particular had a reputation such that one couldn’t safely leave an SS man alone in their custody, but they were far from being the only ones. A British army report acknowledged that its troops were in the habit of shooting SS men out of hand, adding baldly: ‘Many of them probably deserve to be shot in any case and know it.’ These practices often extended to the ordinary Wehrmacht soldiery as well, especially since many Allied commanders had told their troops at D-Day that German prisoners would be an embarrassment they could do without, for they would only slow up the essential breakout from the beach-head. Orders might still be given not to kill prisoners, but once it happened there was no fuss and no further questions were asked. Given the general ferocity, Allied ‘terror bombers’ and Typhoon pilots especially, knowing how hated they were, often wore brown army uniforms, reckoning that, if shot down, their chances of survival were higher than they would have been had they been wearing RAF gear. It was often with a sense of genuine wonderment that Allied soldiers finally came to see that the Germans were ‘people just like us’.

In popular myth much credit in this final phase goes to the French Resistance. Certainly, many Maquisards rose with almost suicidal bravery at London’s call and paid a terrible price for having done so. Many locals, on the other hand, were distinctly cool and there were reports (not always true) of French women snipers fighting in aid of their German boyfriends. The real problem was that the Normans couldn’t be sure that the landings would succeed: if they failed, German reprisals against anyone who had sided with the invader would be appalling. As the Allies finally burst out of Normandy and it became increasingly clear that they were going to win, their reception got warmer and warmer. At the same time, direct Resistance assistance to the Allies was limited: ‘better than expected and less than advertised’, as Patton cuttingly put it. In fact the help that counted was indirect: the widespread sabotage on the railways, much of it carried out by railwaymen themselves, significantly hindered German attempts to move men and matériel up to the front, for example. But once it was decided that the Panzer divisions would fight until they were ground to pieces – the eventual result – there wasn’t a large role for partisans to play. The ensuing battles saw the second largest deployment of tanks after the battle of Kursk and although many individual tank-hunters wrought great damage with bazookas and panzerfausts, the struggle was essentially between armour, artillery and fighter-bombers.

The great prize, as everyone was aware, none more keenly than Patton and De Gaulle, was to break out westwards to the Seine and Paris. The goal was as much political and symbolic as anything else. The Communist-led Resistance was anxious to see the Red Flag fly over the capital while De Gaulle, fearing a repeat of the Paris Commune, was equally desperate to establish a countervailing Free French presence in the capital as soon as possible. Neither side could do anything unless Eisenhower could be persuaded to take the city. The triumphant scenes at the liberation of Paris form the conclusion to Beevor’s book, though really they belong to a different story. His narrative is essentially about the battles that raged for three months in Normandy and thus settled the outcome of the war. At the end of those three months the German armies were broken remnants, with 240,000 casualties and 200,000 prisoners in Allied hands. The British, Canadians and Poles had suffered 83,045 casualties, the Americans 125,847 and the Allied air forces another 16,714. In purely military terms it was a remarkable result. Everyone expected that the attackers, having to invade across fields and beaches that were virtual shooting-ranges organised by well-entrenched defenders, would suffer by far the greater casualties. In fact the Allied high command were greatly relieved that their casualties were so much lighter than they’d feared.

In a sense we have all been affected by that feeling of relief, and by the ease of the Western Allies’ advance that followed, allowing us to see the war in the West as a low-casualty war. In overall comparison with the Eastern Front that remains true, of course. It has been standard military doctrine since 1945 that the Wehrmacht was the strongest force in the war and that no amount of naval or air warfare could bring Hitler down. For that to happen someone, somewhere had to destroy the Wehrmacht and this task was essentially performed by the Red Army on the great plains of Russia. But that shouldn’t overshadow what was achieved in Normandy. The toughest task of all was to take on and defeat the crack Waffen SS regiments, many of which had ended up in Normandy having carved careers of such horror in the East as to justify in full their death’s head insignia.

* Even less celebrated – not mentioned by Antony Beevor – is Lawrence Hogben, a naval instructor, who also played a part in persuading Eisenhower to postpone the invasion from the 5th to the 6th and wrote about it in an LRB Diary (26 May 1994). He has a walk-on part in Giles Foden’s novel, reviewed on the previous page.

From the LRB letters page: [ 8 October 2009 ] Derek Robinson.

R.W. Johnson’s latest book is South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid.

September 29, 2009

LRB on on Bonnie and Clyde

Cloche Hats and Perms

Bee Wilson

Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn Buy this book

Easter Sunday fell on April Fools’ Day in 1934. A young woman called Bonnie Parker was sitting in a field by a narrow dirt road near the town of Grapevine, Texas, playing with a white rabbit that she had named Sonny Boy. She was waiting for her mother, to whom she intended to give the rabbit as an Easter present, but the rendezvous got delayed. By the time Sonny Boy finally met his new owner, probably on 18 April, he would have witnessed several murders and had a number of near-death experiences.

‘They’re young. They’re in love. They rob banks,’ was the tag line for Arthur Penn’s 1967 film, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Self-importantly influenced by the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut was originally slated to direct it, but decided to make Fahrenheit 451 instead), the film portrayed the star-crossed criminals as free spirits thwarted and eventually brought down by the law. If you’d been stuck in this godawful hidebound era in redneck Texas in the middle of the Depression, Beatty’s cosmopolitan smirk seemed to ask, wouldn’t you have taken to robbing banks too? This was crime as counterculture. Beatty – who produced the film as well as starring in it – had originally wanted Bob Dylan to play the role of Clyde. As for Dunaway, Bonnie was a braless rebel in a tam o’ shanter.

Apart from their crimes, the real Bonnie and Clyde were not so very rebellious, as Jeff Guinn’s admirably thorough biography shows. Right to the bloody end, and despite their reputation as the most terrifying murderers in the South-West, they retained a pathetic desire to please their respective mothers, both of them fiercely religious matriarchs. Sonny Boy was a case in point. Despite her situation – ‘wanted’ all over Texas – Bonnie was adamant about giving her mother an Easter present. ‘It was the kind of silly, sentimental gesture she still liked to make,’ Guinn observes. Clyde dutifully arranged a family get-together for 1 April, sending a go-between to fetch their mothers and various siblings to meet up by the roadside northwest of Dallas. It was a sunny afternoon. Bonnie, in constant pain after a car accident, swigged a bottle of whiskey as she waited, but in between slugs chewed on pieces of lemon peel, a habit of hers (the Texas police kept a look out for lemon peel at crime scenes), because she didn’t want her mother to know she’d been drinking.

Time magazine demonised her as the ‘gun-toting, cigar-smoking Bonnie Parker’. A series of humorous photographs they shot of themselves leaning on the bumpers of stolen cars and aiming guns at each other fell into police hands and forged their reputation. In the most famous (re-created by Dunaway in the film), Bonnie, dressed in a tight sweater and long black skirt, has a cigar dangling from her mouth, her foot on the fender and a gun at her hip. As Guinn writes, it was after the publication of this photo in April 1933 in newspapers and magazines throughout the States that Bonnie and Clyde and their Barrow Gang became national celebrities, on a par with Al Capone and Pretty Boy Floyd. ‘Bonnie,’ Guinn writes, ‘supplied the sex appeal, the oomph, that allowed the two of them to transcend the small-scale thefts and needless killings that actually comprised their criminal careers.’ More than the stolen car and the gun, the public was shocked by Bonnie’s cigar, ‘in a time when most respectable women would discreetly puff cigarettes in private’. There was hardly an article from then on that didn’t mention her cigar-smoking. A woman who dared to smoke cigars was surely capable of anything.

Except that Bonnie didn’t smoke cigars. The cigar in the photo was merely a prop, borrowed from one of the men in the gang. Indeed she had little of the cold nonchalance that cigar-smoking implied. Unlike Dunaway’s Bonnie, whose confidence seems to emasculate Clyde (in the film he is depicted as impotent), the real Bonnie was clingy. She was desperate to please – whether men, women, children (she often gave random country kids rides on the bumpers of their stolen cars), or bunny rabbits. One day that April, after a shoot-out, Bonnie and Clyde kidnapped a police officer called Percy Boyd. They became fond of him – Bonnie bandaged his head wound in the back seat and gave him a clean shirt to replace one that was spattered with blood. Even though he was one of the ‘laws’, Bonnie trusted Boyd enough to ask him a favour: if they were caught while he was with them, would he please make sure that Sonny Boy reached her mother safe and sound? Finally, they released the cop. As he got out of the car, Boyd asked Bonnie what she wanted him to tell the press. She is supposed to have said: ‘Tell them I don’t smoke cigars.’

The public was shocked at the idea that a woman could be an equal partner in crime. But she wasn’t. It was Clyde and his cronies who wielded the shotguns and drove the cars; Bonnie just went along for the ride, writing poems about their exploits on a little typewriter. ‘Their nature is raw/They hate the law/The stool pigeons, spotters and rats,’ she wrote in ‘The End of the Line’. But she talked more than she walked. Two police officers were shot dead when they approached Bonnie and Clyde’s car near Grapevine on Easter Sunday. The papers immediately blamed Bonnie. A local man, William Schieffer, claimed that he saw a woman walk up to a wounded police officer and shoot him repeatedly while his head bounced on the road ‘like a rubber ball’. Bonnie’s murderous reputation was cemented. From now on, Guinn explains, she was seen as a ‘kill-crazy floozy who laughed as she finished off an innocent rookie patrolman’. But as Clyde’s sister Marie later complained, Schieffer’s porch was too far away for him to have seen anything clearly. Besides, what the media didn’t know was that Bonnie by this point was a cripple – in 1933 her right leg got coated in battery acid in an accident caused by Clyde’s reckless driving – and she could barely walk unaided, never mind stroll up to a man and shoot him. The two cops were shot at by Henry Methvin, a drunken con, and finished off by Clyde, as Bonnie sat in the Ford cuddling Sonny Boy.

The photos that shocked the public were not in themselves so unusual. In the miserable Dallas slums they both grew up in, one of the few affordable ways for teenage couples to have fun was to go to Fair Park on the city’s south side and get photographed in silly poses. Bonnie and Clyde’s gun-toting pictures were a throwback to Fair Park’s photo booths.

The girls donned huge hats and flourished frilly parasols. The boys decked themselves out in goofy cowboy gear. They pointed fake guns at each other, brandished ‘cigarettes’ in long holders, and struck exaggerated poses behind rubber prison bars. The photos came in strips of three for a nickel. The girl would take one, the boy another and the third might be given to a parent or friend.

More than any previous biographer, Guinn shows Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow as products of West Dallas in the 1920s. An ‘appalling collection of ramshackle shanties and tent camps’, West Dallas was generally recognised to be the worst slum in any Texas city. Elsewhere slums were gradually incorporated into the city itself. In Dallas, the city fathers, keen to rival the culture of San Francisco or New York and worried about a huge influx of undesirables, did nothing to assimilate the hordes who arrived each year from the Texan countryside. Tough vagrancy laws kept newcomers out of the city proper. Immigrants ended up squatting on the floodplain west of the Trinity River, where their presence didn’t compromise Dallas’s shiny downtown. Some settled in the foul smoke of Cement City, named after the poisonous local factories, which provided the residents with their low-paid jobs. If you were really unlucky you ended up in the adjacent slum of West Dallas, ‘The Bog’. Here there was nothing, no industry of any kind, only ‘fetid air and swarming bugs, open sewers and garbage-strewn blocks’.

It was here that 12-year-old Clyde Barrow, the fifth of seven children, arrived in 1922. After decades of thankless toil, his parents, Henry and Cumie Barrow, had been forced to give up on their rented farm in Ellis County when boll weevils devastated the cotton crop. In West Dallas, they tried to start again, but their luck was no better than average for The Bog. Henry made a pittance collecting scrap metal. At first the family lived in a tent set on the muddy ground; later, they graduated to a homemade shed, hammered together from wood, shingle and nails. Food was mostly sandwiches from the Salvation Army – ‘thin discs of bologna between slices of stale bread’.

Despite the squalor, or perhaps because of it, stylish clothes were very important in the slum. No matter how hardscrabble your circumstances, you had to have some ‘Sunday clothes’. ‘Males might have one dress shirt and a pair of cheap department store slacks,’ Guinn writes. ‘Women would have a single frock made of material that was store-bought rather than homespun.’ Living in a slum did not stop the girls from wanting cloche hats and perms, rouge compacts and elegant long skirts. Becoming criminals was a way for Bonnie and Clyde to ensure that they could wear their Sunday clothes every day. On the run, Bonnie would switch her hair colour, ‘going from golden blonde to streaky auburn to full-blown red and back again’, and Clyde let her dye his hair too; on one occasion, a strange shade of vivid red.

The famous stylishness of Bonnie and Clyde was a very West Dallas thing. Neither of them was anything special to look at, but their wardrobes made them glamorous. Even when they were sleeping rough, they made a point of dressing in clean, fashionable, neatly pressed clothes. They were great frequenters of dry cleaners. It was their style to hit town, drop a few things off to be dry cleaned, camp out in the countryside for a while and then return for their freshly laundered clothes before perhaps holding up a few grocery stores. Sometimes they stole clothes but mostly their wardrobe acquisitions were legit (though made with stolen money). The gang left a trail of receipts for underwear, shoes, gloves, dresses and automatic shotguns. Clyde enjoyed giving money to his younger siblings L.C. and Marie and asking them to buy him a new suit. ‘L.C. especially loved buying suits for Clyde in stores near public bulletin boards displaying his wanted posters.’

Initially Bonnie’s family wasn’t dirt poor like Clyde’s – her father was a brick mason, which was at least a trade. In 1914, he died, leaving Emma, Bonnie’s mother, alone with three children. They moved to Cement City, where Emma worked in a garment factory sewing overalls. The teenage Bonnie won poetry competitions and often boasted that one day her name would be up in lights. She smothered herself in make-up, and soon found ways of extracting gifts of candy from the boys at Cement City School. In 1925, when she was 15, she paid for a special studio photograph of herself, complete with Clara Bow pout and ringlets. The following year, she had changed her hair to a straight bob and married a well-dressed thug called Roy Thornton. In a surviving photo, she has a dark-red jammy smile and Roy, raffish in a white shirt and tie, has the imprint of her lipstick all over his mouth.

After three unsatisfying and violent years of marriage, Roy abandoned her. She was working in a café by now, where she seemed to dress too well for a waitress on wages of $3 a week. Guinn wonders whether ‘her wardrobe might have reflected income from occasional prostitution.’ In January 1930, she went to a party at her brother’s house and met Clyde Chestnut Barrow. He wasn’t as good-looking as Roy but he was better dressed and drove a fancy car. The attraction was instant. When he was arrested less than a month later on charges of attempted robbery, she swore she would wait for him.

Clyde had already been found guilty of a string of low-level crimes, starting with poultry theft – lifting the odd chicken from the backyards of the slums. Later, he was repeatedly arrested for car theft. The new electric starting system pioneered by Ford in 1912 made it easy to jump in a car and take off, particularly if the owner had been foolish enough to leave their keys in the ignition. A stolen car could sell for a quick $100: three months’ wages at Clyde’s old job. Intensely brand-conscious, Clyde’s favourite car was the Ford V8, which he hot-wired more than any other; at the end he and Bonnie died at police hands in a V8 riddled with bullet holes.

It was prison that turned Clyde from a hot-wirer to a murderer. If West Dallas was the foulest slum in Texas, the foulest prison was Eastham Prison Farm, set in swampy riverland where prisoners were expected to do ten hours’ hard labour a day sustained only by dry cornbread, the odd turnip green or ‘near-raw, rancid bacon’. Clyde, imprisoned at Eastham for robbery in 1930, was repeatedly raped by a hulking fellow convict called Ed Crowder, probably ‘in view of other prisoners’. When another prisoner – Scalley, a lifer – offered to take the blame for Clyde if he killed Crowder, Clyde seized the chance, fracturing the rapist’s skull with a piece of lead piping hidden in his trouser leg. Scalley confessed to the crime, and Clyde got away with it. According to Guinn, it was one of only two premeditated murders he committed; the second came four years later, when he helped an associate, Joe Palmer, murder a guard who had abused him in prison. All his other killings were done on the spur of the moment. This was not a criminal mastermind.

Even with Crowder dead, life at Eastham was almost unendurable. Bonnie had stopped writing to him, having hooked up with a new boyfriend and a new job, and the farm labour was increasingly hard to bear. In desperation, he hacked off the big toe and part of another toe on his left foot, hoping to be judged unfit for labour. His timing, as so often, was atrocious. Just two weeks later, his mother’s letter-writing campaign to the Texas governor finally bore fruit and Clyde was granted parole. He had cut off his toes for nothing. He would never walk properly again. When he arrived back in February 1932, his sisters welcomed him home with a gift of silk shirts. As for Bonnie, she abandoned her new beau at once and eagerly embarked on the life of crime that would make them the two most famous names in the state.

Yet the gang – which at one time or another included Buck and his wife, Blanche, and various friends and associates (Ralph Fults, Henry Methvin, W.D. Jones) – was intensely family-minded. When they wanted to arrange a family gathering, Clyde and Bonnie would drive past the old Barrow home in West Dallas and toss out Coke bottles in which he’d stuffed messages indicating when and where to meet. Clyde’s mother, Cumie, would then phone Bonnie’s mother and say, ‘I’m fixing red beans,’ which was code for ‘Bonnie and Clyde are in town.’ It was at one of these meetings that Bonnie finally handed Sonny Boy over to her mother. ‘Keep him away from the cops,’ she warned. ‘He’s been in two gun battles and he’ll land at Huntsville if the law finds it out.’

Photos survive of some of these get-togethers. In one, Bonnie, Clyde, their mothers and some of their siblings are posing beside a stolen car. A scrunched up coat is used to disguise the number plate (they had been stung before by forgetting to cover the number plate, making it easier for the cops to trace them). In the front row, Bonnie’s mother is entwined with Bonnie and Clyde’s sister Marie. In the back row, Clyde stands hugging Cumie and Bonnie’s sister Billie Jean. Cumie is a shrunken figure in spectacles and a hat who stares implacably at the camera.

Cumie Barrow was a fundamentalist Christian who taught her children that their souls would be sent to hell unless they did everything the Bible said. If she and Henry had ‘taken more time to really be with our children, played with them more and watched over their growing up as we should have, things might have been far different from what they were’, she later reflected. The Barrows were no Mafia dynasty, and yet only two of Henry and Cumie’s seven children escaped prison. Buck, a key member of the Barrow gang, was in and out of prison and eventually died from gunshot wounds nearly a year before Bonnie and Clyde. L.C. Barrow served several terms for robbery and forgery. Marie Barrow got into bar fights and also spent time in prison. For a while, Jack Barrow, the eldest son, kept out of trouble – ‘determined to raise his four daughters free of the slightest criminal taint’ – until October 1939, when he got into a bar fight and killed a man. Only Artie and Nell Barrow managed to stay on the right side of the law.

Among Guinn’s new sources are unpublished memoirs by Marie and Cumie Barrow, making his biography more informative than previous studies (of which there have been many). On the impoverished cotton farm where they’d lived before West Dallas, Cumie brought up all her children to respect both learning and the ways of God. Yet most of them grew up respecting neither. ‘If you don’t go to school,’ she constantly nagged them, ‘you’ll grow up to be idiots.’ They chose to be idiots; when Buck and Clyde were in jail, they had to ask other prisoners to help them write letters home. The odd thing about the Barrows is that despite having failed to live up to Cumie’s endless strictures, her criminal sons seem not to have resented them much. Whatever else Bonnie and Clyde were on the run from, it wasn’t family life. Clyde was always ready with another basket of fruit and candies to give his mother and she was always prepared to drop everything and meet him on some patch of highway. She recorded the dates of his visits on a wall in the family shack, and later copied them into her memoir: ‘December 8th, 10th, 14th, 20th and 29th; January 4th, two times that day, 7th, 10th, 13th, 15th and 18th; February 13th, 18th, 22nd; March 3rd, 19th (12th?), 24th, 27th.’

On the road, Bonnie and Clyde, missing their own mothers, re-created a strange semblance of a nuclear family. In the new-fangled motor courts they loved to stay in, they would rent only one cabin and share it with their associate, the 16-year-old W.D. Jones, who slept on the floor (he was scared of the dark). W.D. took part in the robberies, but did not get an equal share. Clyde just tossed him a dollar from time to time, like pocket money. Bonnie, who couldn’t have any children of her own, called W.D. ‘Boy’. He called her ‘Sis’, and Clyde was ‘Bud’ (his old childhood nickname). The three of them would share meals of bologna-and-cheese sandwiches washed down with buttermilk (and latterly, large amounts of whiskey for Bonnie). It was W.D. who took many of the jokey photos on car bonnets, until he got arrested in 1933 and tried to save his own skin by saying he had only done the things he did because he was forced to at gunpoint, which was certainly not true.

Bonnie and Clyde saw themselves as outlaws, like Jesse James, as Bonnie wrote in ‘The End of the Line’:

You’ve read the story of Jesse James –
Of how he lived and died;
If you’re still in need
Of something to read
Here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

Clyde was no Jesse James, however (‘their two-year crime spree was as much a reign of error as terror,’ Guinn writes). There were a couple of big bank robberies ($33,000 from a bank in Kansas), but the gang specialised in tiny grocery store hold-ups as well as car theft, and their bigger schemes often ended in comic failure. Their reputation of course was different. ‘Clyde and Bonnie,’ Guinn writes, ‘came to epitomise the edgy daydreams of the economically and socially downtrodden. Resentful of their own powerlessness and poverty, Barrow Gang fans liked the idea of colourful young rebels sticking it to bankers and cops. Clyde and Bonnie were even better than actors like Jimmy Cagney who committed crimes onscreen, because they were doing it for real.’ Guinn has spoken to contemporaries who remember how thrilling it was to see Bonnie and Clyde on the newsreels, and to imagine the exotic lives they led, swanning around in fancy hotels. The reality was cold baked beans in a field and a cramped room in a motor court when they were lucky.

In the 32 years since the movie, doing a ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ has become a kind of shorthand for breaking loose from all the ties of civilisation. The curious thing about the real Bonnie and Clyde is how many of those ties they chose to keep: the small obligations they honoured, the rules they observed, the conventions they followed. When money was flush, or they needed a treat, they sometimes bought a proper hot meal from a restaurant, instead of their usual diner sandwiches. In July 1933, Buck was fatally wounded after the Platte City shoot-out, when some county cops ambushed the gang at a motor court. They managed to get away, but a bullet had gone right through Buck’s skull – ‘you could look right inside his head.’ As they camped out, Buck expressed a desperate desire for some fried chicken. Clyde drove to Blohm’s restaurant in Dexter. He paid for five chicken dinners and promised he would bring the plates back the next day. Which he did.

Bee Wilson is writing a short study of sandwiches. Her last book was Swindled, a history of adulteration.

September 28, 2009

Best Time in One's Life

September 27, 2009

Listening to: Miles Davis

The Sunday Times review by Clive Davis
It is the album that unites buffs who know every catalogue number under the sun and people for whom jazz is something to be listened to once a year at a dinner party. Half a century after it was recorded, Kind of Blue, Miles Davis’s bestseller, remains the most admired landmark in post-war jazz. Eisenhower was still in the White House and Fidel Castro was still finding his way around his presidential palace when the trumpeter went into the studio in 1959. Yet to listen to the album that nudged jazz in the direction of modal improvisation is to savour music that seems utterly timeless.
The story behind the making of the LP has previously been told in absorbing detail by the American author Ashley Kahn. Rifling through record-company memos and paperwork, he brought the sessions to life in a volume that combined ample footnotes with the allure of a coffee-table accessory. Now comes the turn of the effortlessly versatile British journalist Richard Williams, whose previous book subjects have been as diverse as the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, the racing driver Ayrton Senna and the film director Krzysztof Kieslowski.
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Given that Kahn has already pored over the blueprints (pardon the pun), Williams broadens his focus to examine how Kind of Blue influenced countless musicians within jazz and beyond. In a brief coda, Kahn had already demonstrated how the likes of Herbie Hancock, the pianist, and funk master James Brown had absorbed some of the lessons. Unlike the dense chord changes of bebop — which added ever more complex permutations to the Tin Pan Alley song structure — Davis’s exploration of the possibilities of scales produced solos that seemed refreshingly uncluttered and almost mystical in their intensity. Building on Kahn’s work, Williams now roams far afield as he introduces figures as disparate as Lou Reed, the keyboard guru Brian Eno, the composer Terry Riley and Manfred Eicher, the German producer and founder of the ECM label.
As a tour of the no man’s land where the more esoteric end of popular music overlaps with contemporary classical music, The Blue Moment is full of stylish thumbnail sketches. One problem, though, is that the connections between Davis’s work and the artists he is said to have inspired remain frustratingly elusive. Kind of Blue may have been part of the musical education of the composers John Adams and Steve Reich, but exactly how Davis’s influences have entered the world’s bloodstream is often left unexplained.
Williams is on more solid ground when he examines how Davis made the leap from conventional bop to the spacier textures of modal-based playing. He pays special attention to the haunting sketches that Davis created in Paris for Louis Malle’s 1958 film noir Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold), a film whose score far outshines its hackneyed storyline.
John Coltrane’s evolution after he left Davis’s group also comes in for scrutiny. His feverish solos pushed the modal framework to breaking point as he edged deeper into atonalism. Strangely, though, Williams shows little interest in the one Davis album of the 1960s, the pioneering jazz-rock classic In a Silent Way, which came closest to reproducing the introverted melancholia of Kind of Blue.
Nor does Williams confront the question of whether, after Kind of Blue, jazz paid a price for its increasingly introspective tendencies and Coltrane and co’s passion for ever more extended solos. Kingsley Amis, vintage jazz-lover, may have been pining for a lost youth of gramophones, punts and 78rpms when he declared his dislike of Davis’s musings, but the question of how the music can strike a balance between experimentation and entertainment is one that jazz critics spend a good deal of time avoiding.

The Blue Moment by Richard Williams
Faber £14.99 pp309

September 26, 2009

TLS on Stalin

on Stalin

New research shows how the Soviet Politburo and the secret police served a single man
by Donald Rayfield

The torrent of documentary material released in the 1990s on the workings of Stalin’s totalitarian rule is still more than a trickle – despite Putin’s repression of the Russian media and NGOs, despite the overt rehabilitation of Stalin as the great personnel manager and author of military victory, and despite the restrictions on historical archives and foreign researchers. In 1995, Oleg Khlevniuk, perhaps the doyen of archival researchers into the Soviet period, published a slim volume on the Politburo and the mechanisms of power. Since then it has expanded, in German and English, as well as in Russian, to become a more detailed examination of how the system worked. From 1925, when Stalin began to dominate the “collective” leadership, to 1936, when he had physically eliminated every possible opponent, rival or even plausible successor, the Politburo gradually lost any resemblance it had once had to a Cabinet of ministers. All the evidence we have shows that, except for very rare occasions, the Politburo acted more as a secretariat; any demurral, let alone dissent, was quickly suppressed. Its members were called on to sign their names, or telephone their assent, when Stalin proposed a particularly gruesome process, such as the annotated “shooting lists” of 1937–8 for 44,000 persons holding posts important enough to require Politburo sanction for execution, or the 1940 decision to murder 22,000 captive Polish officers (the Katyn affair). Otherwise, they were the muscles that tensed or relaxed their grip on the population according to the impulses that came from Stalin’s brain.
Two major sources of information have been in the public domain since 1998: one is the apparently complete list of visitors to Stalin’s Kremlin office, with the length of time they were closeted with the leader; the other is the correspondence between Stalin and two of his most trusted and hard-working Politburo subordinates, Molotov and Kaganovich, during the months that Stalin spent relaxing on the Black Sea between 1925 and 1936. The absence of effective long-distance telephone lines and Stalin’s mistrust of the channels of his own secret police (until he could appoint his own head of the NKVD) meant that for those summer holidays he relied on letters and couriers. Many other sources have now been published, including virtually all Stalin’s written enquiries and orders to the Lubyanka, and the agendas, if not the minutes, of all Politburo meetings. Stalin took all the decisions, though he was sometimes moved to frenzy by his Politburo’s sycophancy. The only exception was in the autumn of 1945 when, exhausted by the war, especially by cajoling Churchill and Roosevelt into ceding most of Central and Eastern Europe to USSR control, Stalin allowed the Politburo to run the country without referring every detail to him. His anger in December 1945 at the “rotten” liberalism that Molotov and Malenkov had shown when unsupervised did not translate into arrests and shootings, but only because Stalin was now too tired to see anything through. From 1946 to Stalin’s death none of the Politburo could rely on the relative constancy that Stalin had shown them a decade earlier: he sadistically played them against each other. The result was unexpected: the scorpions thrown together in the jar learnt to cooperate as well as to devour each other, which is one reason why Stalin’s system survived his death so smoothly and for so long, despite the coup against Beria, and Khrushchev’s manoeuvring to oust Malenkov and Molotov.
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Khlevniuk’s study is heavily weighted to the early 1930s, when we have the extraordinary correspondence (franker than that of most “democratic” ministers), and relies on extrapolation and logic to follow the workings of this system of rule in the years (1938–41, 1947–53) for which our best sources are only the undoctored minutes of party meetings. The book puts paid to a number of fashionable theories, notably that Stalin (like Napoleon in Tolstoy’s interpretation) was merely riding the crest of waves generated by forces below him: he is clearly his system’s author and operator, convinced, against all the evidence, of his genius and infallibility. And to judge by the Stalins of recent years – the North Korean Kims, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe – the Stalinist system of intransigent rule over a cowed populace through a totally subservient Politburo still works.
Paul R. Gregory, a Professor of Economics, focuses on Stalin’s other instrument of tyranny, the secret police that he inherited from Lenin and which Stalin definitely made his own only in 1936 when he replaced Genrikh Yagoda with his own protégé from the Politburo, Nikolai Yezhov. From 1918 until 1936, the secret police enjoyed unique autonomy. It chose its own heads: Felix Dzerzhinsky nominated Vyacheslav Menzhinsky as his second in command, and Yagoda as the next in line. Stalin swung all three round to his side mainly because he promised them a permanent role in the state (Trotsky was more interested in the military, while liberals like Bukharin proposed reducing, even abolishing, the secret police after Lenin’s death). Stalin offered them the task of eliminating, first enemies abroad and then, more controversially (for some secret policemen), enemies within the party.
As in Khlevniuk’s study, Gregory’s facts and figures for the numbers executed, imprisoned, deported and worked to death are documented and undisputed. Here too, enough correspondence has been published to show that the decisions were taken by Stalin. The difference between the secret police and the Politburo was that persons such as Menzhinsky and Yagoda had their own agendas, styles of working and even inhibitions. In some initiatives, such as the destruction of the more prosperous peasantry and the persecution of foreign specialist engineers, Stalin had enthusiastic encouragement from Menzhinsky; in others, such as blaming the murder of Kirov on the “left opposition”, Yagoda dragged his feet. Even when Stalin appointed his own chiefs, they were harder to control than Politburo members. Yezhov went into a feeding frenzy that threatened to destroy the professional cadres on whom the working of the country’s infrastructure depended and to reduce the whole population to a state of petrified incompetence. Beria proved so efficient and ingenious that he became capable of neutralizing many steps that Stalin took to ensure that his secret police never became more powerful than the party. Yezhov was shot, but Beria, especially following his involvement in building the Soviet atom bomb, became what Stalin had once declared undesirable for a human being: indispensable.
Paul Gregory has written a book which is, on the whole, well researched, but is vitiated by a predilection for mathematical formulae. The graphic presentation of the waves of arrests and executions is effective, but the Loyalty/Repression and “Power-Maximizing” graphs and formulae to predict “defection” or “loyalty” of a Praetorian guard rely on false assumptions. The Yagodas and Yezhovs did not take cool rational decisions based on the likelihood of survival, reward or execution. (Earlier secret police bosses, like Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky, did show some calculation in swinging their men round to Stalin, but it was more of a company decision: choosing the client that would offer them the most business.) Even Beria, the most versatile of all, was no Talleyrand. Such men were caught up in a psychotic whirlpool. The only rational response (and a very few did make it) when offered advancement by Stalin was to make an excuse and find a job as a park keeper or morgue attendant in a remote town, so that nobody could accuse you of sabotage or spying.
The biggest surprise is that Gregory virtually ignores Menzhinsky, the effective chief of the secret police from 1921 until his death in 1934, a man of such satanic genius and cool control that Stalin overcame his distaste for bourgeois intellectuals and trusted his advice as he trusted no one else’s. Menzhinsky can be held responsible for more deaths than all the other secret police heads taken together, and to reduce him, in a study of Lenin’s and Stalin’s state security, to just a few mentions as “Yagoda’s official boss” is in itself a remarkable piece of Stalinist revisionism.

Oleg V. Khlevniuk
MASTER OF THE HOUSE
Stalin and his inner circle
Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov
313pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $38).
978 0 300 11066 1

Paul R. Gregory
TERROR BY QUOTA
State security from Lenin to Stalin (An archival study)
346pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
978 0 300 13425 4

Donald Rayfield is Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is the editor of A Comprehensive Georgian – English Dictionary, 2006.

September 24, 2009

TLS on Golding

on Golding

September 23, 2009

William Golding and the capacity for evil
An ambitious and complicated late starter who did not understand the impulses behind his own books

Few thought he was even a starter.
There were many who thought themselves smarter.
But he ended PM,
CH and OM,
A peer and a Knight of the Garter.

Clement Attlee’s neat summary of his career might be adapted for William Golding. He too was a late starter, one oppressed in youth by doubts and feelings of social, and perhaps intellectual, inferiority. Until his middle forties he was a poor, reluctant and unsatisfied provincial schoolmaster. But, like Attlee, he outstripped many who had a head-start on him and he ended with a knighthood and the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first English novelist to be awarded it since Galsworthy. His life was transformed in 1954 by the publication of Lord of the Flies, the novel to which his biographer has thought fit to call to our attention in his subtitle – in case Golding’s name might otherwise be unfamiliar. Yet Lord of the Flies came close to sharing the fate of three novels Golding had already written, which had failed to find a publisher. Five publishers and one literary agency returned it, and the reader for Faber & Faber recommended its rejection as an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy . . . . Rubbish and dull. Pointless”.
It was fortunate for Golding that a new editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, had picked up the scruffy typescript, read a few pages, found himself gripped, and managed to persuade his colleagues that they should publish the book if the author would be prepared to revise it. Golding was very lucky indeed. Monteith would remain his editor, friend, comforter, confessor and encourager for more than thirty years, a rock on which Golding’s enviable career was built. And Lord of the Flies was an almost immediate success. It made Golding’s reputation and his fortune. It was soon adopted as a standard school text, eventually selling several million copies in Britain and the United States. When, towards the end of his life, he considered selling the manuscript, its value was put at £250,000. However, “Golding worked out, as he notes in his journal, that after tax and agent’s fees, the manuscript could not be expected to yield more than £100,000, and ‘We don’t need a hundred thousand that bad’”. In 1954, the advance on royalties had been £60.
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As with other comparatively late starters, Muriel Spark and Angus Wilson for example, the publication of one novel released Golding’s creative energies. Others quickly followed: The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959) and The Spire (1964). Given that all Golding’s novels went through several drafts, partly because he rarely seems to have had much idea of where he was heading when he started to write, this was a remarkable rate of production. Though reviewers were often mystified, and sometimes dismissive – and though his concerns were unfashionably metaphysical rather than social – nevertheless, within ten years Golding was firmly established as one of the most original and formidable of contemporary novelists. His own view of his novels was ambiguous, and his responses to questions about them often evasive. Reviewers and academic critics hunted, successfully, for symbols; he insisted that he was only a storyteller, or at least a storyteller first and foremost. Yet, until his last more relaxed novels, readers often had to work hard to follow the narrative.
Of none of his books was this more true than Darkness Visible, which he worked on intermittently for more than ten years. He despaired of it often, sometimes suffering from writer’s block, and after its publication in 1979, refused to discuss it or respond to questions about it. John Carey recounts the plot in detail, with notes about the way the novel changed in the writing. “Windover”, Golding noted in January 1974, “now I think is possibly a coloured gent” who might be extradited to a country that would “do him”, perhaps Portugal. “Two years later”, Carey remarks, “he reminds himself that ‘the proper person for the British Government to sell for oil would be a Jew’, so perhaps Windover could be a ‘coloured Jew’ who is ‘framed’ by MI5 and maybe the CIA as well.” According to Carey, “his decision to ditch these ideas and make international terrorism his political subject seems to have been a response to events”. Many good novelists often have little idea where their novel will take them when they write its first sentence and opening pages, but it does seem that Golding, especially in writing Darkness Visible, had fewer signposts along the road than most like to have. He told Monteith, “The basic difficulty is that I don’t know what the damn thing is about either”. He had written so many versions that “I can’t remember what is which”.
Carey suggests that “his refusal ever to discuss the book may relate to this inner bewilderment”. And Carey himself (who edited William Golding: The man and his books in 1986) eschews explication. His biography is not an essay in criticism; for the most part he contents himself with reporting the response of reviewers, most of whom were favourable, while often puzzled. That, as I recall, was my position when I reviewed Darkness Visible for The Scotsman. I thought there was something remarkable going on, but I couldn’t say exactly what it was. A. S. Byatt identified the mysterious Matty as “the incarnate Second Coming”, but also as the Egyptian God Horus, which suggests uncertainty on her part. She found the book “spattered with clues and signs, clotted with symbols and puns” – an observation, Carey says, that was “intended as praise, not blame”. But, whatever its difficulty, the book sold well, 15,000 copies in the first month in Britain, with another printing of 10,000; in the US, 45,000 copies were printed in the first year.
“It would be hard to think of two novels more unlike than Darkness Visible and Rites of Passage”, Carey writes, “but they were written in tandem”. Indeed, the name of a character sometimes slipped from one book to another in Golding’s drafts. This leads Carey to suggest that the two books are not quite as dissimilar as they appear: “For both novels are, though different in tone and period, about despised victims who are redeemed and justified”. The victim in Rites of Passage is the young clergyman Colley, who takes to his bed and apparently dies of shame after participating in a drunken homosexual incident on the lower deck. Some of Golding’s friends believed that he had homosexual tendencies himself, and after a dream in which he had dressed up in his mother’s clothes Golding wrote in his notebooks: “I pretend to be immune to such bent delights as homosexuality and transvestism, but my dreams won’t let me get away with standard attitudes about myself”. He dreamed of making love to two of his Oxford contemporaries and of being invited by a small Ethiopian boy “to bugger him”. He declined the invitation “with a gloomy sense that he has missed the only thing the place has to offer”. Such dreams represented his unconscious self, and he denied any “real life” homosexual experience. Carey, perhaps wisely, does not indulge in further speculation, though he notes that when Golding’s daughter published a novel, it was one in which the heroine’s father “reveals that he was in love with another man before meeting her mother”.
Rites of Passage won the Booker Prize of 1980, which many thought should have gone to Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. Burgess, who had announced that he would attend the Booker Prize dinner only if he had won, shared that opinion. He took his revenge in an apparently generous review of Golding’s 1984 novel The Paper Men (in which a famous novelist is pursued by a tiresome biographer). The dust jacket for the novel declared that the Nobel Prize had been “the final recognition of Golding’s genius” (“come; how about the OM?”, Burgess asked) and confirmation of his unique greatness. “It would seem to me”, Burgess wrote, inserting his stiletto, “that, with right British modesty, Golding has deliberately produced a post-award novel that gives the lie to the great claim. He is a humble man, and The Paper Men is a gesture of humility.”
In this biography, even the best novels receive little more attention than accounts of the many holidays taken by the Golding family. The book is as much about the man as the author, and the social self Golding presented was very different from the self who wrote the novels. This is of course true of most novelists, but evidently more so in Golding’s case than in many others’. His family and friends knew him as Bill. But Carey “would never have dreamed” of following suit, partly because he “respected him far too much”, partly because “the whole ‘Bill’ business seemed and still seems an element in the bluff, affable old sea-dog disguise which hid the real Golding”. At their first meeting he “could not believe that this was the man who had written the novels”.
Yet the man Carey presents to us was complicated enough. From a lower middle-class family with, in his own words, “proletarian roots”, his father a rationalist schoolteacher, Golding was acutely classconscious until well into middle life, resentment being fed by the contrast between his own Marlborough Grammar School and the neighbouring public school, Marlborough College. Yet the schoolboy Golding had certain advantages over the privileged pupils of Marlborough College, one of which was the availability of girls. Two in particular attracted him in his teens. One, a couple of years younger than himself, seemed sexually willing, but when on one occasion she resisted his advances, he attempted to rape her. It would have been what we now call “date-rape”, and it was a couple of years before she protested, volubly, in a pub. This, Golding later wrote, was “the logical, vicious end of a relationship that had begun in vice and prospered viciously”. The other girl, called Mollie, was gentle and chaste. For a time they were engaged, or there was at least an “understanding” between them. Then he ditched her when he met Ann Brookfield who became, and remained, his wife. Mollie subsequently suffered mental problems, for which Golding held himself to some extent responsible. Another cause of guilt.
Despite his comparatively humble background, Golding won a place at Brasenose College, Oxford, to study science. He did little work and wasn’t happy, feeling out of place, and eventually switched to English Literature. After Oxford, he drifted, tried his hand at acting, had a volume of poems published (old-fashioned Georgian verses), before training as a teacher. Carey thinks badly of the appointments board’s judgement that Golding was “a day school type”, but they were probably right. On the outbreak of war he joined the RNVR and married Ann. He had a good war, first as an ordinary seaman, then as an officer in command of a Landing Craft Tank (Rocket) on D-Day and later at Walcheren, a grisly experience, memories of which would haunt him all his life. Then it was back to teaching, music-making, chess-playing, putting on school plays, sailing, and writing, or trying to write, novels.
It sounds a pleasant life, but Golding was discontented, and would remain so until Lord of the Flies and its immediate successors set him free. One wonders how it would have continued if Charles Monteith had not picked up that yellowing typescript and seen there what other readers had been blind to. A private man, uneasy with people he didn’t know well, cagey and often unforthcoming in interviews, Golding nevertheless adapted to his new-found celebrity and wealth. He did stints of teaching at American universities, which he seems to have enjoyed, and which helped to make him known there, even though for some time his American publishers failed to push his books as enthusiastically as he and Faber thought they should. He became a member of London clubs (the Savile, the Athenaeum and the Garrick), and lectured widely, heading eagerly overseas at the drop of the British Council’s hat. Rather to one’s surprise, he lobbied energetically to get his knighthood. Within twenty years of his first novel being published, he was earning enough to resent having to pay so much tax, and went so far as to investigate the possibility of using tax havens, while asking that some overseas royalties be held over to be collected on foreign trips. This doesn’t appear to have offended his wife, whose social democratic principles remained strong enough for her to refuse to visit Greece during the regime of the Colonels. (Carey describes Ann’s family and friends as “staunchly left-wing”. Would he, I wonder, apply that adverb to anyone holding right-wing views?) But success did not resolve tensions, and may even have exacerbated them. Golding was a heavy drinker, and, though stopping short of alcoholism (probably), he sometimes became incapably drunk at inappropriate moments, on one occasion emptying a Paris hotel mini-bar before a dinner at the Paris Book Fair. Sobered up with black coffee, he then asked the South African anti-apartheid poet and novelist Breyten Breytenbach, “What makes you think you can write a novel just because you have been in solitary confinement?” “I am entirely disgusted with myself”, he wrote in his journal.
Golding was uncomfortably conscious of his capacity for evil, or at least for entertaining evil thoughts. “I have always understood the Nazis”, he said, “because I am of that sort by nature”; it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that Lord of the Flies was written; Darkness Visible and Free Fall also. His war experiences brought about “a sort of religious convulsion which is not uncommon among people of a passionate and morbid habit”. The war let him see the “viciousness” and “cruelty” of his own youth, something not apparent to most who knew him, even though, in drink, he was sometimes a conversational bully.
Carey treats him with sympathy and intelligence, eschewing any attempt at amateur psychoanalysis of this complicated man and writer. One might wish that he had applied his own critical skills more often to the novels, especially the more puzzling ones, rather than being content to report the opinions of others, but this is an admirable and continuously interesting literary biography. It is scrupulously done, though it is odd to find Carey reporting a colleague of Golding’s at the Rudolf Steiner School where they taught in 1935 praising C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, the first of which was not published till 1950.

John Carey
WILLIAM GOLDING
The man who wrote “Lord of the Flies”
573pp. Faber. £25.
978 0 571 23163 8

Allan Massie’s most recent books include The Thistle and the Rose: Six centuries of love and hate between Scots and English, 2005, and Charlemagne and Roland, which appeared in 2007.

Charles Monteith on Golding

The typescript was unenticing. Bound between two pieces of cardboard, the sheets had a dog-eared, shop-soiled, down-at-heel look. The edges of the first dozen or so were yellowish, evidence that they, and they alone, had been read a number of times; the remainder were whiter but not pristine. Though I had been a publisher for less than a month, I could already spot a manuscript that had been the rounds and this was an obvious example. A short submission letter, written from Salisbury, was attached: “I send you the typescript of my novel Strangers from Within which might be defined as an allegorical interpretation of a stock situation. I hope you will feel able to publish it.” It was signed “William Golding”.
A Tuesday afternoon in late September 1953. As usually happened on Tuesday afternoons, three or four editors were weeding out the week’s haul of manuscripts in preparation for Wednesday’s weekly editorial committee, appropriately, if somewhat quaintly, called the Book Committee, at which decisions were made. Strangers from Within was in the pile pushed in my direction. Our professional reader — she read for a number of other publishers as well as Faber and also for a leading literary agency — had already given it one of her “quick looks” and her verdict was in green ink at the top of the author’s letter: “Time: The Future. Absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atomic bomb on the colonies and a group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish and dull. Pointless.” This was followed by a capital R enclosed in a circle, the symbol for “reject”.
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I opened it expecting nothing and after the first dozen or so pages was inclined, like so many readers before me, to abandon it at that point. They described a nuclear war. Remembering them now, more than thirty years later, my impression is that they were powerful, if occasionally overwritten, and that they contained, initially, no characters at all. Later the focus shifted earthwards and to a hurriedly organized evacuation of schoolchildren destined presumably, for the Antipodes. The planes in which they flew had detachable cabins, “passenger tubes”, which could be released by the pilot in toto to float to earth beneath giant parachutes. The focus altered once again to one particular plane, to a fierce air battle over the Pacific, to the release of the “passenger tube”, to the island and, at last, to some human beings. They were all boys.
As I read on I found that, reluctantly, I was becoming not merely interested but totally gripped. The island was vividly, brilliantly real and the boys were real boys: despite his half promise, Ralph’s betrayal of the secret of Piggy’s nickname; the appalling sycophantic laughter of the crowd; Jack’s authority over his choir. A fat, spectacled boy at school myself, I squirmed for Piggy. I said that I would take the manuscript home to read properly and when I had finished it I found it unforgettable. Indeed, to anticipate a little, as I read and reread it over the next month or two, thought about it, discussed it with colleagues and with the author, it came to dominate my imagination completely. I found that, increasingly, I kept talking about it until friends began to hint that I was becoming a Golding bore.
But I realized that the novel had flaws which seriously weakened it and might, for some readers, make it a partial or total failure. Some were superficial — commas which studded the pages as thickly as currants in a fruit loaf, Piggy’s “common” speech — his “ass-mar”, “them fruit” — laid on with too heavy a hand; but these could easily be put right. Two others were more serious.
The first was structural. In addition to the long description of atomic war at the beginning, there were two further occasions on which the scene shifted from the island to what was happening in the world outside: an “interlude” occurring about half-way through and describing an air battle many miles above the island which culminated in the body of the dead airman, the “Beast from Air”, drifting down by parachute; and, at the very end, an outline of the lethal manoeuvres in which the “trim cruiser”, the whole fleet of which it formed part and the enemy fleet opposing it, were engaged — rather too clearly placed there, I thought, to show that what had happened on the island was a fable, reflecting in miniature what was happening in the adult world. These passages needed severe pruning.
The second flaw, more fundamental and much more difficult, was Simon. Simon was Christ; or, too obviously, a Christ figure. At times he would retire to a secret place in the jungle hidden behind a mat of creepers, where a Voice spoke to him from the green candle-buds as they opened in the scented dusk to reveal their white flowers; a vision assured him with prophetic certainty, and he assured Ralph, at a moment of appalling doubt, that Ralph would get home safely; when the boys’ fragile society began to fall apart and Jack and his blood-smeared hunters began their murderous dances, Simon led the boys, or some of them, on Good Dances on the beach. Alone and terrified he confronted and was not vanquished by the Lord of the Flies — a literal translation of Beelzebub, as Golding later told me. Simon alone, despite his weakness, the threat of epilepsy, taunts that he was “batty”, seemed untainted by an otherwise universal stain. In the end he was murdered.
To put it crudely and insensitively, Simon was not to me, and would not be, I suspected, to most readers, wholly credible. I do not, in fact, think that I fully understood the problem at the time and it is only in the light of Golding’s other novels and later discussions with him that I see it more clearly now. Simon is not only a boy, a fully and totally human boy; he is one of those rare people who are in fact — it is impossible to avoid these imprecise and difficult words — “numinous” or “charismatic”. Nathaniel in Pincher Martin and, most clearly of all, Matty in Darkness Visible are later variations on the same mysterious theme. But Simon, as he first appeared, was not entirely successful. For the reader — or at any rate for me — the suspension of disbelief was a very unwilling one and the only idea I had was that any purely miraculous events in the narrative must be made ambivalent, eliminated or “toned down” in such a way as to make him explicable in purely rational terms. At the same time his importance, indeed his centrality, must be preserved.
At the next Book Committee I reported that the novel was odd, imperfect but potentially very powerful and that I would like to discuss it with the author. There was general doubt, not unnaturally in view of the description I had given of it and the reservations I had expressed; and it was decided that it should have several more readings before any contact was made. Two editorial colleagues agreed with my verdict; Geoffrey Faber took it and was also prepared, though with doubts, to support me. The final hurdle was the Sales Director, who, like our reader, was regarded as a real professional who could tell by instinct whether or not a book would sell. He kept it for a week or two but eventually brought it to a Book Commitee meeting where we all waited for his verdict, which he gave — he was a kind-hearted man — with a ruefully apologetic glance at me. The book, he said, was unpublishable. This led to a heated discussion at the end of which it was decided — this was chiefly due to Geoffrey, who was unwilling to dampen too abruptly a young editor’s enthusiasm — that I could meet the author and discuss the changes I thought would improve the book, but that I must make it clear that the firm was in no way committed to publishing it.
Golding and I first met in early December. I was nervous and so, I suspect, was he: he was the first of “my” authors. In advance I had speculated a good deal about him and had decided that he was almost certainly a young, or youngish, clergyman, for the more I thought about the novel the more its theological substructure became apparent. Brought up a Presbyterian as I had been, with parts of the Shorter Catechism immovably embedded in my mind, I could recognize Original Sin when I saw it: “the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of original righteousness and the corruption of man’s whole nature, together with all the actual transgressions which proceed from it”.
So the neatly trimmed beard — clerical beards were not so common then as they are now — the grey flannel trousers and tweed jacket surprised me; but when Golding told me he was a schoolmaster I realized that I had been stupid. Only a schoolmaster would know so intimately, and with such precision of detail, how awful boys could be. We talked at length and at the end I felt that a cautious trust and even liking had established themselves between us. I made my suggestions, rather nervously, and Golding, to my relief, promised to take the typescript back with him and, in the light of a rereading, consider them.
About ten days later he sent me some bits of the emended version of my novel — the beginning, the middle and the end. I’ve done away with the separate bits, Prologue, Interlude, Epilogue, and as you’ll see, merged them into the body of the text. Furthermore, Chapter One now begins with the meeting of Piggy and Ralph and I’m allowing the story of how they got there — or all that is necessary of it — to come out in conversation. Simon is the next job, and a more difficult one. I suppose you agree that I must convey a theophany of some sort or else he won’t be as big a figure as he ought. I’m going to cut down the elaborate description of it, though, and try to get the same effect by reticence. Then I’m distributing odd bits and pieces of “Simonry” throughout the text, to build him up .... I’m making Piggy’s speech ungrammatical but not misspelling it.... Rereading the novel as a stranger to it, I’m bound to agree with almost all your criticism and am full of enthusiasm and energy for the cleaning up process. In fact I’m right back on the island.
The changes were even better than I had hoped for. All that I had suggested was a drastic shortening of the “nuclear war” passages, but Golding’s solution was more radical and totally successful. They had disappeared completely and the novel’s new opening could not have been bettered. In my reply I congratulated him and suggested a few other, fairly superficial changes which he accepted a few days later in a letter with which he enclosed the redrafted “Simon” passages. It is clear from my reply - which rereads, I fear, rather pompously — that I was still not completely satisfied.
Here are the “Simon” bits back again, with my tentative emendations pencilled in. I think you have hit on the right approach to this most tricky of all the problems in the novel; and my emendations are again simply “toning down” of emphasis. I think the danger to be guarded against now is turning Simon into a prig, a self-righteous infant who insists on saying his prayers in the dorm while the naughty boys throw pillows at him. In the early stages I feel it is enough simply to indicate that he is in some way odd, different, withdrawn; and therefore capable of the lonely, rarified courage of facing the pig’s head and climbing the mountain top. The allegory, the theophany, is the imaginative foundation and like all foundations is there to be concealed and built on.
Before long, Golding returned the typescript in what was to be, by and large, its final form. He had been ill, running a very high temperature which was partly due to tonsillitis and partly to “the effort of patching —- so much more wearing than bashing straight ahead at a story”. With this version I was, by and large, satisfied, though I thought a few small changes might be made with advantage; and when I reported all this to the Book Committee it was decided, at long last, to accept the book for publication. I suggested we offer Golding what was then our usual advance for a first novel, £50, but in view of the author’s patience Geoffrey Faber made it £60. And so it was settled.
The next problem was the title. In our earliest exchange of letters I had said that Strangers from Within didn’t seem to me right —- both too abstract and too explicit — and Golding did not demur. Indeed, he began at once to suggest alternatives, “A Cry of Children”, “Nightmare Island”, “To Find an Island”. Both I and my editorial colleagues offered suggestions — my own favourite hunting-ground was The Tempest, which is set on an island — but it was Alan Pringle, an editor rightly reputed to be good at titles, who eventually thought of Lord of the Flies. It has turned out to be probably the most memorable title given to any book since the end of the Second World War. Chapter titles were the next problem. Our Production and Design department was adamant that a decent-looking novel must have chapter titles to be used as running heads; and Golding, though he said his instinct was slightly against them, accepted without further protest a list of suggestions I sent him.
The book went into “page on galley” proofs, which looked like galleys but were half the length and it was only then that I carried out a final editorial operation — cutting Ralph’s hair. In the desperate chase at the end, when Ralph is being hunted down by Jack and his pack, his long, unshorn locks keep falling blindingly over his eyes, symbolizing effectively, but perhaps too heavily, the descent of irrationality, instinct, panic, over reason and intelligence. Golding was as patient as ever: “By all means cut Ralph’s hair for him. I had some doubts of it myself.” So I simply took out every other reference to it. The Production department completed its work and Sales took over.
Before publication we made various efforts to whip up some advance publicity but with only modest success. John O’London’s Weekly, that forgotten literary periodical, was to make it “Novel of the Month” but ceased publication a week before the accolade was to be conferred; a committee set up by the first Cheltenham Festival did not even short-list it for their First Novel award — nor did it have any better luck with the Authors’ Club’s annual Silver Quill. The Book Society, then a very powerful body, promised a reference to it, though no more, in their monthly magazine. On September 17, 1954, Lord of the Flies was at last published, by a curious coincidence exactly a year after it was first submitted. Its early reception by reviewers was usually good, and even, on occasions, enthusiastic. E. M. Forster and C. S. Lewis both praised it. Eliot, who had not read it before, was told by a friend at the Garrick that Faber had published an unpleasant novel about small boys behaving unspeakably on a desert island. In some mild alarm, he took a copy home and told me next day that he had found it not only a splendid novel but morally and theologically impeccable. The book began not only to be talked about but to sell and before very long we had to order a reprint. In the United States, where we had great difficulty in placing it, it made little impression at first, but after a year or two, a paperback edition began to spread like forest fire through university campuses, at first on the West Coast and then in the rest of the country. Personally, I was first alerted to what was happening when an article on Golding appeared in the Hudson Review. And finally the book began to be “set” at university level, at A Level, finally at O Level, in Great Britain and then at equivalent levels abroad. By now there are translations of it into twenty-six languages, including Russian, Thai, Japanese, Slovak, Serbo-Croat, Catalan, Icelandic and Persian; and versions in Indonesian and Malayalam are in preparation. Sales of Faber editions alone total over three million copies, but there is no record, so far as I know, of total sales throughout the world. They must be astronomical.
In December 1983 Golding invited me to accompany him and his wife to Stockholm for the Nobel ceremonies; and on the evening of the presentation there was a great ball at which the laureates and their entourages were presented to the King and Queen. Carl XVI Gustav — a spectacled, serious-looking young man — shook Golding’s hand warmly. “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding,” he said. “I had to do Lord of the Flies at school.”
Copyright Charles Monteith, 1986.
This article formed a chapter in William Golding, the Man and his Books: A tribute on his 75th birthday, edited by John Carey, published by Faber, 1986.

September 23, 2009

Eric Marrian

Fantastic collection by Eric Marrian. There is more to come.

September 22, 2009

Listening to: Dean Reed

Сегодня - день рождения очень странного человека. Ему сегодня было бы 71, но он покончил жизнь самоубийством, не дождавшись падения Берлинской стены. Он был киноактером, певцом и черт знает кем еще, но для всех нас он был прежде всего черт знает кем еще :)
Этот альбом был выпущен в 1966 году.

Из Википедии:

Дин Рид родился 22 сентября (1938 г.) и вырос в Лейквуде, штат Колорадо.
В 1958 году он приехал в Калифорнию и подписал контракт с музыкальной студией Capitol Records. Студия обеспечила ему рекламу, он стал певцом, записал несколько пластинок, появлялся на национальном телевидении и получил определённую известность. Однако истинную популярность его песни нашли в Южной Америке, где его слава превзошла Элвиса Пресли. После нескольких очень успешных гастролей по странам Латинской Америки он решил остаться в Аргентине. Там он записывал альбомы, снимался в фильмах и вёл свою собственную телевизионную программу.
Но его левые взгляды и политическая активность (в частности, Рид выступал за запрещение ядерного оружия, против войны во Вьетнаме, устраивал концерты, весь сбор от которых шёл заключённым в тюрьмах) не нравились правым силам Аргентины, и под их давлением (дело доходило даже до обстрела дома, где жил певец) в 1966 году Дин Рид был вынужден выехать из страны. Несколько лет он прожил в Риме, где активно снимался в т. н. «спагетти-вестернах» — «ковбойских» фильмах об американском Диком Западе итальянского производства. Позже стал сниматься и в СССР и странах Восточной Европы, где также пользовался большой популярностью (впервые приехал в СССР в 1965 году). Одновременно он участвовал и в общественно-политической жизни: выступал против участия США в войне во Вьетнаме, за что был арестован на одной из демонстраций в Риме; помогал в выборах (социалистического) президента Альенде в Чили в 1970 г.
С 1973 года Дин Рид поселился в ГДР, где продолжал петь, сниматься в фильмах, а также снимал собственные фильмы, не оставляя и политической борьбы в согласии со своими убеждениями. Наиболее известным его фильмом стал «Певец» — биографический фильм о чилийском друге Дина Рида — певце Викторе Хара, который был убит пиночетовцами после военного переворота в Чили в 1973 г.
Несмотря на свои левые убеждения (сам Рид называл себя «марксистом»), Дин Рид никогда не вступал в коммунистическую партию (в том числе в стране своего постоянного проживания — социалистической ГДР) — и всегда подчёркивал свою любовь к США.
В 1986 году певец был найден мёртвым в озере недалеко от своего дома в (восточном) Берлине. Официально было объявлено, что он утонул. Немецкие друзья Рида считали это самоубийством. Семья певца полагает, что его убили.
После рассекречивания архивов восточно-германской службы безопасности — Штази — версия о самоубийстве получила еще одно подтверждение, когда среди документов было обнаружено прощальное письмо Дина Рида, которое он написал перед смертью.
В начале 2000-х годов американский актер Том Хэнкс собирался снять художественный фильм о нём под названием «Товарищ рок-звезда», где хотел исполнить главную роль, но информация о ходе съемок скудна.

September 21, 2009

Просмотрено: Любить 1968

Светлана Светличная

Алиса Фрейндлих

простой набор новелл, соединенный одним вопросом: "Что такое любить?". Между новеллами - документальные снимки с улиц Москвы и Ленинграда, а также краткие интервью с различными людьми. Состав - звёздный... Миронов, Вертинская, Светличная, Фрейндлих...

September 20, 2009

Just Seen: Tenderness (2009)

A mesmerizing portrait of a psychotic killer and an escapist teenage girl.

September 19, 2009

Just Seen: FAQ on Time Travel

very funny and clever...

September 18, 2009

Просмотрено: Два Голоса

Алиса Фрейндлих и Никита Михалков в последней части фильма "Два Голоса" - триптих рассказов о любви. Остальные части - смотреть просто невозможно....

September 17, 2009

Just Seen: Julia

Fantastic! a must see...

September 16, 2009

Listening to: Eliza Lacerda

September 15, 2009

Listening to: Eva Cortes

September 14, 2009

NYT: Air, Showers etc in NYC

Bathing, but Not Alone

There are some things it is better just not to think about. Like the 10,000 bacteria you inhale with each breath in the average office building. Or the 10 million bacteria in each glass of tap water. Microbiologists have now added something else to the list of things too gross to contemplate: the deluge of bacteria that hit your face and flow deep into your lungs in the morning shower.
Showers in New York carry a particularly high dose of a microbe related to tuberculosis called Mycobacterium avium. The bacterium and its close cousins can cause a variety of exotic chest complaints, including lifeguard’s lung, hot tub lung and Lady Windermere’s syndrome.
read more
This unwelcome peek behind the shower curtain has been provided by a group of microbiologists headed by Norman R. Pace of the University of Colorado. As part of a project to measure microbes in the indoor human environment, they looked at shower water, in part because in showers bacteria are incorporated into fine droplets that can be breathed deep into the lungs.
Conventional tests depend on growing cultures of the bacteria to be identified, but because most species cannot be grown in the laboratory, a majority of bacterial species are missed. Dr. Pace’s method examines the genetic material directly, without the need for culturing bacteria.
He has turned up more than 15 kinds of bacteria in showers across the country, from Tennessee to Illinois, Denver and New York City, he reports this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Aside from the thought of being sprayed in the face by a bacterial cocktail every morning, the shower bacteria present no serious danger, with the possible exception of the M. avium. Dr. Pace said this microbe could be a risk to people whose immune system was compromised.
The bacteria get into shower heads from the water and build up there, so the dose is highest when the shower is first turned on. Running the water for 30 seconds before stepping in would mean fewer bacteria in one’s face, Dr. Pace observed. Also, the bacteria seem to find metal shower heads a less hospitable niche than plastic ones.
M. avium tends to be a particular problem in municipal water supplies, Dr. Pace said. The reason is that cities treat their water with chlorine, a poison that kills most bacteria but gives avium a selective advantage.
Dr. Pace’s news for New Yorkers is not all bad. He has also been testing the air in the city’s subways. Apart from a lot of aerosolized iron particles, presumably ground off the track by the wheels, the subway air is remarkably fresh and like outdoor air. The reason is that the movement of the trains pumps fresh outdoor air into the tunnels.
Another paradox of city life: it seems it is healthier to inhale the subway’s air than the shower’s mist.
Dr. Pace explained that his shower and subway projects arose from a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which was interested in how to detect microbes that might be used in a bioterrorist attack.
The foundation’s officers decided that it was first necessary to understand the natural microbial background in people’s houses and public places. They commissioned Dr. Pace, a distinguished microbiologist, to determine what these background levels might be.
Dr. Pace said he was still taking showers, which he deemed no more dangerous than getting out of bed in the morning. “The yuck factor isn’t nearly as great as people may think it is,” he said.
But after the findings about showers, he did throw away his scummy plastic shower head and got a metal one instead.

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