The Homo and the Negro

by James J O'Meara

Ah yes, love that “imperceptibly”; it’s there, but you can’t see it until the critic comes along. Double points!

  McCrea’s still got something on the ball, though; in his own PC way, he does manage to notice many of the points we and Wilson have been hammering away on. Holmes’ stories manage to insinuate the plight of women under patriarchy, the toiling of the oppressed workers, the ruthless exploitation of the colored masses, etc., because Holmes exercises the superhuman powers of the Chakravartin:

  Holmes sees almost everything and he understands everything he sees, often immediately. Holmes’ work . . . reveal[s] the connections that remain otherwise hidden, or unspeakable. Holmes is an appealing figure in an overcrowded world and a bewildering global economic system because reveals unseen or disavowed connections. Holmes reveals new, unexpected connections and conjunctions generated from the new circumstances of metropolitan living.

  McCrea, of course, does not attribute this to any mystical, superhuman achievements. Rather, he brings it back to another of our themes; Holmes’ method of deduction depends on the same patient, exhaustive, perhaps neurotic and suffocating, accumulation of details that we have identified as the literary method of weird fiction. In “The Red-Headed League,”

  Holmes sees something invisible to the police, to the characters who are victims of the scam, and, of course to the eternally astonished Watson:—namely, that “the line of fine shops and stately business premises . . . really abutted on the other side upon the faded and stagnant square.” The fact that the two neighborhoods are physically next to each other is invisible to Watson because socially and imaginatively they are so far apart.261

  Like Poe, Lovecraft, and other writers of weird fiction (as well as such Traditionalists as Guénon and Evola),

  Strangeness is hidden somewhere within ordinary life. For the mystery to be solved or the criminal identified, commonplace doings and commonplace people, not usually worthy of enquiry, must be scrutinized.262 Holmes is able to see or make these connections due to his social isolation. He is not of the world he investigates. The only ones who see the world the way Holmes does are the criminals and family outsiders.

  McCrea also agrees with Wilson in seeing Holmes as a fin de siècle figure, a withdrawn dandy, but fails to notice any development of the sort Wilson descries. Instead, he takes the idea in a different and equally intriguing direction: “Holmes is a bohemian bachelor who abhors family life.”

  Yet Holmes himself is a confirmed bachelor who lives, on and off, with a male companion. Watson, just as he intermediates between Holmes and the reader, is never fully part of either realm, the bohemian bachelor life he shares with Holmes or the heterosexual family world which he ostensibly joins when he marries. . . . Watson shuttles anxiously back and forth between them, supposedly living at home with Mary, but moving back to Baker Street whenever there is a crime to solve. . . . From the point of view of the reader, he is married to Holmes. What seems to engrave itself more than anything else on our reading memories is the domestic life of 221b Baker Street. Holmes and Watson sitting in their rooms, reading the newspapers, discussing Mrs. Hudson’s cooking, or waiting for the door bell to ring and a stranger to arrive with a new mystery to solve.

  Refreshingly, McCrea dismisses any concern over the question “Is Holmes gay?” one way or another. Instead, he picks a different thread to unravel:

  What we can say for sure is that Holmes stands emblematically outside of the economy of marriage and reproduction.

  Holmes is most often called in to help where the family is failing or under threat.

  Here we see Holmes and Watson taking on the role we’ve called attention to before: the Männerbund, the “band apart,” outside of but not hostile to the family unit; indeed, by its very isolation, able to come to its defense in desperate times.263

  This cultural role parallels the (paradoxical, to some) biological role of homosexuality in enabling large groups of mammals to survive, by allowing some members to be always available for defense, food gathering, etc.264

  221b Baker Street is inhabited by a “couple” whose partnership cannot bear biological fruit, a household which will not leave a genetic legacy. By the same token, Holmes’s professional eye is resolutely turned away from thoughts of the future. . . . Where we find clarity and solace is not in the comfort of family life, the marriage and fertility that offers comfort in so many other kinds of narrative, but in the unconventional homestead of 221b Baker Street, a queer source of order from which the strangeness of the world, and how it came to be as it is, is visible with a unique kind of clarity.265

  This raises another, subtle point (though I doubt McCrean notices). The homosexual is often the homophobic Right’s favorite straw man for “those with no concern for future generations.”266 And yet isn’t the Right—the non-libertarian, at least—concerned above all with the past, and the preservation thereof? In a word, archeofuturism?

  The gaze of the stories is fixed firmly on the past, on how things turned out as they did, not on what they will or might become. The mysteries, even when solved, leave us with a sense that underneath ordinary daily life there might always lie something old and dark and violent that will return in an unpredictable form.

  McCrea also make an important point about the use of Watson, which returns us to our them of wish-fulfillment:

  There is something in the stories’ form as opposed to content, that has nothing to do with historical context but which draws us in wholly and inexplicably. . . . Watson is our way into the stories. . . . because his blindness and puzzlement in the face of these facts mirror our own experience of reading the story. The sense that Watson incarnates of missing the big picture, of not “getting” how everything really fits together, is part of our experience of life itself.

  It is one of the sources of fellowship between ourselves and Watson that we never master Holmes’ skill, and it is part of the stories’ compulsive hold on our attention that we keep feeling we might.

  This is an essential component to the wish-fulfilment aspect that Wilson emphasized. Kingsley Amis made the same point in his invaluable study of the Bond phenomenon: Bond, like all wish-fulfilment figures, must be enough like us to plausibly suggest that, “I could do that if given half the chance.”267 He’s a good shot, not the best in the Service; he needs to train, to read up on card tricks, etc. He’s Batman, not Superman.

  Unlike Batman, of course, he’s not a vigilante (except, notably, when pursuing Blofeld), but, as Amis emphasizes, a loyal, old-fashioned King and Empire Brit, a mere “civil servant,” and certainly not a grubby little spy. This makes him even more like Green Lantern, as opposed to both Bats and Supe, as I noted in the title essay of Green Nazis.268

  In tune with the times, Bond, unlike Holmes, is presented as a relentless womanizer, and even (in the books) make occasional homophobic observations, usually in the context of bemoaning feminism and other aspects of modernity.

  Thus, in the novel Goldfinger, Bond muses that Tilly Masterson is:

  One of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and ‘‘sex equality.’’ As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. . . . He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.”

  Sounds like something right out of today’s man-o-sphere. 269 Bond is really rather a crusty old reactionary—part of his “Queen and country” mentality that explains his perverse championing of the British, who haven’t mattered since the days of Bulldog Drummond.270

  Amis, however, is at pains to point out, in that carefully cataloging way of his, that Bond seldom beds more than one or two ladies per book, a rather modest count, well within the “I could do that” mode of successful wish fulfilment.271

  More importantly, Don Juanism is easily
seen as a cover for latent homosexuality; Bond’s marriage is quickly erased by Blofeld,272 who then replaces Tracy as the object of Bond’s obsessions. Once Blofeld too is dispatched, the energy of the series—perhaps also due to Fleming’s physical decline—drops off dramatically, and it really just peters out.

  Amis is correct to suggest that both M and the various super-villains function as surrogate fathers for Bond, who is intimidated by their worldly sophistication and punished for his transgressions and inadequacies; M and the villains both do so with snide comments and other displays of superiority, the villains ultimately inflicting corporal punishment as well.

  All this is echoed in the recent (supposed) Internet surge to have Gillian Anderson take over the role of Bond. Although popular with a certain generation of post-humanist nerds,273 a number of problems seem obvious.

  First, the whole “Jane Bond” idea has already been exploited by the porn industry.274

  More importantly, a female Bond completely ruins the ratio of detailed realism vs. wish fulfillment; as New Rightists frequently point out, real world women just can’t do that stuff, and it’s even dangerous—to them—to pretend otherwise.275

  As Tim Stanley insists:

  Here’s what I’m not saying: that women can’t play men’s parts. They can, they have and it can be illuminating. The problem is that the switch is almost always highly self-conscious—it’s done to make an artistic point.

  When a woman plays Hamlet, the audience is in on the conceit and feminising the role adds new depths to it. When Cate Blanchett played Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There it was to make the point that Dylan’s constant search for meaning, and his ready identity with outlaws, meant that he could just as easily be played a woman as by Marcus Carl Franklin, a black adolescent, or Richard Gere, an ageing Billy the Kid.

  By contrast, the desire to see a woman play Bond is purely so that a woman can play Bond—and with the absurd proviso that we’d all have to act like we hadn’t noticed. The idea is both dumb and dishonest.

  Sure, make a film about an ass-kicking female spy who beds everyone she meets and drives a Lotus underwater. But don’t call her Bond.276

  The Bond world as a whole, then, is a Männerbund,277 or rather, a sort of world-wide public school in which Bond is trained for membership. The dynamic is all two-way, Bond/M or Bond/Villain, with the villain trying to win Bond over to “the dark side” like Emperor Palpatine.278 The famous “Bond Girl” can at most take the place of Watson, with generally unsatisfactory results.279

  I suspect that the lack of a Watson figure accounts for the relatively lower level of personal obsession with Bond, whatever his world-wide fame;280 for all his solitude and singularity, Holmes needs a Watson, not a Bond Girl, for the reader’s interest to crystalize around. But as always, your mileage may differ:

  I’ve learned a whole lot about life from James Bond, and I will continue to defend Bond and continue seeing these films from now till my dying breath . . . unless they make Bond black.281

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right

  June 6, 2016

  HUMPHREY BOGART:

  MAN AMONG THE COCKROACHES

  “Bogart was a medium-sized man,” said John Huston. “Not particularly impressive off-screen.” Put him on camera, however, and “those lights and shadows organized themselves into another nobler personality, heroic.”

  Recently Andrew Hamilton wrote about “The Courage of Jodi Foster” at Counter-Currents/North American New Right,282 the courage in question being her outspoken standing by, if not exactly “supporting,” the always controversial Mel Gibson.

  Looking at Ms. Foster, as many of us like to do anyway, and meditating on her life and work, one word comes to mind: Aryan.

  What also comes to mind is Stefan Kanfer’s new book, Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart,283 where the subject’s “outstanding characteristics—integrity, stoicism, a sexual charisma accompanied by a cool indifference to [the opposite sex]” are not only “never out of style when he’s on-screen” but applicable to Ms. Foster as well.

  I don’t mean to sound like I’m pushing Ms. Foster as the new Bogart—although she probably wouldn’t mind—but the task Mr. Kanfer sets himself is to not merely provide another Bogart bio. You could say he wants to explain why adding another bio is unnecessary; for Bogart, even over fifty years after his death (from cigarette-induced esophageal cancer, which today would be the ironic death of a Mad Men character) is as well-known, as popular with movie-goers, as quoted, as imitated (a point we will return to), and as influential on filmmakers and actors as he was at the height of his Hollywood career.

  How, then, did this not particularly handsome or multi-talented guy, born in 1899 (!) manage to make such a mark that the American Film Academy named him the Greatest Hollywood Legend?

  Hamilton has already suggested the answer:

  Foster is a member of that curious set of Hollywood figures who come from privileged backgrounds: John Lodge, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Otto Kruger, director Robert Aldrich. She attended a French-language prep school, the Lycée Français de Los Angeles, and since her teens has frequently lived and worked in France.

  For “privileged” read: upper class WASP; in Foster’s case, descendants of Mayflower passengers; for Bogart, a society doctor and a famed illustrator. He attended, but was expelled from, Phillips Andover; and while he may never have dubbed his own films like Foster, I heard he’s really big in France anyway.

  Kanfer says he needs to examine not only the social context Bogart emerged from, but also “the changing image of masculinity in the movies”—at which point I, and perhaps you, usually cringe. But fear not, there’s no “queer theorizing” or anything particularly feminist here. What emerges, perhaps unconsciously, is a portrait of the actor as the embodiment of Aryan Virtue.

  For all his rebellions against [his parents], for all his drunken sprees and surly postures, Humphrey could not escape the central fact of his life. He was the son of straitlaced parents whose roots were in another time. Their customs and attitudes may have become outmoded, but they were deeply ingrained in their son. . . . They showed in his upright carriage and in his careful manner of speaking, in his courtesy to women and frank dealing with men. He came to recognize that he gave “the impression of being a Nineteenth Century guy,” no matter how hard he tried to be au courant. But it worked in his favor. (p. 20)

  It helped first of all because the theatrical fashion at the time was for indolent playboys, but although looking the part, Bogart was actually not very good playing it; as we shall see, it was miscasting that made his career. (Near the end of his career he made another, failed stab at playing a Long Island playboy-industrialist in Sabrina.) It played a more important role behind the scenes; Bogart learned early that “there were only two kinds of actors, professionals and bums” (pp. 19–20), and he had resolved never to be a bum.

  Directors liked how dependable Bogart was, always showing up on time and knowing his lines, and saving the drinking, though heavy, for after hours. (His frustration on Sabrina showed when he insisted on leaving the set each day at the contractual 6 p.m., no matter what, after an assistant handed him his highball.) Actresses liked to work with him because there was no funny business, and actors trusted him not to upstage them. Once he got a leg up in the movie business, he remembered his friends, and lent a helping hand to Peter Lorre, Fatty Arbuckle, Gene Tierney, and Joan Bennett.

  During the run of Petrified Forest Bogart “made a special point of being courtly offstage, in direct contrast to [his character’s] snarling persona.”

  It was now apparent to all . . . that he was truly old school. He never believed in totally immersing himself in a character; there was no fusing of the performer and the part that was to mark film and stage acting in the decades to come. (p. 39)

  One recalls Noël Coward’s similar dismissal of “The Method School,” describing his method as finding t
he emotion in oneself, learning how to imitate it on stage, and then dismissing it.

  Once he got to Hollywood, Bogart’s career got many unexpected boosts from his “old school” professionalism. His very debut, reprising the Broadway role of Duke Mantee for the film, came about when Edward G. Robinson got a swell head after Little Caesar and began demanding more money and deference. Though he was the obvious choice, Jack Warner decided to teach him a lesson and gave Bogart a call. Robinson would get his revenge by killing him in numerous films, until Bogart finally got the drop on him in Key Largo.

  Later, George Raft made the same mistake, began believing his own press, and Warner again turned to the unassuming professional, Bogart, for High Sierra, one of the last great noirs.

  Meanwhile, Bogart was driving a battered Chevy, wearing old suits, and telling reporters he wouldn’t make the rookie mistake of “blow[ing] themselves on Cadillacs and big houses.” Bogart put every cent in his FU fund (p. 45).

  His genetic endowment didn’t just shape his attitudes; even his appearance was a plus:

  Bogart was something new onscreen. . . . The appeal of [Robinson, Muni, and Cagney] was ethnic [each was half or wholly Judaic]. . . . In contrast to those stars, Humphrey was a WASP. . . . He represented the notorious malefactors from the heart of the heart of the country . . . all of whom had been dramatically and savagely hunted down and killed in 1934. . . . Duke Mantee seemed a guarded and intense man who lived outside the law, yet had a speck of nobility buried deep within. (p. 43)