A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  As he dandled me on his knee, my father used to tell me the story of how he and some trusty comrades sabotaged King George V’s jubilee back in the 1930s. They ascertained that the route of the procession ran down Fleet Street. Three days before the parade they dressed as workmen and told newspaper offices on both sides of the street that they were city employees stringing up banners. They slung one across the street with “God Bless Our King” written on it.

  On the day of the actual parade, they returned and found the crowd so great they could scarcely get near the string they had run down from the banner and around the corner into an alley. Eventually a partner in crime got on my father’s shoulders and pulled the string. The banner fell open, to reveal the words, “Twenty-five years of hunger, misery, and war.” They heard a gasp and great bay of rage from the crowd on Fleet Street, and took to their heels.

  When they saw the newsreels, everything had gone even better than they had dreamed. The news cameras were right behind the King’s coach and caught the banner perfectly as it fell open. I saw it myself about a decade ago, and it was odd to see the jerky horses in the old footage, and the commotion, and remember Claud’s role. Down the years it’s been easy to forget—until the Diana insanity—how reverent the British were about royalty not so long ago.

  In the 1950s, my family was very friendly with the late Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote a piece about the royal family for an American magazine. I think it might have been the old Saturday Evening Post, or perhaps Look. By today’s standards Mug’s piece was tame to the point of invisibility. He wrote things like, “Even her friends say Queen Elizabeth can be dowdy and a frump.” But the roof fell in. At the time Muggeridge had a big job at the BBC. He was promptly dropped. People traveled great distances to daub horseshit on his country house in Robertsbridge, Sussex. His son John had just been killed in a skiing accident and Malcolm’s wife Kitty got plenty of letters from people saying how glad they were this had happened.

  September 11

  A photograph is by definition a moment seized from time, and the seizure can remove context in a way that might not exactly be unethical, but does damage the truth. Photographers tend, alas, to think in clichés. Refugees must never laugh. Hungry children must never smile. Someone once told me that Walker Evans’s famous black-and-white photographs of the Okies fleeing the dust bowl, printed in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, didn’t exactly do justice to the humanity of these Okies, shown by Evans as invariably grim. The contact sheets apparently showed laughter as well as tears, exuberance as well as despair.

  The patron saints of photojournalism all manipulated grossly. Photography is, almost always, manipulation. Take the famous photo of young love in Paris, the boy and his girl kissing with abandon. Turns out it was set up. Or take Henri Cartier-Bresson’s equally famous picture of the batty old woman wagging a flag somewhere in the American Northeast on July 4. Turns out Henri set her up with the flag. So the picture was a lie. Unethical? Most assuredly. That’s the nature of the beast.

  September 17

  First one friend of mine and then a second developed arrhythmia last week. One of them told me that what with the irregular heart beat he was worried about having sex on the ground he might croak on the job. It’s a fear that often besets the older man with any sort of pain between Adam’s apple and belly button. I referred my pal to a study by M. Ueno cited in an essay by Hackett and Rosenbaum called “Emotion, Psychiatric Disorders, and the Heart,” published in Heart Disease, edited by Eugene Braunwald, published in 1980. The Ueno essay is alluringly titled “The So-called Coition Death,” published in something abbreviated as Jap. J. Leg. Med. 17:330.1962, though why the Japanese should be so interested in this I’m not sure, since their rates of heart disease are remarkably low owing to the huge intake of sashimi and seaweed. On the other hand, Japanese executives are in the habit of dropping dead from overwork.

  Coital death is unusual. Ueno’s study showed that coition accounted for 0.6 percent of endogenous sudden deaths. Most of these occurred in the context of extramarital screwing. Males in that situation were on average thirteen years older than their companions and one-third were drunk at the time.

  Of course this fear of dying while fucking is connected to the notion that the latter activity involved a great expenditure of physical effort. Not really. One study by Hellerstein and Piedman reckoned that the equivalent cost in oxygen of maximal activity during intercourse approximates six calories per minute. During “foreplay” and “afterplay” about 4.5 calories are consumed. I’m not sure what “afterplay” involves now. In the good old days it meant lighting a cigarette, puffing on it and blowing lazy smoke rings in the air, sort of, while trying to persuade the love partner to get up and mix a gin and tonic.

  Hellerstein and Friedman conclude that the demand placed on the heart by sexual intercourse is equal to that of “a brisk walk around the block or climbing a flight of stairs.” No big deal really. We should all try it more often. At least that’s what I told my arrhythmic friend.

  October 8

  My favorite forger is still the amiable German who did the Hitler diaries in the early 1980s, though the old ladies who managed to sell their forged Mussolini diaries twice run him a close second. When he finished dashing off the Fuehrer’s daily reflections into a series of cheap notebooks, he decided their authenticity would be improved if Hitler’s initial were embossed on the cover. So he hastened off to the stationary store to buy some Letraset, only to discover that the letter A had run out. He decided to use F instead. So each notebook had FH. Not a single one of the experts noticed.

  One of Princess Di’s ancestors fell for a forgery by an Italian called Joseph Vella, who claimed in 1794 he’d unearthed the seventeen lost books of the Roman historian Livy. His story was that he’d got them from a Frenchman who’d stolen them off a shelf in Santa Sophia in Constantinople. They were, Vella said, in Arabic, which was not implausible, since the Arabs translated classical works, which is how many were saved.

  Vella persuaded Di’s ancestor, Lady Spencer, to put up the money for a translation into Italian, and quickly made a specimen page, which he claimed was the whole of the sixteenth book of Livy’s history. Now Vella got the bit between his teeth and reported another great find, the ancient history of Sicily in the Arabic period, across 200 years, plus all the correspondence between the Arab governors of Sicily and their superiors in Africa. The king of Naples showered Vella with medals and other gratuities, including a pension. There was a problem. The only Arab text he had was a book about Mohammed. But though his knowledge of Arab orthography was scant, he inserted dots, curlicues and similar flourishes that looked like Arab script. When he published a facsimile, further praise was heaped upon him for translating these illegible scribbles. Vella said he’d almost lost an eye after poring over the manuscript and the view was he should get a higher pension.

  Vella’s work was published throughout Europe, until finally an Orientalist examined the manuscript, declared it to be the history of Mohammed and family, and Vella went to prison.

  October 15

  I’ve been following the gastronomic excursions of Vogue’s Jeffrey Steingarten with increasing concern. The man is out of control. October’s Vogue features him in an excursion to Rome as the climax of an obsessive three-year quest to make pizza bianco and pane Genazo. The former is a kind of bread, a bit like focaccia, and pane G is a wholemeal bread.

  Steingarten’s approach evokes the single-mindedness of a Mars shot as prepared by the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. He notes his arrival time in Rome. He scuttles to his target bakeries to measure and collate, oblivious to the charms of the city, or indeed of his companion soon—one surmises—bored to distraction by her employer.

  It’s all a bit reminiscent of someone engaged in sex with eyes fixed not on the beloved but on some Masters and Johnson diagram of neural responses. Steingarten represents the ultimate triumph of positivism. He races to collect samples of Italian flour,
malt and water for later analysis in US labs. He reports excitedly that one Italian manufacturer had overestimated the protein content of its flour by nearly 3 percent. Enraptured by such triumphs of US lab analysis, Steingarten has nothing to say about the vital gluten levels in the flour that are both a feature of the flour and a consequence of the way in which the dough is kneaded.

  Such omission is emblematic of Steingarten’s approach, which sees breadmaking as an activity akin to manufacturing rocket fuel, rather than as the outcome of an interaction among domestic yeasts, wild yeasts and variabilities in wheat strains and water. Fermentation involves not just the introduction of domesticated yeasts, but also the chance invasion of wild ones. Bread is a living thing that involves both. As anyone who regularly bakes bread well knows, bread becomes better not purely as a function of technique or careful measurement and proper ingredients, but rather because the kitchen becomes progressively colonized by wild yeasts. This is why European bakeries, somewhat messier than the sterile kitchens of this country’s commercial US bakers, produce better, tastier bread. The dough-encrusted towel, the unsterile bowl all play their part in providing a haven for wild yeasts.

  Steingarten describes how his researcher, Martina, begins to pale as he outlines his scientific endeavor: “By the time my oration has finished, Martina’s nutty skin has turned a ghostly white. At least she has grasped the heavy responsibility that now weighs upon her handsome shoulders.” Actually, Martina was grasping the dreadful truth that she had to spend the next several days with an idiot thinking that science alone can capture the ineffable.

  November 5

  One of the Republicans’ problems is they’ve always overstated the case against Clinton, so they’ve devalued the currency of abuse. Now no one pays any attention and Bill’s popularity ratings remain high, whatever dirt laps about his knees. The thing to do is wait until he’s dead and then let him have it. This is what happened to the Roman Emperor Nero. The sweaty plebes of Rome liked him. He was populist in political tilt, snooted the upper-crust Senators and threw terrific parties, to which the ordinary folks were invited.

  But history took its revenge, in the form of the denunciations of Nero by Tacitus, Suetonius and the rest, propagandists for the Roman upper crust. But the Christians hated him too, for obvious reasons. Then after nearly 2,000 years of maltreatment by these mythographers, poor Nero got chewed up again by the French religious mythographer Ernest Renan, who depicted him in pitiless terms as the Antichrist. Eagerly reading Renan was a Polish nationalist, Henryk Sienkiewicz, who wrote Quo Vadis, serialized in Gazeta Polska between 1894 and 1896, earning him the Nobel Prize in 1905. Nero got excoriated once more, not only as the Great Beast, but also as somehow the proto-foe of Polish nationalism.

  The first Quo Vadis came in 1901, and by 1912 Enrico Guazzoni produced the third adaptation, running for a full two hours and blessed with incredible success, including a premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of King George V, and in New York, where it was the first film ever to play in a Broadway theater. With Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis the new medium reveled in long shots and pans around crowds (sweaty plebs) enjoying the martyrdom of Christians, under the supervision of Nero.

  By now, Quo Vadis was becoming a weapon of the Catholic Church in Italy in its battles with the new secular state, and once again Nero proved useful in his beastliness. Next came DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross in 1932, once again offering the easy contrast between the depravity of Charles Laughton and the Christian purity of Mercia. Nero’s doom was sealed in 1951 with the released of Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis, when he was represented by Peter Ustinov in all his foreign decadence, set against the manly strength of Robert Taylor and the American way. So Nero stood for Stalinism and everything foul. The voiceover at the start of the movie talks about AD 64 as a period when “the individual is at the mercy of the state … and rulers surrender their subjects to bondage.” But simultaneously the hounding and suicide of the novelist Petronius is taken by Maria Wyke as an allegory of Hollywood blacklists.

  November 19

  Nanny-gate is winding down. At its height it represented the fiercest stress to Anglo-American relations since the war of 1812, when my ancestor Admiral Sir George Cockburn burned down the White House, then hastened along to the National Intelligencer to avenge himself on the press which had treated him roughly. Sir George told his men to destroy the newspaper’s type fonts saying, “Be sure that all the C’s are destroyed so the rascals cannot any longer abuse my name.”

  Woodward wasn’t a nanny but an au pair. Back in the 1950s in Britain the au pair was usually a Swedish girl. The headmaster of my boarding school had two—the only females under the age of thirty in our fastness in Perthshire. Fitzpayne and I faced expulsion for having tea with them in the headmaster’s study at a time we thought the man was safely absent on some official function.

  The nanny was the pivotal figure in male upper-class character formation. Mothers were seen once a day for about thirty minutes, when the youngster was brought down from the nursery quarters to be displayed in the drawing room. After the onset of boarding school at the age of eight, these contacts between mother and offspring shrank to the four months’ vacation time. The son and heir’s maternal substitute was of course the nanny, in Churchill’s case (Mrs. Everest) along with many others the only woman such men loved. Heirs to large estates would get their own back on Mummy by booting her out into the “dower house,” a structure—sometimes converted stables—detached from the main house.

  Among the many anguishing rites de passage was the transition from care by nanny to supervision at the boarding school by Matron, in my case an austere figure in starched white who would line all us little boys up and then, one by one, have us come forward so she could briefly cup our testicles in her chill hand. There might be useful employment for Amirault prosecutors here. There was a successful restaurant in London in the 1980s in which waitresses were dressed as nannies and matrons and barked fierce commands like “Eat up your carrots, young man!” at a clientele whimpering with pleasure at this temps retrouvé.

  After Matron’s ministrations we would head off to chapel and once a term have the pleasure of hearing the headmaster announce that we would “now sing the one hundred and thirty-sixth psalm, verses one to six.” We would naturally look at the omitted verses which concluded with the psalmist’s delighted cry, “Blessed be he who taketh the little children and dasheth them against the stones.”

  I should note that in my case contact with Mama was extended far beyond the half hour display at cocktail time, since she bred horses and we all rode a lot though we feared the dangers of the chase. How we yearned for snow and ice in the winter months which meant riding was off, instead of which we would hear the exuberant, ominous cry, “Lovely day for hunting.”

  November 23

  Behind every fortune lies a crime, Balzac wrote, and no doubt that was true in the case of the steel dynasty of Jones and Laughlin, in Pittsburgh. But the Laughlin side of that enterprise produced James Laughlin, who shunned the family business in favor of publishing and launched New Directions—the most sustained presentation of good writers in the history of one publishing company: Pound, William Carlos Williams on down.

  I said to my friend Ben Sonnenberg, the day after Laughlin died last week, that it was probably one of the most culturally productive uses of surplus extraction in the history of American capitalism. Ben suggested the Mellons, but that’s because Ben is an Anglophile and loves those eighteenth-century paintings of horses the Mellon family purchased out of Gulf Oil loot. Think of what some of the other American fortunes have produced: from Singer sewing machines to … the New Republic. I asked Ben—who used his patrimony to found Grand Street (now the property of Jean Stein)—whether he thought crime lay behind his dough and he said that alas, it wasn’t a fortune. I suppose “tidy sum” would better describe it. Ben Sonnenberg Sr., the famous publicist, wanted to have written on his gravestone, “At least I never took a
cent from Joe Kennedy or Howard Hughes.” His house was number 19 Gramercy Park South, and Ben Jr. once told me his father’s butler sneaked out late one night after his master’s death and planted the urn under some bush in the Square itself.

  We turned to discussion of another productive fortune, that of Pirandello’s father who was in the sulfur business on Elba, enabling young Luigi to get on with his writing. Last week I saw Pirandello’s final play, The Mountain Giants, at the La Jolla theater, well acted and staged by students in the theater department of the University of California at San Diego. It is a wonderful piece of work and not, so far as I could see, particularly “unfinished” as it is usually described. Ben Jr. said that in the years when he’d been active in New York theater he’d tried endlessly to get The Mountain Giants produced there, but without success.

  Then he told me a good joke. Grasshopper goes into bar. Bartender: “Good lord, we’ve got a drink named after you.” Grasshopper: “Why would you call a drink Bob?”

  November 26

  OSWALD’S TALE

  Dear Mr. Anderson,

  Alexander Cockburn, ever obstinate, is of the opinion that JFK’s “assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot the President because he believed, not without reason, that this deed would help save the Cuban Revolution.” Oswald disagreed.

  From his arrest until his summary execution, Oswald spent almost 48 hours in police custody. Reportedly, 12 of those hours were spent in interrogation by state and federal police. There are no stenographic or taped records of these interrogations, and Oswald was denied legal representation. However, memoranda by some of the investigating officials were published in the Warren Commission Report. These officials report that Oswald vehemently denied shooting either the President or officer J. D. Tippit, and two of these officials also report that Oswald expected Cuban policy to remain unchanged with the death of JFK.