No, she said, I have not.
You are familiar, though, Dies said, with the writer and the collection in question?
Reluctantly, Sutton nodded. Dies nodded, too. Then, once more, he opened his folder, this time easily locating the page he sought.
I’d like to read you an excerpt, he said. I regret it very much, given the very particular … quality … of the piece, but I do think you’ll understand, given the circumstances, and that it may indeed prove to … further our discussion. Here, now. He cleared his throat. Page forty-three.
When I was a bit slow in performing some duty, Dies read, I was called a lazy black son of a bitch. All right. Dies glanced briefly over his eyeglasses, licked his thumb, and turned the page.
Page forty-four (skipping just little ahead, he said). If yuh say yuh didn’t I’ll rip yo’ gut-string loose with this fuckin’ bar, you black granny dodger. Yuh can’t call a white man a liar ’n’ get away with it, you black son of a bitch.
Is that enough, Miss Kelly? Dies asked, snapping the folder shut. I’ll say it is! Now I’m curious, Miss Kelly, if you actually find “literature” of this type to be in some way “rehabilitating”?
Sutton stared at him. What possible connection can my opinion, she asked after a heavy pause, of what you’ve read just now have to do with this discussion?
Oh, everything in the world! Dies said. Everything in the world! Are you—let me ask you this again—of the opinion that this sort of “literature”—the sort I’ve just read—holds some value for reader and listener? That it might enlighten us in some way? Enlarge our cultural tradition, or our minds?
I believe this discussion is over, Sutton said. I have nothing to report. Dies raised an eyebrow, scribbled something furiously on the cover of the folder in front of him, then let the subject drop.
SUTTON DID NOT LET the subject drop quite so easily. She was working first-string news at the time, but kept after Walker for a feature piece on Dies, and before long—to her surprise—he relented. A week later, she followed Dies to Washington, where—having been forced at last to extend his investigation beyond the Federal One employees who had openly broken with the project—he interviewed Henry Alsberg, the project’s director.
The interview was far less intimate than her own had been. The press was wild for it, and—to mark the occasion, as well as deflect some attention—Dies had invited the rest of the committee to join him this time. More usually (as Sutton knew from her personal experience) he roved the country, aside from the typist, alone.
Alsberg played his cards right. Right off the bat he managed to win sympathy from even the toughest critics of Federal One, and even Dies himself, by admitting to a onetime radicalism he had since, he promised, been cured of—thanks to a stint as editor for a collection of letters sent surreptitiously from a Russian gulag.
This was just the sort of stuff Dies wanted to hear.
There are certain things, Alsberg said, that once you learn you just can’t turn away from. They haunt you; you give up all your old ideals. Everything becomes treacherous and confused, and you don’t know what to believe anymore. After this happened to me, and I became staunchly anti-Communist—as I remain to this day—I can tell you one thing for sure. I suffered for it in America. I was blacklisted. I couldn’t get any of my articles printed any more. Even today, I am considered a reactionary. I hadn’t known how far the influence stretched before because I had been a part of it: that’s how it goes.
But after this promising initial outburst, Alsberg seemed to have nothing more to say; certainly nothing to hang a case on. It was a tremendous blow for Dies. Now, even according to America’s self-professed “arch-anti-Communist,” as the newspapers had it, nothing was amiss with Federal One. Dies was heralded by the press—and even by some more outspoken members of the cabinet—as “the harbinger of American fascism”; it was recalled in editorials and government assemblies alike that Mussolini, too, had “risen to absolute and despotic power” after having organized a similar hunt for “Communists” in his own country. Same thing with Hitler. “We are deluding ourselves,” the newspapers chimed, “if we believe that it is out of the question in this country that, after just such a scare as was recently drummed up by Hitler in Germany and is currently being drummed up by Dies and the rest over here, some man on horseback might also rise up in order to ‘protect’ us from the perceived danger.”
But Dies was not easily discouraged. After the Federal One hearings, he hit the road, holding hearings in Chicago and Detroit. The teachers’ union was investigated, along with every student group (to his credit, most turned out—just as he’d suspected—to be verifiable fronts for the CPUSA). Finally, he homed in on Hollywood; but there, for some reason, he cut his investigation short. Later, it was rumored that Dies had been paid off by the head of Paramount Pictures, Y. Frank Freeman; that he had been so flattered by his treatment there—all the stops had been pulled, the red carpets rolled out—that he entirely forgot why he had come.
The investigation had initially been launched on the strength of the testimony of John Leech, who, a month prior, claimed to have served as a recruiter for the Communist Party in Hollywood since 1936. He rattled off a dozen names for Dies to follow up with, among them Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney. But—unusually—after only a few weeks, Dies reported with confidence from Hollywood that nothing was awry. His official take on the situation (in sharp contrast to every other investigation he had so far pursued) was that “no man can be held accountable for what someone says about him”; the case was abruptly put to rest.
Not long after, Dies got into some trouble of his own when his investigations came in at cross-purposes with the newly revamped FBI. At the end of 1938 he was invited to the White House for an urgent chat with the President. Sutton heard about it later from her father, who was so galled by what he called Dies’s “blatant insubordination” that it took nothing, hardly, to get him to speak freely on the subject.
I would have had him thrown out for a rogue years ago—the Judge complained—but for some reason the President’s seen fit to go the absolute opposite direction. Invites him to the White House, you know. Calls him “Martin.” Was absolutely at his most ingratiating.
You know you have to protect innocent people, “Martin,” the President had said. You can’t go around dragging in everyone and anyone that crosses your path.
Dies had, by all accounts, agreed wholeheartedly, grateful for the note the President had chosen to strike—considering the terrible mess he’d just made for the FBI.
Of course, he’d said quickly, I do understand. We had, for instance, as you may have heard, quite a bit of trouble awhile back with certain movie actors—but in those cases it was clear we had to be quite sensitive—
Quite right, the President had said. We all make mistakes. But these types—as I’m happy to hear you agree—must not be held up to the public as sympathizers, where it may simply be a matter of ignorance on their part.
Oh, yes, Dies returned. Like you, Mr. President, I am a very busy man. If we dragged every ignorant man in this country through the dirt, I can assure you there would hardly be time for anything else.
At that the President laughed good-naturedly—a response that confused Dies at first. He hadn’t been joking. Soon afterward, however— as, later, Judge Kelly reported irreverently—the two parted on agreeable terms, shaking hands like old friends.
—
SUTTON HAD SCORED A MAJOR VICTORY IN SECURING THE DIES ASSIGNment, but when the Hollywood scandal fizzled, and, soon after, war erupted in earnest, she found herself no closer to convincing Walker to send her overseas.
From Paris, Alden’s letters rang with a mixture of excitement and alarm. She anticipated them eagerly: keenly jealous, as she did not mind telling him, of his having, inadvertently, found himself “right in the midst of it all.”
But then, without warning—just before France capitulated in June 1940—Alden’s letters stopped abruptly. After tha
t, the summer dragged endlessly as Sutton waited for any word from—or (she braced herself) of—Alden at all.
Finally, at the beginning of September, she received the briefest of letters. He was being held—Alden wrote—in a German prisoner-of-war camp, just south of Berlin. He said very little other than that, and nothing as to how he had ended up there—only promising that, all things considered, he was well, and further assuring her that, with a little luck, he’d be back in Paris before long.
IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER that, just after the first bombs rained down over London, that Life magazine offered to send Louis overseas. Sutton redoubled her efforts with Walker when she heard the news, and felt the sting of his refusal, when it came, even more acutely. Briefly, she considered Louis’s suggestion that she go along anyway—not bothering with the proper press credentials. But something stopped her. Almost everything else, she reflected, that she had so far accomplished in life, she owed to someone else’s influence or authority. Her first job at the Star, for example, had been secured by the Judge; the job with the FSA and later the Writers’ Project she owed to Louis, or at least the connections of his father. Perhaps it had become personal with Walker as well. She wanted badly to force from him something other than his by-now-familiar, rehearsed replies. That there were no “facilities” for women in the field was a particular favorite of his. She refused—she insisted on multiple occasions to him and to Louis—to have a lack of women’s toilets keep her out of the war.
Once Louis was gone, however, she bitterly regretted her decision. She waited anxiously for any news of him, and in her own letters plied him with questions pertaining to every detail of his experience. In order, she said, that she might be better able to imagine it, and not feel, therefore, quite so far away from him, or from the war. His letters, however, when they came—at first fairly often, two or three in a week, then fewer and farther between—were disappointingly void of any details at all, save on the subject of his new acquaintance, the writer and philosopher P. D. Ouspensky—who, by a stroke of unimaginable luck (but there is in these matters, I am now quite certain, wrote Louis, no such thing), he had met almost immediately after his arrival in London.
AN ANTI-BOLSHEVIK, OUSPENSKY had appeared in all the fashionable occultist circles of Europe throughout the last decade. He had written The Fourth Dimension, and more recently A New Model of the Universe— two books that, after Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Louis especially admired. He wrote enthusiastically after his first meeting with the author at a press conference held at Ground Zero that Ouspensky had been “an absolute delight,” and assured Sutton needlessly (she had barely heard of Ouspensky, except from Louis himself) that “anything that might be said against the man in America is absolutely false.” His understanding of the research conducted by Myers, not to mention the advancements he had himself made in the field, was more thorough, and far-reaching, than—Louis wrote—he’d once guessed. “It is remarkable,” he wrote Sutton a week after he and Ouspensky were first introduced, “to be offered, finally, something in which I can actually believe, rather than merely speculate about.”
Indeed, many of Ouspensky’s proposed “revisions” to Myers’s approach struck Sutton as comparatively levelheaded. He held, for example, that the rumored “Messiah child”—conceived through channels Myers himself had opened to the unconscious world of the not-yet-born and the dead—was just another myth; created, like all religious and quasi-religious exercises, in order to explain away the imperfections within the lives of those who invented them or fell under their sway. A way, that is, for them to imagine that all the seeming trivialities (and infidelities) of their own lives were in fact serving some higher purpose; were part of a linear trajectory toward total redemption. That Myers’s “Messiah” would one day turn out to be an ordinary man who, having been raised an only child in a quiet London suburb, was intent only on continuing to live his remarkably ordinary life, would not have surprised Ouspensky. For him, there never was any possibility of final redemption. Though every person was born and reborn ceaselessly upon the earth in a sort of incessant reincarnation—one that, unlike the Eastern philosophies, took place recurrently at exactly the same point in time and under the same circumstances. It was a process that (still more importantly) was not to be confused with the sort of nihilism inherent in a concept like Nietzsche’s “eternal return.” For Ouspensky, there was always a perceivable progress to be achieved through such multiple succession—if, that is, one was appropriately aware of the possibility of achieving it. With the correct discipline and training, Ouspensky urged, we might learn to uncover our past lives in such a way as to affect not only the present, but the past and the future as well. No, there was no final or total “redemption,” in Ouspensky’s opinion—only diligent hard work. Through which, eventually, we might pass out of the system entirely, having been absolved of everything but the most vital aspects of our human personality.
Ten years earlier, Ouspensky had enjoyed an immense following. There were those who argued that he had single-handedly shaped the Russian avant-garde—which had, of course, shaped everything else. Of late, his star had dimmed. He had lamented as much to Louis. Most of his work was being carried on now by others—former followers who had all but forgotten him. He had managed to retain only a very small, but exceptionally loyal, coterie; most devotedly, perhaps, a young woman named Cécile, who—at just barely thirty—had made, according to Ouspensky, more progress in the field than anyone else he had ever had the pleasure to meet. She could recall not only small “flashes” of previous lives (the purview of most of Ouspensky’s devotees), but could recount from them whole narrative sequences. “She does this,” Louis explained to Sutton in one of his letters home, “with her eyes closed. Sometimes traces of other languages mix in. It’s remarkable! Once, for example, a language no one present could understand was later identified (with the help of a local ethnographer) as an ancient Hopi dialect—a language Cécile herself, of course, would not have had the least opportunity to learn! The question of how any English woman born—recurrently—in Leicestershire in 1909 would have had the chance to pick up an ancient Hopi dialect is still to be worked out—but it certainly is an interesting one! Ouspensky has suggested it may have to do with what he calls ‘static’ information—excess data and energy a time-traveler picks up as she makes contact with, and learns to read, her own past. Whatever the case, it’s apparent Cécile is on the verge of recalling much more than has ever been substantially recorded of a previous life through a living person—something that will very soon make all of Myers’s experiments look like child’s play.”
ON AT LEAST ONE OCCASION, Louis had the tremendous luck of being asked to sit in on Ouspensky’s “sessions” himself. Afterward he wrote glowingly that “all that has been said is absolutely true.” He’d experienced, he reported to Sutton, the strangest sensation—quite impossible to describe. A sort of “vision,” perhaps, of what he had assumed at the time was the future, but knew must actually be the past. And all the while, he was traveling, or seemed to be—it was the most uncanny thing—down a long, narrow staircase. He could see hardly anything at all along it, and the more he strained, the more the angle of the “vision” tilted so that whatever lay below remained, from that incredible vantage point, just beyond his line of sight. “I imagine,” he wrote, “that with practice I may be able to train myself to see farther. It is just, as Ouspensky assures us, like learning to draw—or take a photograph. Not a question, that is, of learning the skill in itself (which is always secondary, and anyone can do), but of learning—in the first place—to see!
“I would not be sharing this with you,” Louis continued—it was a letter dated the tenth of October, the height of the Blitz—“or at this troubling time be so inspired by its discovery, if I was not absolutely confident in the truth of these findings. Though, sadly, I do not feel hopeful that anything of significance can come of this in the public sphere for some time—given the
deeply entrenched bias against anything that disrupts our persistent and obstinate reliance on the tropes of ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism,’ not only in art but in politics as well. I ask you, is it not true that every encounter—in art, in politics, and even in love— fails the moment it imagines the ‘reality’ it encounters as preexistent, fixed; capable of being simply transferred like a rubbing of a leaf or the inlaid inscription on a headstone to the page? The leaf, the page, the headstone, the words—all are concatenations of hard matter, existent within the visible world … but the work of every encounter—art, politics, and especially love!—should be, should it not?, to move between the material of this world and the material of another. There is, then, at the heart of every ‘naturalistic’ attempt at encounter, which accepts the simple appearance of things, a great error of judgment and perception. In short—a lie. Think of it! What a boon it has been to politicians to have us all suddenly develop an aesthetic appreciation of the gritty real! I feel that my work here—to catalogue and therefore to promote only misery and misfortune—is doing a great disservice not only to the present, but to the future as well! The photographs I’m taking now, for example, of the bombs; every one, as you can imagine, is so extremely overexposed as to render half the image entirely blank. What can result in a fragmentation of any present reality—dividing the world into mere surfaces, that is, of such and such dimension, overexposed and nearly blank of everything but the abstract play of shadow and light—but a future reality drawn from and against exactly those same lines?”
Shortly after, Sutton received an almost illegible message in slanted scrawl, unfamiliar to her, which recounted the events of an evening Louis had spent in the company of Ouspensky and a handful of other followers (Cécile—she noted—among them) trapped on the rooftop of Ouspensky’s mansion in Virginia Water, about twenty miles from London.
Quartet for the End of Time Page 30
