The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  What was he like—this Barnett Ludens fellow—when they fell in love, courted, married? She tried—it was and is a desperately hard fight—not to be destroyed herself. She has undertaken many times to shoulder burdens too heavy to lift. She can’t seem to help any of them. Could anyone? Why is it so important to help the helpless? Why had she ever thought she could? That is not the point! she yells at herself. The point, always, is to try! And they are all becoming crazier than anything she has ever seen, just like the soldiers are coming back wounded in brains as well as bodies.

  Barnett appeared in her life after Lessie had disappeared; he read to her great portions of his new writing, and, yes, she recognized the influence of fascistic thinking in the enormous volumes of his poetry. She thought it was because he was just a man, and men as rulers were coming into their own therapeutic limelight as something not always so healthy. Because he reminded her of Lessie—no, she could not help him either, and felt robbed, deprived because of that failure—she married his brother. She would not admit it—she could not make the same mistake twice!—but he arrived as a crazy man, Barnett did. She never knew him otherwise. Only after he underwent many tests at St. Purdah’s under the supervision of Dr. Heidrich (on his way to Partekla) was it discovered that he had nothing physically wrong with him. He was just … crazy. “And I think he has syphilis that is not showing up in his tests.” She then told him Barnett had lived abroad for many years before the war. “That might be it, then,” Aalvaar said. “I have many memories of my own earlier wild oats, both over there and here.” He smiled as he said this in a mock-confidential tone. He is very handsome and obviously muscular and lean in his well-tailored NITS officer’s uniform, with a shaved head before it was fashionable, and an indeterminate accent, as so many people in Washington possess. She wonders how he came to St. Purdah’s, and what his qualifications are. She makes a mental note to check when matters here calm down.

  Barnett was then administered massive doses of malaria. “We do things like this now,” Dr. Heidrich explains. “Give people a disease. Give people another disease to fight the first disease.” She’d already heard that scores of Negroes were being “given” syphilis. Dr. Heidrich continues, “In the case of syphilis, we infect them with malaria, give them so much of it that they become fevered with high temperatures. It often destroys the syphilis. Sweats it away. Boils it out. Sometimes it works. Many times it doesn’t. But I have nothing else to offer.” Barnett had been “given” malaria twice and now Barnett is “given” mammoth doses of syphilis via injections of blood from a man very sick with it himself.

  After she leaves Barnett’s room she walks the endless corridors of this endless place, St. Purdah’s, tonight with the lights out and none of the guards she knows around to help her now that she’s lost. The cries of crazy people in the dark are always infinitely sad to her. This place was said to be “enlightened” in 1905 when it opened. They bathed people in warm water endlessly. That was considered progressive thinking, to lead the patient back to “reasonableness.” God, the place is big. She finally finds the exit, guarded by its gargoyle.

  She is called back a few weeks later. Barnett Ludens has turned purple. He is covered from head to toe with purple blotches.

  “Baby, what’s happened to make me so colorful again?” he jokes. “Ezra taught them all how to write.” Now he’s nuts again. “Hemingway. Gertrude. Fitzgerald.”

  He can hardly talk for coughing. He’s trying to make light of it but she can tell he’s scared. She sort of is too, but she wouldn’t mind if he died. She admits it to herself here and now, on this spot. She has never before wished a person in her life dead.

  “We don’t know what it is,” the young doctor from COD admits, referring to the purple color, with Dr. Heidrich arriving and standing by. “Has he been fucking with anyone lately?”

  “Intimate would be a preferable term, young man,” Heidrich says as if it were a fact.

  “In here? He’s been in here a long time. Barney, what twats have you been licking?” For some reason, she’s decided to be brazen.

  Instead of answering he lapses into gurgles and mumbles, punctuated by short bursts of loud screaming that convulse him in coughs and saliva drool.

  “His penis … well, here, look.”

  It is Dr. Heidrich who pulls back the covers and raises the hospital gown. Barnett’s penis has been cut off. Everything under the covers is blood-soaked. Yes, she wishes him dead.

  Barnett Ludens suddenly grabs for the sky, loses it, and falls into the arms of his wife, and death.

  And she realizes that, really, she had for so long wished him dead. Well, here it is, in her arms.

  Later, in Heidrich’s office, where she notes that his first name is Aalvaar but has no time to deciper the framed diplomas before he brusquely hands her a report, written by “P.J.,” which describes P.J.’s interview with Barnett Ludens, “such as it was,” on what was apparently one of the last days of his life. Heidrich nods that she is free to read it and she does, while she knows his eyes never leave her. There is much of Barnett’s gibberish, “patient is unable to finish a sentence,” and reference to “patient’s inordinate usage of profanity.” P.J. then apologizes. “I am afraid that I was summoned too late to assess and record much more about anything from his final thoughts.” And then, just above his initials at the bottom of the single page Korah’s just read, the details of the autopsy, which “reveal that the patient had been penetrated anally so many times his rectum was wrecked beyond repair.”

  “Presumably it was one of the staff,” Heidrich contributes. “Because of the war we’re forced to hire many we shouldn’t. Director Hoover’s office has been notified because he wishes to be informed immediately of any unusual deaths, which this certainly is.”

  After several more weeks a Negro attendant at St. Purdah’s, who is a deaf-mute and who bathes the men, is arrested and charged with Barnett’s murder and rather quickly dispatched. Israel, too, had been summoned because of his still-recalled experience with bodily mutilations. He cannot believe what he discovers. Someone penetrated Barnett Ludens repeatedly with a tiny spiked dildo, not dissimilar to the one used on Mercy Hooker, though of metal and not marble, that was discovered in Barnett’s bowels. Israel looks down upon it almost as if it were an old friend. He looks up at Heidrich and smiles enigmatically. He does not recognize Heidrich, just as he never remembers enough about glause.

  It is never discovered who did any of this to Barnett. It is never discovered who severed his penis. The mute Negro attendant, who for the record held the name of Booker T. Washington Jones, was in fact electrocuted for the murder of Barnett Ludens.

  Years later, when she is quite old, Korah writes a famous essay that appears almost at the end of the last volume of her collected works, totaling twenty-three thick and influential books now considered among the most estimable in the field of psychoanalysis. She calls the essay “The Sublimity of Art, the Brutality of Fact.” It is the first and only time she writes about Barnett Ludens, whose own work—both his art and his poetry—is by now considered part of the canon of American culture and listed on university syllabuses here and there. It would be on more of them had he not been so weird.

  “What do we do with cases like this, where the outpourings of interior messages are so bipolarized and intertwined, incapable of separation, really? His mind was both vile and sublime. His art was both cruel and of a sort that reaches to the angels. Certainly the latter could not have been achieved without the tortuous expense of the former. To be sure, there is no answer to the question: Which ones do we save and protect? And we must stop thinking there is an answer and breaking our own hearts seeking it. As with Siamese twins joined at the brain, we can only witness with awe the incredible energy it must take just to stay alive, much less maintain balance. We are left with the painful injunction to cherish that which reaches for eternity and withhold our instinctive punishment of a torment that we cannot ourselves begin to comprehend. It is fa
r from a perfect solution, particularly in these punishing times, which all times seem to be or we psychoanalysts would be out of business, but it is the only solution a civilized country, which we are far from being or becoming, can attempt.”

  AFFAIRS OF STATE

  The assistant secretary of state, Sumner Welles, is discovered to be, particularly when drunk, a loud and aggressive homosexual, particularly toward Negroes, particularly toward Negroes who are Pullman porters. His boss, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, uses this information to see that Welles is put out to pasture. Roosevelt is fond of Welles and certainly fonder of him than of Hull, but he dislikes fairies and in the end gives in to Hull, who has always been jealous of Roosevelt’s obvious preference for Welles over himself. Hull has his own dark secret: his wife is Jewish. It is Hull, among others, who oversees Roosevelt’s covert policy of denying any help to the Jews running in terror all over the globe, desperate for sanctuary. Hull is called to task for his hypocrisy by Joseph Alsop, a popular political columnist who writes regularly with his brother, Stewart, for the Monument. Joseph is a homosexual and equally terrified that this information will be used against him. When Joe threatens to reveal Mrs. Hull’s heritage if Mr. Hull doesn’t help a few Jews stay alive, Mr. Hull retaliates with a threat to reveal Joseph Alsop’s homosexuality.

  After another Pullman porter incident, Welles is fired by Roosevelt in 1943. Cordell Hull will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945.

  In March 1956, Confidential magazine will run an “exposé” revealing more or less all these same juicy details, but not until 1995—some forty years later—when the Johns Hopkins University Press publishes Irwin F. Gellman’s Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles, will the world be treated to this news in an academically acceptable version.

  Welles goes on to become a stirring advocate for world peace. He lectures, he writes bestselling books, he is miserable. He is dragged out of Negro bars drunk many times over the years.

  Welles does not die until 1961. His being found dead drunk and facedown in a filthy stream in the Maryland countryside precedes his death. Some say he was murdered. He didn’t live long after being rescued from this near-drowning.

  Emendations to earlier Nazi laws and to the “recommendations” of the Wannsee Conference of 1942 to eliminate all Jews were officially extended to include gypsies and homosexuals, who were and are being killed all along anyway. As a homosexual, how was Welles dealing with this? Or Joseph Alsop? Whatever the repercussions from these emendations, they were never written about, although there are loads of scholarly studies about how many Jews were murdered. Joseph Alsop was one of the great journalists of his time, honest and fearless about everything, it would seem, except himself. It is an old and pathetic story, how “secrets” silence people.

  How much did Welles know about the active participation of “his kind”—i.e., Ivy League, North Shore, Back Bay, Main Line, Lake Shore, even Beverly Hills—in the financing of the very Nazis with whom our country was at war? As an assistant secretary of state, how much did he know about Ivy Lee, the founder of Public Relations, dead since 1934 but not forgotten (part of his papers to this day either still embargoed by or stolen from Princeton)? Ivy Lee’s job was to make Hitler look good in America. Amos Standing was assigned by Ivy to “run the Hitler account.” How much did Welles know of one of America’s most powerful law firms, Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented I.G. Farben’s American subsidiary, American I.G. Corporation, the largest manufacturer of film in the world?

  But why should any of these men talk about any of this? To this day, neither Dredd Trish nor Junior, his son, will speak of their family’s relationship with Hitler. Or did Welles know and in the knowing drink himself to death? Or did he just drink himself to death for his uncontrollable unsatisfied longings for love?

  FROM MY HISTORY OF EVIL

  Having still not heard from you, Fred, I feel I must reiterate my calling lest you did not get my message.

  I am proud that I am getting so caught up in my enterprise. I was going to call it The New England Journal of Evil, but in the end I thought that would be gilding my lily under false pretensions. I shudder to think that it might be your pestering, hectoring, confrontational style, Frederick, a style which I believe is called in-your-face, that has enabled me to see that my role is more than simply to supply a superior IQ for the wireless.

  The problem of evil should have been the fundamental topic of wartime among intellectuals. But it wasn’t. Nor was it after. Nor is it now. Nor has it ever been in the entire history of The American People. Of any people. Even the Germans themselves. Almost as a matter of course, from war clouds’ first dim gathering, politicians ignore evil and historians do the same. I find myself haunted more and more by evil’s increasing apparitions. They are so absolute, so total, so everlastingly resonant. So overwhelmingly suffocating. So impossible to overlook, and yet so totally ignored.

  I learn something more about evil every day. I have been reading a most instructive volume by Michael H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler. Did you know that Josef Mengele was born with wide spaces, gaps, from teeth missing on each side between his upper incisors, yes, missing on both sides? His own research had determined that such irregularities were hereditary. This knowledge disturbed him greatly and guided his intense study of anthropology. To be able to research hereditary malfunctions in an unrestricted fashion on humans as was now provided to him in various camps was utopia. Auschwitz, his final posting, permitted research and experimentation on human bodies with no concern for life or death. He could now add to his field of interest a growing obsession with pain. Was the administration of or the receiving of pain in any way also an inherited characteristic? Such investigations soon combined into his own pathological predilection for cruelty. To discover what inside of him might exist in others motivated him to punish those others in retribution, his paybacks as it were, for his unwanted physical and genetic inheritance. This, of course, is the genesis of sadomasochism. Mengele’s thinking, complicated and confused, was beginning to follow insights formulated by Freud. Germany was already infected by many new unconventional ideas, not only from Freud. German medicine would certainly never be the same, or trusted in the way it was. It will be estimated that as many as 400,000 persons of both sexes were sterilized, most of them involuntarily, between 1933 and 1945. And, of course, that some six million Jews should be exterminated under the supervision of an evil monster in retribution for his absent bicuspids is as historically unforgivable as the twisted contributions that IBM and Hollerith provided, which allowed so many people, Jews, gays, and other unwanteds, to be located so they could be murdered.

  I wish you were all on board with me in framing our whole history and discussions in terms of evil. Why is this a leap for you? Is your gay world so timorous of admitting that you are actually hated?

  FRED RESPONDS

  There comes a time in the middle of the night when one awakens from a troubled sleep and wonders if one has not begun to go slowly crazy. You are all correct about my infinitesimally drip-by-drip slow extenuation of this. I cannot seem to let go of every grain of detail, for each at some moment seems so important that I must scoop it up and slither it into my own voluminous vomit-out. The world must know everything! I suppose many journeys can be like this: midway, or even partway, the most relaxed of tourists (and I know I’m hardly that) can punish himself for the such-and-such signpost missed along the route. “How could you have spent so much time and energy and money coming this far,” he says to himself, “and be so stupid in not including that, of not stopping off to go face to face with that, of missing that turn.” That is how I feel. I think you’re each correct, in what you’ve called me on.

  If this were an ordinary life I’m attempting to lead, I’d commit myself to a shrink’s care, if only to start tranquilizing my growing despair. I’m grateful for every single word each of you has said to me, and to each other. I can offer an apology (for evidently disappointing
you), but for the life of me I don’t know for what. It is my life, too, that this plague and this history is all about. I am trying, as it were, to shit it out as best as any constipated little boy all clogged up can do in his rush not to do it in his pants before he gets home from school to … what? An empty household with no arms to hold him, but at least with a toilet to embrace his innards as he squeezes them out bit by bit.

  I think, at this juncture, we must each go along our increasingly less merry way. I can see that each of you is now firmly embedded (and emboldened!) in the same search that I am. Good! For the hovering special-delivery man standing in the doorway, I sign acknowledging receipt of your package of disappointments in me, and sign off, and may we all meet somewhere over the rainbow.

  In other words, you tell your history, and I’ll tell mine.

  In love and gratitude, Fred

  OF COURSE BORIS GREETING CAN SPEAK

  Of course my pal Senator Vurd has not made his fearful reputation by relying upon facts. Thus it is “known with certainty” by Senator Vurd and his “confidential sources,” inside first the Tally Office and then the Office of Unnatural Acts, that Greeting is suddenly making a fortune from the sale of its ampules, marketed under the trade name Dridgies, to the homosexual population. Senator Vurd knows “for sure, for goldang sure” that an awful lot of the single men living in Washington are also beginning to stick Dridgies up their noses just before they reach for heaven as they climax during sex. He’s even tried it himself once, maybe twice.

  In his autobiography that of course no one’s ever read, Clarence Meekly says that he watched as the only love of his life was massacred and immolated. And of course he vowed that the world would pay a price for his great loss. This is the part of our company lore that of course I delight in telling at our retreats and sales conferences. I delight in owning a company that can claim its very own massacres.