Remembering Frederick Charles Ferdinand Weiss—July 31, 1885 to March 1, 1968)

Frederick Charles Ferdinand Weiss is one of the more elusive figures of the mid-20th-century American Right. The smudgy snapshot I’ve scanned here, and duotoned in an attempt to make it presentable, seems to be the only portrait available. That may be symbolic.

Sixty or more years ago, Fred sometimes popped up in Drew Pearson’s political-gossip columns, usually named alongside H. Keith Thompson and “Ulick Varange” (alias Francis Yockey or Frank Healy), in a purported triumvirate of intellectuals and activists affiliated with the new Socialist Reich Party in West Germany in the early 1950s. “Such a flagrant pro-Nazi party” was the SRP, Pearson tells us, “that it was outlawed by the West German government.” [1] Farther down in this March 1954 column, Pearson adds:

Of the three pro-Nazi agents in this country, the best known is Weiss, who masterminds the National Renaissance Party, a group of fanatical anti-Semites with headquarters in Yorkville, N.Y. Weiss is one of [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy’s most ardent admirers, yet at the same time is collaborating with the Communists. He spouts the Communist line on foreign policy, particularly against the European Defense Community, and his fanatical band is known to be infiltrated with Reds.

But after getting our attention with this crazy Nazi-Red-McCarthy outfit on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Pearson doesn’t bother to develop the theme. He leaves us hanging and tells us the FBI are really interested in Yockey, who’s not in evidence right now.

In reality Pearson has nothing more to tell, and anyway there are alternative tellings of the National Renaissance Party (NRP) saga. About forty years ago I came across a skinny black-and-white pamphlet by one Joseph Kamp, of New York City and West Palm Beach, FL. It was called The “Bigots” Behind the Swastika Spree, and it was evidently intended as a refutation of Drew Pearson’s remarks.[2] It told the story of how the NRP was actually founded and led by a most pathetic young man named James Madole. Madole came from Upstate but now lived with his mother in Yorkville, where he put out a newsletter and held meetings and street demonstrations with his ragtag followers. To me, it all sounded rather like the Dead End Kids, with knobs on.

Fred Weiss was nowhere in this telling, so far as I recall. Joe Kamp wanted to tell us that this whole National Renaissance Party thing was a fraud, a front, secretly funded and manipulated by a black-ops agent of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. I don’t have that pamphlet anymore, and don’t know recall whether this agent was named. But he was evidently one Sanford H. (“Sandy”) Griffith. Sandy Griffith passed money on to the NRP and, according to Joe Kamp, encouraged the kids to draw swastikas on buildings and play at being “Nazis.”

H. Keith Thompson told a similar story about Sandy Griffith in his four-part series in Lyle Stuart’s Exposé magazine around the same time, “I Am an American Fascist.” [3] He tells of how he had been approached by a self-described journalist calling himself Al Sheffer, who wanted to do a “friendly” newspaper article about one of Thompson’s new lobbying organizations, The American Committee for the Advancement of Western Culture.

This newspaper article, headlined “Anglo-Saxon Culture Boosted by Jerseyan,” eventually appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger (March 22, 1953), under the byline of Richard G. Shafer—rather than Al Sheffer—who was an actual staff journalist at the Star-Ledger. Richard G. Shafer had nothing to do with the piece, but he lent out his byline. When H. Keith Thompson wrote about this in Exposé  in 1954, he implied that Sheffer/Shafer alias “Sandy Griffith” was actually an ADL operative and provocateur.

But I digress, and now we’re all confused and deep in the weeds. This selfsame Sandy Griffith, suspected of being a mole or ADL operative, was actually a serious person with a public history. He was a middle-aged, once-esteemed foreign correspondent, like Vincent Sheean or John Gunther; who later became a recruit for William “Intrepid” Stephenson’s British Security Coordination in Rockefeller Center in the early 1940s; and then probably Bill Donovan’s OSS in offices down the hall. Sandy Griffith was neither Jewish nor a random gumshoe. Griffith was a scholar, journalist and a high-level spy who wanted to keep his hand in long after the war.

I will deal with that at a later date. In the meantime—for your pleasure—check out some clips from H. Keith’s Thompson’s 1954 Exposé series:

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Despite his relative obscurity, Frederick C. F. Weiss was in many ways a more accomplished gentleman than his colleagues F. P. Yockey and H. K. Thompson. This is partly because because he was born in 1885 and thus was 30-40 years older than they were. German-born, he’d been an inventor and metallurgical engineer in America before the First War. When he went back to Germany in 1914 he was an artillery officer. [4]

Weiss came back to America in 1930, if my records are correct. By the 1940s, 50s, 60s, he was occupying himself with a comfortable old man’s avocations: buying and selling real estate (mainly in Westchester County and Orange County, NY), promoting political causes, reading newspapers, and writing pamphlets, some of which are rather grandiose-sounding (Quo Vadis, America?, Will They Bury Us?, Without Ullstein, No Einstein; Hang on and Pray). [5] Some of the Yockey essay-pamphlets of the era, in particular The World in Flames, and What Is Behind the Hanging of the Eleven Jews in Prague? (both 1952, reprinted in a Counter-Currents collection) have always struck me as having a touch of hysteria behind them. Where does Yockey end and Weiss begin?

Francis Parker Yockey supposedly hid out in Weiss’s suburban and country houses when visiting the New York area during the 1950s. And it’s certainly probable that he helped Weiss edit some of those Le Blanc Publications pamphlets. Somewhere or other H. Keith Thompson remarked that Weiss could not write clearly and convincingly, and Yockey’s hand is obvious in much of the better output. [6] But I until recently I doubted that Yockey was the main author of any of them. At best Yockey cleaned them up.

What changed my mind was reading, or re-reading such things as Yockey’s introduction to the German edition of The Enemy of Europe, which Yockey signed Frederick C. F. Weiss (included, in English, in the 2022 edition from Counter-Currents), but to my mind is purely Yockey. And then there’s Hang on and Pray, Weiss’s jokey mid-1950s takedown of Arnold Toynbee’s interminable and convoluted A Study of History, but which seems to be often largely Yockey in phraseology. I won’t go into that now, but will in a later essay.

Furthermore, there are promotional blurbs from Le Blanc Publications that seem to have no Yockey in them at all. Their humorous come-on is more like that of Tiffany Thayer’s Fortean Society magazines of the 1940s and 50s. Wry, comical, sometimes strained: a kind of knock-down bang-zoom mockery of conventional belief.

Nihilistic? Yes, if you wish.

Notes

[1] Drew Pearson, “Washington Merry-Go-Round, March 31, 1954. The saga of the SRP is the background to Yockey’s The Enemy of Europe, and is discussed in the Foreword and Introduction to the Counter-Currents edition published in 2022.

[2] Joseph P. Kamp, The “Bigots” Behind the Swastika Spree. New York, 1960. When Francis P. Yockey was arrested in San Francisco, Drew Pearson’s column quoted his 1954 column about Thompson, Yockey, Weiss, and the National Renaissance Party. Kamp’s pamphlet presumably was a rebuttal to that.

[3] H. Keith Thompson, “I Am an American Fascist,” Exposé, Sept.-Dec. 1954. At Internet Archive here.

[4] This is according to a letter his widow Marie hand-wrote J. Edgar Hoover after Fred died in 1968. From FBI files, per FOIA.

[5] FBI informants’ notes from the 1950s might incline one to suspect Weiss was some kind of mole or provocateur, not an awful lot different from Sandy Griffith. Some samples from the files:

[INFORMANT REDACTED] stated in December 1953 that WEISS is a German alien who resides at a farm in Middletown, New York. He stated that WEISS is a senile man who loves to write but he is unable to get anyone to publish his writings. Because of this, WEISS has constantly donated money to MADOLE as MADOLE would print anything and everything which Weiss prepared in the “National Renaissance Bulletin.”

[INFORMANT REDACTED] advised on December 3, 1956, that FREDERICK WEISS had recently printed an article entitled, “Who Cares?” which is anti-Semitic, anti-alien, and anti-Negro.

[INFORMANT REDACTED] advised that he has known Mr. and Mrs. CHARLES FREDERICK WEISS [sic], both of Mt. Hope, Middletown, New York, since 1945 and he advised that they owned and operated the Le Blanc Publications of the above address. He advised that this press has published many phamphlets [sic] which he considers un-American … He stated that in his discussions with them, he has learned that they are both active in the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League.

[INFORMANT REDACTED] advised on March 16, 1958, that JAMES H. MADOLE operates the NRP and was formerly associated with FREDERICK WEISS in this party. Informant stated that the above pair had a falling out about three years ago when MADOLE charged that information regarding the NRP he had given WEISS for safekeeping appeared in the publication entitled “Cross-Currents,” published by the Anti-Defamation League.

[6] H. K. Thompson found Weiss and wife rather repellent, and thought their country house in Middletown, NY filthy and disgusting. H. K. also had a low regard for the Weiss literary expression in English. (Martin A. Lee, The Beast Awakens, 1997.)

TIME’s supercilious treatment of Kaufman’s Germany Must Perish! in 1941.

Reviewer starts out supposing it’s satire, like Jonathan Swift’s. But then sees it isn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Personality and Power:
Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe

New York: Penguin Press, 2022

Margot Metroland

This book caught my eye when it came out a few months ago because its format reminded me of Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right, which I reviewed here some seasons back. That is to say, a collection of short critical biographies of a dozen or so worthies, assembled together on a common theme. In the case of Personality and Power, most of the worthies are rather more famous than the serried ranks assembled in Standardbearers. They are the 20th century statesmen (including one woman), mainly European (including British), who made a striking difference in the cohesion and political direction of their countries.

These include Charles De Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Francisco Franco, Helmut Kohl, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Margaret Thatcher and others. As this sample suggests, Kershaw is not making any value judgment. His subjects made the cut if they were a) prominent government leaders, b) navigated one or more severe crisis while in office, and c) set their country on a new path, with a new and different national self-regard. You can be a president, a prime minister, or a dictator; lead a democracy or a totalitarian satrapy; you can be a Builder or a Destroyer; just so long as you were head of a government and made a difference.

Kershaw is generally very fair and insightful in these analytical biographies. He considers Josef Broz “Tito” a thug but gives him his due as a consummate opportunist able to navigate the rapids of the Cold War years, thereby making himself very popular in the West while still polishing his Communist credentials. Helmut Kohl he regards as a wayward political hack who had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time. Francisco Franco he admires for his close-mouthed, steely determination, and refusal to be challenged or countermanded by rivals and associates. There’s a wonderful description of how he would hold day-long conferences with ministers and subordinates, subduing them by refusing to let them answer the call of nature. “Franco’s bladder control was extraordinary; until December 1968 he never paused the meetings to go to the toilet.” This headstrong, I-will-not-be-crossed personality we also find in Margaret Thatcher, Charles De Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer (though without the proscription on lavatory breaks).

The author falls down in his analyses of the two most popular subjects of 20th century history, Messrs. Churchill and Hitler. We get the worshipful praise and steadfast apologias for the first—it’s like something out of Martin Gilbert or the preposterous Churchill stans of Hillsdale College. And then we are fed rote and unnuanced Schrecklichkeit in consideration of the second. (Hitler’s face “has come to represent the face of political evil.”) Really now, a veteran historical writer and Hitler biographer like Kershaw should realize that titanic figures, whether you love ’em or hate ’em, are best painted in shades of grey. Among other things, it makes the story more interesting.

The book is unfortunately structured like a pineapple upside-down cake, with all the fruity goodness baked in at the bottom—that is to say, in the long plenary “Conclusion: History Makers — in Their Time.” So what you want to do here is turn the cake over, and begin from that end: you may read the biographies afterwards, or refer to them now and again, as though they were appendices, as you work your way through the tasty Conclusion. It would have been better if Kershaw had combined this Conclusion with his Introduction, which touches on some of the same subjects without going into them in depth.

Class equilibrium?

As a starting point, Kershaw weighs Karl Marx’s theory of “class equilibrium,” which supposedly explained why a “nonentity” and “buffoon” like Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was able to ascend to power in mid-nineteenth century France. [1] By “class equilibrium,” Marx/Kershaw mean a political situation where there was no clear ascendancy to power, no “bourgeois capitalists” in total control, no powerful aristocracy, no Deep State, no dictatorship of the proletariat. I’d say that’s pretty much the story of most of Western Europe for the past century or two, so we shouldn’t be surprised that none of Kershaw’s subjects fit the theory. Nevertheless he litmus-tests them one-by-one and finds that not only are they contra Marx, the circumstances that brought them to power were quite different from “class equilibrium” and much easier to explain. They possessed a dominating personality and they were standing in the right place during a political upheaval or vast shift in public sentiment. And they proved themselves and steered their nation’s destiny through some major early crisis. That’s pretty much the commonality here.

As a digression, I’ll say that Kershaw’s challenge to Marx’s purported theory is really shooting fish in a barrel. Does any knowledgeable person today regard Louis Napoleon Bonaparte the way Marx did? A clown, a bottle-imp who strived but failed to achieve the gloire of his illustrious uncle? I doubt it. As president and emperor, Napoleon III served a good deal longer than his uncle did as consul and emperor (22 years vs. 14+) and did so without tearing Europe apart. When he fell from power, it was entirely because of his good intentions: he lifted censorship of the press in 1869, whereupon the irresponsible journo firebrands and their Assembly friends immediately commenced sword-rattling against Prussia…and we know where that led. By any measure Napoleon III was one of the most, if not the most, able and brave statesman of his time. Marx didn’t like him simply because this Bonaparte didn’t fit neatly into his timeline of historical necessity.

Helmut Kohl

Anyway, being the right figure at the right time, and sometimes a stubborn cuss, was what allowed someone like Helmut Kohl to make the cut in the Kershaw schema. Germany needed a unifier 1989-90, and here was this grinning, oversize paterfamilias, with no serious political enemies, ready to welcome the tatty, broken-down, polluted DDR into the mighty economy of the Federal Republic. Kohl’s predecessor Helmut Schmidt, an economist by training, might have done a better job of integrating the economies, instead of simply giving the store away as Kohl was prone to, but Schmidt’s political career by then was kaput. At one point in 1990 Chancellor Kohl was going to merge the East German Mark with the Deutschmark at a 1:1 parity, although the true exchange rate (per Kershaw, quoting a Kohl biographer) was 1:8 or even 1:9! Eventually the Bundesbank talked him down to a 1:2 exchange for most currency, with a 1:1 for some savings and pensions. But even the 1:2 rate proved destabilizing to the already tottering East German economy. Wages and salaries immediately rocketed skyward, without being offset by new revenue from outside. “As moribund industries collapsed, unemployment soared.” The outside world wasn’t suddenly rushing in to buy Trabants simply because the Berlin Wall came down. Economic malaise inevitably spread to Germany as a whole, as it was the old West Germany that paid most of the cost of unification. Perhaps this was inevitable; anyway the restructuring depressed the economy for most of the 1990s.

A happier instance of headstrong insistence had come early in the Kohl chancellorship, in May 1985. That was the famous incident when Helmut Kohl took Ronald Reagan to visit a military cemetery in Bitburg. Reagan was then doing the rounds of 40-year VE-Day commemorations in Europe. Since Kohl had been excluded from the Normandy events the previous year, it was thought fitting and proper for the President to drop by a German military cemetery, and say a word or two about amity and peace.

Immediately an “international” (ahem) hue and cry was raised when it was revealed that adjacent to the Wehrmacht cemetery was a plot with the remains of 47 Waffen SS men. Reagan and Kohl were urged to call off the event. Kohl stood his ground and, backed up by White House support (Pat Buchanan, mostly), the President went off to Bitburg, for a brief and quiet ceremony. The whole affair looks comic in hindsight now [2] but in Germany it raised the stature of Chancellor Kohl immensely. Put it in context: a couple of years earlier, the new chancellor had permitted the placement of Pershing II missiles on German soil, and now the American President returned the favor by showing solidarity with the Germans and their war dead

Margaret Thatcher

The Milk-Snatcher: Ian Kershaw likes her very much. There’s an Alan Clark level of fawning admiration. If she weren’t the only woman here, she’d be the quintessential example of leadership, per Kershaw standards. “Often feminine but never a feminist,” and opposed to tokenism, Thatcher was an outlier in more ways than one.

She came to power because she was pretty much the last man left standing. As you may recall, Edward Heath lost the premiership in March 1974 in the wake of miner strikes, three-day-day workweeks, and severe power (i.e., utility) cutbacks, problems that were exacerbated by OPEC’s cut in fuel exports. Any government would have been tossed out after that. Harold Wilson came in with a slight plurality and a few months later he nearly got tossed out as well. Somehow Labour staggered on for a few years more, usually with a razor-thin majority or coalition government. In 1976 Wilson resigned, perhaps for health reasons, perhaps not [3], to be succeeded by onetime chancellor James Callaghan. Meantime Heath had been voted out as Conservative party leader. When an election finally needed to be called in 1979, any head of the Conservatives would have ended up as prime minister, and by this point that leader happened to be Milk-Snatcher Thatcher.

In hindsight Thatcher’s initiatives, whether in the Heath government or her own, were so terribly commonsensical that it’s astonishing they caused a fuss in the 1970s-80s. Do 11-year-olds need free milk at school? Is there something weird about allowing council-house residents to buy and own their homes? Is it really wild and crazy to de-nationalize Rolls-Royce or British Telecom? But these were portrayed as radical ideas at the time.

Kershaw considers the Falklands War in the spring of 1982 to be the turning point in Mrs. Thatcher’s success as PM. It may be true that her post-Falklands approval rating had doubled (to 51%), and it certainly was a time of peak British glory after the sooty, bedraggled, unemployed 1970s. But when an election was called in 1983 and Thatcher’s Conservatives won again, and with a great gain in seats (though not popular vote), it was patently obvious that Labour didn’t stand much of a chance. Mrs. Thatcher would probably have won in any case. The crises that tempered her between taking office in 1979 and the Falklands War were continual, and if times were difficult at least the government didn’t seem as ineffectual as in the 1970s.

And then there was the new Labour party leader, an old socialist journalist named Michael Foot—nicknamed Worzel Gummidge by Private Eye, after a musical scarecrow, because of his unkempt appearance. While Foot was a worthy man in many ways (an old associate of Orwell’s, after all), he did not command respect. Post-election, Labour dumped him for Neil Kinnock, whose poor-mouth speech was famously plagiarized by Joe Biden, and who went on to lose to Mrs. Thatcher in 1987 in a time of greatly rising prosperity. Meantime the PM was operating from a position of strength, successfully settling the miners’ strike in 1985, leaving us a patch of history that is mainly remembered in the context of film scripts (Brassed Off, Billy Elliott).

Mikhail Gorbachev

Even more crumbly and bedraggled than Great Britain in the 1970s and 80s was that other sometime superpower, the Soviet Union. Kershaw offers us the charming insight that Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded in his transformation of the USSR because he possessed “unquenchable self-confidence: and “naive optimism,” traits sorely missing in his immediate predecessors: thuggish nonentity Konstantin Chernenko, and the KGB’s career hood Yuri Andropov, memorable for welcoming Soviet tanks into Budapest in 1956 and also sending them into Prague in 1968. Gorbachev on the other hand is memorable for having a port-wine birthmark on his forehead, for being an amiable negotiator and apparent friend to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, for pronouncing a new policy of Glasnost, or government transparency, and finally for bringing the Cold War to an end with a soft landing. Russian nationalists may view his legacy very dubiously: in 1980 the USSR was not only a superpower, it was a leader in science and technology. Twenty years later it was a frail assemblage of Eastern European and Asiatic “republics” and breakaway provinces, some of which are continuing to break away.

Konrad Adenauer

No statesman is without a blemish, but Konrad Adenauer may come closest in the Kershaw lineup. What a very old West German Chancellor he was, 73 when first elected (1949) and 87 when he resigned, with yet another four years to live. A conservative Catholic Rhinelander, he became lord mayor of Cologne in 1917—youngest Oberbürgermeister in the state of Prussia—and remained such until deposed at the start of the Nazi era. Thereafter he and his large family lived in penury for some years,  subsisting on handouts from friends until he finally was granted his pension in 1937 (parts of the German bureaucracy had managed to remain honorably intact). For a while he took refuge in a monastery. Postwar he emerged as one of the few politicians who had never been a Socialist, a Communist, a Nazi, or an anti-Hitler plotter. He helped found the CDU (Christian Democratic Union party) immediately after the war, and declared he intended to become Federal Chancellor. Writes Kershaw,

He had a high level of self-discipline and — even in advanced old age — a Stakhanovite capacity for hard work. He would prove unshakeably loyal to his colleagues and advisers. Neither in appearance nor in public speaking did he exude natural charisma. He instinctively conveyed authority, however…

The key plot point in Adenauer’s early career as Federal Chancellor came in 1952. Stalin was making overtures to the new Federal Republic (BRD), proposing a Four-Power Conference to “reunite” Germany into a neutral state with “free activity of democratic parties and organizations.” Reunite, that is, according to the 1945 borders; no East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania.

Stalin’s initiative was a plain attempt to wean the Federal Republic away from the embrace of the western Allies. Smelling danger, Adenauer’s negative reaction was unhesitating…

Superficially, what Stalin was offering was far from unattractive… There were powerful voices [in the West] at least in favour of exploring the possibilities… Adenauer authorized a press communique however that was strongly negative in tone, given the threat Stalin’s initiative posed … and the certain and permanent loss of the eastern provinces. Opinion surveys showed that his stance enjoyed much support with the public.

Comment: this episode is the background to F. P. Yockey’s The Enemy of Europe (1953) a long propaganda tract of the period, aimed mainly at West Germans, and cleverly echoing both pro-Soviet and nationalist-Right agitation of the time. Yockey calls out the anti-nationalist politicians who allied themselves with the USA and the Allied High Commission, referring to them as the “Michel element,” Michel being an old German idiom for cowardly dunderhead, here used with traitorous overtones. Yockey doesn’t name any politicians, but the main suspect would have to be Chancellor Adenauer. Though in reality Adenauer helped issue a general amnesty for most of the former Nazi Party members, including full reinstatement with pension rights for civil servants and career soldiers. His regard for nationalist feeling is one reason why he was elected for four terms.

In those early years of the Federal Republic, opinion polls showed that half the population thought National Socialism was a good idea, that the best era in twentieth century Germany was 1933-1939, and that the Führer had done much more for the country than Herr Adenauer. But opinion polls swung around as the Adenauer years flew by. By the time he finally resigned in 1963, age 87, he was rated the greatest German ever, even greater than Bismarck.

Much of this was due to the economic miracle, the Wirtschaftwunder, of the 1950s. Kershaw is careful to point out that the this boom was not directed by Adenauer but by his finance minister and successor Ludwig Erhard, who used the power of the state to support “a burgeoning liberal market economy linked to principles of social welfare.” But another, major reason for the popularity of both Adenauer and Erhard was that the Iron Curtain ran down the middle of Germany. Over on the other side was a glaring example of a system that was abhorrent to most Germans.

Kershaw bias

Kershaw has a decided political bias, of the moderate-Left stripe. Indications are that this is simply because his political education sort of ended in the 1990s, ergo he spouts  commonplace verities from that time. At one point he mentions that when Franco won the Spanish Civil War he had some difficulty forming a consensus because he had no support in the “working class.” No support in the working class—truly? Well, who exactly was fighting on the winning side? Were they all upper bourgeoisie, latifundian grandées, bishops of Burgos and Seville?

What Kershaw really means is that there weren’t any Popular Front-style Left-wing cadres in Franco’s camp. But how could there have been? Anyway this is a very strange and dangerous outlook to have, or at least an unfortunately lazy slip of tongue and pen.

Trying to stay topical, Kershaw makes a late (2019?) interpolation to his manuscript:

Having recently experienced how, out of the blue, the coronavirus pandemic could upturn societies across the globe, we need a special reminder of the impersonal determinants of historical change (though its harmful impact could be significantly worsened by the role of individual leadership, such as that of Trump or the Brazilian president Jair Bolnosaro).

And then, later on:

Democracy is in some ways on the retreat. Donald Trump’s four years as President of the USA showed alarmingly how personality could challenge (and even warp) the structures of the world’s foremost democracy. The American constitution only just survived the battering it took from Trump, and its much-vaunted checks and balances proved to be weaker than had been presumed. The pseudo-monarchical executive powers of the President are, as Trump showed, so extensive that, in the wrong hands, they can endanger democracy itself. The damage Trump’s narcissistic personality and autocratic style of leadership inflicted on the USA, and on democracy in other parts of the world, cannot yet be fully assessed. He came to power on the promise of upholding America’s strength. But he has left the USA looking globally weaker as it contends with forces of authoritarianism, especially though not solely in China.

There are no words. This incoherent rant completely undoes Kershaw’s reasonable analysis elsewhere in the book, as he reveals himself as just one more ignorant foreigner who can’t find Idaho on a map. His broad implication—that President Trump was more radical and alarming than immediate predecessors Obama, Bush the Younger, and Clinton—is laughable. So Donald Trump has a “narcissistic personality and autocratic style of leadership”? More narcissistic than, say, GWB, LBJ, FDR? Where do you see this, Prof. Kershaw? More narcissistic than, say, your big hero Winston Spencer Churchill? Is not a domineering, self-aggrandizing style key to effective leadership, for good or ill, according to the theories you propound here in your little book?

Ian Kershaw enjoys sausage, he likes to eat it, he likes to critique it. He just can’t bear to see sausage being made.

 

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Three years ago I did a semi-humorous, shaggy-dog piece about Pinocchio and the Fascisti (“Pinocchio: The Face of Fascism“). Its jumping-off point was talking about several Pinocchio films in the works, particularly a long-awaited stop-motion animation feature directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson. The film was then scheduled for release on Netflix “next year” (i.e., 2021) and was said to be very dark in theme. This darkness, we were told, lay mostly in its being set in Fascist Italy. There would be bombing and violence and cameos of Benito Mussolini.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (for such is its full name) finally dropped in December 2022. Like the curate’s egg, it’s excellent in parts. It is truly dark in the sense that most scenes are in twilight or have an available-light look. Gustafson’s stop-motion is superb, and the set design is often breathtaking. The script is imaginative and original, though often cluttered with puzzling elements and subplots. There are two very well done scenes of bombers flying overhead, seen from below in silhouette, but with the falling bombs themselves drawn in detailed closeup; followed by extended scenes of destruction and carnage. These seem to be inspired by old newsreels of the London blitz, though a closer model may be the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

Yet this is ostensibly Italy in the 1930s or even 1920s, and you have to ask why the bombing? I’ve seen it said that the first instance actually depicts Austro-Hungarian bombers in the Great War; looking this up, I find there were in fact some bombing missions, mainly around Venice. But this scene still seems a stretch, as the narrator tells us it was all an accident. I suppose these bombing scenes were beautiful in storyboard and, once filmed, too gorgeous to cut, however confusing and unlikely. All that glorious fire and destruction musn’t go to waste.

Much of the script is like this. We get brilliant little set-pieces that are there for show, not for continuity.

Unlike the 1940 Disney version, which kept most of the basic storyline of the 1883 Carlo Collodi book, this Pinocchio isn’t really based on the original source. No, it’s rather more like a vaguely remembered notion of the 1940 Disney film, passed through a game of Telephone. We start with a wooden puppet who is often naughty, and he has a woodcarver “father,” Geppetto, and they get separated but finally discover each other inside a giant fish. There’s an island where bad boys go and get punished. There is also a blue fairy who transforms Pinocchio into a “real boy” at the end. And then you have a loquacious, didactic cricket.

And those are the basic elements that remain in this Pinocchio script. They got strung together here, and then shaped and stuffed into a new story with all kinds of novel plot devices. To help hold it all together, we have a narrator in Mr. Sebastian J. Cricket, a literary insect who speaks with the voice of Ewan McGregor and sometimes sings, though he looks nothing like Jiminy. He is dark blue and grotesquely detailed, like a giant ant in a 1950s sci-fi flick. The blue fairy (Tilda Swinton) is even weirder, a shape-shifting “wood sprite” who appears variously as a lizard-like alien or sphinx-like blue dragon.

The script’s most extensive invention comes at the beginning, in a long backstory of how and why Pinocchio, the puppet, came to be. Now, in the book he begins as a talking log, while in the Disney version he’s a cute toy created by a merry Tyrolean craftsman who specializes in cuckoo clocks. In the del Toro film, the puppet is created as a replacement for Carlo, Geppetto’s beloved son who got killed when bombers dropped their payload on the local church, while little Carlo was standing inside, in rapt contemplation of the crucifix that Geppetto had built. Years later, in a drunken rage, Geppetto chops down the memorial tree by Carlo’s grave and makes it into an ungainly wooden puppet—you know, the kind you make when you’re drunk.

The religious aspect is another new embellishment. There are no churches or pietistic allusions in the book. It’s set in a secular, middle-class post-Risorgimento Italy without any reference to popes or kings or nobles. But here in the del Toro film we have a grand church edifice that figures large in the first act. It is bombed and destroyed, yet rises again. Somehow Geppetto’s giant crucifix survived the bombs and still hangs above the altar. Unfortunately Geppetto’s grief and drunkenness have kept him from finishing the painting of this masterwork. The unfinished crucifix is a sore point with the grumpy, nagging, unsympathetic pastor, a recurring character in the first half of the movie. Another point of contention is the unruly and mischievous Pinocchio, who misbehaves in church. The priest comes by one day with the local Fascist official (“Podesta”) to browbeat Geppetto for this and other things.

I suppose the screenwriters’ rationale for adding all the church business was, “Hey this is Italy. They have some fine old churches in Italy, don’t they? So let’s put one in as realistic detail. And then we can add a mean priest too, and imply he’s pro-Fascist.” Likewise the very pretty set of Geppetto’s mountaintop town is basically a tourist’s idea of a medieval city in Tuscany or Umbria. Not exactly wellsprings of Fascism, which was rooted mainly in the north, places like Milan and Mussolini’s native Romagna.

The “Fascist” part of the story really begins when Pinocchio goes on tour with a puppet show. This plot arc is very nimble, very satirical. For the last stop on the tour, the show’s impresario, “Count Volpe,” is staging a special production for his “good friend” Il Duce. Volpe and his company sail to Catania (Sicily), and watch the crowds cheer when Mussolini makes his appearance, driven up in an impossibly long red parade-car while the soundtrack cues up “Giovinezza, Giovinezza.”

I must say, this is a very squat, hideously caricatured Duce; but funny. Circa 1936, I suppose, given that a newspaper headline has shown him announcing We Win the War! Mussolini salutes the crowd and goes straight to the puppet theater. “I like-a puppets,” he tells the fawning puppet-master Volpe.

Today’s show is supposed to be a special command performance for Il Duce. However, Pinocchio has recently learned that the greedy, foxy Volpe is stealing all his earnings instead of sending them home to Geppetto. So in revenge he turns the performance into a scatalogical burlesque of the “Douce” (as Pinocchio calls him). He dances with a turd-puppet and sings about how he, Mussolini, is full of urine, caca, baby poop.

Mussolini, munching popcorn in the audience, says, “These puppets, I do not-a like,” and orders his bodyguard to shoot Pinocchio. Which the bodyguard does, but being a wooden puppet Pinnochio cannot die. As a result of this, he is recruited into the Italian army.

This unlikely plot twist is the substitute for the famous “donkey transformation” in the original tale. Instead of traveling in a coach-and-four to Toyland (Pleasure Island in the Disney film), Pinocchio and his friend Candlewick get locked in the back of a military van and driven to an “elite” Fascist military academy, the inside of which looks rather like an avant-garde rock-climbing gym. Instead of becoming donkeys (as naughty boys did in the original) the boys are herein being transformed into soldiers ready to give their lives for the Fatherland.

Pinocchio’s friend Candlewick is accused of being a weakling by his martinet father. The father hands his son an automatic pistol and tells him to “Shoot the puppet!” (An allusion to The Conformist, perhaps?) This crisis is quickly resolved, deus ex machina style, when enemy bombers suddenly appear overhead and bomb the school to smithereens. This second bombing scene is even more confusing than the first. Who is the enemy? Who was bombing Italy in the mid-1930s? I’ve read reviews that claim this is really supposed to be WWII, but that doesn’t work for a number of reasons I will forgo enumerating.

I’m obviously thinking too hard about this stuff. I understand the film is not attempting historical verisimilitude. I just wonder why certain new elements are invented and emphasized, while much of the original story and its cultural context is deprecated. Recently I viewed the 1940 Disney version, which I mistakenly believed I had seen many years ago, though it turns out I hadn’t. And truly, it is quite as disjointed as this one, a concatenation of beautifully done set-pieces, even though it hews pretty closely to the (extremely uneven) original book. What it doesn’t do is treat the Collodi story as a sort of Mr. Potato Head text, where anything’s permissible so long as you’ve got a puppet in there called Pinocchio.

The promotional videos and press releases for this film keep reminding us of its renowned voice-artist cast. A particularly notable name is Cate Blanchett, who has done a couple of interviews for the film, and also appears in an accompanying Netflix documentary in which cast and crew describe the film’s impossibly protracted development and production. As it turns out, Cate “plays” a manic monkey that mainly hisses and giggles. You wouldn’t recognize her in a million years.

 

 

 

Hannes Wessels

PK van der Byl, African Statesman

Johannesburg: 30º South Publishers, 2010

 

Margot Metroland

If you need a useful and practical hero in the field of race politics and statecraft, you might take a good look at a colorful and headstrong eccentric named Pieter Kenyon Fleming-Voltelyn van der Byl (1923-1999).

When it comes to the story of independent Rhodesia, most people only remember Prime Minister Ian Douglas Smith. But statesman-soldier PK (as he was always known) was the truly steadfast and remarkable figure in that saga. Without him, Rhodesia might well  have folded its tent in four years, instead of surviving for a battered and beleaguered fourteen. Had there been a hundred PK’s, Rhodesia might well have gone on forever.

Born into one of the oldest Cape Dutch families in South Africa, PK served in the Second World War (British Army, 7th Hussars, in Italy and Austria) and then read law at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After which he became, of all things, a tobacco planter in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia. Gradually he entered politics, becoming active in the new pro-white-rule Rhodesian Front party. In 1965 Harold Wilson’s Labour government announced their intent to turn Rhodesia into yet another disastrous black-run satrapy, and never mind the recent examples of Gold Coast (Ghana), the Belgian Congo, Kenya, and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). PK was second to none in his insistence that Rhodesia cut its ties to Britain and go its own way.

But first, in September, Ian Smith went to London to plead with Harold Wilson. Wilson and the government were intransigent. Wilson threatened military force, and 40 Labour MPs were calling for immediate invasion. Nor were many Tory MPs sympathetic. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury got in on the act, demanding that the RAF bomb Salisbury, Rhodesia’s capital.

And that’s how we got to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, or UDI, signed in Salisbury, Rhodesia by Prime Minister Ian Smith and his government on November 11, 1965, PK van der Byl’s 42nd birthday.

For the next 14 years PK remained the most passionate hard-liner in the government. Intimating that Smith was irresolute and maybe too willing to compromise, PK let it be known that he’d eagerly take over if he ever detected “the least whiff of surrender.” Beginning as a lowly deputy minister of information, PK soon became full minister, later was given the ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs. Throughout his tenure he was determined to control the national narrative, imposing firm censorship of anti-UDI newspapers and journalists, and even deported visiting British journalists for negative coverage. Young Max Hastings came to Salisbury to write sneeringly in the Evening Standard that Smith and PK “would have seemed ludicrous figures, had they not possessed the power of life and death over millions of people.” Max got the boot.[1] So did other writers, academics and politicians who came to Rhodesia on a hate mission.

PK loved to visit the forces in the bush (SAS, Rhodesian Light Infantry, Rhodesian African Rifles) and share in their terrorist-hunting. He dressed for the occasion and was a sight to see. A group captain recalls PK’s arrival one day in the Zambezi region (NW Rhodesia):

[H]is arrival…for his helicopter flight to the site was quite an eye-opener because his dress was so appalling. Below his Australian bush hat he wore a pink shirt with bright blue tie, khaki shorts with black belt, short blue socks and ‘vellies’ (veldskoene, lit. bush shoes). His strange dress in the bush was often discussed. I honestly think he did this from time to time for the shock effect. He knew the Zambezi Valley like the back of his hand, having walked it extensively on his hunting expeditions.

When the RLI and SAS got to know him better, PK became very popular with the soldiers. His ridiculous accent appealed to them just as much as his strange dress.He often requested to be taken on patrol so he could “shoot a terrorist” but asked that care be taken not to get him “lawst.”  (pp. 143-144)

Here is some real insight into the PK mystique. Tall and striking to begin with, he cultivated further attention (or authority) through sartorial elegance or oddness. And his drawling accent was from another era entirely, something one might associate with an elderly palace courtier, who pronounces “house” as hice and “girl” as (hard g) gel. An affectation, many people assumed. At Cambridge in the ’40s they called him the Piccadilly Dutchman.[2]

Speaking of which, South African Prime Minister John Vorster couldn’t stand him (“that dreadful man”), and told Ian Smith never to bring PK along when Smith and Vorster met at rugby matches for quasi-unofficial strategy discussions. To Vorster, PK was a traitor to his people, a old-stock Boer who affected a phony British accent and “imperial mannerisms.”

Old Cape Dutch he certainly was, at least on his father’s side, but he was scarcely a Boer. The van der Byls had been Anglicized since the mid-1800s, and sided with the Crown during the Boer Wars. PK’s father “Major Piet,” another soldier-statesman, had been a minister in General Smuts’s cabinet in Pretoria during the 1940s. Moreover, PK’s mother was Scottish, daughter of an Army physician and Lieutenant Colonel. With this sort of pedigree, you can easily see PK shaping up into a cross between Harry Flashman and something out of P. G. Wodehouse’s Drones Club. (PK’s London club was in fact White’s.)

Further to PK’s character, a succinct description is found at the start of PK van der Byl, African Statesman, in the Foreword by longtime friend Lieutenant-Colonel Ron Reid-Daly:

My early impression of PK was…most unfavourable, because at first sight he appeared to have all the characteristics of a chinless Pom. I remember wondering how Ian Smith, a down-to-earth Rhodesian, had seen fit to accept him into his party. ***[B]ut I was soon highly impressed by him. Unlike many of the more pedestrian types in the military and political hierarchy, PK was focused and absolutely determined to do whatever it took to win the war… Vilified in the international press as an unrepentant racist, he was totally committed to the welfare of his black troops.***

In the light of history there is little doubt in my mind that South African Prime Minister John Vorster, in his misguided effort to win favours from African leaders, scuppered Rhodesia’s chance of survival, hastened the collapse of white rule in Africa and altered the course of continental history when he forced Ian Smith to dismiss PK van der Byl as Minister of Defence.  (pp. 6-7)

“Get rid of van der Byl or I’m turning off the tap,” Vorster said in a 1976 phone call to Smith, according to PK. PK remained in the cabinet as foreign minister, but that was hardly more than a title, inasmuch as Rhodesia was an international pariah, maintaining diplomatic relations only with South Africa…which didn’t want to talk to Foreign Minister van der Byl!

In the mid-70s, Marxist hegemony in Africa moved at a galloping pace. A Leftist military coup in Lisbon meant that once-friendly Portugal now broke relations with Rhodesia, and condoned the Soviet-backed black nationalists in Mozambique (on Rhodesia’s east and north) and in Angola. Rhodesia was now nearly encircled by hostile governments—except for South Africa, where John Vorster was playing a “please eat me last” game, hoping to buy time by gradually sacrificing Rhodesia.

There were other, subtler international factors that disadvantaged Rhodesia as the 1970s progressed. Though frozen out of official diplomatic intercourse, the country had maintained useful contacts with senior intelligence in France during the De Gaulle years (enabling exports of Rhodesian agricultural products), but these became less useful with changes of government. Ian Smith nurtured some warm, promising relations with British ministers early in the Heath years (notably Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home). Instead of “black rule” or “majority rule,” Whitehall in 1971 agreed to pursue the idea of “responsible rule,” and a friendly British-Rhodesian agreement seemed to be in the offing.

It emerged Heath sunk the Rhodesia settlement in exchange for Liberal support for UK entry into the European Common Market. Liberal leader Jeremy ‘Bomber’ Thorpe had long sought Rhodesia’s fall and Heath traded this irresistible scrap. Thorpe considered white Rhodesians homophobic and an embarrassing relic of a shameful imperial past. (p. 160) [3]

Rhodesia ceased to be in 1979, with the so-called Lancaster House Agreement in London. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher didn’t want to drag this tiresome Rhodesia legacy any further into her premiership, and so she forced an agreement to accept a new “Zimbabwe-Rhodesia” government under the black Bishop Muzorewa.

But even that effort was a failure, as the Muzorewa regime was regarded by most governments (including Jimmy Carter’s in America) as merely a puppet of Ian Smith and company. The following year Robert Mugabe took power.

For the next few years, PK sat in the Zimbabwe parliament. There were ten reserved “white” seats in the early years, per agreement. Otherwise he and his new wife Princess Charlotte, granddaughter of the last Habsburg Emperor Karl I, retreated to the elegant van der Byl family estate in the Western Cape (South Africa). They had three sons.

I first bought this book ten years ago. But in coming back to it now, I realize I mainly just delved into the “hot parts,” i.e., the UDI, the collapse of Rhodesia in the latter 1970s, and the extensive photo section. This time around, I was impressed by the densely detailed history of southern Africa from the 1600s to 1800s, and by the geopolitical background to the UDI. Ian Smith and PK and their colleagues in the Rhodesian Front clearly perceived the Communist effort to wreck stable governments in Africa in the early 1960s, using the pretexts of anti-colonialism and black rule.

My paperbound copy of the book cost me about $20. You can now buy the same edition for about $199. But not to worry. There is finally a Kindle version for only $6.99.

 

Notes

[1] Though according to author Wessels, Max Hastings visited numerous times, “masquerading as a Rhodesiaphile hunter-fisherman, [and] repaid endless hospitality with vitriolic scorn”:

Like most of my colleagues I reported from Rhodesia in an almost permanent state of rage. We saw a smug, ruthless white minority, beer guts contained with difficulty inside blazers with RAF crests, proclaiming themselves the guardians of civilization in the heart of Africa. (p. 127)

[2] On a bawdier angle, P.K. was called “Tripod” by his fellow tobacco farmers, for his rumored sexual prowess.

[3] While author Wessels may be guessing right, it’s more likely Mr. Thorpe was just being bien-pensant. “Homophobic” is an anachronism here as it did not enter popular parlance until about 1990.

 

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Commander John Irving, Royal Navy
Royal Navalese
(originally published 1946)
London: Focal Point Publications, 2020

Somebody recently gifted me with this trim, entertaining little book. Perhaps because of the season, I immediately identified it as one of that peculiar species of “Christmas books”: small volumes, usually elegantly designed, illustrated with line drawings, and often found stacked near the bookseller’s cash register in December.

As the subtitle tells you, this is a glossary of nautical jargon. Some of the expressions evidently originated in the Royal Navy, others are simply slang picked up from other services or the World Beyond. Many are extremely funny, a few are risqué, the best are brain-scaldingly obscure.

Marry the Gunner’s Daughter, To. To get a whipping—an old-Navy expression but one that is still sometimes heard. In days gone by, when a ‘boy’ was ordered a dozen of the best with the cane for some offence, he was secured face down across the breech of a gun to ensure that official retribution should fall across a suitably tightened part of his anatomy.

Foo-Foo Egg. An egg of more than doubtful age and edibility. The term hails from Chinaside where John Chinaman buries an egg in especially unsanitary surroundings and keeps it there maybe for fifty years before he eats it as an especial delicacy.

Then you have something like “Low-Down, The” which is herein cited as an Americanism, “The inside information about something.”  For me the phrase conjures up Runyonesque characters and mid-century tabloid journalism (e.g., Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s New York Confidential: The Lowdown on the Big Town, 1948). As the book at hand, Royal Navalese, was first published in 1946, it tells us the phrase had made its way into the RN lexicon  by the Second World War. Good to know.

John Irving, we read on the dust jacket, was a naval gunnery expert who served in the Royal Navy from 1941 to 1945, and had earlier seen action at the Battle of Jutland (1916). But the book is very much a joint effort between Commander Irving and his wife Beryl, who was a noted children’s book writer and illustrator. Here Beryl Irving decorates the alphabetical headings with delicate, wry, line drawings that have a distinctive 19th century feel, very close to W. S. Gilbert’s cartoons for his Bab Ballads. In fact there’s a whiff of Gilbert & Sullivan throughout this book, in text and in pictures:

I gather the book was out of print for many years, though I see copies of the old edition at places like AbeBooks and Amazon for around $80. But the co-creators’ son David Irving, the celebrated historian, had the whole thing newly typeset and published recently (2020). It doesn’t have his mother’s illuminated, if nearly illegible, cover design but it’s currently priced at $15.00 at Focal Point Publications/David Irving Books.

It’s a book to be thumbed through at random. Some expressions are so obvious, or long-embedded in common parlance, I wondered whether they really had a nautical origin at all. E.g., “Looney Bin. The sailor’s name for a lunatic asylum, ‘the observation ward’ at a naval hospital, or a psychopathic centre.”

Also still popular and current:

Bumph. A vulgarism, but one in very frequent use for it refers to the never-ending spate of printed and written forms, orders, hand-outs and instructions, amendments and cancellations whose volume rolls daily onward. [N.B. Originally meant toilet roll, I believe, but mainly the very cheap, old-fashioned pulpy sort.]

Chop-Chop! In a hurry; Hurry up! Pidgin English from the Chinese coast.

And finally, the odd-but-intriguing:

‘Breadcrumbs!’ In a Gun-room Mess, should the conversation verge upon subjects too advanced or too indelicate for the hearing of the younger midshipmen, the Senior Sub-Lieutenant will order ‘Breadcrumbs!’ The ‘young gentlemen’ are then required immediately to stuff their fingers in their ears and continue to block all sound until the order is rescinded.

Off White. Half caste.

Trick Cyclists. Psychiatrists.

Eyetie. Italian. [Which is funny because there’s elsewhere a cross-reference: “Macaroni. Italian: see Eyetie.” And we also have, “Ice creams. Italian.”]

 

 

 

 

 

I did a cartoon treatment of the Big Eight CPA firms around 1980. For some reason Peat Marwick (later Peat Marwick KPMG) had the Pep Wheat Flakes guy. Free association.

I was thinking of the Pete’s Bicycle Shop guy in New Haven, who never failed to advertise in every and any Yale student publication, 1930-1980. “Everybody Knows Pete!”

This had nothing to do with financial accounting, but they loved it at Touche Ross. Peat Marwick had ESSO/Exxon, while Touche had to settle for Associated Dry Goods and Chrysler.

 

 

He’s been dead for 37 years, but the Philip Larkin literary industry keeps burbling along, fueled by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of titillating tales, spicy correspondence, and uncollected reviews, diary scraps and photographs. He’s been the subject of stage plays and TV docudramas, countless critical essays and monographs…and no end in sight.

Just last year we were treated to a new memoir about Larkin and Monica Jones, his longtime colleague and—inamorata? soulmate? caretaker?

“Philip Larkin’s Muse, Monica Jones, Revealed as a Racist” screamed one typical headline. As clickbait this subject was so tasty that The Times (London) reviewed the book three times.

Philip Larkin was vilified after his death for his racism, misogyny and philandering. Now the bigotry of his muse has been exposed in a book…

A ditty hitherto attributed to Larkin read: “Prison for the strikers / Bring back the cat / Kick out the n*****s / How about that?” Any idea that this was satirical is tempered by her once telling Sutherland she planned to vote for the British National Party.

Antisemitism appears to have been Jones’s primary racial preoccupation. A letter she wrote in 1960 about a dinner referred to “a young Y*d publisher” and she later described a female philosopher as a “mincing lisping foreign Jew dwarf”.

Asterisks courtesy The Times. [1]

This is a good example of how far afield the literary tabloid-sensationalism has crept with regard to Larkin. Back in the 1990s we had exposés of Larkin’s odd family and odder love affairs. A decade later we were treated to Larkin’s scurrilous correspondence with Kingsley Amis and others. (Seems they both liked jazz…and porn.) And now apparently we’ve moved into the outer suburbs of the subject, where we trawl through the mean-girl thoughts of the poet’s girlfriends.

Ironically the author of this book quoted above, John Sutherland, was for many years a friend of both Philip Larkin and Monica Jones. Sutherland explains that he originally intended the book to rehabilitate Monica’s reputation, but somehow it just didn’t come out sympathetically when he set it down on paper. And Sutherland couldn’t resist setting it all down. It was too saucy and scandalous, and that stuff always sells when Larkin’s involved. [2]

So when did this Larkin boom begin? Loosely speaking, Philip Larkin first came onto most people’s radar during the Margaret Thatcher era. Meeting him at a dinner in 1982, the Prime Minister gushed like a schoolgirl about how he was her favorite poet. Whereupon a dubious Larkin asked which of his poems was her favorite! So the PM quickly misquoted a line from one of his poems, the title to which she did not recall.

This misquote endlessly impressed Larkin. It told him that Mrs. Thatcher was truly searching old memory banks, and not reciting something she’d learned just that afternoon. [3]

Two years later Poet Laureate John Betjeman passed away, and Mrs. Thatcher offered the post to Philip Larkin. But Larkin didn’t want to be Poet Laureate. No, he preferred his relative obscurity as librarian at the University of Hull, on the bracing North Sea. He didn’t want to have to go on the telly or write vers d’occasion on demand. No doubt he noticed that Betjeman’s own late-career stuff was pretty awful. Besides, Larkin thought he had become old and fat, and figured he was going to die soon. As indeed he did, of throat cancer, at the end of 1985.

The first version of his Collected Poems came out in 1988, and then Selected Letters in 1992. But the interest in Larkin really took off in early 1993, when fellow poet Andrew Motion published Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, a fat, sympathetic, but perhaps too revelatory biography. [4] Motion’s book was generously illustrated with photographs, and invited hoots of mockery in the London media when in March 1993 some newspapers reviewed it alongside lavish photo spreads of Larkin and his various girlfriends and other companions. Larkin at Oxford, Larkin in Devon, Larkin in Hull, Larkin in the Channel Islands. It was as though some anonymous photographer just followed him around for much of his life.

Much later we learned that the photographer was often Larkin himself. He was an avid taker of selfies a half-century or more before Instagram. Usually his self-portraits were medium-format black-and-whites, done in available light with a Rolleiflex atop a tripod. He took them using the timer setting or maybe a shutter-release cable. [5]

I had a friend named Simon Hoggart who was among other things the “Parliamentary sketch writer” (a kind of gossip columnist) for The Guardian. Simon told me that the journo folks in Clerkenwell and Westminster were all a-twitter about a campy photo of a simpering, sandaled Larkin in 1955, with his hands clasped upon a knee. (“Did you see that picture of him at the beach?”) Andrew Motion says the picture was taken by Monica Jones during a holiday on Sark, and maybe it was. I say it has all the appearance of a jokey Larkin selfie. [6]

A bigger subject of wide-eyed wonder in 1993 was Motion’s description of Larkin’s father. Sydney Larkin was City Treasurer of Coventry in the 1920s, 30s, 40s. We’re told he had a great admiration for Nazi Germany, and was even a pen-pal of Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, the German economics minister. According to a onetime Hull professor who was Larkin’s drinking companion,

Sydney had been “an ardent follower of the Nazis and attended several Nuremberg rallies during the 1930s; he even had a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece…which at the touch of a button leapt into a Nazi salute”… As late as 1939, Sydney had Nazi regalia decorating his office in City Hall, and when war was declared he was ordered by the Town Clerk to remove it. … He didn’t even change his tune when Coventry was blitzed in November 1940. Instead, he congratulated himself on his foresight in having ordered one thousand cardboard coffins the previous year, and continued to praise “efficient German administration,” while disparaging Churchill—who had, he thought, “the face of a criminal in the dock.” [7]

Classic, priceless, hilarious stuff. But how much of it to believe? Back in March 1993 I think we  believed most of it. This was still the age of Alan Clark, the far-Right Tory diarist, MP,  and sometime Thatcher government minister, who once responded to a taunt by saying, “I am not a fascist. Fascists are shopkeepers. I am a Nazi.” The story of Larkin’s father was edgy, but not all that outré. It was rather chic, in fact, to have had Blackshirt tendencies.

But while some of these stories about Sydney seem to be true (they’ve been corroborated), others are most likely romantic, imaginative embellishment on the part of Philip Larkin. Because right after telling us about Nuremberg, and the push-button Hitler doll, and the excellent deal on cardboard coffins, biographer Andrew Motion pretty much implies that these stories came mainly from Larkin himself, back in the 1950s and 60s:

Sydney Larkin was generous to his son, and often indulged him, but nevertheless strutted through his early life with a singular arrogance. He was intolerant to the point of perversity, contemptuous of women, careless of other people’s feelings or fates, yet at the same time excitingly intellectual, inspirationally quick-witted and (at least in the matter of books) unpredictably catholic in his tastes. Everything Larkin disliked or feared in his father was matched by something he found impressive or enviable… As the first half of Larkin’s childhood dripped away, the mixture of feelings he had for his family gradually thickened. By early adolescence…it had turned into rage. “Please believe me,” he told his first important friend, “when I say that half my days are spent in black, surging, twitching, boiling HATE!!!”  [8]

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and Larkin knew it. He was very much his father’s boy, and was both embarrassed and exalted by that.

Herein lies, I submit, the core of the Larkin genius. It’s a depressive, self-loathing attitude that nevertheless focuses hard on loathing of self, family, and present surroundings, and yields painful and satirical insights. Bad selfies, sad selfies, good selfies, but selfies nevertheless.

Notes

[1] “Philip Larkin’s Muse, Monica Jones, Revealed as a Racist,” The Sunday Times, London.  April 11, 2021.

[2] John Sutherland, Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves. London: W&N, 2021.

[3] The poem is a thorny thing called “Deceptions,” about a ruined girl and her rapist. It wasn’t one of Larkin’s better known poems in 1982, but has become so since, thanks to Mrs. Thatcher’s mangled recitation: “All afternoon her mind lay open like a drawer of knives.”

[4] Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. London: Faber & Faber, 1993.

[5] Many of his photographs are collected, and his selfie technique explained, in The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs, edited by Richard Bradford. London: Frances Lincoln, 2015.

[6] Obscure literary trivia: Around the same time Philip Larkin and Monica Jones holidayed on Sark—one of the smaller Channel Islands—the writer Bill Hopkins visited the island. Bill used it as a setting for his legendary/notorious novel The Divine and the Decay. Did Larkin and Hopkins ever cross paths, there or elsewhere?

[7] Motion, Philip Larkin, 12.

[8] Motion, Philip Larkin, 13.