A Colossal Wreck (8 page)

It has been amusing, if somewhat irritating over the years, to watch admirers of Capote see evidence of his literary skills pulsating in every word of the dialogue in Huston’s film. For admirers like Mr. Clarke Capote provided “words that were completely fresh.” In reality Capote’s contribution was limited to a few concluding scenes which had to be altered at the last moment. My father was in Ireland and Capote, who happened to be available in Italy, was pressed into service. In subsequent years, as the film acquired a cult following, Capote did nothing to contradict exaggerated accounts of his own connection with the movie.

Sincerely,

Patrick Cockburn

To: Patrick Cockburn

Subject: Re: piece on beat the devil in guardian

Very good. Gore Vidal, who of course loathed Truman C., told me about a year ago that the lines not taken from BTD were supplied by Robert Morley.

February 28

The love of our newspapers for free trade surely has something to do with the fact that although there has been fearsome attrition in the journalistic profession, at least the lost jobs here aren’t reappearing south of the border at a fraction of the cost. The day that column-writing is subcontracted to high school students in Guatemala I expect to see a turn around on the trade issue among the opinion-forming classes.

Free trade is a class issue. The better-off like it. Their stocks go up as the out-sourcing company heading south lays off its work force. The worse-off see the jobs disappear. You don’t have to be an economist with a Ph.D. to figure out what is happening. At the start of this year Walmart reported its first loss in ninety-nine quarterly earnings
reports. It seems Walmart’s customers were unable to afford the “luxury” items on which the store makes its best margins. As long as people can’t afford to shop at Walmart for anything more than the bare essentials of existence, Pat Buchanan will find people ready to vote for him.

March 6

In 1922, in the wake of the 1921 treaty by which the British ceded the bulk of Ireland, assassins killed General Sir Henry Wilson, one of Britain’s top military commanders, as he was entering his house in Belgravia, London. My mother, walking to school at the age of eight, was an eyewitness.

The British took the assassination as a Hamas-type attempt by Irish Republicans to undermine the treaty. They conveyed their view to the infant Irish Free State government, which then unleashed an artillery barrage upon Republicans holed up in the Four Courts, destroying the building which housed the national archive, including every Irish certificate of birth and death.

Coincidence (Long Arm of): My mother having watched General Sir Henry fall to Fenian bullets, went home and reported the episode to her parents. It turned out well for her. She had been in London against her will, removed from Myrtle Grove, formerly Walter Raleigh’s house, in the town of Youghal in Ireland. Here she was enjoying a happy childhood under the supervision of her grandmother, Edith Blake, a woman with nationalist sympathies. But her parents wanted her to come to London and go to school. With Wilson’s murder they were now terrified that as a witness she might attract unwholesome attentions, of the police, Republicans and so on. She was sent back to Myrtle Grove.

Fifty years later she was telling the story to a new friend, Veronica Anderson, mother of Perry, who grew up in Waterford, forty-five miles to the east. Veronica listened and then said, “Did you see a milkman?” “No,” replied my mother, very surprised. “Neither did I,” Veronica agreed. Newspaper accounts of Wilson’s shooting had featured a plucky, but imaginary, milkman who chased the assassins.
As a little girl Veronica had also been walking to school in Belgravia that day, at that time. I suppose the vulgar Marxists would merely murmur, Class is destiny.

March 21

Plain English: At Bodmin Assizes, in the 1930s, Mr. Justice Wright had to pass sentence upon an elderly agricultural laborer who had been found guilty of deplorable bestiality. In somewhat indistinct tones his Lordship announced: “Prisoner at the Bar, the jury have convicted you, on the clearest evidence, of disgusting and degrading offenses. Your conduct is viewed by all right-minded men with abhorrence. The sentence of the court is that you be kept in penal servitude for seven years.”

It was obvious that this diatribe had not been audible to the prisoner, who had stood with his hand cupping his ear, straining to learn his fate. Therefore, the judge said: “Warder, repeat to the prisoner the sentence of the court.”

The task was beyond the warder’s powers, but he did his best, shouting at the condemned felon: “His lordship says you are a dirty old bastard, and he’s put you away for seventeen years.”

Whereupon His Lordship observed, “Warder, I have no objection to your paraphrasing my sentence, but you have no power to increase it.”

Michael Gilbert tells this story in his
Legal Anecdotes
.

A Scotch friend tells me of a man in Dumfries who somehow became a magistrate for a day in the local court. A shoplifter was brought before him and the evidence of guilt was clear. The magistrate-for-a-day assumed a grave face, leaned forward and addressed the prisoner: “Hamish McTavish, you have been found guilty of the crime of shoplifting. It is my duty to inform you that on a set day you shall be taken from this place to another place and there hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

McTavish fainted dead away and the clerk whispered incredulously to the magistrate-of-the-day that he had no right to impose such a sentence.

“I know, I know,” he said, “but I’ve always wanted to say that.”

March 27

Ralph Nader put up a good performance on
Meet the Press
last Sunday.

TIM RUSSERT: But people are going to say, Ralph Nader, in the end this is a real world. Would you prefer to have Bill Clinton or Bob Dole sitting in the Oval Office, because one of those two men are going to be the President?

NADER: I would prefer neither in the real world.

RUSSERT: It wouldn’t bother you if you woke up in November and said, “Bill Clinton was not re-elected today because he lost the state of California to Bob Dole and the reason was that Ralph Nader siphoned off 6 percent of the voters who would have voted for Bill Clinton”?

NADER: If that happens to Clinton because he refuses to adopt a very important campaign finance reform, he deserves it …

RUSSERT: And if he embraced some of your issues that you’re talking about this morning, you would be, then, reluctant to challenge him all the way through to November?

NADER: Not at all. Politicians always need an opposition that stays to its convictions and holds them to their promises …

March 28

Just because the Nazis were keen on animal rights, this doesn’t mean that all animals rights activists are Nazis. The Nazis were keen on alternative medicine too, but this doesn’t mean that the homeopathy and alternative medicine crowd are Nazis. See Robert Jay Lifton’s interesting paragraphs in
The Nazi Doctors
:

Perhaps the most severe conflict between the Nazi bio-medical vision and the traditional medical profession was in relation to nonmedical healers, known as “healing practitioners” (
heilpraktikers
) and “healers” (
heilkundiger
). These groups generally stress the outdoor life, natural foods, and overall re-orientation in living; they often flouted established medical practice and sometimes treated serious diseases with dubious therapies. Long active in Germany, these healers appealed to the regime’s biological romanticism and mysticism and found their strongest supporter in deputy party leader Rudolf Hess, the most intense biological mystic in the Nazi inner circle.

In 1939, as a lasting expression of its relationship to the “nature movement,” the Nazis opened a new hospital outside Munich that was to epitomize many of the principles of the “new German Medicine”: for example, common dining halls, outdoor bathing pools, special indoor physical-therapy centers, and recreation centers. These features would aid physical and mental rehabilitation, prevent “diseases of civilization,” and strengthen “natural forces of resistance” to disease that were both physical and psychological. Not a “hospital,” it was a “house of health” (
Gesundungshaus
).

May 2

“A loan-at-interest is the only known thing in the entire universe that does not suffer entropy. It grows with time. All other things, ourselves included, fade and die.” Those of you maxed out on your credit cards but still making those monthly payments at some outrageous rate know this as well as I (who have learned by dint of bitter experience not to have credit cards at all).

Those first three sentences came from an informative letter that Stan Lusby of Otago, New Zealand, sent to one of my favorite newspapers,
Catholic Worker
, a while back. Lusby commenced his discussion of capitalism with some personal disclosures. He had, Lusby confided, known all his life that lending money at interest was intrinsically wrong. “I came late in life to Christianity, and it was a great source of comfort to verify my intuition through scripture, although I am now deeply enmeshed in debt, having listened to my peers and not the word of God.”

Lusby then supplied a succinct history of the origins of the very word “capitalism”:

The word “capitalism” comes from “caput tally” or head-count of the slaves. I followed the line of word discovery further, after reading the
New English Bible
, for it referred to Nebuchadnezzar “investing” Jerusalem with his troops. “Vestment” means clothing that one puts on, but “investment” implies that one has been cloaked-in. It was the Roman word for a military operation for the taking of slaves. Clearly, such a military operation called for a minimum physical injury to a salable commodity and what we now call siege tactics were deployed.

The military word “captain” refers to the one who counts the heads of slaves. It is used in both the land and marine branches of military. Out of starvation, the defenders “capitulated” (Latin,
caput
, head). On the long march back to Rome, the captain carved the daily head-count into a horizontal component of the scaffolding of the tent in which the captives were housed at night. Even today, such a piece of scaffolding is still known as a “ledger.” To prevent the slaves breaking away, they were tied with a piece of leather called a “bond” to a long pole termed a “bank.” That word survives to this day in the expression “a bank of oars,” coming, as it does, from the galleys which were powered by slaves.

Lusby should have added that the word also survives as “the bank,” to which we are held captive by the long thong of debt.

May 8

On April 18 Israeli shells crashed into a United Nations compound, manned by Fijian soldiers, at Qana in southern Lebanon. They were 155mm shells with M-732 proximity fuses which detonated each round seven meters above the ground, causing maximum casualties and what the military calls “amputation wounds.” They were fired from new American-made M109A1 howitzers, which need a forward “spotter” for precise targeting.

Inside the compound—itself the approximate area of a city block—there were two buildings crammed with Lebanese villagers fleeing Israeli bombardment. Only these two structures, a chapel and a meeting hall, were destroyed. Nothing else in the compound was seriously damaged. No UN people were hurt. Estimates of the dead have edged up to around 105, but no one really knows. Did the Israelis know that refugees were in the compound? Yes. Some forty-eight hours before the massacre a senior member of the UN staff in southern Lebanon had told an Israeli general that the UN was protecting 5,000 refugees in all its compounds, including Qana.

May 9

The
Nation
magazine held a meeting on “The Fifties” last week, at Town Hall in New York. A decent number of people, many of them of mature vintage, showed up. The last time I visited Town Hall was back in 1983, and that was another
Nation
event about the 1950s, in the form of an evening about the Rosenbergs. By the third millennium maybe we’ll hit the ’60s?

The big news about the recent evening was a strong attack on rock ’n’ roll. The onslaught was made by Fred Hellerman of the Weavers, a group temporarily put out of business by the 1950s blacklist. Hellerman, advanced in years but spry, denounced rock ’n’ roll as “mindless and devoid of content,” and held it no accident that it coincided with the worst years of the cultural blacklist. He singled out Bill Haley and “Rock Around the Clock” for specific abuse, and even essayed a kind of “shabbadooba” cry. In response, Allen Ginsberg, also on the platform, cried out in apparent solidarity with Little Richard, “a-wap-bam-boom.”

I was at school when the film of
Rock Around the Clock
was banned in Britain as being liable to madden youth and cause attrition of moral fiber. In 1975 my brother Andrew was working in London for a TV program on the year 1955. The film revolved around the memories of two men, George Melly and Derek Taylor, of 1950s Liverpool. George, very sensibly, was rather reticent on specific details of his own experiences. Derek, later press agent for the Beatles and a very nice man all round, had met his wife to be, Joan, at a dance in New Brighton, the leisure destination across the Mersey from Liverpool. Andrew thought he would recreate the occasion and rented the relevant dancehall for the occasion asking the Vintage Rock ’n’ Roll Appreciation Society to furnish Teddy Boys, for a
quid pro quo
of beer plus the screening.

Gratifying numbers of Teddy Boys turned out in their thick crepe soles, drainpipe trousers, drape jackets and greased hair with Duck’s Arse capillary deployment. Many of them were now mature in years themselves, with young ’uns—three generations in one case—also garbed in proper ’50s style. Andrew and his team screened
Rock Around the Clock
.