Cover of the July 1926 Vanity Fair issue in which Anderson’s “Inquiry” appeared
“Nations are like people,” the US American novelist, short fiction writer and poet Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) remarked in 1926. “It takes a long, long time for one of them to grow up.” That year—that month—the United States was commemorating its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, which prompted Anderson to add:
As a nation we are still young. It has only been a hundred and fifty years. What’s that? Well, we may still be wearing short pants, but we are walking down past the clothing stores on Main Street and looking at the spring styles in long pants almost every day now. Such a job we tackled—whew!
Never mind “whew!” How about “whoa”? A “still young” nation? I have heard that one before—back in 2018, at the wedding here in Wales of an international trans student from the United States whose sister told me, probably in response to a reference of mine to the still fresh wound inflicted on democracy by the MAGA king’s first term, that her homeland was bound to make mistakes, and presumably be excused for making them, because the Republic was still so very new.
I had never been to Rome, that teeming aggregation of antiquities to which all roads ostensibly, and, as it appears, inevitably lead. Eventually, that is. Years of German high school Latin, drummed into me at a school not far from the Roman outpost of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (Cologne), did little to raise my curiosity sufficiently to make me hit one of them. Those roads, I mean, or, for that matter, any books on the destination that proved final for Daisy Miller, who caught Roman Fever traipsing around the ruins that Mr. Stone never got to see, having perished in transit so that his missus, Mrs. Stone, might experience, at his expense, the Roman Holiday of a Roman Spring.
As eternal as the standard admission lines to its main attractions, the Italian capital lingered on the bottom of what, by now, has turned into a bucket list of sights yet to see, a catalogue of places to die for that reminds me of nothing more forcefully than my ever-dwindling supply of vitality. The adage that Rome wasn’t built in a day does no longer make my inclination to take things slow seem like a virtue, much less an option.
The frescoed semicircular loggia of Villa Giulia
Although I was not exactly fit as a fiddle while Rome burned in the sweltering spring of 2026—an unseasonable reminder that our insistence of ticking off items on our must-see lists might well contribute to our species kicking the bucket before long—I nonetheless returned with the nagging question why it had taken me so long to visit. So long, apparently, that everyone else decided to make the move at the same time and take over the place like a horde of goths—the latter-day sad sacks of Rome—spilling into the Forum.
It was a visit to Cinecittà—the fabled Hollywood on the Tiber—that brought back memories of many a vicarious visit to Rome, none more enchanting than William Wyler’s Ein Herz und eine Krone (“A heart and a crown”), under which title I first experienced Roman Holiday (1953) dubbed in German. Partly shot, and spectacularly so, on location, the romantic comedy was filmed at Cinecittà, as was Wyler’s 1959 epic Ben-Hur and its 2016 remake, along with countless Italian pictures, from the Telefoni Bianchi comedy romances of the Mussolini era to the fantasies of Frederico Fellini, who referred to Rome’s film studios as an “ideal place” that “replaced the world” for him.
The Bocca della Verità, Rome, as approached via Roman Holiday
Approaching the culture and history of Rome via the dream factory of Cinecittà—on a personal tour that, incidentally, followed news then breaking of Wyler’s daughter, philanthropist and arts patron Judith Sheldon, being found dead in her jeep, alongside her husband—comports with and is characteristic of the obliquity with which I am wont to sidle up to any subject. My idiosyncratically queer way or waywardness of sliding aslant on a scale of relative irrelevancies are expressive of my struggle to get the facts straight and my unwillingness to surrender to apodictic tyranny by accepting them as imperative, impartial and incontrovertible.
The tumble-down classicality of Rome engenders a Felliniesque retreat from factuality. The allure of ruins, at least to minds romantically inclined, lies in their state of incompletion, the presence of their partial absence. Their fragmentation and decay enable us to imagine the past, of which they are imperfectly imaged representations, and, through the peculiar interplay of art and nature, appreciate the present as evolving, not fixed. Their artifactuality thus exceeds the mere factual. No systems of classification are equal to their mystery. Would ancient civilizations have such a fascination for us if we had them all figured out?
The question is rhetorical, and it leads me in a roundabout way to When in Rome (1970), a murder mystery by Ngaio Marsh, without whose mention of it I would not have visited the Villa Giulia. The Villa houses the National Etruscan Museum, the world’s foremost collection of Etruscan art, of which the tomb effigy of Sarcofago degli Sposi—the Sarcophagus of the Spouses—is the most celebrated. It is at its feet that Marsh’s mystery opens:
Cover of the May 1926 issue of Vanity Fair in which Aldous Huxley’s essay “The Present Fad of Self Confession” was first published
I readily admit to having a thing about anniversaries, however obscure. They are an invitation to catch up with whatever I missed first time round, especially if I was not around at the time. The century marker in particular offers an opportunity—or a pretext, if ever I needed one—to dwell on bygone media events and the popular culture of yore, traces of which I sample in a twenty-first century context and, more narrowly, from the perspective of my own experience.
For quite some time now I have been browsing vintage US American periodicals ranging from Radio Broadcast to Vanity Fair in search of materials ripe for centenary processing. Seriously dated though my selections inevitably are, I am more intrigued by resonance than I am concerned with variance, let alone obsolescence.
That is to say, even at the risk of presentism, I am drawn to the relatable—and am committed to relating—instead of concentrating on what makes the past so unalike from the present as to appear entirely and solely of its time. Context need not be confinement, just as difference does not have to spell distance.
Declaring something “past” assists in creating an air of critical detachment. It fosters an attitude of authorial but nonetheless assumptive command over a given subject, a superciliousness that, like an eyebrow hovering prominently above the inspecting eye draws—or should draw—attention to the viewpoint of the writer whose imperiousness gainsays any claims to objectivity.
In my own catchings-up with the presumably out-of-date, I resist assuming an authoritative posture or persona. All the while, I am aware of—and aim to foreground—my queer biases and spectatorial limitations as an absent witness or indirect observer.
Far from clinical, the choosing of a subject matter and the manner in which we approach it reveal personality, whether the self at work is acknowledged or not. Whenever we put our name to them, our published words proclaim “I wrote this”—unless, as is increasingly the case in a grim reality inconceivable to those living in 1926—they hush up, however vainly, that “AI wrote this.”
Despite obvious differences, both technological and social, in the ways in which we communicate and consume—how we take in and dole out prose for public consumption—the question of the “I” in journalistic writing, be it as a peek-a-boo tease between the lines or as a treatise writ large, continues to raise itself, to this day, even—or especially—as distinctions between fact and fiction, news and commentary, intelligence and artificiality have become all but erased. Brave New World, indeed, this domain of public discourse.
For that reason alone, Aldous Huxley’s “The Present Fad of Self Confession,” published in Vanity Fair in May 1926—coincidental with the author’s first visit to Hollywood—struck me as worth revisiting one hundred years later, at a moment in time when I question my own willingness to give so freely of myself in projects such as Retroactive Selfies, currently all but shelved on Instagram, and the visual narrative Envelope that I have proposed for display in a local gallery.
Walter Prichard Eaton’s words as printed in Vanity Fair, April 1926
“Who he?” I thought. Or make that “hooey!” The “he” in question is Walter Prichard Eaton (1878–1957), a theater critic and academic of whose voice I first took note while flicking through the digitized pages of Vanity Fair’s April issue. April 1926, mind. The “hooey!” is Eaton’s, or rather, it is my response to his sweeping dismissal of motion pictures in an article titled “The Strangling of Our Theatre,” the first in a series of reports from the cultural battlefield that Vanity Fair billed as a “Symposium” on the “Future of the Theatre in America.”
In a succession of articles, prognostications on the fortunes of the theater in the United States were made by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sydney Howard (May issue), theater mogul Lee Shubert (June), independent theater manager Brock Pemberton (July), Ralph Block, production manager of the Famous Players-Lasky Film Corporation (August), and John Emerson, President of the Actor’s Equity Association (September). Eaton’s response to them in the October 1926 issue of Vanity Fair drew the curtain on the “Symposium.”
Now that “Motion Picture Producers” were beginning to exert “direct control of the drama,” as the editors of Vanity Fair put it, a number of questions, however leading, arose:
Will this result in the production of only such plays as will make good motion pictures, in other words, cheap, obvious and sensational plays?
Will the intelligent minorities who are sponsoring non-commercial playhouses succeed where the commercial houses have failed?
Is our stage to lend itself still more to the standards of Moronia, or will a new theatre of the Intelligent Minority arise, overthrow the theatre of commerce and release the latent dramatic talent of America?
Now, “Symposium” literally means “drinking together.” Perhaps the water cooler was contaminated to begin with, given this set-up, but the intemperance of Eaton’s verbiage has no convivial air about it.
What follows, which may well be “hooey” to you—or “flap-doodle,” to borrow the term used by Eaton that started me off on this tangent—is an attempt at having a word on having words: words as thought, words as theatrics, and words as troll.
When, at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, the forty-seventh and perhaps last elected President of the United States, in one of his characteristic falsehood-and-insult-littered tirades, referred to Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark he had long coveted, as “a piece of ice,” his imperialism, imperiousness and imperviousness to historical facts were once again on blindingly stark display.
Greenland, Iceland, or whatever the misleader of the fabled free world may call the largest island of them all—if indeed it is land, or a land, rather than a frozen asset on the verge of liquidation—it needed to be his, outright. Until, that is, Number 47 (previously 45 but never adding up to more than number two) was duped into settling for cubes portioned out in a deal existing since 1951. Put that in your Diet Coke and drink it, sucker!
“A piece of ice.” Is not Melania enough? Well, not according to the Epstein files, if ever we get to see them entire and unredacted. The likely scenario of hell freezing over comes to mind, boggled though it is.
“A piece of ice.” That, clearly, is what cultures and communities—history and humanity—are to a rapacious tyke-oon, a petulant plutocrat whose crude, rudimentary vocabulary and short attention span remind us daily how limited his definition of “great” is and how precisely that limitation sums up the narrow mind of a bottom feeder—a Moron-roe Doctrinaire?—raised, none too loftily, on the notion that anyone aspiring to be a big fish needs to swallow whatever comes or gets into his way.
Greatness, thus conceived, means little more than to amass much to amount to more in the eyes of the world he, in a less-than-popular deviation from his America First agenda, has set his greedy peepers on.
“A piece of ice,” indeed! The word is chilling enough as an acronym, when it refers to a deadly experiment in cryotherapy involving the deep-freezing of democracy until it falls off the body politic as if it were an unwelcome and unsightly growth.
While I could not gauge the degree of ire among the largely undemonstrative audience at Davos, the phrase certainly made my blood boil, as does pretty much every exhausting waste of air emanating from a hothead whose actions are raising the global temperature as perilously as the actual warming his administration has chosen to deny for the opportunity of raking in a final few billions. When Number 47 talks Greenland, you can bet he means greenbacks.
It is undeniably global warming that makes the island of Kalaallit Nunaat more strategic a region than it ever was, now that melting ice caps open routes and facilitate access to the Arctic.
Climate change was not yet an issue during the so-called “Battle for Greenland”—the subtitle and subject of War Below Zero, a book published in 1944. And yet, atmospheric conditions and the ability to forecast them on location were apparently key to the US interest in the region in a pre-satellite age.
According to War Below Zero, the conflict in question was not a war for “territory” but “a war for weather.”
A page from Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine, May 1965
Over the past few months, enervated by minor illnesses and the lingering nuisance of ingrown eyelashes that make reading for pleasure less than pleasurable, I have been busying myself performing the mentally undemanding task of cataloguing my digital collection of detective and mystery magazines, most of which, for the reason aforementioned, still await my perusal.
Not one to embrace chaos or relish disorder, I derive comfort from such indexing. The virtue of record-keeping is not simply its own reward, however. After all, owing to a dogged determination that some may prefer to label “anal retentiveness” or look upon as signs of life “somewhere on the spectrum,” I now have a fairly comprehensive overview of twentieth-century British and US American crime fiction, especially by writers active during the so-called golden age of murder mysteries between the two world wars, authors whose rules-governed puzzles resonate with us once more in a period of heightened global uncertainties and the attendant anxieties to which they gives rise.
I was just completing, for the time being, my currently 139-page-long single-spaced crimino-bibliography, replete with cross-references and annotations, when I happened on an item that brought home again how elusive and downright illusory any attempts are to escape, via fictional chronicles of crimes long solved, from the actual and ongoing illegalities of today, not least the enforced lawlessness in the rewilded West of the by now all but nominal United States.
A photograph published in the April 1926 issue of Radio Broadcast showing a young John Huston (left) and fellow members of the Provincetown Players
Here I go again. Another broadcasting centenary, another radio “first.” This “First,” mind, is wrapped in quotation marks, as the claim is not mine. I am not going to dispute it, either, or challenge someone else to have the last word in the old “Who’s on First?” routine. I have been there before.
The claim served as a hook. It was designed to underscore the international significance of the event. At the same time, I tried to justify its happening in Wales by drawing attention to the play’s Welsh setting and the playwright’s affinity with the country. More important to me than arriving at a definitive answer to the vexed question of whether Comedy of Danger should be regarded as the “first” of its kind are the shifting definitions of the term “radio play” on which, to my mind, hinges the answer to that question—or rather, its unanswerability and ultimate pointlessness.
After all, it is difficult to say what is “first” in any field if the field itself is not clearly delimited first, or if the field is so limitless that it defies delineation in the first place. In the case of “radio play,” Hörspiel (play for listening) or radio drama—relatively arcane though this field of study may be—definitions not only vary greatly but are often not even attempted.
When is a play a radio play? That is a question I have been asking for a long time in my musings on the wireless, and it is a question I keep asking myself. “When is a play a radio play” strikes me as a more useful way of framing the debate than the more obvious question “What is a radio play?” because the former encourages us to avoid the most perfunctory of answers: A radio play is a play written for and/or heard on the radio.
Sure, on the surface it barely scratches, that statement sounds reasonable enough. But are all plays written and produced for radio broadcasting radio plays by default? Is it the medium, then, that makes a play—any play—a radio play?
Not that “radio” as we understand or know it these days bears a close resemblance to “radio”—as a receiver set, a system, and a phenomenon—anno 1925, the year when Sue ‘Em, proclaimed by its publisher to be the “first radio play printed” in the USA, successfully made a play for first place in a radio playwrighting contest.
Illustration for “The McNoodle Brothers’ Radio Mystery” in Radio News, Sept. 1923
Philo … Gubb? Never heard of him. Nor, in all my years—make that decades—as a reader of detective fiction, had I come across, or become aware of, Ellis Parker Butler (1869–1937), the writer who brought Philo Gubb—“a tall, thin man, with the face and gait of a flamingo,” a paperhanger with a hankering for “deteckative” work—into a flurry of being. Not until recently, that is.
Generally, I do not mind stumbling onto what might have been got at with greater ease and efficiency through methodical research. I am aware that any perceived surprise on my part—that “Eureka!”-inducing moment of discovery—may be owing to an absence of assiduity. That said, some of the most memorable encounters are made by chance, along circuitous routes.
In the case of Ellis Parker Butler and his brainchild Philo Gubb, though, I regret not having made the acquaintance of either of them sooner, given that this particular route led me back, unexpectedly, to the early days of broadcasting, about which Butler had much to say that might have been of interest and use to me in Immaterial Culture, my study of so-called old-time radio.
Now, Immaterial Culture does not pick up on the story of broadcasting until the network days of the late 1920s. To gain an understanding how radio evolved, a look at prehistoric transmissions, albeit largely in the absence of sound recordings, is nonetheless instructive. You cannot expect to “get” the cream of old-time broadcasting if you neglect an inspection of the cat’s whiskers for traces of same.
The published script as it appeared in We Stand United, an anthology of radio plays by Stephen Vincent Benét and “decorated” by Ernest Stock.
I commenced this journal back in 2005. It was intended as a continuation of, and promotional vehicle for, my doctoral study “Etherized Victorians: Drama, Narrative, and the American Radio Play, 1929–1954.” Its title, broadcastellan, was meant to declare me to be keeper of a vast Luftschloss—a neglected alcazar of the air, immaterially composed of numberless radio recordings I determined to play back.
As of this post, broadcastellan is nearing its twentieth anniversary. While I do not take this as an opportunity, let alone an excuse, to reissue older posts, I nonetheless wonder: When history seems to be repeating itself, perhaps I may be justified to do the same, if only to demonstrate that not every “been there” necessarily translates into a feeling of “done that,” and that not all twice-told tales are a rehash—not, at least, when you approach them from a perspective that has profoundly, even fundamentally, changed along with the context, your life experience and your attitude toward the world.
I devoted one early entry to “The Undefended Border” (1940), a play by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943). Revisiting it now, in the age of the MAGA tariff wars and annexation threats, I cannot but think of the loose cannon that is recklessly flouting, or at any rate tarnishing, the legacy of the rusty “lone cannon” commemorated in Benét’s play.
The Bookshop by the Sea, where I purchased A Century of Detective Stories
The Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth, where I live, has no shortage of bookstores, first-hand and otherwise. At one of them—The Bookshop by the Sea, which sells both old and new volumes—I purchased, some time ago, A Century of Detective Stories. Published in 1935, it is an anthology of crime and mystery tales introduced by G. K. Chesterton, whose outrageous “Fad of the Fisherman” I found occasion to discuss here previously.
Ystwyth Books, where I purchased Death by Marriage by E. G. Cousins on the day I posted this blog entry.
Trying to live up to its title, A Century of Detective Stories is a brick of pulp, and it is not easy to handle when you are reclining in a lounge chair hoping to catch those rare vernal rays that are the oft unfulfilled promise of summer on the typically temperamental and frequently bleak west coast of Britain.
Oxfam Bookshop, Aberystwyth, where someone beat me to a large selection of Three Investigators books on the day of writing this entry.
Aberystwyth and its environs have, in part for that reason, been the setting of murder mysteries, among them the noirish detective series Hinterland and the quirky retro-noir novels of Malcolm Pryce. And, as I am writing this, the place is a veritable crime scene, with local booksellers displaying mystery novels and hosting literary events dedicated to the art of murder. It is all part of Gwyl Crime Cymru, billed as “Wales’ first international crime fiction festival.”
Waterstones, Aberystwyth, where I tend to purchase copies of British Library Crime Classics.
Meanwhile, I am still catching up with A Century of Detective Stories. Selections include narratives by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Marie Belloc Lowndes, as well as works by some of the biggest names in crime fiction written between the two World Wars: Agatha Christie, H. C. Bailey, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Edgar Wallace, to drop just a few. The diversity of this collection is part of its strength and appeal. Its title is nonetheless misleading.
