Category: Personal

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“The terror of the unforeseen”; or, Missing The Plot

While not entirely lacking in fancy or imagination, I generally avoid speculating about roads not taken, avoid taking in prospects retrospectively by asking “What if . . . ?” What if I had never gone to America? What if I had not left again some fifteen years later? What if what I had left had not been a country whose majority had just re-elected George W. Bush? While I would not go so far or sink so low as to substitute that “What if” with a nonchalant “So what,” I much rather ask “What now?” or justify whatever decision I made with a defiant “So there!”

I suppose dismissing the value of such speculations by arguing that any alternate of myself would not be myself at all is a way to avoid accusing myself of not always having chosen the best or most sensible path. Perhaps, a little foresight might have worked wonders greater than could ever be performed by getting myself worked up wondering, in hindsight, what I might have been; but to compound the failure to see the future with the failure of facing up to the past as is strikes me as perversely self-destructive . . .

Now, this is not about me sighing for what might have been. Since I don’t ask “What if,” such regrets rarely present themselves—itself ample justification for not indulging in morosely remorseful constructions of alternate biographies. This is about the alternate history I took with me on that trip back in early November 2004, when I left America for a new life in a part of the old world I had never seen let alone set foot on. The book in my hand luggage was Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—which, I thought, was just the volume for the occasion, just right for the moment of leaving behind what had been home to me and what, owing to the hysterical war-on-terror politics in the shaping of which I had no right to take part, had felt increasingly less like the freest, the friendliest, much less the only place to be.

In The Plot Against America, Roth considers what might have happened if Charles A. Lindbergh had defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 to become President, largely on the strength of a persuasive if false—and unfulfillable—promise of “an independent destiny for America.”

Roth conceives of an alternate 22 June 1941, five months after Lindbergh’s inauguration, while yet adhering to the historical fact that it was the day on which the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union was broken when the former nation embarked upon Operation Barbarossa in an attempt to conquer the latter.

On that 22 June in AR (Anno Roth) 1941, Lindbergh, as President, addresses his countrymen and women by expressing himself “grateful” that Hitler was waging a war against “Soviet Bolshevism,” a war that “would otherwise have had to be fought by American troops.” Listening with dread to that address over the radio are the central characters of Roth’s nightmarish revision, a Jewish family from New Jersey who are terrorized by the thought that the pursuit of an ostensibly “independent destiny for America” means the alignment with a regime engaged in the Holocaust, that putting America first means putting an end to their civil liberties, which means “destroying everything that America stands for.”

“The terror of the unforeseen,” Roth writes, “is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.” Good histories, including alternate ones, may yet provoke terror by not swaddling in the paper logic of hindsight causalities what, however palpable, is yet uncertain and unascertainable as events unfold, and by reminding us not to mistake the unforeseen with the unforeseeable.

I remember opening The Plot sitting at a New York airport named after another American president and finding myself distracted by a German family visibly disquieted by the book’s cover art. There, staring at them was a swastika, the symbol of the terror that could have been foreseen. I was so self-conscious of this act of provocation that I was unable to read on; and once I had arrived in Wales, I was too absorbed in my own altered state—the detachment from what I had known and been—to have much use for any engagement with any alternate past one.

This week, for no particular reason, I picked up the book anew, and I read it as a commentary on two historical pasts—1941 and a 2004 (mis)informed by 11 September 2001—that somehow seems too comfortably remote, the anxieties that had given rise to its creation and my purchase of it being past as well. I can now amuse myself by pointing out that the day I read the abovementioned passage in Roth’s book coincided not only with the anniversary of that imaginary radio address but also with the birthday of Lindbergh’s spouse Anne; I can appreciate references to popular radio programs (“You should be on Information Please”) and personalities like Walter Winchell that render The Plot verisimilitudinous, conveniently to extract them for the sake of yet another cursory entry into this essentially escapist journal whose raison d’être was the sense of homelessness and estrangement I felt when I arrived in Britain on the eve of Guy Fawkes, that celebrated plot against King and Parliament.

What if I had not mislaid—and not even missed—The Plot all these years? What if I had avoided the impulse of discontinuity, of creating for myself a virtual space and time capsule of extra-historic hence fictitious isolation and had made more of an effort instead to participate in the real debates that are shaping my future? By refusing to ask myself “What if . . .?” as I belatedly re-enter The Plot I seem to be defusing Roth’s argument, fully aware that, by doing so, I may well expose myself to—rather than becoming exempt from—that certain “terror” of not foreseeing.

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"I started Early—Took my Dog . . ."

“. . . and visited the Sea.” I have not read the poetic works of Emily Dickinson in many a post-collegiate moon; yet, as wayward as my memory may be, I never forgot those glorious opening lines. You might say that is has long been an ambition of mine to utter them, to experience for myself the magic they evoke; but, until recently, I have failed on three accounts to follow Emily in her excursion. That is, I had no dog to take along; nor did I never live close enough to the sea to approach it on foot, at least not with the certain ease that might induce me to undertake such a venture.

Now that there is Montague in my life and Cardigan Bay practically at our doorsteps, the only thing that prevents me from having such a Dickinsonian moment is a habitual antemeridian tardiness. If “All’s right with the world” when “Morning’s at seven,” as Robert Browning famously put it, then I might as well roll over and let it bask in its easterly lit serenity. It is for the early birds to confirm of refute such a Browning version of bliss.

Besides, as Victorian storyteller Cuthbert Bede once remarked, it is “well worth going to Aberystwith [. . .] if only to see the sun set.” So, I’m starting late instead and take my dog for evening visits to the sea. No “Mermaids” have yet come out of the “basement” to greet me; nor any of those bottlenose dolphins that are on just about every brochure or poster designed to boost the town’s tourist industry. They are out there, to be sure; but unlike Ms. Dickinson, I’m not taking the plunge to get up close and let my “Shoes [ . . .] overflow with Pearl” until the rising tide “ma[kes] as He would eat me up.”

Not with Montague in tow. Dogs are not allowed on the beach this time of year. It is a sound policy, too, given that Montague frequently manages to confound me by squatting down more than once, especially when I am only equipped with a single repository with which to dispose of the issue. Is it any wonder that I’d much rather start late, preferably under cover of night?

On this sunless Tuesday morning, though, I started just early enough to keep Montague’s appointment with the veterinarian. No walk along the promenade for the old chap, to whom the change of schedule was no cause for suspicion. Now, I don’t know what possessed me to agree to his being anesthetized to have his teeth cleaned, other than Montague’s stubborn refusal to permit us to brush them. I trust that, once he has forgiven me for this betrayal of his trust, that we have many more late starts to meet and mate with the sea . . .

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“. . . and all the ships at sea”: A Kind of Homecoming

This is not going to be one of those “the dog ate my homework” sort of posts, which are as much an excuse for not writing as they are a woeful excuse for writing anything at all. Besides, I could hardly blame Montague, our terrier, for keeping me from keeping my journal. Rather, it is the home work that has done the biting, gnawing and tearing at the hours I would otherwise earmark for sinking my incisors into stale pop-tarts—you know, those cultural marginalia with which I am wont to occupy my mind.

While I have rarely been all at sea when it comes to the leisurely pursuit of gathering and examining pop-cultural jetsam, my mind does not take to creative recycling when my limbs are aching after having performed some burdensome chore; and these past three months, my limbs have had quite a workout. We have been readying our late-Victorian house in the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth for its present trio of occupants, only the four-legged one of whom appears to be as blithe and sprightly as of old, albeit saltier.

We have moved in at last; and even though much remains to be done to make and keep the place shipshape, especially now that the house guests are checking in and up on our work, the sofas and easy chairs are in place from which to let out a defiant “Later!” and take off instead in further explorations of the airwaves or some such neglected channel.

The waves! Even though you would have to climb to the top floor of our house to get a glimpse of the bay, the surf and the seagulls are very much part of the enveloping soundscape. I suspect that the sights and sounds of the sea are going to feature prominently in subsequent—and decidedly more frequent—entries. It was not quite so easy for me to work the business of scraping wallpaper into my reflections; but the sea is another kettle of fish altogether.

So, “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea,” as famed newscaster and lexicon-artist Walter Winchell used to say—and which greeting I extend to Mr., Mrs., and Ms. Internet surfer the world over—“Let’s go to press . . .”

Related writings (featuring Walter Winchell or an Impersonator)
“Being But Blogmad North-Northwest”
“Amelia Earhart Is Late”
“Old-time Radio Primer: B Stands for broadcastellan”

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His Words, Her Voice: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and the Resonance of “Enough”

“Oh, I have seen enough and done enough and been places enough and livened my senses enough and dulled my senses enough and probed enough and laughed enough and wept more than most people would suspect.” This line, as long and plodding as a life gone wearisome, was recently uttered by screen legend Olivia de Havilland, now in her 90s. You may well think that, at her age, she had reason enough for saying as much; but Ms. de Havilland was not reminiscing about her own experiences in and beyond Hollywood. She was reciting the words of one of her most virile, dashing, and troubled contemporaries: Errol Flynn, who was born one hundred years ago, on 20 June 1909, and apparently had “enough” of it all before he turned fifty, a milestone he did not live to enjoy.

In her brief talk with BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves host Matthew Sweet, de Havilland talks candidly, yet ever so decorously, about her swash-buckled, devil-may-careworn co-star, about his temperament, his aspirations, his fears. Hers is an aged voice that has a tone of knowing in it. A mellow, benevolent voice that bespeaks understanding. A voice that comforts in its conveyance not of weariness but of awareness, a life well lived and not yet spent.

I could listen for hours to such a voice. I might not care for, learn from or morally improve by hearing what is said—but the timbre gives a meaning to “enough” that the forty-something Flynn never lived to express or have impressed upon him. It is the “enough” of serenity, the “enough” of gratitude, the “enough” of not asking for more and yet not asking less . . . or stop asking at all.

My own life is marked and marred by a certain lack of inquisitiveness, it sometimes strikes me. Being blasé is one of the first masks we don not to let on that we don’t know enough, that we know as much, but don’t know enough simply to ask. I wore such a mask of vainglory when I set out in life, the dullest of lives it seemed to me. My fellow employees had a nickname for me then.

It was my moustache that inspired it. Errol Flynn they called me. Little did they know that, even at age 20, I felt that I had “enough” even though I so keenly felt that I had not had much of anything at all. I simply had enough of not even coming close to the glass of which I might one day have had my fill; but, for three long years, I did not have sense enough to leave that dulling life behind. No voice could talk me out of that barren existence but my own.

It was not easy for me to regain a sense of curiosity; it was as if the pores beneath the mask had been clogged after being concealed so long, my skin no longer alive to the breeze and its promises. I had brushed off more than I dared to absorb. One morning, I took a walk around Central Park with one of Errol Flynn’s leading ladies, Viveca Lindfors, and was neither startled nor thrilled; nor did I not seize the opportunity to inquire about her past or permit her to draw me into her presence as she offered me advice and assistance.

Instead, I preserved the sound of her voice on the tape of my answering machine—like a butterfly beyond the magic of flight—her words saying that she had enough of me was dispensing of my humble services as her dog walker. I am left with canned breath, quite beyond the chance of living what might have been a great story.

Enough of my regrets. I can only hope that, when next I feel that I had “enough,” the word will sound as if it were uttered in what I shall henceforth refer to as a de Havilland sense, with dignity, insight and calm—and an acceptance that is not resignation.

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Dwelling on the Subject: The House in the Child

My future study, getting a make-over

How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as “with lead in the rock for ever,” giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise.

It was Walter Pater’s “The Child in the House” (1878) that gave me the idea for a title; but it was my history of habitation that made me write The House in the Child, a fictionalized autobiography. I received some sort of graduate prize for submitting a fragment of it, a rather generous acknowledgement of the pain it took to attempt its construction—and fail. Now that I am quite preoccupied with the impending move—a subject that, to recycle a line from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” (1892),  “dwells in my mind so”—it occurred to me just how long the concept of dwelling has been on my mind, that maze of memories Pater calls the brain-building.

The House in the Child was never finished; and that is just as it should be, for the house was never finished with me. The foundation for the narrative was a sense of dislocation and the absence of private space—living abroad, with a dinner table as a study, wondering what “home” meant. Thinking about the past, it came home to me that my family had been destroyed by the ambition of building that house. And yet, retreating into my own room (a luxury denied me during much of my adulthood) and the hidden realm of thought, I had done so little to keep the architecture of domesticity from falling apart.

Writing about myself—this most self-serving of literary endeavors—offered me a chance at revision, a chance to think of myself as someone who was not always thinking of himself first. I was not this child, but I might have been:

She points at the colorful map drawn neatly with crayons—red, blue, and green. Mostly red, though, because it makes everything look more significant and urgent somehow, like a warning label. On the map, the house looks like a castle, with chambers and vaults, corridors and hidden passageways. Everything’s angular and crooked, like in a real maze. A map can make any place important even if it really needs no map at all. The new house is much too small, really—too plain, straight, and square. Nobody gets lost in a bungalow. But this drawing was not supposed to make it all clearer and plainer. It was meant to add the mystery and adventure the whole place lacked from the start.

There is still so much to unpack; but she needs to rest for a moment, anyway; and so she sits right here, glancing at this piece of paper.

“Everything’s set up nicely, don’t you think? You kids will love it. No more fighting about space and privacy, no more arguing about what goes where. Now, let me see.”

She plays the game well, slowly following the paths with her finger, studying the map as if it really were the floor plan to an enormous fortress.

Maybe she enjoys this moment because she is just as disenchanted with her new home as . . .

“Ah, here we are. This is your room. Your sister’s room is next to it . . . right here, see? And somewhere down here, in the basement, is the workroom. And you know who’s going to spend most of his free time in there. Then there is our bedroom, straight across this hallway, here. This is what we always wanted, isn’t it? We’re all going to have our own rooms now.”

All except she. She does not have a place to herself, like we all do. What is her place? Where can she go to close the door? She has to sleep with him at night.

Maybe that’s why she keeps staring at the map, examining it as if she were looking for a vacant space to rest her eyes. Maybe she holds on to this plan because it promises a hiding place not to be found elsewhere—not provided for in our house. Maybe that’s why her finger keeps running up and down the paths, back and forth, back and forth, like a mouse trapped in a labyrinth.

Finally, she lets go, gets up, and turns out the light.

“You can always come here, Mutti.” But she has already closed the door—and she did not take the map . . .

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“I pulled and she shook”: A Décor to Try One’s Decorum

My dog, Montague, demonstrating his wallpaper training in response to my stripping

All right, so I’m sounding like an aging burlesque queen about to toss her tassels and turn in the G-string that is a turn-on no longer—but, by Gypsy, I am tired of stripping. Wallpaper, I mean. This old Mazeppa has nothing but a scraper for a gimmick, and the only hand she ever got for all her grinding is a mighty sore one. I just could not live with it, though, that dreadful pattern—having it stare me down in defiance, berate me for letting myself be defeated by all the work that needs doing in the old house we plan on inhabiting before long. The idea (not mine, mind) was to paint over it—but I scratched that faster than I could scrape. It might peep out from behind the paint, that ghastly design. It might start to creep up on me if I don’t get at it first—just like in that most famous of all interior decorating nightmares, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). To date, Gilman’s feminist tale of terror is the most convincing argument for taking it all off.

To the tormented soul telling the story, the paper she finds in her room—the room in which she is meant to rest—becomes a “constant irritant.” Within a few short weeks of studying it, for want of the intellectual activity denied to her, she is driven to the distraction once classified as hysteria:

The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. 

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.

Unlike the blank, “dead” paper on which she writes in secret, the wallpaper is teeming with life, just below the surface. It is the surface of conventions that Gilman tears down with a vengeance:

This bed will not move!

I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth.

Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!

When Gilman’s story was adapted for US radio, listeners to CBS’s Suspense program may have felt rather differently about this schizophrenic battle when, in a broadcast that aired on 29 July 1948, it was enacted by Agnes Moorehead, who, in tackling the part, had to struggle as well with our memories of the neurotic and disagreeable Mrs. Elbert Stevenson, her most famous Suspense role. “Sorry, Wrong Paper,” I kept thinking as I witnessed the disintegration. And yet, as the hard and cutting echoes of Mrs. Stevenson suggest, paper can beat both rock and scissors—a thought that filled me with renewed terror.

“It dwells in my mind so!” Gilman’s character remarks, tellingly, about the dreaded wall covering. The dwelling has overmastered the dweller, like a wild animal resisting domestication, a beast beyond paper training. The prospect of being dominated or possessed in this way by a questionable décor is a scenario horrifying enough for me to put penknife to paper . . . and keep stripping.

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"Milkman" in the Attic

“Look, sonny, we’re up here for work. We’ve put this attic off, and put this attic off. Now that we’re here, let’s make every minute count.” That was the voice of reason Rush Gook—and several million radio listeners besides—heard on the day (18 August 1942, to be precise) that mom Sade decided it was time to tackle that stuffy space under the roof of the “small house half-way up in the next block.”

Our attic, revealing the age of our house

As anyone familiar with Paul Rhymer’s Vic and Sade could guess right off, there was more room for doubt than reason that the task would be accomplished, and that, when the brief visit with the home folks was over, said space would be any more disorganized than it was before the job got underway. You could expect more order, method and sanity sticking your head into Fibber McGee’s closet.

Now, I’m not being etymologically sound here, but it is probably no coincidence that attics are just a single consonant removed from antics—and that is just what you should expect to find while up there, even if it is antiques you’re after.

Our new old house has not one but two attic spaces—and in the smaller of these we found ourselves confronted with some kind of time capsule. Only, it wasn’t quite the right time.

The graffiti on the wall suggests that construction was pretty much completed by September 1896, which was probably the last time the roof space was clutter free. Not that I want it to be barren of memories, mind.

Given the age of the house, I was kind of hoping for a family skeleton. Romantic novels of the Victorian age suggest that the darkest secrets are best kept just below the roof, rather than being crammed into the proverbial closet. Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason comes to mind, and that seminal study on the subject (Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic).

The Benny Hill album

Instead, we were treated to “Benny Hill Sings ‘Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West.’” Not exactly a Victorian treasure—but at least Ernie’s story has the proper romantic ingredients: lust, rivalry, and premature death (a “stale pork pie caught him in the eye and Ernie bit the dust”); there is even revenge from the beyond, as the milkman’s “evil-looking” successor, Two-Ton Ted from Teddington, is denied the pleasures of his wedding night:

Was that the trees a-rustling? Or the hinges of the gate? / Or Ernie’s ghostly gold tops a-rattling in their crate?

The cleanup sure slowed down once I came across that discarded collection of vinyl, the highlight of which, to me, is a curiosity labeled “Memories of Steam.” The locomotives on the cover could not deceive anyone into expecting the tell-all record of an inveterate Lothario; but I was thrilled nonetheless, transported back to the days when, as a boy, I was given an album of collected noises that led me to stage my own audio dramas—signifying nothing to anyone else, but chock-full of sound and fury. Come to think of it, that one record may well have laid the tracks that, long and winding though they were, earned me a doctorate . . . just the kind of certificate to relegate to the space I had just visited.

Another find in the attic

Yep, even a climb up to an attic filled with the leavings of previous inhabitants leads me no further than some dim corners of my own memory. Unlike Sade and Rush, I do not have to wait for crazy Uncle Fletcher to disrupt the tasks at hand with one of his dubious recollections (“Sadie, do you remember Irma Flo Kessy there in Belvidere?” She was a “peevish woman” who “used to have a little habit of slappin’ her husband’s face in public”). I can count on my own past to traipse close behind and creep up on me.

This time, though, the detour into those mental crevices was a welcome and trouble-free one. Down below, rooms hung with ghastly wallpaper were waiting for a hand attached to my aching body . . .

Related recordings
“Cleaning the Attic,” Vic and Sade (18 August 1942)

Related writings
“The Home Folks Are Moving In”
“Home Folks Lose Ground to Plot Developers”

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“Von Ribbentrop’s Watch”: Thoughts on Kristallnacht

Perhaps I should call her. We have not talked in over a year. Could I have telephoned tonight, though? Not simply to exchange a few kind words, mind. From her, I would like to learn about the past that shaped our world; and who would not seize the opportunity to grasp that past firsthand? That said, I have never quizzed my German grandmother about life in the Third Reich, never attempted anything amounting to probing inquiry. I am more distressed by my failure to ask than by any responses I might get. Not that any number of answers could make me stop wondering.

Another watch, another (lost) wartime story

Tonight marks the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, and I am more keenly aware than usual that the past is not done with, that many of those who threw stones into shop windows or looked on as Jews were hauled off to the concentration camps are still among us. Their ideologies, their hypocrisies, and their indifference are alive as well.

My grandparents were not among those who resisted the Reich and its reign of terror. “Of course, we knew they were being shipped to the camps,” my paternal grandmother once told me. Frank about knowing, she was open rather than open-minded. Third Reich propaganda remained at work throughout her life, even some forty, fifty years after the defeat of the Nazi regime. Once she heard I was schwul (German for gay), she ceased to acknowledge me; not as much as a reply to my Christmas cards. My maternal grandmother, now in her nineties, continued to correspond, though, sending greetings and wishes to me and mine. Is she more open? Or is she, like so many of us, merely permitting her personal feelings for her own kind to gainsay thoughts that would otherwise dominate her mind?

My maternal grandmother worked for one of the leading Nazi families and remained loyal to them decades after the war, introducing me to the heirs when I was a child. My memories are vague. I remember being told about the guilt that made outcasts of the obviously well-to-do family for which grandmother worked as a seamstress. There was a boy, roughly my age, with whom I played while grandmother worked. As much as I would like to fill in the blanks, I cannot bring myself to ask about the past, about grandmother’s connection to the Von Ribbentrops.

On this Remembrance Sunday, as Britain commemorates the 90th anniversary of the 1918 armistice and those killed in war, I drift in and out of consciousness, sick with the commonest of colds. Swirling in the thick of my head are thoughts that just the right word cannot put into any conclusive or satisfying order. I continue to question myself rather than demanding answers from those who might help me to resolve matters.

Instead of proving that actions speak louder than words, Kristallnacht demonstrated that actions are louder than the silence of unvoiced dissent. A stone, in this respect, is like a resounding “no” to the potentialities of change latent in the troubled mind. Words can set nothing aright if they merely create the illusion of control, if they obscure the chaos within us rather than dispel it. I let my words bespeak confusion rather than answer conclusively, thus falsely. I let them run riot rather than underwrite what amounts to the hollow triumph of paper solutions.

A quandary is at the heart of “Von Ribbentrop’s Watch,” a radio play by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, which premiered 8 November 2008 on BBC Radio 4. It is the story of a Jewish shop owner in contemporary Britain who learns that the less-than-reliable watch he inherited from his father once belonged to Nazi Germany’s Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop. What to do? Keep the watch and ignore the Swastikas to which a watchmaker alerted him? Sell it to collectors of Nazi memorabilia in order to keep alive his own struggling business? Would that be retribution or profiteering?

The fascinating premise is undermined by the language in which the conflict is couched. It seems that the playwrights are rather too enamored of their at times desperate wordplay, too eager to elicit awkward chuckles from assorted squabbles at a Passover table when restraint might have served them better. Perhaps, the broadcast date for this dreadful piece of imitation Goldbergs was as unfortunate a choice as the playwrights’ mockery—a Jewish defense of Nazi crimes, the sounds of broken glass after a family quarrel, followed by an otherworldly visit from Von Ribbentrop—as it gave me reason to believe that “Von Ribbentrop’s Watch” was meant to coincide with and somehow commemorate the horrors of Kristallnacht. Armistice Day, by comparison, is given a solemn treatment on BBC Radio 3, with an adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front.

At least, the titular chronometer of “Von Ribbentrop’s Watch” seems to suggest that even belated justice is preferable to terminal ignorance; time catches up with timepiece in question, however exasperating and offensive the ninety minutes that it takes us to hear about it. Not that the conclusion is rewarding: in its tacky irony, the play insists that the Jews end up confessing their guilt by association.

In response to this appalling piece of misjudged comedy, which is supposedly based on a true story, I retrieved the watch shown above. Like so many stories of so many objects around me, the story of this watch cannot be recovered, the one who could have helped to pieced it together having died many years ago. It was given to my partner, whose father brought it back from the Second World War. My camera failed to capture it, but the face bears the Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the Resistance.

What we need to resist, always, is the convenient answer, the conclusive remark, the word to extinguish the doubt that is the life of thought, the hope for change; and the doubt we should all permit ourselves to voice on this day is whether the past is truly over or whether we are still victims of the same prejudices, susceptible to the same talk, capable of the same actions. Those are the questions we cannot expect anyone to answer on our behalf.

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Day for Bonfire Night; or, On a Bum Note of Triumph

However disheartening California’s majority rule in favor of amending the state constitution so as to protect an institution for which millions of divorced Americans have shown little respect, 5 November 2008 is still a day to inspire confidence in a democracy’s ability to refine and redefine itself, to let go of old prejudices so often upheld as time-honored traditions. To update and appropriate On a Note of Triumph, Norman Corwin’s cautiously optimistic radio play in commemoration of VE Day: “Seems like free men [and women] have done it again!” Perhaps, it seems even more of a victory to those living in Europe and elsewhere around the world.

Like many non-Americans anxious for change in Washington, I stayed up all night to keep track of the election results. Watching the BBC coverage, I was struck by the enthusiastic response to the outcome, even though it should come as no surprise that most people around the world are relieved to see the Republican rule of proud indifference come to an end.

I was tickled by David Dimbleby’s hilariously awkward interview with the cantankerous Gore Vidal, who refused to explain his enthusiasm about the Obama victory to an audience he assumed to be ignorant of America’s civil rights movement and the Republican mindset that impeded it. Perhaps, the world does not understand what it means to be an American; but now, for the first time since 11 September 2001, the world is once again eager to learn and willing to empathize.

Here in Britain, 5 November marks the anniversary known as Guy Fawkes Day, or Bonfire Night, when the threats of extremism and self-righteousness go up in smoke. Generally, it is the figure of Gunpowder Plotter Guido Fawkes that is burned in effigy. Tonight, though it may well be the Republican legacy that the British are eager to consign to the flames. Change, after all, is only a dirty word to those incapable of coming clean about a past that is far from spotless. And, given the state of our global economy and, more importantly, our globe, mend our ways we must.

Today, 5 November, also marks a personal anniversary. It was on this day, four years ago, that, after nearly fifteen years of living, working and studying in the US, I left Manhattan to impose myself on the Welsh and the British at large. I intended the departure date to coincide with the previous election, thinking that the result might either be so decisively against my kind as to eclipse any misgivings about moving and—allowing me to wash my hands of a country whose people were reckless enough to re-elect George W. Bush—or so encouraging and propitious as to send me off into uncharted territory with a sense of hope and a feeling of elation.

It turned out to be the former, of course; but that did not keep me from visiting to Manhattan and from feeling very much at home there. You may not read the anxiety into the above picture, one of the first photographs taken of me after my move to Wales, a Principality theretofore unknown to me.

Before moving, I had shed nearly twenty percent of my body weight, as if resolved to let go of my past or determined to leave behind what could not be retrieved, as if I were trying to convince myself that I needed to regain weight on British soil in order to make it British. If you look at the image of me posted in the previous entry into this journal, you will notice that I did regain the weight, largely owing to Welsh meat and home cooking.

I owe it to my partner, with whom I am yet barred from forming a legally recognized union amounting to matrimony, that I am feeling at home in our remote cottage halfway up in the Welsh hills, a place that, the wilds of the rain forest or the Congo notwithstanding, could hardly be more different from life in Manhattan. How wonderful it is to be celebrating this historic moment of harmony as a very intimate part of my own journey . . .

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After the Falls

Having just returned from a trip to Niagara Falls, I was eager to revisit Henry Hathaway’s 1953 technicolor thriller starring Marilyn Monroe. Shrewd, sexy, and sensational, the expertly lensed Niagara is the most brilliantly devised star-making spectacle of Hollywood’s studio era. It has so much going for it that it can afford to be utterly predictable. The Falls are predictable, which does not make them any less exciting. And as much as I enjoy spotting old-time radio performers like the aforementioned Lurene Tuttle or Jack Benny’s jovial announcer Don Wilson, Niagara hardly requires any added attractions to make repeat viewings worth my while. More than the mere setting for a tale of adultery and revenge, the magnificent Falls are a dramatic extension of Monroe’s form and the character she portrays, as well as an obvious metaphor for the rush of desire and the flimsiness of the social fabric with which we attempt to stay it.

No one seems safe from the inexorable and devastating force of Niagara. Not even Jean Peters, the far better half of a couple of second honeymooners so clean as to be emotionally washed up and well past passion. Spending a honeymoon by the falls is something of an endurance test. Either your love proves as strong and permanent as the scenery or the flame is doused and consumed by it. Passion, to be sure, is no requisite for marriage, which is why the falls can be seen as a substitute for it, an ersatz externalization for the unsettling influences those settling in dare not permit themselves to experience.

No matter how many showers she takes, how many times she gets sprayed by the mist, no matter how many times she slips into a new dress, Monroe’s Rose is far from spotless. She is no Lorelei Lee, either, an infantilized siren whose predatory sexuality is rendered innocuous by her apparent simplicity and her chief interest in the monetary value of her prey. According to the Code under which Hollywood operated, a lapsarian anti-heroine like Rose must go down in her own scheme to rid herself of her brooding, volatile husband (Joseph Cotten, whose character is too unsure of himself or his position to control his wife, let alone the film’s point of view).

For the gender-confused and fatalistic teenager I once was, Niagara outlined adult life as an improbable proposition, a threatening, unconquerable front: the terror of “taking the plunge” in conformity and the peril of attempting to go against the stream while stuck in a barrel destined for the Horseshoe Falls. Wet behind the ears, I seemed unlikely to get altogether soaked. My downfall would be suffocation, not rapture. The only recourse that appeared open to me back then was to assume the likeness of a devastating and lamented corpse when the bells were rung on my behalf by the re-producers in charge of casting me aside. I never got entirely over this feeling, but have long since learned to keep afloat.