If New York City is the bawdy street-walker of the world and Paris the elegant courtesan, then London is the dowager Empress.  Yet, being a country lad at heart, I want to see more than London on my next visit to the United Kingdom and I am particularly smitten by Dorset and its corn fields, pastures, heaths and high hedges, its spinneys of hazel and oak.  The Dorset as Geoffrey Household described them in his 1939 adventure novel ROGUE MALE.

Dorchester

After leaving Magdalen College, Oxford, Household spent much of his young adulthood working abroad.  When he returned to London he felt “lonely and déclassé” and sought to rediscover his native land by talking long walks in the country, the best of which were those that took him over the Dorset downs to Exmouth where his parents were living.[i]  One walk of twenty-eight miles took him to a place called Piddletrenthide and if any of my readers have been there, I would love to hear from you and see a photo of the place.

ROGUE MALE was the first of several novels that Household set in Dorset where his characters could be “free of foot” and where the “western end of the chalk, not too closely populated, suits the mood of loneliness,” where a someone “may stand back from an England which half-way to the horizon, recovers her youth” and see her “as a man standing back from his beloved.”[ii] 

Maiden Castle, Dorchester

Household wrote ROGUE MALE in 1938 while the storm clouds were gathering over Europe and it was published in September, 1939 just after war broke out.  In the plot, the hero, an unnamed British aristocrat, has fled Europe after attempting to shoot Adolph Hitler.  He soon finds out that he has been pursued by German assassins to London and that no one, not even the British government, can protect him; he somehow must go to ground where his hunters will never find him.  When Household wrote the story he had intended that fear would supply the suspense.  Did he suspect that the German war machine would soon supply an atmosphere that would compliment his writing?

Fear filled the air of Britain and the pages of the novel.  For if an Englishman hunted by foreign assassins could not be safe while hidden deep in that idyllic corner of the sceptered isle called Dorset, burrowed between the thick Dorset hedges, surrounded by good Dorset farmers and tradesmen, with English laws enforced by the good Dorset constabulary, where then on God’s good earth could an Englishman be safe? 

Marshwood Vale

So being the curious sort, I decided to do some research on the Internet to see what that out of the way bit of England looks like today.  I used the same itinerary Household gave his hero as he ran and hid from the assassins bent on removing him from this planet.  The results, I am delighted to report, were magnificent and I have listed them pictorially below:  The best way to make this tour is by car, staying overnight at a local inn.  Otherwise, one can take a train from London to either Dorchester or Yeovil (130 miles) and rent a bicycle.  As our British cousins still insist on driving on the wrong side of the road, this is the mode of touring Dorset that I recommend.  Trains leave from both Paddington and Waterloo Stations but the South West trains from Waterloo are less costly.  Your London hotel should be able to assist you with bicycle rentals at either terminus.  The Yeovil train from Waterloo continues on to Exeter for those who wish to stay overnight in that university town.   Below is the exact itinerary the Household hero followed:

1.  Wimbledon Common: It was here that the hero spent a night in the open after dispatching one German thug in the Aldwych tube station, still carrying with him “the sound of steps and his scream, and the hideous, because domestic, sound of sizzling.”[iii]  It was then that the hero decided that if he was to die, then it would be in the open.
   

   Wimbledon Common

2. Dorchester: The hero first fled here by train from Wimbledon.  The Town Pump is a central point in Dorchester – located next to Dorchester’s Corn Exchange and the impressive clock tower; you will find an information board, outlining four popular historic walks around the town.  You can get a flavor of these by clicking on one of the walks in the Discover Dorchester section – there you can take an Interactive Walk, to find out a little more about what each of these walks entail.  Dorchester has so many pubs that it is hard for me to single out one or two. Thus, I have included a list to choose from as an endnote and leave it to others to do their own research.[iv]
3. Weymouth: Our hero made his way here along the A354 and then doubled back to further confuse any pursuers. 
   

   Weymouth Harbor

4. Old Roman Road from Dorchester to Exeter.  Our hero used, staying away from the highway, oiften hding during the day and cycling at night.
5. Powerstock:  While reachable by bicycle from Bridport or Cattistock, Powerstock resides along the old Roman Road from Dorchester to Exeter, and is in area of weaving and snaking valleys that dip and rise, making for good exercise along with the views of the countryside.  Our hero, following the Old Roman Road, passed by the village at night.  You can visit by day and see the church of St. Mary and refresh yourself at The Three Horseshoes pub.
   

   Powerstock

6. Marshwood Vale:  The Vale is mostly pasture and small villages linked by narrow lanes.  There are several Iron Age hill forts that can be explored. Two popular cycling routes are from Bridport (no.9) and Cattistock (no.11), discussed below.  The Vale’s one village is Whitchurch Canonicorum with its 13^th century Church of St. Candida. The pub is the Bottle Inn.
   

   Cow pasture, Marshwood Vale

7. Beaminster: In northwest Dorset, the town was within walking distance of our hero’s burrow in the Marshwood Vale and he went there several times to buy food and supplies.  Pub is the Red Lion.
   

   Beaminster

8. Lyme Regis: The hero had his solicitor send him books to the post office in this little coastal town because it had a winter colony of Londoners and strangers.  This was his first folly.[v]  The town is famous for its selling of fossils from its Jurassic cliffs and The Pub is the Pilot Boat.

9.  Bridport: The market town for the region.  On the cycling route to Marshwood Vale (No. 6, above), you pass Pilsden Pen and Lambert’s Castle.  

Fortified Tower House, Bridport

10.  Sydling and the Sydling Valley: “which, by the map, appeared to be as remote a dead end as any in Dorset,” as Household’s hero describes it.  “The downs on both sides of the Sydling Valley were country after my own heart: patches of gorse and patches of woodland, connected by straggling hedges.”[vi]   It was here that he holed up in an abandoned cottage, which he made appear to be his hideout to deflect hunters away from his real burrow.  In the village of Sydling St. Nicholas, there is the Greyhound Pub.

Cattistock

1. Crewkerne: Crewkerne Castle, a Norman motte castle, is on Castle Hill, a mound to the northwest of the town.
2. Yeovil:  The town is in South Somerset, just over the border from Dorset.  Originating in the paleolithic mists of Britain, its present name is derived from its position on the river Yeo.  There is a small railroad museum and the nearby village of Brympton contains the medieval manor of Brympton d’Evercy.  Pub: Wine Vaults.  Only a few miles away from Yeovil is the Sherborne School, that institution of privilege that writer John Le Carre attended with detest and which he used and abused as a thinly disguised model for the fictional Carne in his second George Smiley novel, A MURDER OF QUALITY.  In Sherborne, you may stop for refreshment at the Brittania pub before returning to Yeovil.
3. Eggardon Down: This stretch of countryside which the hero criss-crossed in a vain attempt to elude the police and his would-be assassins is best known for the Iron-Age Eggardon Hill Fort, which has one of the finest views in the UK, allowing one to look across Lyme Bay to South Devon and Start Point.  The hill fort is an easy cycle ride from Bridport and can be included as part of the cycling route to Marshwood Vale, No. 9 on itinerary, above.
   

   Eggardon Hill

I recognize that the entire itinerary can be daunting time wise and for those who can only spend a day or two, than my recommendation is to Cattistock directly by car, or by train to Dorchester and then on to the village by bicycle and to spend a couple of nights at the inns listed above (No. 11) and make cycle rides to (a) the Sydling Valley and Beaminster via Powerstock, or to Crewkerne with the return via Beaminster, or (b) to Yeovil and Sherborne, a more ambitious 40-mile cycle tour.  If you can spend more time and if your hotel can arrange it, then rent a bicycle in Dorchester and return it at Yeovil and take the train back to London from that town.  But no matter what, if you do choose to visit Dorset, make sure to have a copy of ROGUE MALE with you.

[ii] Against the Wind, P. 222.  Household became an avid shooter while at Magdalen and remained so throughout his life and so loved Dorset that he shared a shoot on its high farmland.  Two if his other novels set in Dorset are  A TIME TO KILL  and A ROUGH SHOOT.

[iii] ROGUE MALE, P. 55

[iv] Dorchester pubs often frequented by walkers of Dorset include but are not limited to: Baker’s Arms, The Blue Raddle,  Borough Arms, The Bull’s Head, Cornwall Inn, Junction, King’s Arms, Old George, Old Ship, Royal Oak, Stationmaster’s House, Sydney Arms, Thomas Hardye, Tom Brown’s, The Victoria, and White Hart.

[v] ROGUE MALE, Pp 80-81

[vi] ROGUE MALE, Pp 90-91

[vii] ROGUE MALE, P. 94

A working class industrial town strung out along the narrow valley of the Corrèze River, Tulle was never a place that France cared much about.  In the 1830’s, the French writer Prosper Mérimée described it as a “little town, squeezed into the depths of a narrow valley by steep mountains that seem to forbid it all expansion.”[i]  The early twentieth-century poet Paul Claudel said that “it’s no more than two or three long winding streets descending to a large factory and a small train station.”[ii]

The same descriptions could apply in 2012 except that the large factory, which had produced munitions for the state and was the town’s largest employer for over a century, was closed down in the 1990’s.

Tulle is best known today as the political fief of France’s President-elect, François Hollande.  Indeed, as Hollande gave his victory speech on Sunday evening, the sign flashing on his website and centered below him on the podium read “Tulle-dimanche 6 Mai 2012.”  But there was another date that Tulle was once more famous for and which has haunted the town for decades.  9 Juin 1944—June 9, 1944.  A date far more ingrained into the psyche of Tulle and perhaps Hollande, himself.

That was the day the German SS 2d Panzer (Das Reich) Division indulged itself in a mass hanging of Tulle’s young men and boys.  Tulle had been a Communist Party stronghold before, during and after the Second World War, and the Communist factions of the Resistance in the Limousin region had long been itching for a fight with the Germans.  June 6, D-Day, gave them the opportunity and on June 7 they attacked the German garrison guarding Tulle’s munitions factory.  By June 8^th, the Maquis were in control of most of the town, having killed or maimed forty German soldiers and penning the rest up in their garrison.

But this tiny victory in the largest war the world had ever seen would prove to be fleeting.  The Das Reich Division had been ordered to head north to Normandy to bolster German forces trying to stem the Allied invasion.  And a unit of some 500 of the Das Reich’s soldiers was diverted en route to relieve the besieged Tulle garrison.  The Maquis melted back into the forests and hills of the Limousin and when the SS arrived in Tulle on June 9th only the town’s ordinary citizens were available for retribution.

And this was not just some ordinary barbarous SS Division; that would have been bad enough.  For the Das Reich killers had come from the Eastern Front where the year before they had fought at the major Battles of Kharkov and Kursk and whose commander at Tulle, Sturmbannführer Kowatch, remarked to a local official who protested: “In Russia we got used to hanging. We hanged more than 100,000 at Kharkov and Kiev, this is nothing for us here.”[iii]

The SS spent the morning of the 9^th busily rounding their victims up, some 3,000 men and boys, out of which two batches of sixty were selected to be killed.  Other SS roamed the town, scavenging for any ropes and ladders they could find.  For the places of execution, the SS used whatever was handy: telephone poles, lamp posts, balconies all along the main thoroughfare, the Avenue de la Gare.  After a long leisurely lunch, the SS spent the afternoon hanging 99 of the 120 selectees, as the rest of the rounded up men and boys were forced to watch.  Also watching from behind their shutters of their homes were many citizens.  The SS left the bodies hanging in plain view for hours before ordering them to be hauled to the local garbage dump for burial. Another 101 young men and boys were deported to death camps in Germany from which they never returned.  This atrocity is less well known throughout the world than the Das Reich’s destruction the next day of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and the killing of 642 of its inhabitants.  But it is well known to this day in Tulle.

While Oradour had suffered even more terribly, it had almost no survivors and became a symbol in France of German atrocities committed during the war.  Tulle, on the other hand, had plenty of survivors and witnesses, who suffered silently in the shadows of history.  Even today many of their children and grandchildren who had not yet been born on June 9, 1944, carry the same emotional scars as their parents and grandparents.

For decades, the inhabitants of Tulle were so overwhelmed by grief that they could not even discuss the massacre of June 9^th.  There is a small museum of the Resistance in the town as there are such museums in many towns in France.  Few visit it, unable to bear the pain.  Many of the streets have been renamed after victims of the SS; apparitions that permanently hover over the town.  Many of the buildings along the Avenue de la Gare whose balconies were used by the SS to hang their victims have been torn down, but the recovered remains of those hanged are buried in the cemetery on the hill overlooking the town.  A cemetery visible from virtually every street.  The old Hotel St. Martin which housed the Gestapo torture chambers no longer exists either, but when one walks along the narrow river, one cannot help but imagine the terrible suffering of those imprisoned there in 1943 and 1944.  The Souilhac district of the town is now referred to as the Quartier des Martyrs.  Three words that speak volumes about this unspoken tragedy.

Yes, the ghosts remain, in the form of sad and bitter memories that still permeate the collective psyche of its citizens.  For virtually everyone in Tulle either had a family member, friend, neighbor or acquaintance that had either been hanged on June 9^th or had been deported to the death camps.   There are other ghosts as well.  The ghosts of injustice.   Sturmbannführer Kowatch disappeared after the war and was never caught and punished for the Tulle Massacre.  The commander of the Das Reich Division, Brigadeführer Heinz Lammerding, was sentenced to death by a French court in 1951 but was never extradited from then West Germany and spent the rest of his life running a prosperous engineering firm in Düsseldorf.  Can there be any doubt that this lack of justice still haunts the town?

Today, some French sneeringly refer to German Chancellor Angela Merkel as “La Boche.”  But to many citizens of Tulle there is another German woman, Paulette Geissler, “la chienne,” who readily comes to mind.  For it is la chienne, convicted in 1951 and sentenced in absentia to three years for the minor crime of failing to assist someone in peril, who embodies everything terrible that happened that day.  While the inhabitants of Tulle may be reluctant to talk about the massacre they have never been reluctant to talk about la chienne whose behavior on June 9^th is remembered as most vile: drinking and laughing as the victims dangled from ropes, dancing to accordion music, even participating in the selection process. Who can say what is true and what is not?  What is important is that la chienne was there at the time, consorting with the SS, and that she had the arrogance to make a nostalgic visit to Tulle in the 1970’s while on a hunt for foie gras in the neighboring Dordogne.  A visit in which she acted as if the massacre had never occurred.

When the citizens of Tulle see Chancellor Merkel’s image on television, do they conflate it with that of la chienne?  How can one think otherwise?  And does President Hollande?  Perhaps.  At the very least he is highly cognizant of the events of June 9^th and the profound effect it has had on the town.   It is from these bitter unspoken memories and grief that has wrapped Tulle as a shroud that President Hollande arises.  While he has been criticized for being too bland a politician, that is perhaps only a mirror of the psyche of Tulle.  In any event, what happened on June 9, 1944 in Tulle and the decades long internal suffering of its inhabitants will no doubt play a part in how Hollande interacts with Germany and its Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

[ii] Tulle et ses environs, Guidebook. Martel, 1997, P. 69

[iii] Antoine Soulier, Le Drame de Tulle, 1971, P. 26.

The story of Chen Guangcheng is a dramatic story, a story about a blind peasant activist hounded by a repressive regime and who escaped from a house surrounded by police who were little more than paid thugs.  It is certainly a story worthy of our attention and we should be hopeful that there will be a satisfactory conclusion.

But let’s get real.  Because Chen, in a fit of emotion, decided to leave the sanctuary of the US Embassy, it is not a “human rights disaster” or President Obama’s “day of shame,” as the President’s Republican detractors, including Mitt Romney, have decried.

There certainly have been human rights disasters within recent years but the house arrest of Chen does not rank among them.   As a symbol of resistance to totalitarianism, the blind activist peasant, in a society that has treated its peasants as badly as the big feudal landlords once did, surely makes good copy.  But let us remember that he is far from alone, supported by the mute resistance of hundreds of millions of his fellow citizens.  Moreover, those jolly comrades in Beijing and their entourage of hoods in the cancerous organs of the State who seek to repress him now make up a minority of the top Communist Party leadership and a lesser minority of the  Party’s Central Committee.  And while this gang of the truly blind insists on ignoring the Long March of history, it cannot stop it.

So now let all of us turn to the true human rights tragedies.  Past and present tragedies that Republicans, as well as Democrats, and all of our friends in the United Kingdom, France and other civilized nations should unceasingly talk about:  Genocide in Rwanda; ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the south Sudan and the ongoing starvation in Darfur province; the gang rapes of women and children in Zaire; modern slavery in the Middle East; child prostitution in Thailand and Central America, patronized by American and European pedophiles; and the vicious treatment of many women in Pakistan and Afghanistan.   Compare these tragedies to the house arrest of a relatively well-fed dissident!

Which brings me to the horrific story of a 15-year-old Afghani girl, Sahar Gul, a story all but subsumed in the politically generated hullabaloo over Chen.  

15-year-old Sahar Gul, enslaved and tortured Afghani child bride. Photo by Getty Images

Sahar, sold off by her family as a child bride, was kept in a basement torture chamber for six months by her in-laws, who ripped out her fingernails, broke her fingers and repeatedly burned her with a hot iron in an attempt to force her into prostitution.  And to top off her torment, my fellow Americans, Sahar’s husband and brother-in-law are members of the vaunted Afghani Army that we are expending tax dollars to train and protect Afghanistan as the US-led NATO coalition draws down its forces.

Finally rescued after her uncle complained to top authorities, she was in court in Kabul to see three of her in-laws sentenced to ten years in prison; a small measure of justice.  Absent were her husband and brother-in-law who are on the run and we must ask who is sheltering and protecting these Afghani Army members?

We must also ask what will happen after the US and the other NATO nations withdraw most of our troops?  Afghanistan is a patriarchal society and will, unfortunately, remain so long after the US footprint is lifted.  The traditional practices of child marriage, giving girls away to settle debts or pay for their relatives’ crimes and so-called honor killings in which women seen as disgracing their families are murdered by their relatives will continue, for as we see, they are continuing despite our being there.

Much work to help girls like Sahar has been done by the organization Women for Afghan Women but whatever progress has been made in the form of schooling and ending physical abuse and marital slavery may all be lost.  To abandon these Afghan women and girls is to condemn them to a fate which we would die to protect our own women and children from.  I have argued in the past and argue again today that if we can take in Cuban refugees fleeing Castro, we can certainly airlift any Afghan woman or girl who wants to get out of that hellhole.

And if we do not, this will be one more gigantic human rights tragedy.  I wonder what Chen Guangcheng would have to say about this.  Perhaps he might take some time out from his attempts to get to America for graduate study to comment. That is if he has anything truly to say about real human rights violations, or has even thought about them at all.  The same goes for those strident Republican voices who so eagerly have become his champions, all in the seamy cause of election-year politics.

“We all went to Paris.  It was where we had to be,” Gertrude Stein once remarked.

Gertrude Stein

The moveable feast Ernest Hemingway called Paris has fed New York for the past four weeks in the remarkable Gertrude’s PARIS Festival, the month-long celebration of Gertrude Stein and the City of Lights.  The celebration, held at the Symphony Space, 95^th Street and Broadway, is now in its final week and there is still time to visit Paris without ever leaving the Big Apple.

Hemingway

The festival, organized by Laura Kaminsky, will end this Saturday, May 5 not with a whimper but a loud bang: a 12-hour free to the public marathon tribute entitled Wall to Wall Gertrude’s Paris.  This is a not to be missed opportunity for lovers of Paris and the Lost Generation and anyone else with a touch of nostalgia to partake of the moveable feast on a scale never seen before.   Silent films, literature and food and drink, all interspersed with music of Paris that ranges from the aristo concert chambers of St. Germain to the prole Belleville streets and the lively, jazz-filled Montmartre cabarets.

Gertrude in her salon with Jame Joyce ad Hemingway

Running from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., this capstone event, a gift of the Symphony Space to New York, will present a Paris from the fin de siècle to the advent of World War II.  Attendees will arrive to be greeted by strolling musicians and antique cars parked at the entrance.  Because of its length, this marathon presentation is broken up into segments divided by opportunities to partake of food and wine.

The first segment runs from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and features readings from Stein’s works interspersed with music by Debussy, Stravinsky and Poulenc.  Lunch will then be served at the back of the house and in the adjoining Bar Thalia.

The next segment runs from 2:15 to 7 p.m. and features readings of Stein, Hemingway and James Joyce, even two poems by Tristan Tzara, all presented in portrait pairings of word and music.  They are all topped off with healthy of servings of Parisian cabaret songs and the later period chansons françaises of Serge Gainsbourg, Michel Legrand, and other Parisian song writers.  Of these chansons, only the L’accordéoniste by Michel Emer and recorded by Edith Piaf in 1940 fits the time period. 

La fille de joie est belle; Au coin de la rue là-bas. Elle a une clientèle; Qui lui remplit son bas. 

I would have liked more Emer who wrote throughout the 1930’s, including over twenty songs specifically for Piaf, but even twelve hours is so little time for so much Paris.

From 7-8 p.m., dinner in the form of a six-varietal wine tasting accompanied  by a selection of French cheeses will be served in the Thalia Studio (while the Saturday marathon is free, the wine and cheese tasting requires tickets which may be purchased at the box office or the Bar Thalia).

The final segment runs from 8-11 p.m. and kicks off with Harlem in Montmartre, featuring Reb and John Spikes’ 1919 jazz standard Someday Sweetheart, Cole Porter’s Miss Otis Regrets, Love for Sale and You Do Something For Me along with the Koger, Scotto, Varna French classic of 1931, J’ai deux amours.  One of the singers will be the versatile Tamara Tunie, better known for her long-running television role as the medical examiner, Dr. Melinda Warner on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

This will be followed by A Walk Through Gertrude’s Paris, hosted by Adam Gopnik, who for many years wrote the Letter from Paris for the New Yorker Magazine, and features readings of the works of temporary and permanent American expat writers Langston Hughes ( photo on right, below), Anita Loos, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virgil Thomson, Sylvia Beach and Lincoln Kirstein.

This will be followed by Michael Arenella & His Dreamland Orchestra, who will offer seventeen dance songs from the 20’s.  For those of you who cannot make it to the Symphony Space in New York on Saturday, the 5^th, you can still enjoy the readings and the music.  Pour yourself some champagne, roll back the rug and log on and hear it all at SYMPHONYSPACELIVE.org. 

And if you can’t wait until Saturday to take your trip to the 1920’s Paris, then tonight at 8 p.m., the festival is offering the Singers Space’s American Songbook.  Hopefully, in addition to Porter and George Gershwin, there will be music by key African-American jazz musicians and personalities of the era, such as James Reese Europe, who started it all, and Bricktop and Josephine Baker who kept it going.  Then on Thursday and Friday, May 3-4, at 9: 30 p.m., there will be a musical presentation, From the Charleston to the Foxtrot, with Michael Arenella, on cornet and vocals, heading up a trio.

As America approaches the one-year anniversary of the demise of Osama Bin Laden, formerly our nation’s number one enemy, at the hands of US Navy Seals who were acting under the orders of President Barack Obama, my thoughts turn to some other US Naval heroes: The Five Sullivans.

On January 3, 1942, the five Sullivan Brothers, George, Francis “Frank”, Joseph “Joe”, Madison “Matt” and Albert “Al,” enlisted in the US Navy.   Sons of a hard-working Iowa brakeman for the Illinois Central Railroad, all five were assigned to the light cruiser USS Juneau.  On November 13, 1942, the Juneau was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and forced to withdraw from the Battle of Guadalcanal.   During the withdrawal it was again torpedoed and sank.  Frank, Joe and Matt Sullivan died instantly.  Al drowned the next day.  With about ten other sailors, George survived for five days in shark infested waters before throwing himself over the side of a raft, driven insane by grief over the loss of his four brothers.  There was also a sixth Sullivan, Genevieve, who served in the WAVES and whose boyfriend, Bill Ball, was killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor.   It was his death that spurred her brothers to enlist.

The Five Sullivan Brothers

Two US Navy destroyers were named after the Sullivan Brothers: The Sullivans (DD-537 and DDG-68), and their sacrifice inspired two Hollywood movies: The Sullivans (1944) renamed The Fighting Sullivans and, in part, the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan.  

While the Sullivans were the largest set of brothers to die together during World War II, on the Juneau alone there were at least thirty pairs of brothers and a quartet, the four Rogers brothers from Connecticut.

The Four Rogers Brothers: Joseph, James, Louis and Patrick

Sadly today, we have a candidate for the Presidency of the United States who says that the hunt for Osama Bin Laden was not worth it.  That’s right, my fellow Americans, this politician said the evil mastermind who slaughtered thousands of our fellow Americans on 9-11 was not worth the effort of being hunted down and brought to justice.  Yet this same politician grins and prances across the campaign stages of the nation, vowing that, if elected, on his first day in office he will take military action against an Iran bristling with missiles and economic action against a China who is the largest importer of American made products.   And while this politician (we will call him “Mulligan’ because of his incessant attempts to “do over” his past policies) engages in all this tough talk, he is joined by The Five Mulligans, his five smiling country club sons, all fit and healthy to do battle on the golf courses of America.  And all who have chosen not to wear this country’s uniform.  Well, regardless of the outcome of this November’s election, you can take this to the bank:  The US Navy will never name a ship after them.

1. Cambridge Circus—also known as “The Circus” –the home of the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS which employed George Smiley.  It was from here that George was forced into retirement only to be brought back to find the Soviet mole “Gerald,” who was burrowed somewhere in the upper echelon of the Service.  On my first visit to London, which was more years ago then I care to remember, I made a pilgrimage to Cambridge Circus in an effort to determine which building in that maze of jumbled streets was the building Smiley’s narrator had deemed to be the SIS headquarters.  I was armed with my clues as are most Smileyologists: The building was five stories and had Edwardian dormer windows and Bill Haydon’s top floor office was in a pepper pot turret overlooking Charing Cross Road.  See if you can find it.
   

   Cambdidge Circus

2. 9A Bywater Street, Chelsea, a blue-shuttered cottage in a cul-de-sac mews just off of King’s Road; Underground stop is Markham Street.  This was the home of George and his wife, the aristocratic Ann, whose serial unfaithfulness went so far as to bring her lovers into the home.  One of those lovers was “Gerald,” who at the advice of his KGB handler Karla, joined “the queue.”  Ann, exhausted from her latest tryst, would compose herself into the dutiful and faithful wife while listening to Sibelius in the front room.
   

   The Smiley residence at 9 Bywater Street

   Nearby restaurants: Tom Aikens, 43 Elystan Street, with a contemporary French cuisine; Underground stop is South Kensington. Rasoi, 10 Lincoln Street, Indian cuisine; Underground stop is Draycott Place.  Both restaurants have been awarded one star by the Michelin Guide.  For a quick and decent sandwich or pastry, there is Paul at 134 Kings Road, right at the corner of Bywater Street and King’s Road; Markham Street stop.

   

   Paul's on King's Road and Bywater Street

3. Heywood Hill Bookstore, 10 Curzon Street, Mayfair.  This antiquarian bookstore was favored by Smiley for its offerings of obscure German texts, including a volume of Grimmelshausen; the Underground stop is Green Park.
   

   Heywood Hill Bookstore

4. Thomas Goode of 17-22 South Audley Street, nearby in Mayfair.  This is the exclusive store where Ann bought the bone china cup and saucer as a present for George.  When he retired for the last time he gave it to the secretaries in the Interrogator’s Pool as a going away present.   The shop is only a few blocks from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.  Nearby, you can stop at the worthwhile cocktail bar in the venerable Connaught Hotel for a martini or The Punch Bowl for a glass of wine and you may run into one or two of “the Cousins” from the Grosvenor Square “Annex” while you are relaxing.
5. Manchester Square, Westminster-the location of Smiley’s club, founded by one of George’s war-time bosses Steed-Asprey after he was asked to leave his old club.  The club was originally made up of the wartime spies and the “old” Circus.  Later, George avoided it, not the least because one of its members was that pompous twit from the Foreign Office, Roddy Martindale.   Closed to the public, you cannot dine in the club but at the Hertford House nearby in the Square is the excellent Wallace Collection of arms and armor.  You may take afternoon tea and enjoy viewing the collection; hours are 10 a.m. to five p.m. and the Underground stop is Bond Street. 
   

   Manchester Square-The Wallace Collection

6. Sussex Gardens, Bayswater: Where mole hunter Smiley set up his operational HQ in Room 9 of the “Hotel Islay.”  Like The Circus, the Hotel Islay does not advertise itself and you will have to surmise its exact location from the descriptions provided by Smiley’s narrator.  The Underground station is Paddington.  For a great feel of Smiley’s world and its people there is the nearby Frontline Club, 13 Norfolk Place, Paddington where you can mingle with Brits (and a few others) who serve on the “frontline,” whether it be as journalists, with the F.O. or other agencies and even catch an insightful lecture on foreign affairs and news coverage (Tube stop is Paddington Station). 
   

   The Frontline Club Near Sussex Gardens

   And if you have a mind to, as I have, visit this area of the City of Westminster again at night as it is terrific for pub crawling.  Here are my two not to be missed favorites: The patriotic plus Victoria, 10 Strathearn Place, Paddington just across the road from Hyde Park (Tube stops are Paddington or Lancaster Gate) with an interior atmosphere that still breathes Empire; and the museum-like Windsor Castle, 27-29 Crawford Place, Marylebone, which is also the home of the Handlebar Club whose member sport handlebar moustaches. And if you are lucky you may find Cockney comedian Joe Brown standing next to you at the bar. The Underground stop is at Edgeware Road.

7. Lexham Gardens in Kensington, central London.  Location of the safe house in TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY where George lured Toby Esterhase to a meet and broke him down.  Described by Smiley’s narrator as a “two-room scalp hunters’ shakedown,” the safe house was located on a square that was “Victorian residential, at the centre, a caged garden, already dark.”  
   

   Lexham Gardens

   On nearby Marloes Road (where Peter Guillam “ghosted” Smiley as he left the safe house) and Stratford Road is the Devonshire Arms pub where you can get a decent, if not the best in London, fish and chips and a pint of good beer or ale. The surrounding streets contain some interesting mews and a few blocks away on Allen Street is the Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Church.  Stroll further on through Edwardes Square and cross Kensington High Street and you will find another of London’s hidden gems, the Leighton House Museum at 12 Holland Park Road, the studio house of the 19^th century aristocratic painter, Frederic, Lord Leighton.  The Underground stations for Lexham Gardens are Earl’s Court or Gloucester Road.

8. Five-Lock Gardens, Camden Town (Underground station is Camden Town, Northern Line.  While the Chalk Farm Tube station is closer you cannot easily cross the Canal and thus it is a bit of a walk).  This is the location of the safe house where Smiley entraps the London KGB Rezident Polyakov and “Gerald,” the Soviet mole within the Circus.  As with Cambridge Circus and Lexham Gardens, Smiley’s narrator-confessor is vague as to the exact location of the safe house.  But here, perhaps out of exuberance over the exposure of Bill Haydon as “Gerald,” the Soviet spymaster Karla’s creature within the Service, more is revealed than had been intended.  We know from the files that the safe house was near the Camden and Hampstead Road Locks and that Peter Guillam had a clear view of the building from his surveillance post on the towpath on the other side of the Regent’s Canal, with its “ripple of rats and the stink of still water.”  
   

   Regent's Canal near the safe house in Camden Town

   We also know from the record that Guillam’s post was near the steel low-arched bridge with its zigzag stairs that led to Gloucester Avenue and that he could see the trains crossing the trestle over the canal.  The report also states that Guillam walked up Gloucester Avenue to meet Lacon at the corner of Princess Road.  The bridge is no longer there but the tow path is and you can take a canalboat ride down much cleaner water past the general location.  Surely these are enough clues for any Smileyologist to find the safe house, are they not?  But no, for if Guillam is where Smiley’s narrator-confessor places him, then he would be facing the back of the row of houses on St. Mark’s Crescent and could not see either Polyakov or “Gerald” approach the safe house.  If you are puzzled stop in at the Sardo Canale Restaurant at this corner and have a good Italian meal while you ruminate over all the geographic permutations.  Nighttime is best as you can imagine Guillam and Lacon conversing in the shadows across the street.

Afterwards, partake of the eclectic food the surrounding northwest London area has to offer.  The Abbey Tavern on Kentish Town Road is one I would recommend for good food and a good time (you retrace your steps to the Tube station and then walk up Kentish Town Road); another is the closer Albert at 11 Princess Road with a beer garden.

You can wind up the tour at the north end of Whitehall on Northumberland Avenue, where George finished his days in the Interrogator’s Pool before retiring to a cottage “somewhere” in North Cornwall.

Even though I have kept the itinerary short, I know that it may be tough to complete, especially for those tourists that have tickets for a full venue of sporting events, so if you have to cut it down, keep it to numbers 1, 2 and 8: the Holy Trinity of the George Smiley novels: Cambridge Circus, 9 Bywater Street, and the Lock Gardens safe house.

In my next blog article, I will give a pictorial description of Geoffrey Household’s Dorset, using the same itinerary his protagonist in ROGUE MALE used while on the run from foreign assassins.

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”[i]  This comment from one of the Old Testament scribes is an apt description of the literary hoaxer and his “product.”

Today, when cable TV talking heads churn out books by the truckload, it is all too easy to be fooled.  While those of us who have a deep and abiding interest in current affairs may know the real writers from the media bleaters, in this age of the television personality cult, it is all too easy to fool much of the public.  Between the “research” by the networks’ hordes of unpaid undergrad interns and “editing” by the near-starving assistant editors at the publishing houses, one has to wonder what exactly these media babblers actually contribute to “their” final product.   And while the origins of these works may be suspect, it is not the type of literary hoax I am discussing.

Nor is it plagiarism, that tricky little devil that turns academics into insomniacs, who stay up for nights on end, worrying that a colleague or student might filch a conclusion or phrase or a bunch of conclusions or phrases without giving the author credit.  Or worse, that they themselves might one day get caught out and thus they spend their sleepless nights feverishly praying to the gods that they achieve tenure before that unhappy day of justice arrives.

What I am discussing is the genuine literary hoax, a hoax that purports to be a genuine work of literature, a hoax with a long history of fooling even the most astute most of the time.  Yet happily, not all of the astute all of the time.  For if they were not eventually exposed as frauds, how would we ever come to know that they were literary hoaxers?

During the late 18^th and the 19^th century, literary hoaxes were common.  In fact, many purported confessions and autobiographies were expected by readers to be fictional accounts, often written by people with an axe to grind.

In 1836 a Canadian woman named Maria Monk, who claimed to have been a nun, wrote a kuridly titled exposé  Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed.  In the book, Monk alleged that nuns of the Religious Hospitalers of St. Joseph in Montreal were forced to have sex with the priests in an adjacent seminary.  The priests supposedly entered the convent through a secret tunnel.  If one of the nuns became pregnant, Monk claimed, the baby was baptized after birth, then strangled and dumped into a lime pit in the basement.  This was a time of virulent anti-Catholic hostility and there is some evidence that Monk, who apparently suffered from a brain injury, had been manipulated by the publisher and team of ghost writers.

Another 19^th century literary hoax was The Songs of Bilitis, a collection of 143 prose poems written in the manner of Sappho and purportedly written by an ancient Greek courtesan named Bilitis.   The poems were translated into French by Pierre Louys and published in 1894 in Paris.  Louys even included a biographical chapter on Bilitis.

It soon turned out that the poems were actually written by Louys and that Bilitis never existed but the French demi-monde apparently did not care as the poems’ emphasis on Sapphic love made the book a much sought after cult item.  And although Louys had fobbed them off as ancient writing and had even plagiarized some of the work from Sappho, The Songs are today considered to be of some importance in French literature.

The most literary famous hoax of modern times was Clifford Michael Irving’s 1970 sale to the gullible editors at McGraw-Hill of a purported autobiography of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes.

Clifford Irving

Irving, a moderately successful novelist, enlisted crony Richard Suskind to help him research Hughes and to forge letters purported to have been written by Hughes.  Irving then hornswoggled McGraw-Hill into paying him a $100,000 advance, a princely sum at the time, along with additional advance checks totaling $665,000 and made out to H.R. Hughes.  Irving’s wife then deposited those checks into a Swiss bank account under name of “Helga R. Hughes.”  The next year Irving and Suskind delivered their manuscript to McGraw-Hill and it was declared to be real by Hughes watchers at Time-Life and Hughes expert James Phelan, who himself had written a book about the billionaire.  Phelan apparently was unaware that segments of the Hughes “autobiography” had been plagiarized from one of Phelan’s own books.  Irving was also able to dupe a forensic document analyst and willingly took a polygraph which gave inconclusive results.

Only when Hughes himself protested in 1972 did the hoax unravel and Irving and Suskind were convicted of fraud.  Irving spent seventeen months in prison and Suskind five. 

Petty criminal Michael Pelligrino showed that he had stones as large as Irving’s.  While in jail he  conned the Artist Management Group into believing he was Michael Gambino, an illegitimate grandson of the late don of dons, Carlo Gambino.   Then upon his release in 2001 Pellegrino sold the same phony story to Simon & Schuster and walked away with a $500,000 advance.  Pellegrino, who may have had aspirations to become a cable television personality, then hired a ghostwriter to write his “autobiography” The Honored Society in which he detailed a fictional lurid life of crime as a mobster.   After the book was published that same year, the Gambino family hired a lawyer who exposed the fraud to Simon & Schuster, which then withdrew the book.

James Frey

In 2003 Hollywood screenwriter James Frey pulled a fast one on the publishing world, fooling Amazon.com and Oprah Winfrey with his fake autobiography A Million Little Pieces, in which he falsely wrote about his battle with drugs and alcohol addictions.  Addictions that never existed but garnered him the Amazon book of the year award and a place in Oprah’s book club.  The fraud remained unexposed for almost three years until The Smoking Gun website exposed numerous fabrications in the book, including a nonexistent criminal record and automobile-train accident that Frey claimed occurred in 1986 in Michigan.  Incidents that Frey’s publisher later admitted she had never fact-checked.

Frey and Oprah Winfrey

When he was confronted by Larry King on Larry King Live about the discrepancies in his “autobiography,” Frey still stuck to his guns and claimed all the facts were true.  After the broadcast, Oprah even called into the show to defend him!

My personal favorite literary hoax is the modernist Australian poet “Ern Malley” whose avant-avant-garde poems made up an entire edition of the poetry journal Angry Penguins.  Malley never existed as he was a creation of Australian writers James McCauley and Harold Stewart.  Unlike Irving and Pellegrino, whose motives for fraud were purely monetary or Louys, who wanted to make a name for himself, McCauley and Stewart had an older and purer inspirational muse: revenge.  They were writers who preferred early modernism and they harbored a literary grudge against Max Harris, the founder and editor of Angry Penguins.  The hoaxers considered Harris to be a mere youthful dilettante and they despised his magazine.

The "Ern Malley" special edition of Angry Penguins

In 1944, both men were serving in the Australian Army’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs.  Apparently drawing upon skills learned and used in their military assignment, they decided to perpetrate a hoax on Harris and his magazine by creating the fictional dead poet Ern Malley and surrounded him with a completely fictional biography, including a fictional sister “Ethel.”   “Ethel” wrote Harris to tell him she had found some of her deceased brother’s unpublished poems and at the suggestion of a friend was sending them to him.  The poems, all seventeen of them, were actually written in a single day by McCauley and Stewart who named the collection The Darkening Eclipse.

“I am still the black swan of trespass on alien waters,” read the last line of the first poem of the collection.[ii]  One can only imagine McCauley and Stewart doubled over in laughter in their billet while Harris drooled over his literary “discovery.”

Harris, in fact, was so smitten by the collection that he immediately decided to publish a special edition of Angry Penguins, dedicated to Malley and The Darkening Eclipse.  He even went so far as to commission artist Sidney Nolan to do a painting for the cover.  This special Autumn 1944 edition was released in 1945 and soon rumors spread that Harris had perpetrated a hoax upon his readers.  The Australian newspapers, being Australian newspapers, knew a thing or two about hoaxes and were soon asking questions.  First, the Adelaide Daily Mail suggested that Harris had, himself, been the victim of a hoax.   Then the Sydney Sunday Sun exposed McCauley and Stewart as the real authors.

Both men went on to have decent careers. McCauley had a long and distinguished career as a Professor of English at the University of Adelaide and Stewart eventually moved to Japan where he published two volumes of translations of traditional Japanese poetry that were best sellers in Australia.  The Darkening Eclipse collection is now considered to be far better poetry than the hoaxers had intended and has gone through several republications.

Harris tried to resurrect Angry Penguins but failed and then tried other literary ventures that also met with little success.  A committed leftist and member of the Australian Communist Party, he later moved to the far right and became a columnist for newspapers that were sympathetic to his views.

More sinister than the above hoaxes and bordering on the ghoulish are Fragments by “Binjamin Wilkomirski” and Misha: A Memories of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca.  These books were fraudulent memoirs of the Holocaust years.  Fragments, which purported to detail life in two Nazi death camps, was written by one Bruno Grosjean, who had never been in a death camp; Misha, the saga of young girl travelling across Europe to escape the Holocaust, was published in seventeen languages and became a best seller in Europe before being exposed as a fraud.   Almost as sinister was Love and Consequences, a book purportedly written by a Margaret B. Jones, a mixed African-American-Native-American foster child from Los Angeles, but actually written by a middle-class white woman named Margaret Selzer, who as a teenager attended Campbell Hall, a tony Episcopalian day school in North Hollywood.   In perpetuating her hoax after publication, Selzer went as far to speak in what she believed to be a vernacular African-American voice while giving radio interviews.

These are just a few of the literary hoaxes that exist.  There are others that have been discovered and I am sure that there are even others waiting to be discovered.  And unfortunately, as long as there are publishers so hungry for the blockbuster that they are willing to close their eyes and hold their noses, there will also be others created in the future.   As Ern Malley’s line from The Darkening Eclipse might have put it, the literary hoax, this vanity of vanities, will always be “the black swan of trespass on alien waters.”

[ii] The poem is “Durer: Innsbruck, 1495”

“What do you think war is?  Brass Buttons?”

This was the question that Dr. Adams (Arthur Kennedy) plaintively asked his son, Nick (Richard Beymer) in HEMINGWAY’S ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN.  This  rarely shown1962 Twentieth Century Fox production is a solid portrayal of Ernest Hemingway’s semi-fictional youth Nick Adams, whom Hem had made famous to a generation of Americans through his short stories.  Of course, this question was never asked of Nick by his father in any of Hem’s stories but it could have been and thus its inclusion in this star-studded film makes literary and biographical sense.

Yesterday morning, I was trapped by circumstances into waiting for my lawn tractor and tiller to be picked up for servicing.  Forced to forego my usual three-mile run and workout, I was punching through my television remote and happily stumbled across this film listing, minutes before show time.   As I had not seen the film in decades, I knew I was in for a treat.   I poured another cup of French Roast and messaged a writer friend who is as great an aficionado of Hem as I am.  Then I sat back and so thoroughly enjoyed the film that I am now writing about it.

The film was released only a year after Hemingway’s tragic suicide (Yes, I know this is a redundancy for all suicides are tragic) and the screenplay by A.E. Hotchner, a friend and biographer of Hem, remained as faithful to the Nick Adams stories as Hollywood could, given the era.

Hotchner and Hemingway on a hunting trip

The film rapidly takes up the first five of the stories, those that are set in the northern Michigan locale of Walloon Lake where the Hemingway family summered:  “Indian Camp,” ‘The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “The End of Something,”  “The Three-Day Blow” and “The Battler,” with “Indian Camp” placed third, however, instead of first, most likely because its graphic portrayal of a Caesarian Section delivery by jackknife and without anesthesia would have turned off the movie audiences of 1962 to the rest of the film.  At least I am sure that was what producer Jerry Wald had concluded.  Indeed, even this one long scene was mellowed, having the Ojibwa husband Joe Boulton (Simon Oakland), despairing of his wife’s screams, run out of the cabin instead of killing himself by slitting his throat while lying in his bunk, as Hem wrote in the original story.

And actually starting the film with “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” works better, as it leads off with two problematic themes that haunted both Hemingway and Nick throughout their real and fictional lives:  The cowardice of Dr. Adams aka Dr. Clarence Hemingway, which both Hem and Nick found unacceptable, and the marital strife of the Adams (Hemingway) parents, with Mrs. Adams (Jessica Tandy), like Grace Hemingway, immersing herself in the Bible and her music, and dominating her husband much to Nick’s disgust, just as did Grace Hemingway pushed Dr. Hemingway around, much to the great writer’s disgust.

Richard Beymer as Nick Adams, Arthur Kennedy as Dr. Adams, with Pat Hogan (left) as Billy Tabeshaw

In this film segment Nick’s father threatens to knock Joe Boulton’s teeth down his throat after Boulton repeatedly called the doctor a thief, accusing him of stealing a timber company’s logs.  Nick is appalled and ashamed when Boulton calls Nick’s father out on this threat and Dr. Adams backs down and walks away.  This shame is compounded later when Nick sees his father being bullied by his mother into an explanation of what had occurred with Boulton.  In the short story, Nick and his father go off hunting squirrels but Hotchner, who knows how to flesh out a good movie scene and also had a good sense of the internal Hemingway, instead has Mrs. Adams forcing Nick to undergo a music lesson instead of going hunting with his father.  The resentment is clear on Nick’s face and the movie watcher has to wonder whether the resentment was greater toward his mother for depriving him of time with his father when his father could have used the companionship or toward his father for caving in (once again) to his mother’s overbearing will. And Hotchner has Mrs. Adams (Grace Hemingway) further humiliate Dr. Adams (Dr. Hemingway) by telling him that the music lesson was important because Nick, unlike her husband, has ambition to match his talent.

The next film segment mirrors the short story “The End of Something,” in which Nick breaks up with a summer fling (Diane Baker), telling her that “It isn’t fun anymore.  Not any of it.”  While in the short story, it is made clear that the pair have had a sexual relationship, to which Nick is referring, in the movie this is glossed over.  This story than proceeds to an interesting Hotchner scene in which Nick tells his father that he had broken up with “Carolyn” (Marjorie in the story) and Dr. Adams insists that Nick go ahead with plans to marry the girl because his mother was looking forward to it.  When Nick asks his father if he always plans everything around what his mother wants, Dr. Adams replies in essence that is married life and Nick would get used to it.

That scene segues nicely into the next story “The Three-Day Blow” in which Nick goes over to his friend George’s (Michael J. Pollard’s) cabin and the two boys drink George’s father’s liquor.  But instead of taking about Nick’s dumping Carolyn, books and baseball, as they did in the original story, in the Hotchner created dialogue, the pair talk about Nick’s dreams to go off and become newspaper reporter.

Next, Nick, who has no intention of following his mother’s plans for him to get married to some girl from Horton’s Bay, is on the road, by himself, as George, who had started out with him, returned home.  This episode mirrors “The Battler,” with Nick catching a ride on the rails only to be knocked off by a vicious brakeman (Edward Binns).  While wandering down the railroad tracks, Nick spots a campfire.  This leads to what I consider the most interesting scenes in the entire movie, with Paul Newman (another close long-time friend of Hotchner) playing the half-crazed, punch drunk boxer Ad Francis and Juano Hernández playing Bugs, an African-American companion who looks out for him.

Newman and Hernández use their full acting abilities and do great honor to Hemingway’s powerful dialogue which Hotchner faithfully retained in this story and throughout the movie.  In one snippet, Newman as Ad says of Nick: “He says he’s never been crazy, Bugs.”

Hernandez, as Bugs replies: “He’s got a lot coming to him.”

Bugs explains to Nick that Ad went crazy after Ad’s sister, who had also been the boxer’s manager, left him.  The viewer is left to puzzle this through, as the viewer also has to do with the relationship between Ad and Bugs.  As in the other stories, it is not long before “The Battler” turns sinister.  Ad, seeing Nick cutting bread for sandwiches, asks to hold Nick’s knife.  Bugs stops Nick from giving the boxer the knife.  Soon Ad, who had liked Nick up to that point, ominously begins to attack him verbally and then to physically threaten him.  He is only stopped when Bugs slips up behind him and knocks him on the head with a blackjack, which Bugs explains is the only remedy when Ad gets like that.

The next situation Nick finds himself in is a short adaptation of the very short story “A Pursuit Race.”   But instead of Nick meeting Billy Campbell, the alcoholic bicycle racer, as Hemingway had written, Hotchner changes Campbell’s character to that of a publicity advance man for a cross-country bicycle race and burlesque show.  When the promoter asks Nick take over the advance publicity for the race and show, Nick says he wants to be a newspaper reporter.  The promoter then tells him to go to New York. 

Not part of the original story, this is a Hotchner created scene that leads to a further series of Hotchner written vignettes and longer scenes in the Big Apple, including the one in which Dr. Adams pleads with Nick, who has volunteered to be an ambulance driver in the Italian Army, not to go off to Italy.  Hemingway, however, was completely silent on the feelings of the Adams family toward Nick’s volunteering.

One of the better vignettes involves a New York managing editor played by Philip Bourneuf:  When Nick pleads for a newspaper job even though he has no experience, the editor tells him “Try the Chicopee News. Make your mistakes there.”

Much of the rest of the film takes place in Italy, covering an amalgam of the short stories “A Very Short Story,” “In Another Country” and “Now I Lay Me.”   Susan Strasberg plays Rosanna, Nick’s love interest, who, like the plots, is also an amalgam of characters: Luz from “A Very Short Story,” and perhaps Catherine Barkley from Hem’s novel A FAREWELL TO ARMS and Agnes von Kurowski from Hemingway’s real life.   Excluded by Hotchner is the extremely poignant “A Way You’ll Never Be” in which Hemingway ascribes a severe head injury to Nick and its psychological aftermath that were a mirror of Hemingway’s own war injury and its subsequent deleterious effect on him.

Nick's Homecoming with Jessica Tandy as Mrs. Adams

Instead, upon the wounded Nick’s return to the States, Hotchner inserts another story which closely follows the plot of “Soldier’s Home,” which was a non-Nick Adams story about a veteran named Krebs and his mother.  Yet it could have been a Nick Adams story just as it was in part Hemingway’s own story about his wounds, his subsequent insomnia and his strained relationship with Grace Hemingway.  In fact, Hotchner further darkens the story by having Nick learn as he steps down from the train in his hometown that his father had killed himself while Nick was in Italy.

 While circumstances of Dr. Adams’ death are murky in the Hemingway stories, we do know that unlike the film or in Hemingway’s own life, Nick was somewhere around when his father killed himself.  Although Hemingway does not explicitly say so, we realize that Dr. Adams, like Clarence Hemingway, shot himself in the head.  For in the story “Fathers and Sons,” an adult Nick, trying to relate to his own son, reflects on a series of very dark, sinister occurrences from his youth.  In one of these brooding passages, the narrator tells us about Nick (and Hemingway, himself):   “If he wrote it, he could get rid of it.  He had gotten rid of many things by writing them,” and “There was nothing to do about his father and he had thought it all through many times.  The handsome job the undertaker had done on his father’s face had not blurred in his mind and all the rest of it was quite clear.”  Nick even remembers complimenting the undertaker on his work.

Yet, by placing the suicide at Nick’s homecoming, Hotchner was able to expand and deepen the tragic relationship of the Adams’ family, having Nick’s mother complain because Dr. Adams had left Nick a suicide note but did not leave one for her.  “I was his wife and he didn’t even leave me a note,” she tells her son.

The movie ends where it started, with Nick and his mother back in their lakeside cabin in northern Michigan.  Omitted from the film were “Big Two-Hearted River Parts I and II,” stories that took place as Nick retreats to the deep woods on a fishing trip, trying to deal with aftermath of war.  Also omitted was “The Light of the World,” in which a seventeen-year-old narrator that could be assumed to be Nick deals with homosexuality, which like suicide, is a recurrent theme in Hemingway’s short stories.

Yet there is only so much time in a movie and ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN runs 145 minutes.  All in all, Hotchner did a remarkable, fantastic job, one of which Hem, had he seen it, probably would not have complained.  And for Hem not have complained about Hollywood would have actually been great praise.  This cinematic tribute to Hemingway is a most worthy adjunct to his writings; a movie every Hemingway buff should see, and if they already have, should watch it again.  And then go back and read the Nick Adams Stories!

As a final thought, I wonder: Did Hotchner, in writing the screen play, take Nick’s advice?  Like Nick and Hemingway, was he trying to get rid of things by writing them away?  I know I do.

Those discussing the US Constitution’s Commerce Clause in Article I, §8 and its implications for the constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care Act need to understand that this clause is only the constitutional starting point for legal argument and not the end.   We should also be reminded that the Constitution was established by the People of the United States to carry out the specific aims listed in the document’s Preamble.

One of those aims is to “promote the General Welfare.”

Under the Doctrine of Implied Powers, enunciated in 1819 by a unanimous Supreme Court decision in McCulloch v. Maryland [i], (the second important case every first year law student studies in Constitutional Law), Congress has broad powers under Art. I, §8 to legislate for the general welfare.  These implied powers were vigorously argued during the Constitutional Convention’s ratification debates, were promoted by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, and were supported in the Federalist Papers, particularly No. 44.  Moreover, these implied powers have support in the Constitution itself under the Necessary and Proper Clause (Art. I, §8, Clause 18).

This clause was included in the Constitution to correct fatal flaws in the earlier Articles of Confederation.  As Chief Justice John C. Marshall[ii] wrote in McCulloch about the Constitution, “But there is no phrase in the instrument which, like the articles of confederation, excludes incidental or implied powers; and which requires that everything granted shall be expressly and minutely described.”  Marshall went on to say that an analysis of the Commerce Clause “depends on a fair construction of the whole instrument,” including the Necessary and Proper Clause.   He further stated that “1^st. The clause is placed among the powers of Congress, not among the limitations on their powers.  2d. Its terms purport to enlarge, not to diminish the powers vested in government.”  Thus, the Supreme Court held in McCulloch that it was within the powers of Congress to establish a national bank.

Moreover, Chief Justice Marshall in his majority opinion also pointed to Hamilton’s description of the Necessary and Proper Clause during the 1790 debate to create a national bank that “Necessary often means no more than needful, requisite, incidental, useful or conducive to it…” and that “it gives an explicit sanction to the doctrine of implied powers.”  In signing the law creating the national bank instead of vetoing it, it was this definition that President George Washington accepted rather than the narrow construction argued by Thomas Jefferson, who opposed the creation of the bank. 

Chief Justice John C. Marshall

Moreover, Chief Justice Marshall, in discussing the Necessary and Proper Clause and its implied powers to Congress, further stated: “This provision is made in a constitution intended to endure for ages to come, and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.”

Certainly, health care today in this country, regardless of what one’s opinion is of the Affordable Health Care Act, is one of those crises.

Five years after McCulloch, in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)[iii], which upheld the broad powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause, Chief Justice Marshall further held that the enumeration of powers granted by the people to Congress in the Constitution need not be construed strictly.

After this decision the reaction by the Southern slaveholding states to the Commerce Clause was off and running with states-righters constructing elaborate attacks on Chief Justice Marshall and the Supreme Court.  These were quickly followed by the South Carolina legislature, which passed a series of Resolutions in 1825 attacking the Constitutional powers of Congress.  This was to be followed up in 1832 when South Carolina enacted the Ordinance of Nullification, declaring that federal tariffs enacted by Congress in 1828 and 1832 to help develop American manufacturing were illegal within South Carolina. And finally, in 1861 South Carolina travelled all the way down the road of treason by declaring secession from the Union and attacking Fort Sumter.

The next case in importance for the current argument is the war-time Wickard v. Filburn[iv] in which the Court held that the government could regulate the growth of wheat for home consumption under the Commerce Clause, forcing farmers to buy wheat on the open market instead of growing it for their own use, under the theory of a “national market” and the “affecting doctrine,” with Justice Robert H. Jackson[v] referring at length to the language of Chief Justice Marshall in Gibbons.

Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson

Justice Jackson wrote: “At the beginning Chief Justice Marshall described the federal commerce power with a breadth never yet exceeded.  [Gibbons v. Ogden] He made emphatic the embracing and penetrating nature of this power by warning that effective restraints on its exercise must proceed from political rather than judicial processes.”  In other words it is up to Congress to either change or abolish the Affordable Health Care Act, not the Supreme Court.

It is from these three cases that all subsequent cases concerning the Commerce Clause have been argued and decided.  Every Supreme Court Justice and every Supreme Court law clerk is well versed in this case law and you can be sure that attorneys for all sides in the current argument have discussed their ramifications at length in written briefs submitted to the Court.  What the Roberts Court will decide, however,  is still anyone’s guess.

As a curious historical  aside, when the Federalists were in power, their use of the Commerce Clause to achieve ends was opposed by the Jeffersonian Republicans; when the Jeffersonian Republicans came into power, they reversed their stance on the Commerce Clause, as did the Federalists who then opposed an expansive use.

[ii] John Marshall (September 24, 1755 – July 6, 1835) was the fourth and longest-serving Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court (1801-1835) whose court opinions helped lay the basis for American constitutional law and made the Supreme Court a coequal branch of government along with the legislative and executive branches.  He was a staunch Federalist who believed that the United States needed a strong central government in order to survive and that federal law must take supremacy over state law.  A Virginian, he was particularly vilified by Southern statesrighters who feared (correctly) that federal power would one day lead to the abolition of slavery.

[iii] 22 U.S. 1, 6 L.Ed. 23 (1824)

[iv] 317 U.S. 111, 63 S.Ct. 82, 87 L.Ed. 122 (1942)

[v] Jackson was an Associate Justice of the S.Ct. from 1941-1954 and was also the Chief US Prosecutor at the Nuremeberg War Crimes Trials.

Nothing is more irritating than the sight of a man to those who have deliberately ceased to be men.”  Albert Camus.[i]

We see proof of this everyday here in the United States in the sickening venomous  attacks on President Barack Obama and his family; a proliferation of vile racist bumper stickers now appearing throughout the Southern states being the latest product of these twisted minds.   Yet, almost as irritating has been the failure of most Americans, especially writers and journalists, to denounce this hate-mongering; as if by ignoring it, it will go away.  Well, it won’t.  And this man whom we elected to lead our nation deserves our respect and our support against those trying to destroy him in every sense of the word.  Yet, other than to cluck to each other like frightened hens or shake our heads in anger or sadness, we don’t speak out.

Much of the same can also be said for our posture toward genocide in the Sudan, with Ann Curry, George Clooney, Nick Clooney, Dick Gregory and a few others being the notable exceptions.  From the rest of us, only clucking, head wagging and a few minutes of news media time.

And now Afghanistan comes to the fore.  No, I’m not talking about the action of a sole soldier on his fourth combat tour and who may have suffered a serious brain injury and could also be affected by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I am talking about military disengagement, an official action with a sure-fire devastating result that we, as a nation and democratic society, will be complicit in:  The abandoning of the women and young girls of Afghanistan to a fate all of us would fight to the death to prevent happening to the women of America.   Yet we ignore what we know will happen, again as if by ignoring it, it will go away.  Well, like the despicable attacks on President Obama, it won’t.  And while President Obama will undoubtedly survive the attempts to demean and destroy him, unfortunately the women and young girls of Afghanistan will once again succumb to the bloody vengeance and feudalistic rule of the Taliban.

Are we tired, fatigued, worn out from foreign entanglements and still worried over the economy and poverty here at home?  Most likely.  I know I am.  But I also know that my fatigue, my hunger, my worry is nothing like that of the Sudanese families huddling in caves, knowing that they will most likely die of starvation or government bombs and bullets.  I also know my fatigue and fear is nothing like that of the Afghan women and girls who will face Taliban retribution if we disengage too rapidly and without some sort of international protections put in place.

Our own history is a perfect example.  Is this 2012 or 1876?  Make no mistake; a clear analogy can be drawn between the US presence and mission in Afghanistan and post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South.  An equally clear analogy can be drawn between the status of women and girls in Afghanistan and the status of Freedmen under Reconstruction.  Just as the Freedmen under Reconstruction still faced danger from the KKK and other white supremacist groups, Afghan women and girls still face danger today while the US is present.  But what happens when we leave?   As we all know, when our government under President Rutherford B. Hayes fully abandoned the Freedmen after the 1876 election, it led to decades of horrifically violent repression and America’s shame.   Are we destined to repeat this shame?

Afghan Girl Students (Courtesy of Gallo/Getty)

After we leave, how many more little Afghan girls will be poisoned or have acid thrown in their faces because they dared to want to read; how many Afghan women will be beheaded or burned alive because they dared to vote or go to school?  How many more male Afghan school teachers who dared to teach these girls will be murdered by the Taliban and their supporters?  For Camus’ commentary is just as applicable in Afghanistan as it is in the Deep South.

We are not some simpering European nation, where people were content to pontificate about racist America over glasses of wine and puffs of filthy smelling cigarettes while Bosnian men were shoved into mass graves and Bosnian women were gang-raped.  This is the US, isn’t it?  Tell me if I am wrong but don’t we have a tradition of standing up for what’s right?  At least if not all of the time, at the times that count.

It is bad enough that we do not intervene (I concede that logistically there is not much we can do on our own) in the Sudan but in a country like Afghanistan where we have a strong military presence, to abandon millions of women and girls to a very ugly fate should be unacceptable to any decent American.  I am saddened that the Democratic women politicians who correctly criticize Rick Santorum and other Republicans for their extremist postures on women’s health issues do not at least publicly discuss this issue.  I am also shocked that GOP politicians have not attempted to turn the women’s issue back around on the President over this.   It is just more evidence of the hypocritical lack of concern for basic human decency.   The Neocons, for all their utopian recklessness, had at least one salient point.  What good are ideals if we don’t foster, nurture and protect them, as well as protect those who choose under our tutelage to adopt them?

I commented about this yesterday to a journalist with whom I am acquainted; a fine journalist and historian who once worked for the same news magazine that I once worked for, although in different eras, yet eras when that news magazine was still a great news magazine.  His response to my above comments was simply: “Good points but what if the Afghans don’t want us?”

To which I replied: “Which Afghans? The men or the women?”  And again this is the central point.  The power structure, if one can even call it that, of Afghanistan is entirely male and highly chauvinistic, even misogynistic, in character.  And while we play out our end game with the Taliban and the fractured Karzai regime, just as the Republican Administration in 1876 dealt with white Southerners, we will betray an entire segment of Afghan society, just as the US betrayed the Freedmen.  For the women and young girls of Afghanistan, without any say whatsoever, without even having the opportunity to utter a syllable of protest, will suddenly find themselves propelled backwards hundreds of years to be once again in feudal servitude.

So I say this to President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and General Petraeus: Let any Afghan woman or young girl who wants to leave when our troops do, also come to America.  If we can take in the Cubans, we can sure as hell do it for a people whose only crimes were to believe in us and to want to read.

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