David Hughes is an independent writer in Denver slowly drafting a triple biography of Mattachine Society cofounders Bob Hull and Chuck Rowland as well as Mattachine Foundation stalwart Wallace de Ortega Maxey.
An instance of years-ago seeming yester-day. My recently departed comrade, Lowell May, in a fortunate instance of synchronicity, on September 12, 2011 forwarded a snippet of Karl Marx just two months after musician Brian Eno had issued his collaboration with poet Rick Holland, Drums Between the Bells (and six days before Occupy Wall Street). What Lowell sent was a blog post of the same date by one N Pepperell, lecturer at an unnamed university in Melbourne, who felt the quotation from Marx “is on point for the sorts of reading strategies I apply to his style in Capital.” The language of this relatively obscure open letter, published twenty-four years before Capital, when Marx was 23, abstractly mirrors that of Holland’s words atop Eno’s soundtrack.
Reading Jim Dooley’s invaluable Red Set: A History of Gang of Four1 last year I was fascinated with how some of the philosophical underpinnings of the band’s songs mirrored what I’ve been dealing with in writing materials with comrades in a labor group. What follows is not a review of Dooley’s book, but rather a commentary on the mirrored passages and also, to a much lesser degree, remarks on my exposure to theoretical thought through pop music (of all things). This post is based on the notes I took at my first (and only) full reading, and is not a comprehensive look at Gang of Four reasoning.
Art & Language
The future Gang of Four’s Jon King and Andy Gill both met Terry Atkinson while studying art at Leeds University in the mid 1970s. Atkinson, an instructor, had been a cofounder of Art & Language, an association of artists that molded conceptual art into concretized ideas. But that collective also had a cachet for fans of popular music. Just as avant-garage rockers Pere Ubu would collaborate with Red Crayola in 1979,2 the latter’s Mayo Thompson already had worked with Art & Language on the LP Corrected Slogans (1976).3
So Atkinson had a built-in interest amongst students of art and music, like King and Gill and future Mekons Jon Langford and Mark White. Dooley quotes Atkinson from the beginning of a 1990 essay that appears to be so in line with Gang of Four’s song “Why Theory?” (1981) that it could raise a chicken-or-egg question if we weren’t aware of the interaction between the instructed and their instructor. Atkinson, followed by Gang of Four:
No matter how much theory is disguised or repressed, there is no practice without theory. The theory that practice has nothing to do with theory is a theory, a disingenuous and naïve one, but none the less a theory.4
Each day seems like a natural fact And/But what we think Changes how we act
The operative word is “seems.”
Dooley follows this up with a discussion of Jon King’s interest in the original Situationists and their culture jamming, which is fairly obvious, but of course integral to the GO4 story.
Seventy pages later Dooley discusses how, if action can’t be divorced from thought, institutions can’t be separated from their history. In other words, there is nothing necessarily “natural” in the order of things. On this point Dooley cites a text that King provided, by Georg Lukács.5 (I include here a preceding line because of its correspondence with Atkinson, above.)
Marx opposes to [his predecessors] a critical philosophy, a theory of theory and a consciousness of consciousness. It dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins and shows therefore that they are subject to history in every respect including historical decline.6
(Racist police as progeny of slave hunters comes to mind.7) To perceive any institution, law, idea as natural—the flipside being unnatural (as in acts)—simply perverts and subverts human agency. For worse or better, these are our constructs. Natural is not in it, as Gang of Four exclaim in their iconic song from the first album.
The same song poses:
The problem of leisure What to do for pleasure
Dooley cites a Situationist International line: “The emptiness of leisure stems from the emptiness of life in present-day society, and it cannot be filled within the framework of leisure.”8
As Dooley notes, this implies that leisure “is somehow exterior to our everyday working lives, and larger society […].”9
It’s a sharper critique than British band Multivizion would present in their 1981 single “Work to Live, Don’t Live to Work,” which actually leads off with the line, “There’s dignity in labour” before complaining of a demanding boss who wants “blood for money,” and which encourages resistance against the status quo without questioning it altogether. The lyric does, however, declare, “Well, money comes in handy/ But I don’t need it that badly.”10
The (In)Dignity of Labour: Too Dear a Price
I’m compelled to digress here and comment on Multivizion’s critique by way of what I read decades ago in Bartolomé Bennassar’s The Spanish Character: Attitudes and Mentalities from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, first published in 1975.11 In a chapter titled Power, Work, and Wealth, the author begins by mentioning the need for immigrant labor in the households of the wealthy during the first two centuries of his study, quoting Jorge Nadal, who wrote a few years earlier that “Spain, especially its Catalan and Valencian regions, was invaded by a multitude of immigrants from the other side of the Pyrenees.”12 Bennassar then explains that such a dearth of labor was in part solved by slavery.13
In a subsection titled Attitudes Toward Work, Bennassar writes, “Very early it seems, foreign travelers and attentive Spaniards noted this people’s lack of interest in manual labor and, more generally, their poor opinion of labor.” Felipe II’s 1561 study of his realm showed that prominent cities like Valladolid and Burgos had only 40 and 48 percent of family-heads declaring an occupation, respectively; Segovia only 70 percent.14
Bennassar quotes Henry Swinburne, who visited Spain in 1775 and 1776:
The poor Spaniard does not work, unless urged by irresistable want, because he perceives no advantage accrues from activity. As his food and raiment are purchased at a small expense, he spends no more time in labour than is absolutely necessary.”15
Bennassar also provides several examples of Spanish industriousness. Labor that long was considered “honorable” includes work on the land as well as public service—“the royal service, the study of letters, and the sea (the road of conquest and large-scale commerce).” Looked down upon were “mechanical professions” (use of hands) and “dealings in money.”16
Then Bennassar discusses what caught my eye nearly thirty years ago. I’ve never liked to work for a wage myself, and I guess this resonated at least on the level of “work to live.”
For Spaniards of the Old Regime, labor, even if remunerative, was not an end in itself. Labor might be the necessary condition for a decent life, but excess in work should be avoided.17
And then:
We must dismiss the legend of interminable days of labor, of years made up of identical days, all devoted to labor. A large block of time was always reserved for diversion.
Bennassar goes on to explain that even after the archbishop of Toledo had reduced the number of dioscesan holidays, per a papal recommendation at the end of the eighteenth century, feast days plus Sundays totaled 94 a year—ten days shy of our own 104 weekend days—
[…] to which must be added the parish feasts, the occasional corridas, the Mondays off demanded by artisans, apprentices, and day laborers as free time. This comes to 170 idle days in the year.18
We can roughly contrast this with our (U.S.) 104 weekend days, six relatively firm national holidays, and ten days of vacation: 120 total (if we’re lucky). To which, Bennassar adds that the workday itself was “rarely longer than six hours,” citing Joseph Townsend from 1731.19
Bennassar makes a near-summation in this subsection by quoting another foreigner, Théophile Gautier, a hundred years later:
Pleasures like ours, gained by dint of pain, fatigue, tension of spirit and application, they think are bought at too dear a price.”20
Leisure is loss
Nearly forty pages later in my reading of Red Set Dooley points to another Gang of Four song, “A Hole in the Wallet” from the second album, which deals with the commodification of “all aspects of contemporary life.”21 The song concerns women, however, whose “business” is to have been educated in order to recognize their equal status, but also: to be seen and not heard, to mask their “nature” with makeup, and to “stay in bed or in the kitchen.” Love, too, is a dead end:
Why work for love if it shows no profit You’ll only earn emotional losses Wasting time is a hole in the wallet
Dooley writes that the song “seems to ask whether we can possibly succeed if we don’t exclusively dedicate ourselves to our work. In a way, leisure is loss.”22 In work as in love.
Situationist Guy Debord, not cited at this point by Dooley, discusses the work-leisure dialectic, writing that leisure, i.e.,
inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of activity, and in the context of the spectacle all activity is negated[,] just as real activity has been captured in its entirety for the global construction of this result. Thus the present “liberation from labor,” the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result.23
Another song on that second album (Solid Gold)—the aforementioned “Why Theory?”—also had its genesis in a feminist critique, although one might be hard-pressed to detect it. Dooley quotes Andy Gill as saying the song’s title and possibly some of its lyrics were “sampled” from a “thick pamphlet” of feminist thought. The song expressed Gill’s dearly held idea “that all of this is man-made, it’s all idealogy—it’s created and it’s used to shape the world we live in.”24
Trying to tell you a dream
My notetaking skipped sixty more pages to mark an interconnection between Joseph Conrad, Karl Marx, Margaret Thatcher, and Guy Debord. The song is “We Live As We Dream, Alone” from the third album Songs of the Free. Dooley writes that the song “is linked to Gill and King’s shared enthusiasm for […] Heart of Darkness,” with Gill observing that the book “is as much about London as it is Africa,” i.e., colonization begins at home.
The title comes from a line in Conrad’s novella, exclaimed after its narrator explains that he’d lost his ability to view Kurtz rationally:
“He was just a word for me. […] It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no realation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essense of dreams…” […]
“…No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essesnce. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone…”25
Defining ourselves
As Dooley writes regarding this same song, “Interconnected are the Marxist ideas of reification and alienated labour,”26 covered thusly in the lyrics:
Man and woman need to work It helps us define ourselves We were not born in isolation But sometimes it seems that way
The space between our work and its product Some fall into fatalism As if it started out this way
In conversation, I find the perfectly “natural” question, “So what do you do?” to be pretty personal, just this side of asking someone about their sexual orientation. We hardly are defined by what we “do” any more than by what we do (or don’t) in bed (or whereever). And so that “space” (GO4’s term) of some workers’ estrangement from the product of their labor grows, just as it does for some young people these days vis-à-vis their gender and their sexual preference(s). Last summer Harvard’s Gay & Lesbian Review reported that, according to a British poll, “only 46 percent of eighteen- to 24-year-olds identified as ‘exclusively heterosexual’—0 on the Kinsey scale.” Another 35 percent fell in the categories of Kinsey’s 1 (predominantly hetero, only incidentally homo) and 2 (predominently hetero, but more than incidentally homo). So nearly one out of 5 fell into the area of bisexual-to-exclusively-gay.
A 2017 poll stateside already had expanded that sample to ages 18–34, and the results matched: 20 percent IDing as LGBTQ.27
The G&LR then reported last fall that stats from a survey of Yale’s first-year class—admittedly a tiny sample—essentially were the same, even if the categories weren’t Kinsey’s. “Straight” came in at 76 percent, while “Asexual/Ace” polled at three, “Questioning” at six, “Bi/Pansexual” at nine, and “Gay/Lesbian” at five percent.28
Just as there are people who accept a sexual status quo on its face, yet move beyond its bounds—say, anyone in that 2 slot on the Kinsey scale—, there are workers who do the same. Even those who adhere to “be thankful you have a job,” as if all value came from Capital—“as if it started out this way” (GO4)—, manage to finagle the system by myriad methods, from lifting paperclips to calling in sick, at the very least.
Society’s Bunk!
They’re invincible, didn’t exist!
— “History’s Bunk!”
The third connection to “We Live As We Dream, Alone” is noted by Dooley’s citing29 of Garry Mulholland,30
who draws a parallel between the song’s sense of estrangement and Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip in an interview five years later, that people
are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.31
Months later she issued it as a statement, itself of interest given what we’ve discussed above:
All too often the ills of this country are passed off as those of society. Similarly, when action is required, society is called upon to act. But society as such does not exist except as a concept. Society is made up of people.32
Dooley then quotes33 from Situationist Guy Debord, the final interconnection:
What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.34
A way out of this dead end is presented by Gang of Four’s “I Love a Man in Uniform,” from the same album. As Dooley writes, “Soldiering is not only a way to make a living in difficult economic times”—“Handouts, they got me down” from the lyrics—“it is also an occupation that offers some sort of structure to a chaotic life.”35 “I had to regain my self-respect,” the song’s narrator sings. “To have ambition was my ambition.” The whole song is a justification for joining, a justification that would change days after the song’s album Songs of the Free was released in March 1982: the Falklands War began April 2.36 Debord: “The spectacle reunites the separate….”
Ideology
My next two notes, scribbled between a couple dozen pages, concerned how Gang of Four viewed their engagement with the message in their music. Dooley cites37 a New Musical Express profile of the band by Charles Shaar Murray in which Andy Gill makes a distinction between GO4 and other bands championing a cause. Gill could have named a number of musicians, but chose Paul Weller, who “seems to be interested in areas of social welfare, but we’re not in the same category at all. A display of conscience is not the same bag as discussing ideology.”38 The difference is between a soul being simply sympathetic and being critical of the order that’s responsible for engendering that sympathy (via the order’s action, or inaction).
Gill had received questions from women friends regarding the song “Woman Town,” which was inspired by Fellini’s City of Women, in which Marcello Mastroianni’s character finds himself in a city with no men—especially a scene in which he “walks down a hallway that seems to consist of countless images, and audio fragments, of women from the doctor’s past,” as Dooley writes. It’s a sexist portrayal in the film, Gill tells Dooley, and is sexist in the song. So Gill’s friends’ queries re the song become problematic, since the song is a commentary on sexism using the sexist as mouthpiece. Such an approach, Gill says, “should be about truth and not trying to present some kind of politically-correct balanced view of the world. Because if that is the case, then what you are presenting is not truth but ideology.”39
Leonard Cohen’s third album displays his stubbled mug and a poem on the verso that begins, “They locked up a man/ Who wanted to rule the world.” To my knowledge that poem, like “Woman Town,” is not autobiographical. And Andy Gill is not Joni Mitchell, who remarks in the current issue of MOJO, “My work is personal, too vulnerable,” in reference to her paintings and the ignorance with which they’re met. “That’s why I quit making records.” But this quintessential confessional-singer-songwriter cuts to the quick regarding the underlying star-making machinery. Upon hearing that A&R types “are no longer looking for talent, they just want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate,” she thought: “That’s interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist—not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision.”40
Of course, Mitchell could be relegated to the same bag as Weller, but her comment remains a critique of capitalism. (For a thoughtful critique of ideology, not out of line with what Dooley presents, see a concise introduction by Chad Kautzer, who first introduced it to me.41)
Pastel Palette, Hard Harmonics
People hated Gang of Four’s album Hard, the band’s fourth, on which “Woman Town” appears, and there’s a lot to dislike, beginning with the cover: pastel palette, a group shot (a first, suggested by their manager, according to Dooley42), the geometric doodles on the verso that were a lot more Malcom Garrett (Assorted iMaGes) than GO4, although the matte finish is a nice touch.
Surfaces aside, I can’t get enough of the opening cut, “Is It Love,” owning four vinyl iterations, which I mixed live as a deejay. It’s not the song’s lyrics but rather the sound that grabbed me. Gill and King had planned to work with Nile Rodgers of Chic, being “huge fans.” But when Rodgers’s fee increased following the popularity of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, which he co-produced, GO4’s manager nixed it, according Gill, as recorded by Dooley.43 Still, Hard, which was produced with brothers Ron and Howard Albert, has a disco sheen akin to Chic, a departure from the prior punky-funk. It opens with Brenda White and Chic’s Alfa Anderson’s piercing a cappella “Is it…” falling nearly an octave to a serene “love…,” which seems sampled from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. Andy Gill demonstrates the depth of his artistry by crafting a guitar solo out of his harmonics—unmatched in his oeuvre, to my mind. It comes off as disco, unapologetically. Yet the band members spend a whole chapter apologizing to Dooley for the album.44 My notes urged me to reread the critique of Hard. In the course of doing so I was grateful to Dooley’s citation of two critics who put into words what I was feeling vis-à-vis disco—the music and its temples.
Disco Dialectic
Simon Frith gets into territory too involved to discuss at length, but states, for instance, that on the disco floor “there is no overt competition for partners, no isolation.” In my experience that was an element of the disco dialectic, that one could be surrounded by potential partners while feeling alone.45 And to quote a line of Frith that Dooley does not:
There was an obvious link between the vocal styles of disco and 1930s torch songs: Billie Holiday and Donna Summer alike stylized feelings, distanced pain, opened up the texts of sexuality (and for this reason, disco, despised by punk-rockers on principle, had an immense appeal to the post-punk avant-garde).46
One can list a number of artists in the latter camp: Lizzie Mercier Descloux, James White/Chance, Malcolm McLaren, The Slits (sorta), Robert Fripp, Talking Heads (they’d hedge by calling the sound African rhythms), Scritti Politti. And Gang of Four. (And all white.)
Dooley also cites Richard Dyer, writing in a publication issued by a gay men’s socialist collective: “[Disco’s] eroticism allows us to rediscover our bodies as part of this experience of materialism and the possibility of change.”47 I never danced to “Is It Love,” but Dyer distills the feeling at least some men had on a dance floor in the ’70s and ’80s. After which we might walk outside and be bashed.
My late musical partner John Callahan who, like me was a fan of both punk and disco, would comment that both genres were reactions to rock’s baroque tendency. The rhythm was reinvigorating, whether via punk’s simplicity or disco’s Latin-esque complexity. Dooley himself touches on this:
It could also be argued that embracing disco had overt political overtones. As with [Gang of Four’s] use of a melodica and the employment of dub techniques, the norms of robust, hyper-masculine rock music were thereby contested. A challenge was made to categories within genres and genders. In many ways, an active dancefloor is the very opposite of music being created by a lone genius and enjoyed by solitary home users. Community is realised via participation.48
But, again, at night’s end, we dream alone.
It’s Not Made By Great Men
Dooley covers more ground in 100+ pages before summarizing the Gang of Four legacy in his final chapter, titled Blooming Flowers, which can be read as a stand-alone essay. My last two notes referenced Fredric Jameson (cited throughout the book), Gramsci, and Foucault from the many thinkers in this section. Dooley writes, “The Gang of Four members are not heroic outsiders pointing to societal ills but rather players caught up in those contradictions, ambiguities and compromises. If answers are even possible, they are hard to come by.”49 He then quotes Jameson, who speaks of the Left’s “very self-defeating nostalgic position, just trying to slow down the movement of history.” This can be said to a certain extent of the Industrial Workers of the World, with a rich history that can tend to overshadow a radical modus operandi that never ended. Dooley cites the concept of “movement of history” via Gramsci’s “notion of hegemony that most aptly captures where Gang of Four were coming from. For Gramsci the idea was that power was in a constant state of flux—that it was something perpetually negotiated and reconfigured. Power was not solely oppression, or force, from above, but also entailed an element of consent. As there was an element of contestation, there was always a potential for agency.”50 And Dooley cites Foucault who asks “the ultimate question” in a discusison of emancipation: “How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?”51
As Dooley illustrates over and over again in Red Set, Foucault’s question lurks in the background regarding Gang of Four’s internal dynamic. The members constantly second-guessed their choices while also unnerving their bandmate comrades by their probing. (Read the book…) Again, as Dooley puts it so well, Gang of Four were (are) not heroic outsiders but rather participants—not great men.
The first was at a small club, probably their show at the Starwood in West Hollywood, capacity 400–800, May of 1980. Earlier that same year, the band had opened for the Buzzcocks and later, Iggy Pop, both at the much larger Santa Monica Civic. But those garnered lousy reviews by the Los Angeles Times, the first due to bad sound, the second to fatigue. The Civic could put a lot of distance between the stage and the floor. And it ostensibly seated 3,000, but when I saw the Clash there, the seats were replaced by metal plates; when we bounced, so did they—and there were a lot more than 3,000 bouncing.
Obviously that Starwood show in 1980 featured the band’s original lineup: Hugo Burnham on drums, Dave Allen bass, Andy Gill guitar, and Jon King vocals. It was riveting. The stage was small enough to bridge the Civic’s divide, but broad enough to allow Jon King his signature sprints between microphones. If King was a gazelle, Gill was a beast of prey, exactly as described by poet Ted Hughes in his “Second Glance at Jaguar”: “He coils, he flourishes/ The blackjack tail as if looking for a target.”
The other day I came across Prashant Bhilare’s recitation of a poem on YouTube. As it streamed, themes like beads were strung on a thread (sūtra, from the Sanskrit)—of imperialism, impermanence, love, possession, exposure. And I was reminded of similar work, such as Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, which I’ve mentioned here before. Her roman-à-clef received the prestigious Prix Goncourt despite its subject: an intergenerational relationship that otherwise would bestir the book burners if not the gendarmes.
Bhilare is more circumspect. Yet, I thought to myself, somehow he shares Duras’s audacity, if not her craft. And I returned to him. The poem is titled “ME.” (Unlike Duras, no subject-or-object equivocation.) Who dares title this thus?
The following is an initial meandering musing on dance: casual, staged, amateur, professional, choreographed, spontaneous, celebratory, liberatory.
Dance Music
Six years ago Pet Shop Boys issued their album Electric and I bought it for the cut “Love Is a Bourgeois Construct,” a sentiment I’d been voicing for some time. But I was more taken with the promo video for the more nuanced “Vocal.” Directed by photographer and filmmaker Joost Vandebrug, it is compiled from amateur video shot at British late-’80s raves as well as Manchester’s Haçienda club. Given the visuals, the song suggests a nostalgic number, but the singer is surprised: “Every track has a vocal/ and that makes a change.” The music—“Expressing passion/ Expressing pain”—is the glue that binds its listeners as well as the promo’s dancers. It can be seen as a tone-poem-take on the experiences of ecstasy, a drug of choice at the time.
In the milieu of the multitudes, Vandebrug’s choices convey not only that E-intimacy but also a heterogeneity—racial, sensual, presentational, more.
The “Vocal” visuals only hint at what was taking place across the pond in the waning ’80s, as do those for Madonna’s promo for “Vogue” (1990), which is an oddly literal (mm… periodical) treatment, a recreation of classic West Coast film and fashion photography, even as her choreography, by Karole Armitage, was a lite—and largely synchronized—version of East Coast ballroom moves (at least in the five-minute cut).
Yes, this involves Leopold and Loeb and their victim Bobby Franks…
Killing time a week ago in the expansive area devoted to new releases at the central branch of the Denver Public Library, a title beckoned: Nina Barrett’s The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of the Most Infamous Crimes, issued last summer.9 If overly familiar with The Crime of the Century—title of Hal Higdon’s 1975 book33—one might ask, Why another rehash?
Barrett has created the sort of case study that resembles an oral history, the kind of approach that I like to take. The book is the logical progression of The Murder that Wouldn’t Die, a 2009 exhibition at Northwestern University, which she curated. As such it is slathered with photos and facsimiles. It reminds me of Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder written by print and exhibition designer Mark Nelson and art and cultural critic Sarah Hudson Bayliss.36 With the look of a university-press popular history, Barrett’s doesn’t have the monograph/fine art sheen of the latter, but both books bring together images that likely hadn’t been seen in one place. And unlike Exquisite Corpse, Barrett breaks no new ground other than by exhuming, well, old ground—hopefully carefully culled.
Sample spread from Nina Barrett’s book, displaying Nathan Leopold’s passport application and photo.
Why discuss a book I haven’t read? I have a list of topics for this blog, some of which, like my most recent post, are the result of nagging questions. One such question involved Leopold and Loeb. Barrett merely induced me to answer it.
Years ago in the pursuit of a larger project I photocopied way too much material from a file on Martin Block, founder and editor of ONE magazine. A passage from a 1993 Block interview, conducted by an unknown party, vexed me. Once I dug into it last week it was relatively easy to investigate. I began with the index of Barrett’s book, which was a bust, but that propelled me. A (virtual) book checkout via Archive.org took me further, but I really needed the Leopold and Loeb trial transcript. Since I’m not an academic I don’t have access. (This is the digital divide that drives me nuts. Even were I a deep-pocketed individual I am denied access.) Fortunately a friend has come through and I can complete this post.
Chicken Pox
chicken (fr naut[ical] chicken = young recruit) pox (k[no]wn L[as]V[egas], mid ’60s) the urge to have sex with younger men.
— Bruce Rodgers, The Queens’ Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon52
Martin Block’s tale actually deserves a context that I wouldn’t mind fleshing out one day, but here begins the slice that I always wanted to delve into.
In the 1930s Block (b. July 27, 1919) had a job as delivery boy for a bookshop with the “most refined customers.”
And it was another kind of world that I had become aware of, and because of my sexual traits and habits, I met on Madison, no on Fifth Avenue one night, a man named Wallace B[misremembered] who I had tremendous, tremendous respect [for]. Wallace had just at that time become an editor at Simon & Schuster. […] Wallace, by the way, was a man you’d find very interesting.
It’s tempting to figure that Block’s interlocutor was archivist Jim Kepner (from whose computer directory the interview was printed). But in my experience, Kepner’s interviews of those he already knew, like Block, were quite informal and conversational, which this is not.
Can I give you a little historical gossip? One of the great gay cases as it was known in this country was the Loeb and Leopold case. Well, […] my friend Wallace, was I think, he was the only or one of the very few witnesses for the defense. And we got to talking about it one day, and […] I asked him about it and I said “What was the true story as you know [it]?” and he said well what never came out was that the reasons that the young [blank line] boy was killed had nothing to do with a thrill killing. It had to do with that this boy at 12 years old or eleven years old was blackmailing Loeb and Leopold and everybody else in their circle because he already was an active homosexual and was blackmailing all the older men, some of whom he had had sex with and some of whom he had not. And he wanted money, and that’s why he was killed.
The question of motive I can’t address except that I’m reminded that a lack of cash led to Loeb’s own death in prison and that Leopold told state’s attorney Robert Crowe that Loeb already “was acquainted with” the fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks prior to his abduction and murder.53 Obviously Wallace B’s account contradicts the usual version of the crime’s narrative, which claims Franks had been selected at random.
I offer Block’s recollection here for any response or rebuttal—not to libel a murdered youth or presume his circumstances.
I mainly wanted to determine the identity of Block’s friend Wallace B, whose surname he misremembered in the interview. Was he even a witness in the trial? With a copy of the witness list I confirmed that a Wallace Brockway testified. And, indeed, this same Wallace B later became an editor at Simon and Schuster, as well as an author, translator, and contributor to many books and audio recordings.
The Fact Hawk
The test of Brockway’s mettle as an editor, according to Block, had been Dick Simon giving him the manuscript of the second volume of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization, The Life of Greece.54
Brockway found three dozen errors in the first two dozen pages and was hired. “I am grateful to Mr. Wallace Brockway,” Durant wrote in the book’s acknowledgments, “for his scholarly help at every stage of this work.”
On behalf of Simon and Schuster, in 1943 Brockway approached Joseph Campbell to produce a latter-day Bulfinch’s Mythology, which didn’t interest the scholar. Instead—six years later—the house published Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.55
Brockway was described as “a fact hawk” and a
sandy-haired, pale-faced, pedantic person […], a young man with an encyclopedic memory and a knack for copying any writer’s style so immaculately that few authors […] were sure what Brockway had rewritten and what [the author] had not.56
At the time of the Leopold and Loeb trial in 1924, according to the transcript, Brockway was an editor “of some books for the Government.” By about 1930 he likely had moved to New York. The New York Times of November 15, 1931 mentions a delay in the publication by Covici, Friede of his translation—the first ever in English—of The Journal of Eugène Delacroix “because of the discovery of a great deal of hitherto unknown material written by the famous nineteenth-century French painter.” Pedantic? Perhaps. When published—again, six years later—Brockway’s name appeared not on the title page, but instead in the acknowledgments.57
By contrast, Gerard van Loon, cited above, states that, on a later project, Brockway “almost snatched the manuscript” away from the author he was editing. Thus “he was largely responsible for seeing to it that this prodigious volume”—Hendrick Willem van Loon’s The Arts (1937)—“was completed on time.”58
Oh, and Covici, Friede was the stateside publisher of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness as well as a relatively early publisher of John Steinbeck. Yet, in 1954, both Pascal Covici (then at Viking) and Brockway (at S and S) would reject Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as being at least problematic, if not pornographic.
Wallace Brockway
Wallace Brockway (1903–1972) is listed as being born in Chicago on August 27, 1903 to Louis S. Brockway and Lillian M. (Johnson) Brockway according to a Cook County index, although over the years he shaved two years off his age.59
He was the grandson of Swedish immigrants on his mother’s side. In the 1910 federal census he’s living in their Chicago household, with American-born Lillian, a concert musician, apparently already separated if not divorced. Ten years later they’re in the same household, different ward, and Lillian is private secretary to a doctor. He’s in the Class of ’23 at the University of Chicago with a tiny résumé: Poetry Club. Nathan Leopold was in the same class: Campus Club Executive Council, Italian Club, Undergraduate Classical Club. They were 19 and 18, respectively.
Composite image from 1923 University of Chicago yearbook, Brockway pictured at right.
At age 16–17 Brockway had attended the Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, during the academic years of 1919–20 and 1920–21. Two decades later, in 1939 he gave a copy of one of his books to Major Roy Warren Wonson, the school’s headmaster, followed by a letter. (Again, Brockway appears to have been 16 rather than 14.)
I hope you were not too perplexed, some weeks ago to receive a copy of (Men and Music), by Wallace Brockway and Herbert Weinstock. If you were, permit me to jog your memory, and remind you of your kindness to a lonely 14-year-old boy, almost twenty years ago. That boy still remembers vividly your playing of Chopin and his pleasure at being allowed to sing a solo at Trinity [Episcopal] Church—I think it was Faure’s (Les Rameaux). At any rate, you fostered the boy’s love of music at a crucial moment of his life. In a sense, (Men of Music) constitutes a debt repaid, after many years.60
Brockway, W. H. is listed in the 1920 yearbook as a Private in both Company C and Band, listed only in Band in 1921.
To the 1920 yearbook Brockway (W. H. B.) contributed a disturbing short story, “The German,” narrated by a young soldier who, after a rocky start, becomes inseparable from a fellow soldier, one Max Lebbard. “When I think of him my thoughts conjure up a great pair of watery blue eyes.” The two are stationed in occupied Coblenz (Koblenz) when Lebbard steals away from camp, followed by the narrator. His destination is his parents’ house and his father’s contempt, “of treason to the fatherland.” Leaving the house, Max commits suicide.
The SMA newspaper The Kablegram carried the following notice in its tidbits column, February 14, 1920:
Brockway, W. H., has announced to the corps that he is engaged, and will probably be married this summer.61
I can’t help but wonder whether this was the result of an ultimatum as much as it appears to be Brockway’s declaration of normalcy. I did a half-hearted search of a marriage record: where to start? Chicago? Virginia? He was to be wed that summer, contradicted by his paean to his fictional comrade—unless W. H. B. was a typo, even intentional, and “The German” was written by a member of the graduating class, Elwyn H. Bishop, aka “Cherry,” who had been at the school for six years and was the yearbook’s military editor as well as a member of the Kablegram staff. That’s a lot of speculation.
Nevertheless Brockway’s parochial relationship with the headmaster should be considered. How did Wonson, and likely his wife Marie—she read Brockway’s letter publicly on a couple of occasions after receiving it in 1939—approach the “lonely 14-year-old boy” on the one hand, and the actual 16-year-old, with his fairly transparent literary allusions and an apparent love of music that brought him to the choir loft, if not the altar, of Trinity Church? What brought him to the school in the first place? And what, if anything, did he recognize in Martin Block, presumably half his age, when he met him on Fifth Avenue?
Ad from the school’s 1920 yearbook. The typographical error in the tuition line would not have served as a gainful draw.
Leopold and Loeb
Four years later Brockway was a witness for the defense of Leopold and Loeb, but one of 16 such witnesses, which I suppose can be construed as “very few,” as Martin Block had put it, when compared with the 100 called by the prosecution. At the time, Brockway was just turning 21, and his testimony is revelatory yet reserved. He studied “arts and literature” at the university but didn’t obtain a degree. He’d known Nathan Leopold for about four years but didn’t consider him a friend. He respected Leopold’s intellect but only to a point.62
Cross examination:
Q You considered Leopold the finest man you ever came in contact with in the university, did you not?
A One of the best intellects; perhaps not the best, but one of the best.63
Simon and Schuster
Peter Schwed, in his profile of Simon and Schuster, includes this description, echoing van Loon above:
Wallace Brockway was almost certainly the storehouse of more erudition than could be believed, but his aspirations were never to be more than an ivory-tower editor. He was a walking encyclopedia and, being an expert in many fields, a regular contributor of Britannica articles.64
Brockway translated Andrea Majocchi’s Vita di chirurgo (Life of a Surgeon) for another publisher, issued in 1937.65
It can be noted that Nathan Leopold himself was a linguist, with fifteen tongues plus English under his belt. The fall of 1923 Leopold was considering a collaborative translation of Pietro Aretino (a taste here). His collaborator’s parents, upon learning of the project, spirited Leon Mandel II “packing to Europe.”66
First edition dust jacket of a bestseller by an “ivory tower editor.” A year later composer and critic Deems Taylor, who contributed the book’s introduction, would be seen on the big screen as narrator for Disney’s Fantasia, for which he also was musical advisor.
In 1939 Simon and Schuster published Brockway’s own bestselling Men of Music: Their Lives, Times, and Achievements, and in 1941 The Opera, a History of Its Creation and Performance: 1600–1941. Both of these were coauthored with Herbert Weinstock. And both men appear to have run with the Leopold and Loeb crowd, as explained by Schwed.
Wallace and his close friend Herbert Weinstock attended the University of Chicago when one of the most famous criminal cases of the century took place there, the murder of young Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb, and they knew all the protagonists of the affair very well. When Meyer Levin wrote his gripping novel Compulsion, based upon Clarence Darrow’s memorable defense of Leopold and Loeb, Wallace was a valuable source for Levin’s research, although it was a part of his life that Wallace would gladly have swept from his memory.67
In his own memory of Brockway’s account, Martin Block suggests no reticence in the telling.
A browse through Meyer Levin’s papers might shed light. Compulsion was published by Simon and Schuster in 1956. But, as Levin explains in his memoir, The Obsession, the idea for the book had come only after some probing by McGraw-Hill editor Robert Kuhn, who asked if the writer had “any Chicago ideas” since that city was Levin’s “background.” When he submitted the novel’s completed first half, McGraw-Hill rejected it. As did Random House’s Bennett Cerf, who had enjoyed Levin’s writing, but refused to consider the book based on the subject alone. Jack Goodman at Simon and Schuster liked it and accepted it for publication. Levin doesn’t mention Brockway’s involvement, so exactly when he contributed to the novel’s research would require its own investigation.68
In 1940, according to the federal census, Brockway and his coauthor Weinstock were renting together on Lexington Avenue south of 38th Street, with Weinstock having the day job of travel agent. The flat’s leaseholder was a 21-year-old underemployed copy editor named Herbert Winer who, as Bart Keith Winer, would coauthor two other books with Brockway, A Second Treasury of the World’s Great Letters (1941) and Homespun America: A Collection of Writings (1958), both issued by Simon and Schuster.
Winer was survived by his wife Shirley upon his death in 1989.69 By 1949 Weinstock was listed in the city directory as living with his “longtime companion” Ben Meiselman, who survived him upon his death in 1971, according to the New York Public Library.
Wallace Brockway died at age 69 on November 5, 1972 of a heart attack at his home on East 57th Street, survived only by his mother, Mrs. Ralph E. Simmons.70 His father, Louis Shaffner Brockway, had died in April of 1967 at age 86 in Los Angeles, not far from MacArthur Park and Loyola Law School, according to Social Security and voter registration records.
Secrets
The question of whether a horrific secret can be kept by multitudes was addressed a few years ago by Daniel Ellsberg, who notoriously did not keep his. He wrote in a memoir that “the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public.”71
If Wallace Brockway, via Martin Block, is correct about the motive for Leopold and Loeb killing Bobby Franks—a secret kept?—, would theirs not, in a perverse and fuzzy sense, be The Perfect Crime?
I keep forgetting we have the realm of music at our fingertips. Long-forgotten or barely remembered works are available if I’d only think to search online. Not long ago I went crazy looking through my LPs for the electronic manipulation of a Chef Boy-Ar-Dee jingle sung by the Andrews Sisters—not remembering I could have DuckDuckGo-ed the keywords. I couldn’t even remember the name of the composer. Turns out it was Jon Appleton, and I had it on a CD…
Tonight I finally wised up and did the search, which led me to a YouTube stream by way of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the label’s founder Moses Asch having recruited Appleton to help in the release of electroacoustic works. Chef d’œuvre (1967), the object of my pursuit, is emblematic of such manipulations, being so well known perhaps due to its popular-culture source material. In the notes for his CD collection, Contes de la mémoire (Memory’s tales, 1996), Appleton complains good-naturedly “that composers are often saddled by others with a ‘signature’ work.” And so it is with Chef d’œuvre. “It is my Boléro,” he writes. Its now-doubly-ironic title translates roughly as “masterpiece.”
Appleton’s various compressions in this composition can be seen themselves epitomized three decades later by rock musician Robert Fripp’s five-second condensation of what surely was a much longer “First Inaugural Address to the I.A.C.E. Sherborne House” by J. G. Bennett, included on the album Exposure but understandably absent from YouTube in our era of attention deficit, the Age of the Feuilleton (a newspaper’s necessarily lightweight literary pages), as Hermann Hesse put it. And as they say, “That’s five seconds I’ll never get back.”
Last night YouTube suggested I watch a new short, Cognitio. I reCOGNIzed one of the actors as having appeared in the 2014 Kadie Elder promo for the song “First Time He Kissed a Boy” (from which I lifted this blog’s header image of four pastel-clad youths). The actor is Lasse Steen Jensen and in the promo he plays a slight thing with an almost-mod mop of hearty hair atop a triangular, angular mug, contradicted by an upturned nose; likewise in the promo, his cruelty is contradicted by his curiosity.
In Cognitio Jensen is presented as the psychically slight, artistically bright Tobias, with an unruly mane that suggests a feral nature. This time curiosity is not rewarded, via the darkly seductive yet elusive Emil (Lior David Cohen).
Back in the 1980s I was given tickets to a Southern California kitsch institution, Pageant of the Masters. The concept intrigued: an amphitheater stage filled with “ninety minutes of tableaux vivants (living pictures), incredibly faithful recreations of classical and contemporary works of art, with real people posing to look exactly like their counterparts in the original pieces,” as described on the event website. But the execution, meticulous as it was, underwhelmed. I guess I wanted more vivants in the tableaux, which occurred too infrequently. But it did occur in a sort of sideshow.
That sideshow was not the companion Fine Art Show, which we took in before the Pageant and from which Andrea and I bought a couple of hand-altered Polaroids that hang on our walls today. Allow me to digress…
Boom Boom Room
The Fine Art Show was conspicuous by the omission of skin: many of the artists appeared to be too well constrained by a bland family-friendly bubble-wrap envelope, but not so well contained that we couldn’t detect hints of riskier work. Hell, Laguna Beach (the Pageant/Show’s site) was home to the Boom Boom Room, which OC Weekly (formerly a sibling to Denver’s Westword via Voice Media Group) claims to have been “the oldest gay bar in the Western United States,” its host hotel, the Coast Inn, having opened in 1929, per the founders’ granddaughter’s timeline. Laguna even had its own chapter of the Mattachine Society beginning in the ’50s.
I recently found I could stream films through Kanopy by way of my public library. The first film I watched was A Taste of Honey, Tony Richardson’s 1961 award winner set in Greater Manchester’s Salford. Jo, played by Rita Tushingham, the daughter of a libertine mother, Dora Bryan, moves out on her own after her mother remarries. While at home Jo has a fling with a ship’s cook Jimmy (Paul Danquah), who soon sails away slowly (if not into the sunset). At her shoe shop job she meets Geoffrey Ingham (Murray Melvin), a textile design student who’s been kicked out of his flat apparently for his own liaisons—with men—and thus Jo invites him to room with her. And room they have—it’s a top-floor studio apartment—but squalid, as only the black-and-white camera can capture, softened somewhat by Geoff’s student’s style.
I recall Tushingham from her less-free-spirit role of Dot a couple years later in The Leather Boys. And Melvin is instantly recognizable from Barry Lyndon (1975) as Rev. Samuel Runt, the “failed Rasputin” for Marisa Berenson’s Lady Lyndon. But what surprised me were two lines in A Taste of Honey uttered by Jimmy in response to Jo’s urge to “Dream of me” upon their second leave-taking. “Dreamt of you last night,” he says. “Fell out of bed twice.” The lines also appeared in the film’s forebear, Shelagh Delaney’s popular play by the same name. But music fans like me otherwise would remember these from the middle eight of the Smiths’ first song on LP, “Reel Around the Fountain.”
I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice
