A Colossal Wreck (28 page)

Jean Ross was a gentle, cultivated and very beautiful woman, not a bit like the vulgar vamp displayed by Lisa Minnelli. Jean died before her time at the age of sixty-two. Her daughter Sarah, my half sister, wrote wonderful detective stories under the name Sarah Caudwell: among them
The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder, Thus Was Adonis Murdered
, and, posthumously published,
The Sibyl in Her Grave
. Before she turned to crime Sarah was a barrister, and a very good one. She used to negotiate my contracts with Verso and I’d pay her by taking her to lunch at the Ritz. As in any other venue she’d light up her pipe, then when waiters rushed up to protest, fling
the thing into her handbag, from which smoke would soon begin to wreathe our table.

Sarah felt strongly about Isherwood’s use of her mother, and wrote a piece about it in the British weekly, the
New Statesman
, in the mid-1980s. Her mother Jean, she wrote, “never liked
Goodbye to Berlin
, nor felt a sense of identity with the character of Sally Bowles, which in many respects she thought more closely modeled on one of Isherwood’s male friends. (His homosexuality could not at that time be openly admitted.)” Sarah’s point was that Isherwood, supposedly so
avant-garde
, was actually very conventional:

The convention does not permit an attractive young woman to have much in the way of intellectual accomplishments, and Isherwood follows it loyally. There is nothing in his portrait of Sally to suggest that she might have had any genuine ability as an actress, still less as a writer. My mother, on the other hand, was at least talented enough as an actress to be cast as Anitra in Max Reinhardt’s production of
Peer Gynt
and competent enough as a writer to earn her living, not long afterwards, as a scenario-writer and journalist.

Above all, the convention requires that a woman must be either virtuous (in the sexual sense) or a tart. So Sally, who is plainly not virtuous, must be a tart. To depend for a living on providing sexual pleasure, whether or not in the context of marriage, seemed to [Jean] the ultimate denial of freedom and emancipation. The idea so deeply repelled her that she simply could not, I think, have been attracted to a man who was rich, or allied herself permanently to anyone less incorrigibly impecunious than my father. She did not see the question as one of personal morality, but as a political one.

The pipe smoking did in Sarah in the end, presumably causing the cancer in her esophagus that killed her at the age of sixty, last year. I knew her best at Oxford in the early ’60s where she intrigued successfully to have women admitted to the Oxford Union. She was always exclaiming about so-and-so’s “wonderful profile,” pursuing dons with this particular asset. One don was known for watching television and Sarah, amid the ashes of her love, sent him this verse:

I cast aside my modesty, I laid aside my shame

And on my knees I offered love—Or something much the same.

You brushed my powder from your sleeve, with elegant precision

And murmured: “Conversation is killing television.”

March 8

In intelligence committee rooms on Capitol Hill and in briefing sessions in the FBI, CIA, and other redoubts of the national security establishment, the air now quivers with gloomy assessments of the secrets “compromised” by the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, a senior official who stands accused of working for the Russians since 1985.

If you believe the FBI affidavit against him filed in federal court, Hanssen betrayed spies working for the US, some of whom were then executed. Among many other feats he allegedly ratted on “an entire technical program of enormous value, expense and importance to the United States” which turns out to have been the construction of a tunnel under the new Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC. He trundled documents by the cartload to “dead drops” in various suburbs around Washington, DC, often within a few minutes’ walk from his house.

It’s amusing to listen to the US counter-intelligence officials now scorning Hanssen for lack of “tradecraft” in using the same drop week after week. These are the same counter-intelligence officials who remained incurious across the decades about the tinny clang of empty drawers in their TOP SECRET filing cabinets, all contents removed on a daily basis by Ames and Hanssen who deemed the use of copying machines too laborious. In just one assignment, the CIA later calculated, Ames gave the KGB a stack of documents estimated to be fifteen to twenty feet high. Hanssen was slack about “tradecraft” because he knew just how remote the possibility of discovery was. The only risk he couldn’t accurately assess was the one that brought him down, betrayal by a Russian official privy to the material he was sending to Moscow.

April 5

Gallup, NM—Drive across the United States, mostly on Interstate 40, and you have plenty of time to listen to the radio. Even more time than usual if, to take my own situation, you’re in a 1976 Ford 350 one-ton, plowing along at 50 mph. By day I listen to FM.

Bunked down at night, there’s some choice on the motels’ cable systems, all the way from C-SPAN to pay-as-you-snooze filth, though there’s much less of that than there used to be, or maybe you have to go to a Marriott or kindred high-end place to get it. By contrast the choice on daytime radio, FM or AM, is indeed a vast wasteland, far more bleak than the high plains of Texas and New Mexico I’ve been looking at for the past couple of days.

It’s awful. Even the religious stuff has gone to the dogs. I remember twenty years ago making the same drive through the bible belt and you’d hear crazed preachers raving in tongues. These days hell has gone to love. Christian radio is so warm and fuzzy you’d think you were listening to Terry Gross. By any measure, and you don’t need to drive along I-40 to find this out, radio in this country is in ghastly shape.

Since the 1996 Telecommunications “Reform” Act, conceived in darkness and signed in stealth, the situation has got even worse. Twenty, thirty years ago broadcasters could own only a dozen stations nationwide and no more than two in any single market. Today the company Clear Channel alone owns more than 800 stations pumping out identical muck in all states. Since 1996 there’s been a colossal shake-out. Small broadcasters can no longer hack it. Two or three companies with eight stations each control each market. Bob McChesney cites an industry publication as saying that the amount of advertising is up to eighteen minutes per hour, with these commercials separated by the same endless, golden oldies. On I-40 in Tennessee alone I listened to “Help!” at least sixteen times.

April 10

So far as rape is concerned, because of the rape factories more conventionally known as the US prison system, there are estimates
that twice as many men as women are raped in the US each year. A Human Rights Watch report in April of this year cited a December 2000
Prison Journal
study based on a survey of inmates in seven men’s prison facilities in four states.

The results showed that 21 percent of the inmates had experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced sexual contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent had been raped in their facilities. A 1996 study of the Nebraska prison system produced similar findings, with 22 percent of male inmates reporting that they had been pressured or forced to have sexual contact against their will while incarcerated. Of these, more than 50 percent had submitted to forced anal sex at least once. Extrapolating these findings to the national level gives a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped.

May 8

Liberals have massed to defend Bob Kerrey, usually by saying that he was just a grunt following orders. In the
Los Angeles Times
, Bob Scheer announced that Kerrey is “a good man” and that the fellow who should be in the dock is Robert McNamara, who wasn’t even Secretary of Defense when Kerrey lined up those women and babies in Thanh Phong and had his unit of SEALs machine-gun them at a range of ten feet.

On Fox, Christopher Hitchens, implacable foe of the war criminal Kissinger, had similar kind words for Kerrey:

COLMES: What’s your view on Bob Kerrey?

HITCHENS: Of Bob Kerrey? Well, he’s my president, in fact, since I teach at the New School, and I think he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t have made that bad a president. I know him slightly. I like him very much. But look, none of the people he killed were raped. None of them were dismembered. None of them were tortured. None of them were mutilated, had their ears cut off. He never referred to them as gooks or slopes or afterwards. So … for one day’s work in a free-fire zone in the Mekong Delta, it was nothing like as bad as most days.

Why does Scheer say Kerrey is a “good” man and Hitchens confide to the Fox audience that “I like him very much”? There’s far more evidence to say “Bob Kerrey is an evil man.” His political career offers meager evidence to back any plea that Kerrey improved the human condition and if we are to say that he is a good man solely because he voted against the war on Iraq, then we have to call Sam Nunn “good” too, and we doubt that even Scheer would want to do that.

Kerrey’s an admitted war criminal.

Just listen to his disgusting disclosures to Dan Rather in
60 Minutes II
, Monday night:

RATHER: If in fact it did happen. If there was an old man, an old woman and three children being killed. Was it or was it not within the rules of engagement for you and your men as you understood it, if necessary, to kill those people?

KERREY: Yes, again, I don’t know how you’re gonna cut this tape, but I don’t have any doubt that the people that we killed were at the very least sympathetic to the Viet Cong. And at the very most, were supporting their efforts to kill us.

RATHER: Old men, women and children.

KERREY: Yes, I mean, the Viet Cong, in a guerrilla war, the people that get caught in the middle are the civilians. And the Viet Cong were a thousand percent more ruthless than any standard operating procedure that any American GI or Navy SEAL had.

Last month you didn’t know that Kerrey had left a ditchful of civilians behind him and accepted a medal for an action that read—officially phrased—21 VC KIA (BC). That means twenty-one Viet Cong, killed in action (body count). So—a liar as well as a killer, since he knew the figures were falsified. This month you do know. So perhaps by the watercooler or in the corridor we hear: “Oh hi Bob! Shit happens, right?”

June 10

What happened to trout? Of all the farm fed fish they’re the most tasteless. Order one in a restaurant these days and you get something tasting like blotting paper. It was different once.

Listen to the French writer, Jean Giono in
La France à Table:

Never with butter, never with almonds; that is not cooking, it is packaging. (It is, of course, understood that my recipes are not for all comers.) With the exception of
truite en bleu
nobody knows how to cook a trout. It is the most unfortunate fish on earth. If an atomic bomb destroyed the world tomorrow, the human race would vanish without ever having known the taste of a trout. Of course, I am no more talking of tank-bred trout than I would give a recipe for cooking a dog or a cat.

So, a fine fat, or several fine fat, trout from the river, fresh (that goes without saying), gutted, scaled, etc.… A frying-pan previously rinsed out with flaming wine vinegar. Make this empty pan very hot. Into this very hot pan, a mixture of water and virgin olive oil (a claret glass of olive oil to 3 of water). Let it boil fast. Add a bouquet of thyme and nothing else whatsoever except 2 crushed juniper berries and some pepper.

Reduce the mixture, and when there is nothing but a centimeter of fast boiling liquid left in the pan, put your fine fat, or several fine fat, trout gently into the liquid. Do not turn the fish over. Cover the pan and boil 1 minute, then 3 minutes very gently, and serve.

This rapid boiling of oil and water is the way to make bouillabaisse, which is fast food, the way fish should always be. Get the mix boiling, just like Giono says, then throw in your firm fleshed fish like bass or snapper with the smaller stuff five minutes later. Take it all off after another three minutes, put a slice of bread in each soup plate, a dish of aioli (garlic mayonnaise) in the center and go to it.

When I was a schoolboy in Scotland I used to catch little, pink-fleshed burn trout, roll them in oatmeal, then fry them. Hard to forget. A couple of years ago, on a pack trip in the Golden Trout Wilderness in the California Sierra, I moodily noted the lack of any trout in a stream of high repute and was told that biologists from the state’s Fish and Game Department had decided the resident trout were alien and poisoned them with rotenone. If they’d introduced trout with the correct birth certificates, they hadn’t survived.
Fishwise, the stream was dead for the next year and we’re now told by our friends Tim and Odette Larson, who regularly pack mules into the Wilderness, there are trout back seemingly identical to the ones purged by Fish and Game.

July 20

I love scrubby old state highways, warm with commercial life. Highway 90 runs from Florida through Alabama and Louisiana, then on across Texas. I got onto it at Mobile and trundled westward into New Orleans, in time to go along and pay my respects to John Sinclair, formerly of the MC5 and now one of the city’s prime musical figures, notably on his radio show. The night I got into town Sinclair was presiding over a benefit at the House of Blues, on Decatur St. for Coco Robicheaux to whom some disaster has befallen. Robicheaux was wearing a bright purple suit. Sinclair is tall and has a goatee beard, which juts out, a bit like Don Quixote’s.

Sinclair told the crowd that a year earlier he and his wife had been grateful recipients of the proceeds of a similar benefit. Later he told me that the Coco Robicheaux benefit was the third in a recent series of “fire recovery events,” starting with Eddie Bo’s fire in what Sinclair thought to be 1999.