Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle, Part I

Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle

Part I:  G.W.M Reynolds and Charles Dickens

The study of social progress is today no less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.  We live in an age of universal investigation and exploration of the sources of all movements.  France, for example loves at the same time history and drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.  These embrace the whole of life.  But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

Alfred de Vigny, Cinq Mars, 1826

I have reached the time in life when it’s time to travel back through the years to review my life.  While my corporeal years are few compared to eternity my mental psychological and historical life goes back thousands of years but more specifically the last three or four hundred.  I am no St. Germain, I don’t claim to have actually experienced those earlier centuries but I have made an attempt to recreate them in my mind.  Looking back I find that mankind has made no emotional progress.  As my ancestors were so am I, so are we all.  If one can’t empathize and sympathize with them one is being snobbish.

I don’t mean to bore you with a mere lineal presentation to the evolution of the human, specifically the European mind, over three centuries.  I intend to roam back and forth linking and combining.

In today’s mental climate some may be furious that I would specify the European mind but it is the mind in which my own mind has developed.  I have little empathy for the Asian mind, for instance, except as represented by the European experience of it.  Nor am I particularly interested in learning another racial mindset when there is so much to be learned of my own.

As a base of reference I have chosen the 1840s and 1850s, a time of great discoveries just before the Darwinian and psychological explosions that were a quantum leap from the past to the present.  A leap which in my own time we are in the midst of experiencing.  The future will bear little resemblance to the past.   Western Civilization is on the brink of extinction and has no desire to live.  The Asian mindset seems poised to be its replacement.  Both the US and Europe are on the brink of disintegration.  Asian hordes are at the door and breaking it down.  Kaiser Wilhelm was right about the Yellow Peril.  Thus, it seems that I’m taking a sentimental journey.

The journey will be a literary one for the 1840s and 50s were years of great writers and even greater literary masterpieces.

The decades before the before the 60s and the annunciation of Darwin played John the Baptist to Christ.  My life has been lived mostly in the literature of that period.  The great predecessor to the period was the beautiful time called the Romantic era.  The French and Industrial Revolutions had put a period to what had gone before.  Man hadn’t changed but the circumstances of life had.  Steam power had entered the picture and with it the coming of the railroads and iron ships, those great dividers between the medieval past and the present.  Electricity, the telegraph and photography made their appearance.  Between the moveable type developed in the fifteenth century and photographic pictures the past could be captured as it was forever.  The movies of the twentieth century, even more effective, were an improvement in film technology.

Science destroyed the belief in supernatural beings, the fairies, the elves, the elementals and, yes, even the gods.  To destroy the foundations of their belief was easy but to destroy the need for them has proven difficult.  Hence the Romantic era when the mind groped to reconcile fancy with science and created beautiful literary effects.  It was then that genre literature began to appear alongside so-called literary novels.  Genres were considered inferior to literary novels and still are although why isn’t clear.  What is clear is the genre novels rule modern literature.

Perhaps literary novels disguise reality under the appearance of things creating an artificial world that doesn’t exist except in the minds of the believers and they don’t want their illusions disturbed.  Hence, the popularity of Charles Dickens for nearly two hundred years.  Dickens is no Shakespeare but perhaps even better read.  Dickens can make grim facts seem palatable, perhaps because of Dickens authorial and censorial distance from the facts diminishes the reality and more genteel  and respectable minds can handle the unpleasantness, which is quite grim, because it is happening to different people under different conditions that bear no relationship to their own lives except to be pitied.  Dickens specifically writes for the self-satisfied and well to do.  Dickens pretties his characters up.

But for every Dickens who has survived the ravages of time there are many, many more who have sunk beneath the waves remembered only by those who think of a vanished Atlantis.  Amazingly one of these writers who crashed beneath the waves during WWI, an English contemporary of Dickens, who was as or more popular than he at the time was forgotten after WWI.  I don’t know large the market for Reynolds was on the eve of the Great Destruction but I have a copy of The Rye House Plot bound with Omar. It was advertised as rare but it should have been unique.  One Norman Hartley Rickard went out and bought the parts for The Rye House Part one and two on 5/13/14 and the two parts for Omar on 6/16/14 then went to the trouble of having them bound together receiving the bound volume back on 7/22/14.  He thought that much of Reynolds on the eve of the war.  The novels themselves were printed sometime after 1880 by John Dicks as they advertise General Wallace’s Ben Hur.  Both books are more obscure Reynold’s titles so that if they were available at the late date of 1914 indicates fair interest in Reynolds.  And then the war came.

During a time of prolific writers Reynolds was extraordinary.  He not only wrote at least 43 novels, the novels themselves were of extraordinary length.  Of his two masterpieces the first, Mysteries of London runs to 2500 pages of smaller type in the current Valancourt Press edition.  His master work, Mysteries of the Court of London is ten volumes running to 5000 pages.  He has numerous works running to 1500-2000 pages.  These were not merely rambling stories but tight and compact, serious sociological and psychological studies with strong historical connections.

While Dickens and Reynolds represent the English contribution to the period, Reynolds, while being English, was also a Francophile.  His writing style is a combination of the English and French psychologies.  His is such an interesting case that I might as well devote a little space to it indeed these rambles will center on his career.

Reynolds was born in 1814, being two years younger than Dickens.  He came from Kent in the South East of England.  Much of the scenery takes place there, especially around Canterbury, in his earlier novels.  His home town was called Eastry.  His father was a naval officer who died in 1822 when Reynolds was eight; at fourteen he was placed in the Sandhurst Military College by his mother apparently to follow in the footsteps of his father.  His mother died in early 1830 leaving Reynolds a complete orphan at the age of fifteen. How this affected his situation is not clear but he either chose to leave Sandhurst or was encouraged to seek a career elsewhere sometime in late July as he turned sixteen.  His formal schooling ended there.  He was one hellacious reader though.

Some say he inherited twelve thousand pounds, some dispute this, but, at sixteen he must have had had enough money to encourage him to emigrate to a new country with a tender age and no skills.  He seems to have existed reasonably well.  His inquisitive nature led to him to examine all levels of society.  His Pickwick Abroad demonstrates this.

There were large numbers of English people who either moved to France, spent long absences there of fled England for legal reasons. It is this society he depicts there in Pickwick Abroad.  There are opinions that he was not a stranger to illegal activities there.  Pickwick himself, in the novel, dwelt at the Meurice Hotel.  The Meurice was begun by a Frenchman who realized that with the number of English in France they needed a home away from home.  He therefore created the Meurice to cater strictly to English tastes.  Reynolds seems to have been familiar with both residential customs there and the riff raff who lived off the legitimate residents.  One wonders what his exact situation was,did he live or perhaps prey on those who did.  He was obviously very intelligent and studious.  He must have had abilities because he was able to earn money as a journalist becoming familiar with newspaper practices.  On his return to England at merely twenty-three years of age he was entrusted to edit the Monthly Review which he revived and set back on its feet.

There is a question of how long he was in France.  The general opinion is from 1830 to 1837.  Dick Collins in his introduction to Reynolds’ The Necromancer as published by Vallancourt thinks he arrived there in 1835.  That doesn’t seem quite right as Reynolds’ experiences would likely take more time to acquire.  Reynolds himself says he lived in France for ten years.  To justify that he must mean that he arrived in 1830, left physically in 1837 and lived on mentally for another three years while physically being in England.  The extra three years would coincide with his writing which is French oriented through is Master Timothy’s Bookcase.  This book would be his mental transitioning from France back to England making up the ten years.

At any rate his knowledge of France and French literature would indicate a seven year residence.  He returned to England just as Dickens’ Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was being published in parts- that is in installments published monthly or weekly.  Reynolds had had an active journalistic and literary career in France publishing his first book there in 1935 at the age of 21 and editing an English oriented magazine.

Rather startlingly, even as Dickens’ Pickwick Papers was still in progress Reynolds began a continuation of the novel called Pickwick Abroad that took place, naturally, in France.  As might be expected this plagiarism caused an uproar that would mar his career.  Nothing daunted by the uproar Reynolds next appropriated the idea of Dickens’ Master Humphrey’s Clock with his own title Master Timothy’s Bookcase.  Both plagiarisms were notably better than Dickens’ originals.  The Bookcase took place in France and then in a weak conclusion, one supposes, mirroring reality, shifted to England to end with another Pickwick story,  The Marriage Of Mr. Pickwick, and several representations of Mortimer’s, the narrator, life in England.  As Bookcase appeared at the end of the ten years this might be what Reynolds termed his ten years stay in France.

Then comes a two year hiatus in which Reynolds wrote nothing.  Reynolds was well read.  He frequently references his reading including Homer’s Iliad, probably Mallory’s King Arthur, Walter Scott much of the Gothic period and the Romantic Era, most especially Byron.  Byron’s poems the Corsair and Giaour made a great impression on him and indeed the next couple generations.  He was well versed in French literature.  Dick Collins in his introduction makes a very telling point for Frederic Soulie (accent aigu over the e) being a direct influence on Reynolds in his introduction to The Necromancer.  Reynolds put together a two volume survey of the literature of France published in 1938 composed mainly of extracts with introductions to the authors.  I reproduce the intro for Soulie here in full from Collins which fairly accurately portrays Reynolds approach to writing:

Quote:

Frederic Soulie

Turn we now to that young and successful writer, who descends into the vault of the dead and snatches the cold corse from the tomb, to introduce it into his tale, who calls in the assistance of plague and fire to add fresh horrors to his romances; and who delights more in the violated sanctuary of Death than in the splendor and gaiety of the drawing-room.  Turn we to him who has revived the midnight terrors, the phantoms, the robbers, the murderers, the executioners, and the violaters of virgin innocence, that were wont to dwell in the legends of the olden times, or in the folios of a German library; whose patrons were Maturin, Lewis and Radcliffe; and whose readers were timid school-girls and affrighted nursery maids.  Turn we to him who has regenerated that school of horror which had nearly exploded within the dozen years;--yes, let us turn to him whose favourite subjects are those which we have dreaded to think of at night in the days of our childhood.

The writer of an ordinary novel may possess a weak, pusillanimous and feeble mind, yet produce an amusing tale.  His book may be called a good one; and he himself may pass as a man of talent and capacity.  But the author of a romance…must own a powerful mind a vivid imagination and a fertile brain; or else his lucubrations will be vain and futile.

His murders must not be told with the coolness of a newspaper report: they must seem as if they were written in letters of blood themselves.  The very page, which narrates their tale, must be surveyed with awe and a species of pleasing and fascinating abhorrence—if the reader can comprehend the antithesis—which create much more than a common interest in the mind.  The romance writer must indulge in nothing puerile; no tame or vapid description will be pardoned in him: his work must be all fire, all vigour, all energy and capable of producing a species of electric interest throughout.

Such is the system of M. Frederic Soulie exemplified in his Deux Cadavres.  This awe-inspiring romance, which seems as if it had been written in a charnel-house, by the light of those flickering candles that in Catholic countries surround the corpse, and by an iron pen dipped in human gore, in the most extraordinary  creation of the brain that ever was yet, in the guise of a historical tale, presented to the world.  Let the superstitious and the timid beware of it: they would not forget its terrible incidents for many a long night, after they had once perused it.  It is a romance which haunts its reader as a man is haunted by a phantom of the victim whom he has slain: it is a book so full of horrors—and all those horrors so natural and so probable—not once exaggerated by the assistance of powers from beyond the tomb—that he, who reads it, lays it aside with the impression that such things might have been, and interrogates himself whether he be just awakened from a nightmare dream, or whether he have witnessed a series of terrible realities.

The scene is laid in England; and the epoch of the tale is the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell.  The work commences with the execution of Charles the First, which is described with painful accuracy.  This is the first horror.  Then comes the desecration of a grave in Westminster Abbey—the parade of a corpse through the streets of London—the hideous ceremony of presenting a jug of beer to the motionless lips of the dead thing, as the procession moves up the Poultry—the visit of two adventurous men to the Chapel in Windsor Castle at midnight—the exhuming of a coffin—the circumstance of one of those men putting his hand to the dead body which that coffin contained and finding by the disserved head that it was the corse of the late King—the journey through dark and dismal roads with that coffin upon a sledge drawn by dogs—rape of a beautiful girl by her lover in an hour of madness—the progress of the plague—murders, duels, riots and deaths—and then the horrid agonies endured by that young girl, who lingered through all the stages of starvation, tied to a tree, till she was wasted away, expired, and found a fleshless skeleton some time afterwards?  This is the brief analysis of Les Deux Cadavres: this is the frame-work of the book upon which was built the reputation of M. Frederic Soulie.

Unquote.

This pretty well expresses the style Reynolds adopted combined with his reading of the Marquis de Sade.  Reynolds used the episode of the woman tied to tree in Robert Macaire.  Unfortunately Frederic Soulie has no translations into English so we can’t enjoy his spectacular style directly.

It appears that this part of quote is an analysis of Dickens:

Quote:

The writer of an ordinary novel may possess  a weak, pusillanimous and feeble mind, and yet produce an amusing tale.  His book may be called and good one; and he may pass for a man of talent and capacity but an author of a romance…must own a powerful mind, a vivid imagination and a fertile brain; else his lucubrations will be vain and futile....

Unquote.

That sums up Dickens as accurately as possible.  If Dickens read this then one can imagine that he would be incensed and develop a deep seated aversion to Reynolds.  Indeed, he would many years later say that Reynolds was a despicable person.  The quote also expresses a certain amount of envy in his dismissal of Dickens from whom he had just appropriated the format of Pickwick Papers for his own Pickwick Abroad.  At the same time the quote illustrates the difference between Dickens and himself.

Reynolds was apparently a theater goer in Paris becoming familiar with the plays of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, both of whom would be major influences of the period 1840-60 and beyond.  Dumas, of course, exists today through his incredible novels, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.  Hugo lives on through his work Les Miserables, recently a very successful stage musical in the US as a revolutionary play.  Also making a most profound effect on Reynolds was another extremely prolific author, the great Eugene Sue.  In 1843, two years before Soulie died, the parts for Sue’s Mysteries of Paris began appearing and that would galvanize Reynolds back into activity.  He immediately began  his own first masterpiece, The Mysteries of London.  A French writer by the name of Paul Favel also wrote a work titled Les Mysteres De Londres at the time also inspired by Sue.  Favel was an excellent crime writer detailing the activities of organized crime through his Blackcoats series.  Written sometime after Reynold’s Robert Macaire or the French Bandit in England that mentions Macaire as the leader of a nationwide loose organization of criminal revolutionaries. It begins the story of the great worldwide criminal organizations of today as well as the US’ Statewide and national criminal organizations.  The Revolution released them, and Democracy allowed them to prosper.

Reynolds while bursting with ideas seemed unable to express them without a format provided by someone else, hence his use of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and Master Timothy’s Bookcase as wells as Sue’s Mysteries of Paris—he had to have a format to follow.  When Sue’s Mysteries of Paris appeared the plan for Mysteries of London appeared.  The basic premise had evolved in Reynolds’ mind, that of two brothers connected to two trees who go separate ways, one of crime and one of rectitude, who then reunite to compare the results of their systems.

This notion may have evolved from Reynolds’ reading of Justine and Juliette by the Marquis de Sade.  In de Sade Justine who follows a life of rectitude ends up trashed and her sister Juliette who followed a life license ends up rich and happy.  Reynolds reverses the results, complaining that such may be case in individual situations but certainly not systemic.

That is not to say his novels are slavish copies of other men’s work.  Oh no, they are amplifications and extensions, completely original alternate versions.  Sue, himself had just entered his masterpiece period with The Mysteries of Paris and its successor, the marvelous Wandering Jew.  For my tastes The Wandering Jew far surpassed the great Mysteries of Paris and that is saying something in a long way.  All these works are massive while the successor to Reynolds’ Mysteries of London, The Mysteries of the Court of London is twice as long as any other novel of the period while its intensity lifts one into the stratosphere.  By the time of Mysteries of London Dickens was pursuing Reynolds in an effort to keep up.  Reynolds by that time was more successful than Dickens so the latter had even more reason to be bitter.

The novel took four years of serialization to be completed and in that time both Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew by Sue had appeared.  The Wandering Jew in 1845, the year Soulie died, so both novels would have had an influence of Reynolds’ novel.  For myself, as great as Mysteries of Paris is, I prefer The Wandering Jew.  Its style may be offensive and off putting to today’s readers but the book has nothing to do with Jews; it is rather an anti-Jesuit story with the greatest villain ever, the Jesuit priest Rodin and his Invisible Hand.

The story involves a fabulous inheritance due to a number of inheritors including two children from Germany.  In order to claim the inheritance they must be in Paris for the reading of the will on a certain date.  If they fail to appear the fabulous fortune will fall to the Jesuits. It is Rodin’s task then to prevent the inheritors from reaching Paris.  Simply killing them would arouse suspicions hence he has to engineer delays and obstacles hence the Invisible Hand.  While without being apparent Rodin’s schemes are always at work.

Here we are introduced to the concept of rather than outright assassination it is better to exploit the weaknesses of the individuals so that they destroy themselves.  Hence for one claimant Rodin easily leads him into a life of dissipation in which the man essentially drinks himself to death.

The closer the children get to Paris the more intensely the climax resolves into a final Armageddon in which all of the participants including Rodin and his Invisible hand are killed.  The only claimant left standing is a good priest and he of course is a very charitable guy with no other use for the money.  With such a model before him Reynolds digs deep keeping his own story racing along but to a relatively weak ending, a slight disappointment very poorly handled.  He does much better in Court of London which ends in a real Armageddon.

Even as Mysteries Of London was drawing to a close Reynolds began the eight years of weekly installments of The Mysteries of the Court of London.  The latter was a grandiose and magnificent structure.  At the time England was only short of a fifty percent literacy rate.  So a pretty good living could be made by organizing a group to read these stories to.  Thus a man could gather a reading group of perhaps thirty people to whom he read the weekly installment.  A really primitive radio setup, eh?  I suppose one could organize two or three groups and live rather comfortably.  I am not aware of what the readers charged but the penny was divided into half-pennies and even farthings or quarter pennies.  For eight years people set aside an hour or two to be read to.  This is not unlike todays filmed episodes that go on for years like the Game of Thrones.  This is quite marvelous.  Reynolds would have been the talk of the town for eight years, actually, combined with The Mysteries of London, twelve years.  That’s something of an achievement.

His writing style then was conceived as to sound like he was talking directly to these hearers while always being so intense that their attention did not waver, and he succeeded.  One can’t be sure but perhaps the memory of this success drove Dickens wild so that he himself devoted the last years of his life reading from his novels, especially Oliver Twist,  to audiences.

Now, Reynolds had a particularly capacious and powerful mind.  While he was writing Court of London over eight years he also wrote eighteen additional novels nearly all of which were 600 to 1500 pages.  The ability to keep weekly installments in mind and while either consciously or sub-consciously planning several others is beyond phenomenal.  While these were coterminous the variety  of incident had to be kept fresh throughout the corpus or all would fail.  Reynolds was capable of doing that while pacing his novels with fast flowing action.  At the same time he is keeping up with social and scientific developments and raising a numerous family.  His psychology is usually thoughtful and spot on.  He refers, for instance, to Anton Mesmer and his Animal Magnetism that moved toward perfection as hypnotism. While revealing the unconscious, the realization of which would dominate psychology through the system of Sigmund Freud about far off 1920.  The unconscious still remains misunderstood.

He makes reference to Franz Joseph Gall’s much misunderstood theory of phrenology, the forerunner of the discovery of the function of brain localities.

His corpus is perhaps too large to be read in full except by the most dedicated scholar, and I mean that in the singular, who would receive no reward for his efforts.  The additional reading necessary to understand the full import and value of Reynolds is even more daunting.

The discovery of influences, for instance, and familiarizing oneself with them is a monumental task.  Reynolds was born under Romaticism and began his career on the cusp of the Positive period of August Comte and Herbert Spencer.

Indeed Romanticism has never left us.  A Romantic revival occurred post-Positivism and the then emerging scientific revelations.  Literary styles were changing or evolving  through the decades and the epigone of the 1840s and 50s were shadows of their forerunners while still better than the pulp writers they engendered.  One of the finest of these was the Anglo-French writer George du Maurier who wrote three classics, almost a trilogy: Peter Ibbetson, Trilby (Svengali) and the Martian.  While not as towering as The Mysteries of the Court of London, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew they are astonishing works of art.

One of the great journalistic successes of all time, Punch or The London Charivari, the famous humor magazine, was founded in 1842.  The magazine remained until the 60s of the twentieth century.  During mid-nineteenth century Du Maurier was a regular contributor with both drawings and texts.  He probably would have continued with the magazine until his death had not he been rejected for the editorship when it became available.  Fortunate for us, for then he turned to writing his novels which were fabulous successes being reprinted until recent times.  Like Reynolds his mind was divided between his French and English heritages.  Born in France, he was removed to England  in his teen years.  This was a traumatic experience for him as the cultures of the French and English were so different.  Reynolds had the advantage of developing an affection for French culture before he removed from England and although an orphan of only sixteen years he appears to have thought he was moving to a wonderland and was never disappointed.  He had the misfortune to have expended his resources, bankrupting himself, thus expediting his return to England.

Du Maurier’s first novel, Peter Ibbetson, would detail his conflict with the English mentality in a beautiful story.  As part of the Romantic revival Du Maurier combines the fairy world with proto-science fiction and fantasy.  His French childhood in the novel is involved with fairies and his little girl friend Seraskier who reappears in England as the adult Duchess of Towers.  Not only that his next novel Trilby is built on a character and situation created by the French Romanticist, Charles Nodier.  In his novel also named Trilby, Trilby was a male Scottish fairy.  Du Maurier transposes sexes and makes Trilby a woman in his title of the same name.

In Peter Ibbetson, Peter is in the care of his uncle who, upon defaming Peter’s mother, is murdered by him, justifiable homicide by another name; nevertheless he is convicted and sentenced to death but spared hanging through the intercession of the fairy Duchess of Towers.

Languishing in prison he goes bonkers and is transferred to an insane asylum.  There he finds that while sleeping he can unlock a door and enter the dreams of the Duchess of Towers.  A beautiful hundred pages follows.

Trilby, his second novel, is in one respect a very long fairy tale masquerading as real life.  The novel records a fantasy of Du Maurier’s experiences as an aspiring artist in Bohemian Paris.  A real font of pleasant memories for George.  He remained a Bohemian all his life and made the most of enjoying that life.  Trilby was a runaway smash hit equaling in impact Dickens Pickwick Papers.

There is a marked difference between the romanticism of Du Maurier and his contemporary William Morris.  Morris writes in an Arthurian mode of pure fantasy while Du Maurier was affected not only by science but the so-called occult world of the founder of Theosophy, Madame Helena Blavatsky.  Her The Veil of Isis published in 1873 may very well had had an influence on him.  I have as yet no real proof that he read Blavatsky, other than the dream world of Ibbetson and the Duchess, but Theosophy is something that Punch would have been ribald about as well as the Spiritualist Movement.

While Comte’s Positivism did intervene between Romanticism and the Revival the whole fabric of the evolving mindset was blown apart by the issuance of Darwin’s Origin of Species .  The Earth trembled beneath the feet of the Victorians and was further shifted by the rapid emergence of psychological analysis.  Between Evolution and the developing knowledge of psychology that solidified with Freud’s pronouncements after the turn of the century.  The ancient supernatural and fairy mentality had to be reconciled with the new scientific mentality; Mankind would not give up the concepts of the supernatural so easily.

To travel back in time again to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution:  by the time of that revolution the Scientific Revolution had been under steam for some little time.  Thus, the European mind was developing rapidly.  There are some, blind to reality, who will object to such a fact as racist.  Associated with race, it may well be, however the fact is that science developed as with no other race on earth.  This is fact.  So, the European mind was solving nature’s mysteries.  As simple as these solutions were they were mind boggling at the time.  The very notion that air has weight is incredible to the mind.  Even today no child believes air can be weighed until he is so instructed.  The fact that air is made up of many gases and that these gases can be separated and that one of these, Oxygen, was the substance of life must have been just too astounding.

By the late eighteenth century then other mysteries could be explained in other ways than the supernatural.  All those wonderful fairies, elves and elementals could be demystified and explained naturally.  Thus the Gothic novel came into existence and the Gothic novelists made it a point to explain supernatural beliefs as perfectly natural.  Thus, the transition from the Medieval world to the modern or rational world progressed.  Lyell challenged the supernatural belief that God had created the Earth four or five thousand years previously.  He presented the monstrous belief that the planet was immeasurably much older and that it developed under natural processes.

Inevitably these incipient sciences were primitive and left more unexplained that they explained.  Resistance to all scientific revelations was strenuous, the European mind having been deeply corrupted by Biblical superstitions.  Slowly the superstitious was being rejected.  The wonderful and beautiful Romantic period was a confusion of the natural and supernatural as the supernatural was gradually disproved.

Reynolds, Dickens, Dumas, Sue and many others were born into the Romantic Age, experienced and moved out of it as society evolved.  Byron was only one important Romanticist but one who influenced that generation experiencing the revelations of science and technological inventions, such as applications like railroad and iron steam ships and the telegraph.

By 1830 science had a firm hold on the imagination and European society was ready to advance to the Positivism of August Comte who organized the loose sciences into specific groupings or disciplines.  Thus, writers, who are on the cutting edge of developments, began to amalgamate these developments.  Reynolds wrestles to get all these literary genres that affected him into a coherent whole; no easy problem.  He and Eugene Sue were prime examples of making order of European intellectual developments.  Reynolds especially was a prominent primitive sociologist and psychologist.  This makes his work extremely compelling.

The generation born into the Romantic Age and are bound into the transition from the Romantic to the Positivist were passing their prime and from the stage by the 1860s when their influences were being eclipsed by he march of time and a generation was emerging that handled the same material in a different manner.

In 1859, as the style of writing was changing, Darwin’s Origin of Species was published and that put a definite term to the Middle Ages.  It was a new world from the 1860s on.  Evolution was the issue while in France Jean-Martin Charcot was making great inroads in the study of psychology. The world could never be seen through the eyes of previous years again.  In literature the giants had left the earth, their epigone would be much smaller.

Moving across the water to the New World of the nineteen twenties and thirties we have a strange phenomenon in the career of the short story writer, Damon Runyon.  Something that emerged out of the Revolutionary/Napoleonic  era that wasn’t so obvious before was the rise of Organized Crime.  Dickens touched on it in the career of Fagin/Sikes in Oliver Twist.  Reynolds, Paul Favel and Sue developed the phenomenon but by the nineteen twenties and thirties in NYC organized crime was virtually an alternate government.  Democracy had no idea how to control it.  Frank Costello, a leading Mafioso, wanted to make organized crime a legitimate form of business.  In his way Damon Runyon aided and abetted Costello.

Runyon, after a terrible childhood in Colorado was brought East to NYC by W.R. Hearst as a sportswriter for his papers.  Runyon because of his childhood had an affinity for the outcasts and outlaws.  Once in NYC he made Satan’s Square Mile centered on 42^nd and Broadway, known also as the Tenderloin, his ‘home.’  He took up a station at a deli called Lindy’s that his stories made famous as Mindy’s.

He sat and observed this immigrant store of criminals during the twenties, committing their antics to print in his short stories.  Not really a very good writer other than that of this criminal milieu, he turned rather gruesome situations into charming stories for the uninstructed; the stories got grimmer as time wore on.

Without his knowledge of the actuality of his stories, as I say, one is charmed.  The stories are written in the illiterate immigrant jargon of the times, a weak understanding of tenses and so forth that some, the New York newspaperman, Jimmie Breslin who was there at the time but wrote in the 60s, think that Runyon invented. I have actually heard people speak that way so I think it was the lingua franca of Satan’s Square Mile.

At the time I am writing, the American past of 1900-1950 has completely disappeared.  At the time Runyon was writing in NYC, Jewish, Italian and Irish colonies were well defined and not yet Americanized except in a very superficial way.  After all, unlimited immigration was only suspended in 1924 so that there were hordes of unassimilated immigrants clustered in their colonies.  Dialects were heard constantly.  Dialect humor didn’t disappear until after the 1950s.  My aunt’s had heavy German accents until they died in the fifties or sixties.

In other words, there were still large populations that hadn’t learned English at all and many, many who had a flimsy grasp of it. 

At any rate, Runyon uses this immigrant dialect as the basis of his stories, and it is that that really gives his stories interest.  No matter, he sat with these criminals ona daily basis and mostly all day at Lindy’s.  Without that there isn’t much there.  However, he sat with these criminals as a very successful ‘real’ American.  He gradually insinuated himself into the underworld as a sort of consiglieri.  He was an important advisor within the underworld.  He, really became one of them protected by his association with Hearst.

The stories are entertaining enough but then Runyon tried to make romantic characters of these thugs on the stage and in the movies.  The effort revealed the situation as it was without the glamour.  In what was supposed to be a comedy Runyon filmed a movie called A Slight Case Of Murder with Edward G. Robinson playing a very convincing Mafia Don.  It isn’t charming on film.

Runyon contracted Cancer in the thirties dying in 1946.  His era died with him.  Organized Crime had become Murder Inc. and there was nothing funny about it anymore.  The sort of last gasp for Runyon came in 1955 when a big budget movie in striking technicolor (the movies lost something when technicolor was discontinued) called Guys and Dolls was released glorifying the Underworld.  Brando and Sinatra starred.  The movie didn’t make it.

It would take the horror film, Coppola’s Godfather to put a romanticized Mafia over a decade or so on.

To slide back a century and a half ago I will now review Reynold’s novel Robert Macaire or, The French Bandit In England.

To be continued in Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle, Part II, Robert Macaire.

Battle Cry

This post has been mutilated. Written long ago I cannot take the time to restore it.

Battle Cry

By

R.E. Prindle

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10212369520566491&id=1034444755

When did our national discourse become so consumed  with the state of our national discourse?  Rarely has so much public dialogue been dedicated to arguing over what can’t be said, who can’t say it and just how they shouldn’t put it.  It has always been politically profitable to frame your opponents’ rhetoric as irrational, cruel, even dangerous.  But our now-constant public skirmishes over speech have moved to another level entirely:  These days, the closer you can situate your opponents’ words to actual violence, the better.

When James Hodgkinson opened fire at a Republican congressional baseball practice in June—wounding Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana among others—he was killed in the attack and left no manifesto to explain his actions.  But the shooting immediately became, for many, a chilling example of the consequences of someone else’s rhetoric, and commentators raced to track down who that “someone” might be.

A Newsweek headline asked if “anti-Trump” rhetoric inspired the shooter…

Amanda Hess NYT

Magazine 8/20/17

 

Cc:  Johannes Rebhan, Alan Derian, Ian Hawke, Scott Rosen

Gentlemen:  In reply to your comments I had written a reasoned comment that attempted to deal with facts and historical opinion.  However, since reading your comments among others on Michael Sellers’ post of the last couple days of scurrilous ad hominems and defamation I didn’t think you deserved it while it would be futile as you refuse to answer arguments preferring to resort to slander.  Therefore I am going to tell you how you appear to an intelligent reader of your comments.

Scott Rosen is a mere thug with a mouthful of canards and insults.  In addition he is not so bright as he spells the Adolf of Hitler Adolph with a ph.  Scott is no longer welcome on my site.

Next, let’s consider Alan Derian.  His reply was very interesting because he cleverly manages to threaten me with dire consequences if I don’t fall in line without exposing himself to the casual reader as he says it is my choice whether I want to be beaten or whatever thereby exculpating himself.

His comment is very well composed, he obviously knows what he is doing.

OK, RE.  Before anyone else reacts to your last discussion about the science of the abilities of the races, let me address two points.

Here Alan admits that there is a science that addresses the relative abilities of the races.  This is an important point because he admits that there are races and that they have differing abilities. 

As an aside the Liberals on Seller’s thread always speak of scientific disciplines  as if that knowledge is wholly different and separate from other knowledge.  They speak of scientists as though they were a different race, almost alien, rather than merely someone whose specialty is physics or chemistry etc..  In point of fact anyone with the necessary intelligence can take up a scientific specialty although those who excel at them possess superior qualities and are few.

Scientific disciplines are one thing while the use of the scientific method is available to anyone and applicable to any task.  When I was in college we were told to not take the course information too seriously but if we got the method that was the point.  I got the method.  You Ian, although a fine fellow do not have the method although you have an overweening self-confidence in your opinions.

Alan then continues:

 

First, you are correct in saying that in Communist countries opposing speech was censored and how America is supposed to be different [exceptional] and allow free speech.  But that term “free speech” is a misnomer.  America has freer speech, it has a wide range (of) what kind of speech it allows, BUT, all countries, in order to survive, must enforce their core values and reject and suppress those who work to undermine those values.

As we all know, America is a diverse society of many cultures each vying for dominance. Aryan culture did not inhibit the speech of any culture or political point of view.  In other words whatever core values the Aryan society of the nineteenth century possessed and expected all immigrants to accept has now been split into competing cultures with different core values who wish to inhibit speech.  So, Mr. Derian leaves open as to which core values he is referring to.  As he here offers a tactic of the Jewish culture, which has no provision for free speech or conscience, it is obvious to which diversity Mr. Derian belongs and whose core values he wants to protect.

As Judaism is a semi-autonomous culture, as now are the Negro and Moslem cultures, while he seemingly speaks for Americans in general or universally his concern is for Jewish core values.  In the struggle for cultural supremacy the Jews at present are leading the rest.  Mr. Derian is also an Israeli citizen; a dual citizen who carries an Israeli passport or can obtain one but it is an important consideration.  One needn’t ask where his primary loyalty lies.

Now, these White demonstrators characterized as Nazis by Mr. Derian are specifically guarding the core values of the Aryan population of the US.  As Mr. Derian points out they must do this or be submerged.  The problem is that they are competing with Jews, Negroes, Moslems on the same basis.  Quite obviously they are the enemies of Mr. Derian and his Jews and vice versa.  Virtue is not the issue here as all are fighting for the same cause but who they are.  There is no possible way of faulting the Aryans without faulting Negroes, Jews and Moslems.

The Aryans were also shouting, according to reports: The Jews will not replace us.  Given the competition for supremacy between the Jews and others this is a legitimate war cry.  They are also reported as shouting Blood and Soil.  As their core values, which Mr. Derian admits must be defended by any means necessary are based on blood as are Mr. Derian’s Jews as well as the Negroes, not so much the Moslems, and soil which means that as they are Americans they have no other soil to claim.  This is not the case with Mr. Derian and his fellow Jews.  Anywhere they hang their yarmulke is home to them.

Now, Mr. Derian says that ‘free speech’ is a misnomer and that in defense of a culture’s core values anyone who challenges them can be forcibly shut up by any means necessary.  This is strange, as Mr. Derian then invokes the Constitution of the United States which guarantees unrestricted freedom of speech as well as assembly and has been confirmed by the recent decision of the Supreme Court as a core value of the United States.  Mr. Derian is subjecting himself to a forcible rebuke.

He then quotes the words “all men are created equal” from the Constitution out of context and says that this is a core value that must never be attenuated as if a mere phase could be attenuated. He neglects to complete the sentence to: “in regard to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  There is no reference to preference of certain people.  The rest of the sentence changes the meaning imputed by Mr. Derian as the evidence for all men being created equal makes it an oxymoron.  Quite obviously all men are not created equal as a certain percentage of births are stigmatized with often horrible birth defects.

Further, in the broader sense, Mr. Derian has already admitted that there is a science of racial differences which implies that all men are not only not created equal but those differences persist throughout life.   Thus, Mr. Derian is hoist by his own petard.

For Mr. Derian it is enough to impose his opinion on US law even though no laws support his points.

Thus while other countries have draconian laws to protect ‘their ‘ core’ values, one of which in most European countries is to never, never criticize the Jews or their interpretations of the holocaust and WWII or you will be put in concentration camps called prisons and have at least a portion of your assets confiscated.  It should be clear whose core values take precedence both in the US and Europe and that those values are not endemic to any European country.

The difference in the US, he says, is people might lose their jobs, that is, their means of subsistence, get screamed at by counter-protestors, that is, competing cultures, deprived of their core value of free, not freer, speech and otherwise to be made to feel bad. That is defamation, insults, directed hatred, which, one imagines are acts of tough love to bring the deluded in line.

To cap his climax Mr. Derian makes this dire threat, which one is led to believe is backed by the full force of the Jews and their auxiliaries.

Bottom line: all men are created equal.  Not all men are more or less created the same depending on your race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.  Men.  Equal.  Period.  You either adopt that or you get crapped on.  Your choice.

So, Mr. Derian ends his diatribe with the threat that you either go along with his and the Jews’ program or they will fuck you over like you have never been fucked over before.  Your choice:  On your knees before your masters, slaves, or what happens to you you have brought on yourself.  Your masters are free of guilt; you have been warned.

So, American democracy has come to that.  The Jews are staged to replace Whites and the Aryan demonstrators were quite right to chant Jews Will Not Replace Us.  That, does however, remain to be seen.  The war is on, not over.

Clip 10 The Vampyres Of New York

The Vampyres Of New York

Clip 10

A Novel

by

R.E. Prindle

 

I sat comfortably in my chair with a glass of excellent Cabernet looking benignly at Lessing, Giusti, Barron Cammell and in the speaker’s seat, Max Savings.  There was some uneasiness as the Chicago insurrection was still raging, other disturbances were taking place in cities with majority Negro populations.  While cause for concern, the concentration of Negroes in urban centers localized the disturbances rather than making them general.

In many other majority Negro areas most of the Negroes had found it expedient to head for the big cities.  Thus the Negro-White situation was rather cleanly divided.  Of course Manhattan was a different situation.  The Negro population had halved over the past three years so while seven and a half percent was still a large population on Manhattan Island their minority status quietened them somewhat while having been expelled from the Aryan areas even those are untouched directly by the gathering storm.  The news today had announced the formation of a New Islamic Republic in lower Manhattan so hostilities were imminent from that part of the city.

I think it struck all of us as odd that we were to discuss events that occurred a hundred years ago having little or no reference to today.  It seemed rather eerie.  Nevertheless Max began:

Max:  All of us are old enough for the Bolshevic Revolution to have influenced our lives.  Those born in the year 2000, now turning eighteen, may not have even heard of it, or if they have, its irrelevance to them leaves the mention of it forgotten.

Those born after, say, nineteen-eighty are old enough for more to have heard of it and perhaps taken cognizance of it but except for the few more scholarly the Revolution lacks meaning.  The names of the participants save Lenin and Stalin have no true meaning to the majority of Americans living.  Even the term American now has little real meaning.  It is good to have some company tonight who share my interest.  Sometimes walking down the street I feel like a time traveler visiting the future or perhaps a transient from a parallel universe, a man from Mars.

So, the greatest heist in History has gone down the memory hole.  The theft of the wealth of a great and extensive nation.

The seizure of the government of Russia by the Bolshevics was accomplished by men who had never know power, men who had no experience or notion of governing, no background in economics nor did they ever have any idea of what money is.  Thus when they gained power they were astonished to find that civilization was based on money, and they had no idea where money came from.  They immediately destroyed the economy, that is the taxation base so that the only liquid wealth they had was the gold reserves and they were running through those fast.

Knowing nothing of relative value they valued the accumulated wealth of centuries at face value not realizing you could flood the market on things of extrinsic value such as jewels and art works but thing of intrinsic value such furs were only used goods that sold at fire sale prices.

Nevertheless they plowed ahead.  Since they were murdering the aristocracy the aristocrats grabbed whatever of value was portable and fled the country.  Thus, not only were these confiscated goods a drug on the market but for decades they were a drug on the market.  The emigres growing more impoverished by the year they sold their jewels and other portable wares while becoming a laughing stock. 

Imagine having been the equals in the highest society then walking around in worn out outdated clothes, no money, while being mocked as ‘Count’ if you dared to say who you had been.  And then as former autocrats of Russia they were despised and hated as much as the Germans have been since the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

As they walked the streets, warehouses in the new Soviet Union, the name Russia having been obliterated from the maps, were packed with long rows of stolen or ‘appropriated’ fur coats, furniture, painting and any removables of value.  Not only did the Soviets steal from the aristocrats but in an anti-Christian frenzy fabulous churches were invaded, priestly vestments, irreplaceable icons, gold and silver vessels, anything, anything of value was removed.  The Soviets themselves were then on the same level as the displaced aristocrats.  They had miles of stolen goods but no money.

The Money Trust, both gois and Jews, was willing to make loans to them but the amount of money required to maintain the old Russian Empire couldn’t be obtained through loans; loans were just stop gap measures and since the Soviets had no income they couldn’t pay the loans back anyway let alone the interest.

In desperation they took like some Jewish old clothes peddlers to trying to hawk old fur coats, paintings, used furniture.  The Soviet Union in many ways was founded on vengeance.  As has been said of the Russian Revolution- Where are the Russians?  In fact there were few of them.  Mostly they came from the subject peoples of the Russians- Letts, Poles, Jews, Georgians, from everywhere but mostly Jews.

As Dostoyevsky sagely remarked in the nineteenth century:  The Jews would kill us all if they had us in their power.  Well, now the Jews had the Russians in their power and, in fact, they were killing them; those that hadn’t the opportunity or wisdom to flee.

Barron Cammell:  Hold It!  Hold it!  This isn’t going to some anti-Semitic Jew bashing like that one’s over there is it?  The Jews!  The Jews!  Always the Jews!  The first to be blamed and last to be forgiven.  Show me some proof that even one Jews was involved.

Me:  Leon Trotsky.

Barron:  Trotsky was a secular Jew; he wasn’t religious.  An atheist.

Me:  OK.  So he was an unreligious, secular, atheist Jew.  What does it take to be a Jew in your eyes Barron?

Lessing:  Barron! Barron!  Let’s not have any outbursts.  This is a fraternal society.  We can express ourselves freely without rancor.

Max:  It’s just history.  The fact are easily ascertained.

Me:  Barron, it is no more clear than in Russia that the Jews work as a national unit and secondarily as an international people working together in their own interest against all other interests in battle for supremacy.  Why then are you offended that Max is placing them in the place and time?

Barron:  Oh, shut up, you.

Lessing:  Barron, no rudeness now.

Barron:  I don’t know why you brought that guy here Lessing.  Everything was fine until he showed up.

Hodding Giusti:  No, Barron, things were about the same.  It was just that no one had investigated anything where the Jews played as prominent a role.

Barron:  They certainly did in my report on the Rothschild’s yet I didn’t accuse them of any crimes.  I praised their economic acumen.

Hodding:  Well, you were very generous to the Rothschilds.  You barely touched on how they got their money or how they bent the rules.

Barron:  You mean innovated, how they changed the way things were done.

Hodding:  Merely another way of saying the same thing although laudatory instead of critical; after all theft is theft and everyone at the time knew it was theft.  Time and an eraser have just altered the reality in the mainstream consciousness.  A legend or myth has replaced the reality.  Such altering of the past was nearly a cottage industry by the time I retired.  But, let Max go on.

Lessing:  Yes, Barron, after all Max puts a lot of time and effort into his presentations.

Barron:  So do we all.  Except for him (indicating me) obviously.

Max:  I may resume then?  Nevertheless, the largest faction of revolutionaries was Jewish or of Jewish origin, since Barron insists that Trotsky wasn’t Jewish for various reasons, hoping to distance them from the mass, as it were.  I won’t call it recent research since the obvious has been known since the Tribe arrived at the Finland Station, however only recently, that is a few years ago, have the Jews admitted publicly that they were the engine of the revolution.  I hope we can consider that settled.

It can be no coincidence that while thousands of Christian churches were looted or destroyed not one synagogue was touched so that only Russians were expropriated.  Needing money and having little except the accumulated things stolen from the nobility and churches, the Soviets determined to convert the stolen things to cash.  This was an incredible stash.  Whatever the Nazis are said to have appropriated from the Jews was miniscule in proportion while a large part of their wealth was probably fenced goods from the revolution. 

I use as my main source Sean McMeekin’s History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks published in 2009.

As the Jews primarily were responsible for accumulating these trinkets they naturally had the networks in Europe and the US to dispose of the stuff.

Barron:  Stop it!  Stop it!

Lessing:  Barron, please! Have some respect.

Max:  Of course as all the stuff was in a legal sense stolen, the Soviet Union itself was acting as the fence.  There was opposition in the West to becoming receivers of this stolen merchandise.  There certainly were protests from Russian emigres when they could identify items that had belonged to them.

Curiously their claims were disregarded unlike with the Jews after WWII during which claims without a shred of evidence were awarded from items appropriated from the Nazis, different in no way from the Jewish Soviets.

Barron:  There is a great deal of difference, somewhere between six and ten million Jews were murdered by Nazi thugs in the Holocaust.

Me:  Six to ten?  It keeps going up.  Let me point out though that the Jews, as a national group, atheist or religious, were complicit in the murder of millions and millions, using your method, Barron, tens of millions of Russian aristocrats and kulaks, simple folks, and whoever didn’t keep their heads down or make it to the border.

Barron:  I believe we can lay the blame for that at Stalin’s feet.

Hodding:  I don’t believe we can.

Barron:  Well, that’s certainly as it is in the historians I read.

Lessing:  There are other histories.

Max:  May I go on?  Thank you.  The attempt, as I say, to sell the stuff ran into opposition so that it was necessary to operate underhandedly in which the main operatives were what Henry Ford called the international Jews.

Barron:  Name one.

Me:  Armand Hammer.

Max:  Yes, he was certainly one of the biggest.  And what Jews were big buyers, especially for jewels and paintings?  This leads us on to wonder how many paintings Jews were reclaiming as theirs had formerly belonged to Russian aristocrats or came from the Hermitage, that is the Czar’s personal stash.

Certainly these selling activities during the twenties were well known to the Nazis so that one might say they had an immediate example perhaps making them believe they were reappropriating Aryan treasures, to use the term.  In any event theirs was not a unique crime.  Nazi crimes may be considered as an extenuation of Soviet crimes.

Barron:  Oh my god!

Lessing:  Hush!

Max:  One of the main conduits to the US, if not the main conduit was the Jew Armand Hammer.  He was quite notorious at the time being resented and hated on a fairly wide scale.  While it was forbidden to attack him as a Jew, anti-Semitic,  he could be attacked as a Communist or tool of the Communists, which he denied on both counts.  Needless to say he denied he was a Communist although his fortune was made by the Soviets.

Even his name, Arm and Hammer, bespoke his father’s politics.  Hammer’s fortune was made in the Soviet Union and then he was chosen as the chief conduit to dispose of the aristocrats’ treasures in the United States.  Can it be any wonder then that Hammer acquired one of the great art collections in the world for himself.  How many other art works were funneled into Jewish art collections such as that of the movie star Edward G. Robinson’s?

Barron:  Can you prove that Robinson bought from Hammer?

Max:  Not at this time but it does make sense.  For instance, David Bazelon who was the Alien Properties Custodian during WWII made Chicago’s Jews, he was a Jew from Chicago, wealthy after the war when he sold whole industries confiscated from the Germans cheap thereby making fortunes, giving Chicago’s Jews great economic power.

Barron:  Can you prove that?

Max:  Certainly.  Those sales are public knowledge and above board.   The government records exist.  Hammer’s sales may have been more clandestine although Andrew Mellon’s collection can be traced to Hammer.  Mellon’s paintings were eventually given to the US National Gallery where they reside today, unclaimed by any Russian although had they belonged to Jews you can believe they would have been ‘restored’ by now.

Barron:  You sound embittered by that.

Max:  Indeed I am for crime anywhere is a reflection on me if I hold my silence.  Heard that one before Barron?  Or, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing?

The point is that Hammer’s collection was composed of stolen merchandise of which he was both a fence and receiver that could be traced to the original Russian owners, but neither Hammer nor any of the Jewish buyers who knowingly and gloatingly bought stolen merchandise ever returned it to the rightful owners.  All legal actions taken by the rightful owners were thrown out.

Yet, when artworks were taken by the Nazis the Jews demanded that such, under very tenuous evidence of the former ownership, were given to them.  Many probably obtained from the Russian hoards.

Even though the Jewish population losses were horrendous, six million are claimed to have fallen in the holocaust alone while other massacres such as Babi Yar and what we might call natural wartime attrition may have claimed a million or two which should have nearly exterminated the whole European Jewish population but miraculously didn’t.  Thus, perhaps, using figures wildly eight million or more Jews perished out a possible ten million yet claimants sometimes multiple claimants after 1945 were there to claim anything that might possibly have been owned by Jews.

Barron:  Do you depreciate Jewish suffering to concentrate on a few dollars.  How heartless.

Max:  You can be exasperating Barron.  I don’t denigrate anything, both Whites and Jews have been known to kill for a few dollars more.  The point I’m trying to make is that the Jews are not long suffering innocents and that on the one hand they conducted according to McMeekin the greatest heist, that is theft, in history and on the other hand play innocent victims.  The end I’m trying for, I suppose, is that neither the Germans nor anyone else need feel guilty for causing Jewish suffering anymore than the Jews feel guilty for causing the untold suffering of the European Holocaust endured through two world wars.  If Freud and the members of the B’nai B’rith wanted to see Europeans and Europe dead then between two world wars they nearly did.  They sought the destruction of Russia and achieved it when Russia was wiped off the map becoming the USSR.  As a Union of Republics, the Jews being one, they on paper, at least, achieved autonomy.  When it became time to murder the much despised Czar and his family Jews did it.

It seems to me the height of obtuseness to believe the Jews are a holy and innocent people.

Barron:  It seems to me that you and that over there lack compassion.  I think you’re being heartless and are despicable.

Me:  Compassionate?  Compassionate?  There’s no one more compassionate than me.  My heart bleeds for the whole of suffering humanity.  All of it not just an infinitesimal part called Jews.  I see the suffering of one as representative of the whole.  How can anyone be happy knowing that some poor individual somewhere is unhappy, to quote Liberal dogma.  What is going on outside our windows as we sit comfortably sipping fine wine is equal to any suffering in the history of the world.  I feel their pain but, still, this is excellent wine and they will have to pry my cold dead hands from the stem of this glass before I give it up.  There Barron, was that passionate enough for you?

Lessing:  Hear, hear!  If I feel guilt I’m sure it isn’t too obvious.

Hodding:  History shows that the suffering is not evenly distributed over the entire population.  Even in the worst suffering some suffer more and some suffer less.  I choose to suffer less.  Pass that bottle over here.

Lessing:  I found your presentation interesting Max.  I really wasn’t aware of the confiscation of the material wealth of Russians by the Bolsheviki.

Max:  Who said I was finished, but if I am, I suppose I am.  It is quite a story.  I was driven off my prepared remarks to a large degree by Barron’s vociferations.

Me:  You made your point anyway.   I rather enjoyed the controversy but then I am a child of controversies.  Barron, what’s the problem here?  Since you speak of Jews you know there is a collectivity that calls itself Jewish or it would be useless to speak of Jews.  If there is such a collectivity then that collectivity must have some identity, some standards of conduct that it acts on.  Since the collectivity functions in the external world it must be observable.  Right?

Barron:  Yes, of course, but that is no reason for Jew bashing.

Me:  Well, analyzing those activities, whether the analysis is correct or not doesn’t constitute bashing does it?

Barron:  It’s the intent that makes the difference.  You are…you are…

Me:  Ok, I’ll finish for you:  You are an anti-Semite.  Right?

Barron:  Not me, you are.

Me:  Right.  I was just finishing the sentence for you.  But Max didn’t say anything that wasn’t true did he?

Barron:  That’s not the point.  The truth is irrelevant.  Some things just shouldn’t be said.

Me:  The truth is irrelevant?  I give up then.  When true things can’t be said there is no hope.  Civilization falls to the ground.

Lessing:  A good report none the less.  Let’s call it a night.

 

We all gave as jolly or cordial a good night as possible.  Barron even bent a little although avoiding me in his gaze.  As I was leaving Lessing asked for a meeting.  I said I had to see about my suits from James Carter.  I would give him a call after talking to Goldbladder.  As I was leaving, my phone rang.  It was Ange.

Ange:  Partly, Merivale is at the door.  I can see him.

Me:  How does he look, Ange?  Agitated, determined, worried, what?

Ange:  Sort of angry, I can’t tell.

Me:  Does he have his cell phone visible?

Ange: Yes.

Me:  But he’s not trying to use the door speaker?

Ange:  I, I, I don’t know

Me:  OK.  Hold on Ange, I’m going to speak to Lessing for a moment.  Don’t hang up.  Lessing, Steinberg’s at the condo trying to get Angeline to come to the door.  You have his cell number, right?  Can you give him a call and advise him he isn’t acting in his best interests?

Lessing:  I think so.  Ask Angeline to report on his reaction.

Me:  Ange.  Lessing is calling Steinberg now, keep your eye on the monitor and tell us his reaction.

Lessing:  Merivale, Lessing here.  We’d appreciate it if you ceased bothering Angeline.

Steinberg:  I just want to talk to her Lessing.

Lessing:  That isn’t possible Merivale.  Angeline is no longer under your control.  She is with Perry now.  They consider themselves husband and wife.  You have already damaged her enough.  Be a good fellow and just leave.  Go home.

Steinberg:  Damn it, Farquhar, I’ve got rights.  I…

Lessing:  Rights are exactly what you don’t have Merivale.  Rights are what you don’t have and actually never have had.  I shouldn’t have to tell you that there are serious criminal acts here.

Steinberg:  You’re not threatening me, Farquhar, because if you are…

Lessing:  Call it what you will, I’m telling you we’ve got you by the shorthairs.  Whatever happens you lose.

Steinberg:  This is some sort of anti-Semitic trick isn’t it Farquhar?

Lessing:  Good God, Steinberg, we’re talking crime, not religion.

Steinberg:  Judaism isn’t a religion.

Lessing:  Who cares what Judaism  is Merivale.  Be wise, turn around, get on the elevator and don’t come back.

Ange:  He just looked into his phone, Partly.  He looked at the elevator and then back at his phone.

Me:  Tell him to leave again, Lessing, he’s ambivalent.

Lessing:  Angeline doesn’t want to see you Merivale.  She’s thinking of calling security; avoid a ruckus and get in the elevator.

Merivale:  Fuck you Farquhar.  Watch your step.

Ange:  Oh, good, Partly, he’s walking back to the elevator.  He’s leaving.

Me:  Excellent Ange.  Have a relaxing cup of tea.  I’ll be there within the half hour.  Good job, Lessing.  I’ll pass a message through Goldbladder this Monday at my fitting.

Lessing:  Will Merivale get it?

Me:  Oh yeah.  Goldbladder will have minutes of this meeting tomorrow.  Steinberg within minutes of my fitting.

Lessing:  And the minutes of the meeting will come from Barron, you think?

Me:  Sure of it.  Alright I’ll call you Monday evening to relay what happened.  Great reading from Max.  See you later.

 

Things are moving very fast now.  My own present life has been one of stress that almost makes me dizzy.  I have to make an effort to stay calm.  On the home front managing Ange is demanding all my powers so that I have to develop a second personality to deal with external matters.  My greatest pleasure, reading, has been shot to hell, no time, while squeezing in writing has forced me to reorganize my time usage.

Dealing with the New York situation has me, uh, ‘rising to greatness.’  I’m learning to delegate whatever can be delegated and hope for success.   Cooperating in an unprecedented emergency has been high.  The ethnic cleansing of our area goes more smoothly than might be expected.  The major problem is our people who have been conditioned to sacrifice their interests to others and who resist the expulsion of Negroes, Moslems and others.  In order to discourage others some of these fanatics have been excommunicated , expelled North into Negroland or South into Moslemland.  Tribeca being somewhere between is a mad confusion of peoples.  Obviously the American Experiment has hit the rocks.

Saturday and Sunday morning then I spent working with Ragnar and his gym crew and delegations working out governmental problems within our community, maintaining Western Civilization as best we can.  It’s sort of like the frontier of the nineteenth century.  This is not easy.  Afternoons I spent with Ange.  While we consider ourselves married we still have to get to know each other.

Central Park is now safe so we spent Saturday strolling the lanes and exchanging confidences about ourselves to each other.  Ange is more lovely than I could have hoped for, beautiful in mind and body.

Sunday we combined romancing with touring community neighborhoods to get some firsthand knowledge of how things are shaping up.  Unsettled to say the least but people seemed to be concerned for themselves and each other.  Transitioning from one state of being to another isn’t easy.  So far, so good.

Then Monday was the day for my fitting.  Everything going to hell but business as usual.  Have to remain centered.  Amazingly, amongst the growing chaos the stock market is holding up well.  Instead of losing I’ve actually gained a few points in my investments.  Of course I have to be nimble.  Amidst all this nonsense I find myself plotting my investments.  Well, life goes on, nothing stops for tea.

Our area was well below forty-fifth street so there was no problem getting from Tribeca to forty-fifth although I did have to cross the border from Tribeca into Whitelands.  Our armed troops were patrolling the streets.

Me:  Any problems getting gas, Ragnar?

Ragnar:  No.  All deliveries are flowing through without any problems.  We are getting food shipments from Jersey both through the tunnels and across the Hudson.  No interference through the Bronx as yet.  Our membership has been growing which we have been able to accommodate so far through expulsion of others but as we’re prepared for trouble Bronxside we’re organized to invade if necessary.  It would be nice to have Columbia in our fold.

Me:  What does Lessing say about Obama?

Ragnar:  So far DC is in a dither.  Fires burning in too many places for them to wrap their heads around.  Incredibly they were so confident in their agenda that they had no clue this was coming.  You’ve probably noticed the jets and copters overhead but so far they’re only making noise.  Lessing says they are calling in troops from NATO and other places as our troops are depleted here in the US, or what used to be the US, but where they will deploy first we don’t know.

Me:  Yeah, well, I’ve got more important fish to fry just now.  I’ve got suits to fit.

Ragnar:  I sure hope you can handle it, Boss.

Me:  Might not be the highest assignment but I’ll be better dressed for one now.

Ragnar:  Especially in hot pink.

Me:  You spying on me Ragnar?

Ragnar:  Word gets around.  Not everyone in town wears a hot pink suit with matching hat and shoes.  People do talk.

Me:  Yeah?  Well I’m going to have a little pink mask too.  Fantomas in splendor.

I hopped out of the limo, entered and mounted the staircase.  Let’s see what Abe is up to.

Abe:  You’re on time as usual, I see.

Me:  I’m pretty consistent Abe.  Time is money and all that.

Abe:  According to Freud so is shit.

Me: Ah ha, ha.  Well he’d know better about that than me. However I am willing to pay in kind if you like Abe.

Abe:  That was just a bad joke.  We’re sticking to your card.

Me:  Great.  So how close are we to getting the suits?

Abe:  This might be the last fitting.  Here let me show you something.  Check out these shoes, this hat, and these gloves.

Me:  I didn’t order gloves.

Abe:  No, but I knew you’d want them.  Look at this matching hot pink to go with the suiting.

Me:  But they’re not fluorescent Abe.

Abe:  Get out of here ungrateful One.  Do you have any idea how much work this has been?

Me:  No, but I have an idea what it’s going to cost.  Remember I don’t have a first born.

Abe:  We know.  By the way how did it go at the whatchamaycallit club you belong to go.

Me:  Something tells me you can tell me Abe.

Abe:  Do you think we have the place wired or something?

Me:  Something.

Abe:  What would that something be?

Me:  Not what Abe, who.

Abe:  Oh, I see.

Me:  Sure you do.  So what did you boys think of Max’s presentation.

Abe:  We thought it was anti-Semitic.  We’re beginning to think you guys are Nazis as well.

Me:  Paranoia becomes you Abe.  Max is an historical researcher he simply reported what was true.  We’re true historians Abe.  We don’t distort the facts to fit an agenda.  You have only yourselves to blame.

Abe:  Sometimes the truth doesn’t have to be revealed.

Me:  The other night wasn’t one of them.  So what else is bugging you Abe?

Abe:  We know you’re Nazis because your goons are forcing we Jews out of Little America or whatever you call your enclave.  That is anti-Semitism and it has to stop.

Me:  Nobody is forcing anybody to leave Abe.  Those Jews you referred to wanted to be in Brooklyn in your national colony there.  You aren’t going to deny that Brooklyn is a Jewish colony are you?

Abe:  How would you like it if we forced Whites out of Brooklyn?

Me:  We’d love it Abe, almost pay you to do it but we’d still make a big noise about it, just to put you in a bad light.  Times have changed Abe, national lines have been drawn.  Anti-Semitism doesn’t have the meaning it did anymore.

Abe:  A big noise hey?  Wait till you see the new issue of New York magazine.  By the way, I see you people have started a new magazine, the New York Beobachter, is that what it’s called?

Me:  I’ve always like your sense of humor Abe.  No, it’s the New York Intelligencer.  We have two hundred and thirty-four subscribers already.  We expect to double that shortly.

Abe:  I suppose you write that crap?

Me:  No, Abe.  I haven’t contributed as yet.  So far we’ve used stringers to report local events and analyses plus relying on letters to the editor.  So far, so good.  Want to take a bundle of a hundred back to Brooklyn?

Abe:  I don’t live in Brooklyn; I live in Manhattan.

Me:  Really?  Where abouts?

Abe:  Not too far from you I imagine in what we call the Tribeca Free State.

Me:  Yucka, yucka, Tribeca Free State, that’s good Abe.  Well then, it’s either Brooklyn or the Free State for your emigres but they will have to move; we’re not much on diversity from embedded elements, we have enough problems with our own of various backgrounds.

So, is this the last fitting before delivery Abe?

Abe:  There will be a last touch up to make sure everything is true.  That’s next for all your suits.  Make an appointment.

 

I did.  As I entered the apartment Angeline greeted me breathlessly to announce:  Partly, I just got a call from Lady and they’re coming back now.  All hell broke loose in Europe.  They were lucky to catch the last plane out.

Me:  Damn.  I suppose that will bring the stock market down, at least temporarily.  Well, where are they now?

Ange:  She said they were a couple hours out.  They should be here tonight.

Me:  You’ve got everything spic and span, no problem there.  Just a minute while I call Ragnar to let him know.

Ragnar, we just received news that Lady and Miles will be back in a couple hours.

Ragnar:  I know, they called.  I’m on my way now.

Me:  Ragnar already knew.  He’s on his way.  We’re shipshape here.  Cook something up in case they’re hungry.

Ange:  Lady didn’t sound very happy I was here.

Me:  I’m sure she was surprised.  She had no reason to suspect I would marry.

Ange.  It didn’t sound like that.  There was a note of disapproval in her voice.  Maybe she thinks I’m not worthy.

Me:  Honey, nobody’s opinion but mine counts.  I know your worth, I know the criminal acts that were committed on you.  There is no better person in the world than you, however the career of Angeline II, of which you are still not totally aware is still out there; for many people that is the only Angeline Gower they know.  We don’t know but perhaps Miles attended one of those parties and, well, who knows?  Be prepared for the worst but we can’t let that affect us.

Ange:  But Partly, I don’t want you to be hurt.

Me:  Honey, nothing can hurt me.  I am proof to the world.  I know how things function.  Let me call Lessing to see if he knows.  Lessing…

Lessing:  I’m on my way.  Hold the fort.

Lessing is on the way Ange, everything is under control.  We can only wait.

When the keys began turning in the locks Lessing, Ange and I were in our places and ready.  The early return was obviously due to the eruption of the Moslems in France and the incursion from Germany to the East.  We should soon have some details.

Lessing:  There’s the keys.  I’ll go open the inner door.

 

The Carmichaels literally burst through the door in high agitation.

Lady:  You can’t believe the turmoil over there.  France is in flames from Marseilles to the Belgian border; Belgium is in flames.  They are looting, burning and killing on all sides.  They are every where, everywhere, Notre Dame was blown sky high.  Churches everywhere are being blown up or burned.  The clergy are being murdered.  The uprisings are in all parts of France.  While the army has been mobilized to combat the invaders from Germany, the troops are ambushed from all sides.

Good God, never in my lifetime, never in my lifetime did I believe something like this could happen.

Me: (clearing my throat)  Welcome back to the Tribeca Free State Miles and Lady.

I said nothing but I had written that this exact same thing would happen.  At my age I didn’t know whether it would happen in my lifetime but anyone who followed EU policies could see it coming.

Miles:  Tribeca Free State?  What are you talking about?

Lessing:  Well, Miles, things have been happening here too.  Manhattan is now several different States.  You have the Moslem Caliphate in Lower Manhattan, the Tribeca Free State here, the New American Republic in mid-Island both East and West, the African Chieftanship in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.  So things are different.  And then there’s the Orthodox Hebrew Theocracy in Brooklyn,  Queens isn’t clear and we haven’t heard much from Staten Island but it appears it might be Whiteland.

Miles:  Egad!  The Tribeca Free State!  Why that?

Lessing:  Nobody is so dominant that it can be claimed but we’re doing our best to get it into the New American Republic.

Lady:  Well, at least the lights are still on.

Me:  Yes, we were able to seize control of the grid.  We’re using it to try to freeze out the Moslems.  They have no power at all, of course, that has raised some havoc with Wall Street but they can always go back .  Once we cut off their water they will have to vacate.  That adds to the woes of Staten Island and Long Island, New Jersey but it’s unavoidable.

Miles:  So war is going on here too?

Lessing:  Yes, Miles, you might call it a phony war as so far there hasn’t been too much shooting; we’re all still sparring with each other, waiting to see what Obama will do.  So far, we assume he’s ‘assessing the situation.’

Lady:  My God, is it the end of the world?

Me:  It is certainly the end of civilization as we’ve known it.  But then that began back at 9/11, now we’re really into it.  But, you said something about Merkel inciting it.

Lady:  Yes.  Over there they think Merkel had the plan when she admitted all those Moslems in ’15 and ’16.  The French think it’s a continuation of the Nazis.  They think Merkel is rearming Germany and once the Moslems are out of Germany with France in total turmoil Germany will attack Moslem France and begin the conquest of Europe.

Me:  Far out!  Crazy little Mama Merkel.  Who would have believed it.  I suppose the Moslems are smashing the wine stores.

Lady:  Yes, of course, but what a thing to mention.

Me:  Damn.

Lessing:  Ata boy, Perry, first things first.

Lady:  Now that you mention it Perry I’m afraid that you and that woman will have to vacate the apartment.  We’re sorry our agreement isn’t viable.  Force majeure.   You do understand, don’t you?

Me:  Of course, Lady.  Angeline has her own condo so we’ll move over there.  We’ll pack and leave tomorrow.  I can assure you I have no objection and no regrets.  I can’t thank you enough for a very wonderful experience.  I’m sure Lessing can fill you in after you’ve recovered from your flight and as we are all fighting the good fight I hope we can be friends and associates.

Lady:  I’m sure we can Perry.  But, I’d prefer you spent the night at…her…apartment and pick up your things tomorrow.

Me:  Certainly.  I understand fully and as I say Lessing will fill you in later.  We’ll take our leave then.

Lessing:  give me a minute Perry and we can go uptown together if you like.

Me:  Sounds good Lessing.  Alright with you Ange?

Ange: (suppressing a sob)  Yes.  I’m yours Partly.

 

Proceed to Vol. I, Clip 11