RAT HAUNTED TRENCHES

Britain today mulls the past of a century ago.

          In this its centenary year, World War One still engenders controversy, especially on the side of the ocean where most of its horrors played out.  Michael Gove, Britain’s  Secretary of State for Education, has castigated dramatists and “left wing academics” who portray the conflict as a tragic shambles and in the process “denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage.”  It was “a noble cause,”  Gove argues, “a just war” —dulce et decorum est.  .  . and a million British lives later.  

          Now appears the decidedly right wing historian, Niall Ferguson, repeating, with his usual well-informed panache, his long-standing insistence that his native Britain would have been better off staying out of the war, no matter who ultimately won it.  Calling British intervention “the biggest error in modern history,” Ferguson reckons not only that Britain could “have lived with a German victory,” but that, given its resources in 1914, it could have “wait[ed] and deal[t] with the German challenge later … [and] respond[ed] on its own terms, taking advantage of its much greater naval and financial capability.”  (Ferguson’s life story will one day be entitled Breakfast with Kissinger.)

          As cogently as anyone in the current flood of centennial commentary, Adam Gopnik in a recent New Yorker –on behalf of every national leadership of the time— likened the decision to go to war in 1914 to the maiden voyages of the Titanic and its sister ship, the Olympic, the latter having avoided to the icebergs and crossed the Atlantic successfully.  Suffused with notions of Honor and the fear of Humiliation, of losing Face, of seeming to Lack Credibility, these captains of civilization (some might prefer “petty officers”) all called out, in effect: “Ram the iceberg!  We can’t afford to let it make us look weak.”  

          All just one hundred brief years ago.
                                                                    _______________________

          More recently (just this past week, in fact), London artist James Sinclair had our upcoming saint’s day for lovers in mind.  Bemused, too, by word of an auction in Texas —where for a mere $165,000 some valiant henwee (i.e. high-net-worth individual) purchased the right to shoot an aging black rhinoceros— he sent us the Valentine sentiment you see at left.  As the lustful opportunity was sold in the name of conservation, none dare call it horny.  Nevertheless, the Beast, no stranger to aging, feels a deep mammalian sympathy.

          But pleasure as well, over the offerings in this edition.  We welcome Amalia Illgner into the cage with a wry and offbeat appreciation of Nora Ephron.  Ellis Douek, our distinguished regular, offers a personal remembrance of his friend, Claudio Abbado, who died in late January.  And Philip Hogge recalls the inaugural Dreamflight 25 years ago, a charity journey that he piloted to the Magic Kingdom with almost three hundred sick and handicapped children on board. 

          Long-time Iran watcher, Marvin Zonis weighs in on the current, controversial deal with that country over its disputed nuclear program.  Novelist Frank Tallis talks about the creative process underlying his award-winning tales of crime and, more recently, horror and the supernatural.  And we conclude with Part 1 of a two-part autobiographical fragment by David Rankin, a reaching back into his Irish-Catholic boyhood.

          It’s the Beast’s 32nd edition; please do enjoy it.   And remember, one and all here welcome your comments.


                     WW

REMEMBERING CLAUDIO ABBADO

Ellis Douek


Claudio Abbado          I met Claudio Abbado when he came to London in the late 1970’s to conduct the London Symphony.  We were introduced by the pianist Maurizio Pollini, whom I knew, and by the writer-broadcaster, Gaia Servadio.  Claudio settled in Chelsea with his second wife, Gabriella Cantalupi, and their young son, Sebastian, and their house soon became a haven for numerous Italians who came to London, including many musicians.  In time we became friends, and I stayed with them in their house in Sardinia during the summer.

          From time to time he invited me to rehearsals, and I was always impressed by the respectful courtesy and kindness he showed towards the players and singers, who seemed to respect and Luciano Pavarottitrust him in return. I remember him patiently explaining a complex operatic story to Pavarotti who interrupted him saying: “Look Claudio, I don’t need all that stuff.  Just tell me where you want me to stand and leave it to me.”  He then sang with such wonderful emotion that Claudio turned to me and said, “What do you make of that? He doesn’t even know what its about!”

          He introduced me to Mahler, of whose importance, like many Londoners, I was not aware then, and again, like so many others he turned me into a devotee.  On the other hand I never understood his support for composers such as Nono, the avant-gardiste.  Claudio only smiled when I tried to discuss them.   

          He impressed me with his interest in, and his support for young musicians and conductors —though he did not suffer inadequate work.  He drew the line whenever he felt that someone was “not serious”.

          His most memorable quality, for me, was his ability to see things as they are, without fuss or flounce, a disposition some liked to say was un-Italian but which, I suspect, he regarded as “serious.”  He showed it too when he was stricken with stomach cancer and needed emergency surgery in Sardinia.  He told me later how, despite heavy blood loss, he was asked to make critical decisions including whether to have surgery then and there in Cagliari, or be flown back to Berlin where he lived and where the medical setup was much grander.  He made the right decision, telling them to get on with it, and survived for many more active years until, just weeks ago, the disease finally took him.

          I have seen cases where doctors have been so awed by the importance or grandeur of an unexpected patient that they were unable to do what had to be done —with dire consequences.  I can only imagine Claudio gently encouraging his surgeon as he would have a diffident singer or musician.
___________________
ELLIS DOUEK is Emeritus Consultant and Surgeon, Ear, Nose and Throat, at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital in London.  He is also the author of A Middle Eastern Affair and a soon-to-be-published memoir of his life and career in medicine.  The 1996 film, Claudio Abbado: The Silence that Follows the Music, can be accessed through www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/74.     

WE RETELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE

Amalia Illgner

          She could peel an apple in one long, curly strip.  The whole apple.  She could teach you craps at a moment’s notice.  She could tell a story.  It might start with the kreplach joke, then expand on the emotional healing properties of butter or the (imagined) joys that would come with having breasts that bounce bounce bounce.  Some say that she sparkled so deliciously that to sit next to her was to sit next Nora Ephronto a glass of champagne.  Others say that many of her stories, unlike the apples, lacked something of a core.  I’ll say that to spend time with her musings on death, truth and womanhood is to join a most wonderful dinner party conversation.

          Australian essayist Robert Dessaix likens great conversation to “a fire that spreads horizontally, refining, reshaping, even scorching.  .  . everyone present as it goes.”  By horizontally he means that all participants feel —for that moment at least— like they’re on an equal plane.  That’s what it’s like curling up with The Most of Nora Ephron, the new collection from Knopf.  It’s past midnight, you’re in your host’s kitchen among the sticky saucepans and burned-down candles, oblivious to the fact that the rest of the party has long gone to bed.  

          When it comes to diving into collected works, movies on planes, cocktail lists, hell, even menus, people can be divided into two camps: those who make a beeline towards the first thing that reminds them (however tenuously) of sex, and those who don’t.  So a piece called “The O Word”, though appearing pretty much at the end, seemed, to me, like the perfect place to start.  “The O Word” (2010) is Ephron squaring off with life’s great equaliser.  To meet her here is to meet a woman in deep reflection.  She is paying microscopic attention to the world around her.  She spends time looking up at the sky and describes the beauty of summertime geese flying overhead.  Their beating wings mark late summer’s closing moments.  But since becoming older, oldish and finally old (‘old’ being the actual “O Word”), she hears these familiar geese with changed ears:

                              .  .  . they became a sign not just that summer would come to an end,
                              but that so would everything else .  .  .  

          Gentle, sombre and touching.  It’s a conscious re-evaluation of what it means to be alive, and how one might best spend one’s time.  When she wrote that piece, Ephron was living with an acute form of leukaemia.  Just two years later she died.  Knowing this certainly gives the piece added poignancy (how could it not?), but its impact does not rely on it.   

                              Someday your luck will run out .  .  .  There’s nothing you can do
                              about it.  Whether or not you eat six almonds a day.  Whether or
                              not you believe in God.

Bam!  She’s going to die.  Pow!  You’re going to die.  Smack!  I’m going to die.  We.  Are.  All.  Going.  To. Die.  The question is:

                              [A]m I doing exactly what I want to be doing?  I aim low.  My idea of
                              a perfect day is a frozen custard at Shake Shack and a walk in the
                              park.  (Followed by a lactaid.)

          The spectre of death and what it means for one’s present is a recurring theme in the collection.  “Considering the Alternative” (2006) is her one-two sucker punch that asks:

                              Do you splurge or do you hoard?  Do you live every day as if it’s
                              your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live
                              twenty more years?  Is life too short or is it going to be too long?  
                              And what about chocolate?  (Boom-tish!)

          It’s been said that Ephron’s writing suffered from an overreliance on humour.  A reviewer in the New York Review of Books posed the question of this collection: “When does humour function as a substitute for psychological depth?”  There are many examples of Ephron’s wit mitigating the blow of an incisively fought argument, or deftly coaxing the reader away from the hot blood and messy guts of an open wound.  Heartburn, Ephron’s only novel, famously based on the breakdown of her second marriage and included in this collection, can be seen as essentially an entire novel glued together from such examples:

                              My father said a lot of terrific daddy things to me that made me cry
                              even harder, partly because the dialogue was completely lifted from
                              an obscure Danny Dailey movie he’d played a pediatrician in, and
                              partly because he nevertheless delivered the lines so very well.

          Ephron openly admitted to seeing a therapist for most of her adult life.  In her writing there seems to be a sense that she had mentally processed the bloodiness of her experiences while away from her desk, so that by the time it came to the writing she had cooled.  The result is writing that is at once deeply confessional yet still somewhat at arm’s length.  She has distilled her experiences to their lessons; their absurdities, to their role in a larger narrative.  In her essay “Revision and Life: Take It from the Top —Again” (1986) she says:

                              Fiction is a chance to rework the events of your life so that you
                              give the illusion of being the intelligence at the center of it,
                              simultaneously managing to slip in all the lines that occurred
                              to you later.

          Her wit and perfectly wry observations are what she wished she’d said.  Rather like how a society’s idea of utopia is a poetic shorthand for its entire value system, you wonder, perhaps, whether a person’s fantasies, their daydreams about what they could, should and would have done are more telling than any pretence to straight-up, balls-out truth.  You wonder many things.  You wonder that if Joan Didion’s mantra was: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’ then perhaps Ephron’s was:  ‘We  retell ourselves stories.  .  .  .’

          There is no doubt that the character in which Ephron wrote and cast herself was that of the heroine.  The plucky girl with small breasts who was cruelly cheated on but who turned lemons into lemonade and carved out her own box-fresh Hollywood ending.  She was a winner.  A winner who implored other women to follow her example and go forth and, well, win, you know, at life.  Her “Commencement Address to Wellesley, Class of 1996” is a rallying call to graduates of her alma mater to join the A-team:

                              Above all be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.  Because
                              you don’t have the alibi my class had –this is one of the great
                              achievements and mixed blessings you’ll inherit: unlike us you
                              can’t say “nobody told you there were other options.”  Your
                              education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead.  
                              Twenty-five years from now, you won’t have an easy time making
                              excuses as my class did.  You won’t be able to blame the deans, or
                              the culture, or anyone else; you will have no one to blame but
                              yourselves.  Whoa!

          She actually says ‘whoa!’  No matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine anyone actually saying ‘whoa!’ with any degree of sincerity.  It just feels unbelievably gee whiz and self-conscious.  So I try to imagine being eighteen and hearing the same words without the muddy filter of a decade’s worth of life.  I think my heart would have probably soared.  I would have felt like the world was open and waiting and ready.  I think I would have fallen slightly in love with Nora-the-heroine and probably dumped whichever silly boy I was currently dallying with, burned my flimsy $5 bra and experimented with lesbianism. Or something.  In other words, I think on eighteen-year-old ears, Ephron’s rallying would have sparked something of a fire.  Whereas a decade later the same words are nothing less than chilling.  

          In 2011’s How to be a Woman, British writer Caitlin Moran discusses the idea of women as ‘losers’ —granting that, as a sex, our achievements are modest compared to those of men and:

                              … the quiet unspoken suspicion that this means we really aren’t
                              as good as men, underneath it all.  After all, if women’s power and
                              creativity had simply been suppressed by thousands of years of
                              sexist bullshit, surely we should have knocked out Star Wars and
                              conquered France within a year of getting the vote?  But, of course,
                              on being freed, people who’ve been psychologically crushed don’t
                              immediately start doing glorious, confident, ostentatious things.  
                              Instead they sit around for awhile going “What the fuck was that?”,
                              trying to work out why it happened, trying –often—to see if it was
                              their fault.
“It’s hard to credit how very smart she was because she was always deflectively feminine and funny, the sharpness of mind softened and smoothened by genuine charm.” -Meryl Streep
          Personally, I’m with Moran on this one.  But unpicking Ephron’s words and weaving my way in and out of the rest of this collection on topics as diverse as Lillian Hellman, Clinton (Bill), Dorothy Parker, Clinton (Hillary), food, love, the love of food, heartbreak, hair dye, heartburn, and why the hot pastrami sandwich at Langer’s is the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world, I start to understand that what she really might be saying is how utterly important it is to have a clear sense of self.  It’s what Joan Didion meant when she wrote so powerfully about self-respect, saying that it was showing a “certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve.”  In other words “it’s having the courage of your mistakes,” whether as a young woman beginning to make significant life choices and accepting their attendant compromises, or as a dying Hollywood legend deciding that summertime geese are simply far too awful to bear.

          Nora Ephron could and did write about anything and everything.  Death. Truth.  And what it might mean to be a woman.  She could tell a story.  And revise a story.  And retell it in such a way that it sticks sticks sticks.  It would be difficult to come away from this collection without a fire kindling in your mind, a flicker in your heart.  The trace of smoke in your eyes.

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AMALIA ILLGNER is a copywriter at the London-based creative agency, Rufus Leonard.  She discovered a knack for advertising while drinking copious amounts of hard spirits in her early 20s, coming up with the tagline “You’re Never Alone with Vickers Gin” with her flatmate Daina.  It’s been a sideways trajectory since then.  The book under review is The Most of Nora Ephron, with an introduction by Robert Gottlieb (Knopf, 2013), 555 pages.

DREAMFLIGHT

Philip Hogge

          One day, back in 1986, a planeload of underprivileged children was flown to Birmingham in the English midlands to see the Disneyland Roadshow.  The delight on their faces said it all: they loved it.  Patricia Pearce, the Cabin Service Director on that flight, was deeply moved by the experience.  Later she talked with her colleague, Flight Engineer Derek Pereira, about how they could do more to help severely handicapped children who rarely had the chance for such a holiday.  And so the idea of Dreamflight was born.

Our British Airways 747 —with a ‘Dreamflight’ logo added.          The first hurdle was persuading the CEO of British Airways that it could be done.   No-one had taken so many ill and handicapped children on so long a flight before:  London to Florida and back.  A medical insurance company was talked into providing full insurance free of charge.  Stoke Mandeville Hospital provided paediatric advice and wrote to paediatricians throughout the country to nominate children.  Letters were sent inviting those nominated to come, and asking their parents to sign in loco parentis forms.   

          Next the organizers needed to find funding for the lease of a 747.  Derek’s small cottage in the wilds of Buckinghamshire became the command centre for organising large numbers of people to raise the money.  The BBC was approached to make a documentary programme.  Filming started in the cottage to show the ‘organisation’.  Seventy medical The aircraft maintenance hangar used for departure.staff were recruited from around the country.  Fundraising events were organised –-raffles, auctions, raft races, parachute jumps, golf days, dinner dances and the like.

          Volunteers were needed to organise everything required for a special flight across the Atlantic, and to crew the aircraft.  A local hotel near Heathrow offered its ballroom as a departure lounge.  Customs and Immigration were persuaded to use one of the British Airways aircraft maintenance hangars so that parents could accompany their children when they boarded.  Famous comedians and television stars gave their time to entertain the children.  Princess Diana came to give them a good send-off.  Bands played.  TV cameras were everywhere.

          My part, as captain, boiled down to one issue –safety.  We had 288 seriously ill children on board, many in wheelchairs.  Not only had we to comply with the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s rules for sufficient able-bodied helpers; we also had to ensure we had sufficient medical staff who knew what to do in an emergency.  And we needed to reassure the CEO that we really could do it all safely.  I needn’t have worried; Pat and Derek had it all organised.  The children were divided into 12 groups of 24, each group having a leader, a doctor, physiotherapists, nurses and other helpers.   All the leaders and most of the helpers were given safety and emergency training at the BA training centre, including a practice evacuation from a smoke-filled cabin and leaping down escape slides!

          I planned the flight at a lower than normal altitude to help those with breathing difficulties, and loaded extra fuel so that we could reduce altitude further, if necessary.  We flew a more circuitous route than normal, closer to airfields in Iceland and Canada, in case a medical problem required us to land in a hurry.  As it happened, the flight passed without incident.  In fact, it was one continuous party with a constant stream of children coming up to the cockpit.  Even those in wheelchairs were carried up the 747’s circular staircase so they could see how the aircraft was flown.

Dreamflight was met by a police motorcycle escort at Orlando International Airport.          Upon landing at Orlando, the aircraft was escorted off the runway by twelve Orange County motorcycle policemen in ‘Vee formation’ with sirens wailing and blue lights flashing.  Outside the terminal building, there were TV crews, jazz bands and Disney One of our police escort outriders.World clowns, all welcoming the children to the big US of A.  Policemen helped carry children in wheelchairs down the aircraft steps and into twelve Greyhound buses.  Then all twelve buses were escorted by motorcycle outriders to the hotel, stopping all traffic on the way.  It was like a Presidential cavalcade!

          The hotel reception area was filled with hundreds of balloons, rooms were allocated, and everyone helped to get 288 tired, excited children off to bed.    

          Next day, we were up at 6 to be ready for a 9 o’clock departure to Disney World.   With so many needing medication or physiotherapy, and the sheer physical effort of dressing incapacitated children, we needed all the time we could get.  The next few days were exhausting, a blur of lifting children into rides, “Lots of excitement, lots of fun, and lots of very happy faces.”accompanying them, lifting them off again, and rushing to the next attraction.  I managed several trips down Space Mountain, which was fun, but all that lifting and carrying did my back no good at all –-it ached for weeks afterwards.  

          Everywhere we went there were TV interviews, the children now well on the way to becoming seasoned film stars.  Great quantities of hamburgers were washed down with gallons of Coca Cola.  Lots of excitement, lots of fun, and lots of very happy faces.  Then, back to the hotel each evening for more physiotherapy and medical treatments before collapsing into bed.   

          It was the first time I had helped to look after so many very ill and handicapped people.  The stoicism they displayed was amazing.  Sufferers from cystic fibrosis, for example, need not only drugs to ward off infections and keep airways clear, but physiotherapy several times a day involving pummelling the chest to break up the phlegm.  To a layman like me, it looked very painful.  Every able-bodied person on that excursion was humbled by the bravery of those children.

          For the flight home, the aircraft was inundated with more cuddly toys than passengers.  Most of the children slept, but the medical team were kept busy with the usual routine of medication, nebulising, chest banging, shaking and vibrating.  Even the elements tried to help with some air turbulence thrown in.  I think the physiotherapists found working five miles up all the way across the Atlantic a novel The author (stuffed parrot on his shoulder) and several honorary mice reboard for the flight home.experience.

          We had been away for only four days, but what days they were.  No-one left that flight unchanged.  Back at Heathrow, I went to my office for coffee before driving home.  I was exhausted.  When my secretary thrust a cup of coffee into my hands and asked me how it had all gone, I broke up and could hardly talk.  I was in tears –not normally something the Chief Pilot of the fleet is expected to do!  

          For many of the children it was a life changing experience.  Here are just three comments later made by some of them on this, and subsequent, Dreamflights:

                              It was not the location that made it so special – It was the knowledge that I
                              was not alone and that there were other people in similar situations who knew
                              what I was going through.

                              Instead of trying to forget and deny my illness, Dreamflight showed me how
                              to face up to it and be proud of who I am and what I have to offer the world.

                              For a week I was pleased to be disabled because, if not, I might never have
                              met these amazing people.  We were on a completely different level from the
                              rest of the world. I was with people who understood things that many of you
                              will never understand –-however hard you try-– the pain of disease, the many
                              limitations, the endless struggle to keep going and what it is like to lose your
                              childhood.  It definitely was a ‘Holiday of a Lifetime’.  

          Since that first flight, there have been 26 subsequent Dreamflights, each organized by British Airways staff and led by Pat and her many helpers, taking nearly 5,000 children to Orlando.  The experience seems to have been a springboard for many later achievements, many of the children having gone on to successful careers.  Even more remarkably, ‘Dreamflighters’ have competed in the Paralympic Pat Pearce and Derek Pereira back home at Heathrow, two very determined people who showed what could be done to change so many lives for the better.games in Athens, Beijing and London, winning a total of 10 gold, 5 silver and 3 bronze medals.

          For me, that first Dreamflight was, and remains, an intensely moving experience. To see so many children coping so bravely with so many handicaps made me feel extremely humble.  Two very determined people, Pat Pearce and Derek Pereira, showed what could be done to change so many lives for the better, and the results speak for themselves.  I am deeply grateful to have been asked by them to be part of their team on that first flight.

 

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PHILIP HOGGE piloted commercially for B.O.A.C. and British Airways for thirty-three years, and was training captain on the Vickers VC10 and Boeing 707 and 747 aircraft.  He was British Airways’ Flight Training Manager, and Chief Pilot of their 747 fleet.  More recently, he served as Director of Operations and Infrastructure for the International Air Transport Association, and as Chairman of EUROCONTROL’s Performance Review Commission.  Brief videos of the inaugural 1987 Dreamflight, of Princess Diana’s visit to the departure hangar, and of the most recent Dreamflight (2013), can be seen, respectively, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0RJ3ksYAn4, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrKPfVbAKoE, and www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTcz60bTNRA.  Dreamflight’s own very informative website is www.dreamflight.org.

THE BIG IRAN DEAL

Marvin Zonis
    

          Ten weeks ago, on November 24th, the P5+1 (the Security Council’s five permanent members, plus Germany) reached an agreement with Iran that it would freeze and partially roll back its nuclear program in exchange for an easing of the sanctions that have severely undermined the Iranian economy, and the Iranian President Hassan Rouhaniimplicit removal of the military threat against Iran’s nuclear facilities.  The deal, which went onto effect on January 20, was signed on Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s 99th day in office.  Obviously taken with the idea of measuring U.S. presidents by their first 100 days in office, Rouhani stated, “I’m happy that before my first 100 days finished we had this victory.”

          Rouhani’s comfort with that piece of American political tradition may be the best indicator yet of the likelihood that a final deal on Iran’s nuclear program will be cut this summer.  It indicates a certain affinity between Iran and the U.S. and the extent of the cultural compatibilities of the two countries. It also is a clue to what Israel and the Gulf states, along with Saudi Arabia, fear the most — that the U.S. and Iran will end up as friends — even allies. (Not, by any means, an illogical fantasy, given the historic common interests of the two countries in oil production, a stable Persian Gulf, a rejection of al Qaeda and Sunni terrorism, and a number of other key interests.)

“What was concluded in Geneva is . . . a historic mistake.” —Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu          Though he has recently toughened his rhetoric, Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, praised the agreement. “This can be the basis for further intelligent actions,” he said.  “Without a doubt the grace of God and the prayers of the Iranian nation were a factor in this success.”

          Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed that the deal was a great Iranian success.  “What was concluded in Geneva.  .  .  is not a historic agreement,” he insisted,  “it’s a historic mistake.  . .  .  It’s not made the world a safer place.  .  . this agreement has made the world a much more dangerous place.”

          U.S. Republicans —at least some— concur.   Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) claims the agreement “shows other rogue states that wish to go nuclear that you can obfuscate, cheat, and lie for a decade, and eventually the United States will tire and drop key demands…   Iran will likely use this agreement,” said Rubio, “and any that follows that does not require any real concessions — to obtain a nuclear weapons capability.”  Others in Congress also fear that Iran is using the interim deal to further its nuclear program, and have proposed tough new sanctions for any Iranian backsliding.  Administration supporters in the Congress are heading off their call for new punishments.

          The problem with these attacks on the deal is that the U.S. intelligence community long ago determined that Iran had the scientific, technological and industrial capacity to build a bomb if it wished to.  Its leaders, the intelligence sources added, had not decided to do so.

          Moreover, the P5+1 has but six months to make a final deal that will result, in President Barack Obama’s words, in “a future in which we can verify that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful, and that it cannot build a nuclear weapon.”  That outcome will depend on preventing Iran from maintaining the capacity to enrich uranium to bomb-grade level, and from processing the output of its heavy-water reactor in Arak into bomb-usable plutonium.

U.S. Sec. of State Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif —a plausible alliance?          The interim deal already goes far in those directions. It subjects Iran’s two enrichment sites to daily inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Iran has agreed to cease all work on its Arak heavy-water reactor.

          Moreover, it turns out that Deputy U.S. Secretary of State William Burns has been meeting privately with the Iranians since Rouhani’s election last June.  It’s plausible that the essential bones of a final deal have already been agreed.

          In short, for having yielded only slightly on the tightened Iran sanctions, America and it allies have made a fruitful approach to solving one of the most critical strategic challenges of our times.  Iran benefits as well.  It will be able to relieve some domestic pressures by getting many sanctions lifted and restoring some measure of economic growth.  Moreover, it will earn international recognition as a nuclear state, a matter of tremendous domestic prestige.

          For all these reasons, the interim deal is likely to succeed and result in a longer term arrangement for controlling Iran’s nuclear program.
_____________________________
MARVIN ZONIS is a global political economist, specialist in Middle Eastern history and politics, and emeritus professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.  Author of Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah and The Kimchi Matters: Global Business and Local Politics in a Crisis-Driven World, he consults to corporations and asset-management firms around the world in identifying and managing risk in a rapidly changing global environment.  See www.marvinzonis.com.

A LOOK INSIDE

Frank Tallis, in conversation with Walter Wells

Frank Tallis 

          WW:   The Beast’s good friend, novelist Frank Tallis (known on his most recent book-covers as F.R. Tallis) has been persuaded —short of bribery, actually— to take time out of his very crowded, new-novel-every-year schedule to offer some insights into the creative process.  That process, for him, has so far garnered numerous awards and prestigious shortlistings (including the Elle Prix de Letrice and the Edgar), along with an upcoming television series.  Tallis, who lives in London, is the author of eleven novels—including the acclaimed Liebermann Papers, a series of six novels of psychoanalytic detection set in long-ago Vienna; and more recently three novels of terror and the supernatural set .  .  . in places where terror and the supernatural thrive.

                                                                   ____________________                                     

WW:   Frank, awhile back, you gave up the glamorous position of clinical psychologist for the equally glamorous –but riskier—role of a working novelist.  Is that a fair characterization?”

FT:   Let me tell you, clinical psychology isn’t really very glamorous.  Most of the patients I saw were  just mildly depressed or mildly anxious.  About once a year I‘d come across a patient who was spectacularly interesting  —a case of demonic possession or multiple personality— and then doing therapy would feel glamorous, almost cinematic.   But such cases are very rare.   As for the glamour of being a novelist, that’s almost always been more public perception than anything else.  There’s nothing glamorous about sitting in a room on your own for five hours a day making stuff up.  I love doing it.  But I do it because I enjoy writing novels, not for the glamour of it all.  Concerning risk — especially pecuniary risk—I would concede that being a novelist is a lot riskier than being a clinical psychologist.

WW:   Okay, so you took the plunge.  You accepted the risks and, in pretty quick succession,  wrote two London novels— Killing Time and Sensing Others.  They were generally well received, but also troubled a few critics who couldn’t quite classify them.  Had you carried the ideas of these two books with you for awhile, knowing you’d tackle them once you took the plunge?

FT:   Only in the vaguest possible way.  I can remember being on the top deck of a bus going down the Edgware Road and thinking it might be interesting to write a novel about a camera that could take pictures of the past —that was a few years before I started writing Killing Time — but I didn’t really develop the idea.  It didn’t gestate.  Likewise, the basic conceit of Sensing Others —a drug that gives access to other peoples’ memories— came to me just after I’d finished Killing Time.  So once again, no long gestation period.  What I did know, however, was that I wanted the books to be experimental.   I wanted to import ideas that you’d normally find in Science Fiction into contemporary crime writing.

WW:   And yet your next novel —in fact your following six novels— were neither science fiction nor contemporary.  You seem instead to have carved out a very special niche for yourself –a series of crime novels set in imperial Vienna over a century ago.  Did you feel that the experiment hadn’t worked?

FT:   Well, I thought the experiment had worked … though now I would not be happy with some of that early writing.   I’ve  become more demanding  about language with each passing year.

WW:   But what was it, then, that took you back to the Vienna of Freud, and Mahler, and Klimt … ?

FT:    Back in 2002, I was having lunch with my agent and she suggested that I might want to think about writing a detective series. I’d always thought that if I was ever going to write detective fiction—

Freud’s Vienna, 1902WW:   You’d considered it earlier on?

FT:   Sure —among other things.   But if I was going to take her up and write a series of detective novels, I should draw on my background in clinical psychology.  Psychoanalysis is perennially fascinating, so I decided that my series would feature a psychoanalytic detective.  And once you’ve made that decision, there’s only one place you can set it: in Freud’s Vienna.  I already had a longstanding interest in the history of psychiatry.  I’ve also been a devotee of Mahler from my early teens, and have a conspicuous weakness for pastries, so the whole thing came together with remarkable ease.  Of course, being a former academic, I did absurd amounts of research to get the period detail right.  But on the whole, it felt natural and immensely pleasurable to be writing these books.

WW:   That research is something I’d like to get into.  But first, that pleasure.  You say it felt natural.   Did you find, from the start, an easy fit between psychoanalysis and detective work?

FT:   Absolutely!  Psychoanalysis and detection are very similar.  Clues are like symptoms.  And the detective is like a psychoanalyst attempting to find a root cause.  It’s quite revealing that Freud himself recognised a close relationship between psychoanalysis and police detection.  He pointed this out in one of his lectures.   It’s also interesting that Freud was a great fan of detective fiction.  One of his patients, the Wolf-man, wrote a memoir.  He reveals in it that Freud was a big fan of Sherlock Holmes.  Apparently, Freud had great respect for this kind of writing.  The Wolf-man said that Freud valued it as much as the writings of Dostoevsky.  

WW:   So over the course of six novels, then, your young psychoanalyst, Dr. Max Liebermann, who links up with a police inspector, Rheinhardt –over their shared love of music, I believe—helps him to solve some very puzzling crimes.

FT:   The fact that I wrote six novels in this series is quite significant.  It took that many to cover the number of topics that had taken my fancy. 

WW:   And they were… ?

FT:   Okay.  They were—The late 19th century occult revival…  The origins of national socialism among the secret societies of fin de siècle Vienna…  Nietzsche’s influence on Austro-German psychology…  Kabbalah and the collective unconscious…  Viennese modernist fashion as against the frequent personification of death as a dark female angel in folklore…  And finally, Mahler’s reign as the director of the Vienna State Opera.  Each Liebermann book features a crime that’s solved with the aid of psychoanalysis.  But each book also features one of these subjects or themes.

WW:   When we spoke earlier, Frank, you reminded me of a statement made by Freud:  “He who has eyes to see and ears to hear becomes convinced that mortals can keep no secret.  If their lips are silent, they gossip with their fingertips; betrayal forces its way through every pore.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (at left) and Edgar Allan PoeFT:   I did indeed.

WW:   Well then, if we can say that Poe’s original detective-hero, Auguste Dupin (the genre’s great starting point), and then Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, both solved their crimes by “ratiocination” (as Poe called it), can we think of Liebermann solving his by a process of sub-ratiocination?—by simply reading a suspect’s unconscious?  It almost sounds too easy. 

FT:   Yes, the concept is really so blindingly obvious I haven’t a clue why it wasn’t done before.  Many authors have had fun playing with psychoanalysis and detection, or with psychologist-detectives.  Liebermann, though, is, I believe, the first ‘authentic’ psychoanalytic detective —insofar as he makes Mortal Mischief, volume 1 of the Liebermann Papers, set in turn-of-the-century Vienna.extensive used of Freudian slips, dream interpretation, projective tests and the like.  One of the things that always disappoints me about books described as ‘psychological thrillers’ is that there’s usually very little psychology in them —at least, very little psychology that someone with formal training in the discipline would recognise as psychology.  The TV series of the Liebermann books is very close to being made right now and I really hope that the ‘psychology’ survives the transition from novels to broadcast.  Psychology is the essential feature. 

WW:   Essential, yet now you’ve moved beyond it, or you seem to have.  You’ve left Max Liebermann behind and taken up the horror novel.  Your last two –and, frankly, I find your productivity astounding—they’ve been, in the case of The Forbidden, about voodoo magic and the border between life and death.  Then, in The Sleep Room, you set a nerve-shattering narrative in a remote psychiatric hospital in East Anglia, and hinge it to its director’s obsession with narcosis, with sleep, this prolonged trancelike sleep, as a cure for craziness.  (‘Hinge’ comes to mind because it almost unhinged me.)

FT:  It was intended to.

WW:   Well it did.  But the shift from Liebermann and psychoanalysis to terror and the occult seems to me a large one —from  the controlled analysis of telltale signs unwittingly given off by criminals, to those uncontrollable forces that keep us in thrall.  Liebermann makes the inexplicable explicable.  Your horror novels, on the other hand –like those of other very gifted horror writers— yield to the inexplicable, to the macabre.  Even your name, your nom de plume, has shifted from Frank Tallis to F.R. Tallis.  Why the shift?

FT:   The simple answer?  I wanted to do something different.  Yet I think I’ve always wanted to write horror/supernatural fiction.  Indeed, lots of Gothic ideas and images surfaced in the Liebermann books. As far as I am concerned, crime and horror writing aren’t so dissimilar. Both are based on the same narrative archetype –‘slaying the monster’. Whether it’s Moriarty or Count Dracula – evil must be overcome and good must prevail.  Secondly, the best crime writing and the best supernatural fiction almost always involve some kind of detection.  The criminal must be tracked down or the mystery that causes the ghost to return must be solved.  Masters like Poe, Conan Doyle and Gaston Le Roux wrote crime fiction and supernatural fiction – and I think that’s because the two genres share the same narrative foundations.  They’re very close.

WW:   So you’re essentially the same writer, the same storyteller, you were before the shift?

FT:   Yes, and regarding my name change … that was meant to send a clear signal that I was doing something different, different at least in terms of conventional types of books —so that people who liked Liebermann wouldn’t buy my supernatural fiction and be disappointed. That was the theory, anyway.  In practice, many Liebermann readers bought my supernatural fiction, were horribly disappointed, and very keen to let me know.  Check out the customer reviews for The Forbidden on Amazon.  There’s no doubting the honesty of some of those views!

WW:   I have, actually.  Do the bad ones hurt?

FT:   Yes!

WW:   .  .  . Fair enough.  And let me ask, as we near our end here, about novelists and research.  It’s not all just the pleasurable exercise of imagination.  You’ve got a new novel of the supernatural coming out very shortly —about ‘sounds’, I believe, different kinds of sounds: film soundtracks, music, baby noises, disembodied voices.  .   . .  How in the world does one research that?  Or need to?

FT:   My new novel, The Voices, is a ‘domestic’ ghost story set in North London during the scorching summer of 1976.  It was the hottest summer of modern times with a kind of mythic, unreal quality for those of us who can remember it.  Because I do remember it, I didn’t have to do a great deal of general, background research.

WW:   Unlike Vienna, 1905?

FT:   Very much unlike it.  I did, however, have to refresh myself, in detail, on what was going on here politically –which was quite extraordinary.  I was only 17 at the time and blissfully unaware that Great Britain was on the brink of social and economic collapse.  (I do, though, remember a lot about what girls were wearing.)

WW:   Some things stick, I know.  But basically, it’s research into your historical context?

FT:  Yes, but beyond that.  The ghosts in the novel manifest themselves through electronic devices —through baby monitors, radios, stereo speakers.  And my protagonist –an electronic film music composer— first makes contact with the dead, unwittingly, when their voices appear on what should be empty, silent tape.  So— I needed also to research the science of ‘electronic voice phenomena’ (yes, there is a science devoted to the talking dead), and to get into even more obscure subjects like the history of the BBC Radiophonic workshop, and the Magic Circle in the 1970s, and the methods favoured by 19^th-century magicians to make people vanish (or appear to).

WW:   Frank, your protagonist (like the composer here) and your other characters —and the storylines they’re involved in—where do they come from?

FT: Well, I think the obvious answer to that question is my unconscious. And I suspect that’s true for most writers. We experience the world, our memories sink below the threshold of awareness, stuff happens, and if you’re a fiction writer, story lines and characters just pop into your head.  But don’t ask me to deconstruct the ‘stuff happens’ stage —some kind of purposeful, preconscious processing, obviously.  It’s difficult to say much more than that.  If I could, it wouldn’t be ‘unconscious’.

WW:  Thanks, Frank.  And thanks to F.R. Tallis as well, for an intriguing look inside.

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FRANK TALLIS, in addition to his novels, is the author of Changing Minds (a history of psychotheraphy), Coping With Schizophrenia, How to Stop Worrying, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: A Cognitive and Neuropsychological Perspective and other works of nonfiction —a brief sample of which appeared in the August 2013 edition of The Fickle Grey Beast.  WALTER WELLS is Editor of The Fickle Grey Beast.   

MEMORIES OF AN IRISH CATHOLIC BOYHOOD (Part 1 of 2)

David Rankin

          Albert Schweitzer proposed a formula for personal peace at an advanced age:  “Good health and a bad memory.”

          Some memories, perhaps, but not all.  Those of Providence in the late 1940s I wish to keep.  .  .  .

          After midnight Mass at St. Michael’s on Christmas, celebrated by the Monsignor Himself, came the long trudge through packed snow, the Mulvaney sisters in the vanguard, their admirers (I included) a decent distance behind.  Pat Mahoney commented upon the sway of Jane’s posterior; Mike Rodgers, just up from Brooklyn, eyed the small tease of calf between the top of Barbara’s boots and the hem of her coat; I watched the dark curls with hints of auburn bounce beneath the edge of Lois’s knitted cap.  Pat was 17, Mike and I both 16.  Jane was 18, Barbara 17, Lois just 15.

                    Mrs. Mulvaney had hot chocolate and cookies at the ready.  Five of us sprawled over chairs and on the floor.  Barbara pulled her skirt down over her knees.  Lois shook her curls.  Jane helped her mom serve, Mahoney following her every move.  Suddenly a familiar Irish beat was heard from a phonograph in the hallway.  Mr. Mahoney made his entrance, jigging his way between Mike and me to the center of the room.  Upon his head sat a saucepan, which he twirled by the handle more or less in time with his feet.

          “Oh, Pa,” said Lois, half embarrassed, half amused.

          Her mother quipped, “If he’d only move like that taking the garbage out.”

          Barbara and Jane clapped to the rhythm.  Mike and Lois and I joined in.  Pat scrunched his lip.

          The night ended with a sing-along, “I’m Looking over a Four-Leaf Clover,” “Who Threw the Overall’s in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder,” and the like.  It was Christmas at its festive best.

          All the while, four blocks away, Mrs. Annie Murphy, my grandmother, would be checking the clock periodically.  And I can imagine my grandfather, Ned Murphy, from County Cork, telling her, “The boy is fine.  He’s fine.  He’s been to midnight Mass.”

          And she saying, “Not till this hour.”

          “Why, sure,” he’d reply, “Mrs. Mulvaney’s feedin’ them after Holy Communion.”

          Annie, however, welcomed no competition in the culinary arts, and Ned knew it.

          Then I got back home, cheeks aflame from running full speed through a raw wind.  “Would you like a bite to eat?” Annie asked me at once, and I knew better than to say, “No, thanks, I’m full up with Mrs. Mulvaney’s cookies.”          

Karl Doerflinger, Christmas Reflections at Roger Williams Park in Providence 

          A few nights later, by the boat house on the frozen lake in Roger Williams Park, the loudspeakers blaring mostly waltzes, I did my fanciest moves on skates whenever Lois was looking my way, or even seemed to.  Mike from Brooklyn, a brazen George Clooney-type, had wasted no time. He was skating with Barbara, dazzling on turns and switches of position, and she was up to the challenge. Pat Mahoney, who preferred shooting pool to skating, was there only because Jane was.  He fell on his first attempt and claimed that his rented skates were too big.

          I, as usual, was the hesitant one.  But with skaters and time both flying by, I finally asked Lois if she wanted to skate.  She did.  And for the first time, I had my arms around that black Irish beauty.  One arm, anyway, around her waist.  The other grasped her left wrist lightly.  As we picked up speed, those lustrous curls, freshly washed and subtly fragrant, blew into my face, deliciously blinding me.     

          When my Uncle Tim arrived to drive me home, Lois and her sisters were several feet away, her back to me.  I started to walk towards Tim’s car.   But he stopped me, asking,  “Aren’t you going to say goodnight?”  No fool, my Uncle Tim.  Quite a ladies’ man in his day, so they said.

          The summer before, I’d been the pitcher on the St. Michael’s team in the town’s twilight league.  Games were on Mondays.  I happened to notice that Mr. Mulvaney attended these games, with Lois in tow.  He was a devoted fan of the Boston Red Sox, and had initiated Lois into that then-dolorous tribe.  (The team hadn’t won a World Series for 29 years, a drought that would extend for another 57).  Lois loved the game, and had a pretty good arm, as I’d noticed, when she played catch with her brother Bill (who’d skipped the Christmas Eve ceremonies, his family’s anyway.)  After our games, Lois and her father would head one way, and I another with the rest of the team to return our uniforms.

          After the holidays that year, the New England winter was pitiless.  But Catholic school made sure we had plenty to do indoors.  At dawn, on days when a vocabulary exam in French or Latin was scheduled, Annie and I would sit before the open oven, she calling out each word in English and complaining that she couldn’t tell if I’d got the translation right.  I insisted that she could tell if the sound was close. It was the same routine every time.  Ned said we ought to put it on the stage.

          Storm after storm brought public transportation to a standstill and closed the schools repeatedly.  Providence was house-bound.  Ned and I played checkers endlessly.  Whenever I talked too much, Annie would say something like, “Didn’t your Uncle Russell bring you a book last time he was in town?”

          Indeed, during that frigid winter, my uncles, as at all times, took very good care of me, the boy whom the family had brought back to Providence from California, at three weeks of age, after their sister, my mother, had died bearing me.

          [End of Part 1]

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DAVID RANKIN is Emeritus Professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and former chairman of its Humanities program.  His most recent book is Rod Dedeaux: Master of the Diamond (2013).  As photographer, he specializes in portraiture and in the world of dance, his work appearing on www.davidrankinphotography.com.   Part 2 of his “Memories of an Irish Catholic Boyhood” will appear in The Fickle Grey Beast’s next issue, in early March.