Adolf Hitler

John Toland Adolf Hitler (1976)
I've read this as research for something or other which will hopefully be in the bag by the time you read this, and which was itself indirectly inspired by Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, a sort of book burning game show hosted by the enduringly unpleasant Carr. The show was produced by Channel 4 who purchased one of Hitler's watercolours for £11,500 so that a studio audience could decide whether or not to have it destroyed, thus posing deeply philosophical questions about whether it's possible to separate the art from the legacy of its creator. I don't suppose anyone suspected that so thoughtful a presentation could ever be viewed with such controversy.

Naturally the internet exploded in response, and I would regard most of the criticism I've seen as entirely justified, although it has since emerged that the painting which ended up shredded was almost certainly a fake. My personal view is that whether or not it is possible to differentiate the art from the artist doesn't really matter, but that book burning or equivalent is never a good look because it's better to understand evil, or that which we have come to perceive as evil, than to settle for screaming this is evil in the face of anyone who happens to ask; because those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, as George Santayana wrote, although admittedly I actually thought that one was a Jim Jones original. The thing about destroying the evidence, particularly in the case of Adolf Hitler, is that it facilitates mystery and even mythology, neither of which are much use in preventing the re-occurrence of the same shit.

Further to this, we seem to have a great many monsters these days, and whilst it's difficult to deny that Hitler became the very definition of monster, it limits the possibility of him ever having been just some bloke. This means that we've somewhat lost the ability to spot the emergence of monsters in our own time, because we can't accept that people very much like ourselves were complicit in the deaths of six-million or more Jews; and so those describing immigrants as cockroaches, for one example, are often overlooked as simply persons with strong opinions who just happen to love their country.

Additionally, Hitler's monstrous qualities should be self-evident without having to have it spelled out for us in the name of viewing figures. Lazy fuckers attempting to score points by drawing our attention to monsters whilst screeching don't you think this is terrible? Well, don't you? Don't you? have really begun to bore me shitless. So, I said to myself, let's discover Hitler.

Toland's biography seems to be viewed as the best of the bunch by someone on the internet, so that's why I picked it. The review I read emphasised Toland's attempts to maintain an impartial view, which sounded promising given that I'm reasonably familiar with the arguments against. The arguments against, as summarised and simplified by a million wearying science-fiction scenarios, are that he was a bit of a loser, a sad, sad man who couldn't paint, was chucked out of art college and spent his youth as a homeless for a while - the wrong sort of homeless, rather than the noble victim types we tend to prefer - and he made for a cowardly soldier during the first world war. Also he hated Jews despite probably being half-Jewish, only had one bollock, suffered from uncontrollable farting, couldn't get it up, and no-one liked him. Ha ha. What a loser!

Unfortunately none of this turns out to be entirely true. Although he was repeatedly rejected by the art schools to which he applied and thus never actually had the chance to be chucked out, and he was mostly self taught, the notion that he had no artistic ability whatsoever is patently untrue - which could also be said of many of us. He was distinguished and even decorated for his soldiering during the first world war, and was popular amongst his comrades. His ballbag seems to have contained the traditional quota of bollocks so far as we are able to tell, and the story of his unidentified paternal grandfather being Jewish seems to have been a story told by his enemies, and as is probably obvious, he made quite a few of those.

More curious still is the question of his antisemitism which, from what Toland describes, seems to have been poorly defined at best. He had Jewish friends in his youth, and was eternally grateful to the Jewish doctor who treated his mother's cancer, and his antisemitism seems to have been conditional, something on roughly the same level of my own grandmother's culturally characteristic regard of black people - gushingly favourable if a black person had been friendly to her in the supermarket, but otherwise synchronised to whatever she'd read in the Sun that week. I haven't read Mein Kampf and have no desire to do so, but it sounds very much like an expression of the early Nazi party's struggle to gain the popular vote - a convenient fulcrum by which to get bums on seats with a promise of saving the country from those bad people over there, specifically by associating the perceived threat of Communism with something a bit more tangible, namely funny foreigners. This isn't to diminish the awful influence of Mein Kampf, but it seems significant that Hitler himself came to regard his book as incoherent populist drivel which nevertheless got the job done. More startling still is that as the party graduated to being the only option on the ballot sheet, the awful treatment of Germany's Jewish population was never quite subject to full support, meaning the reduction of the historical narrative to racist Germany unanimous against former friends and neighbours isn't entirely accurate, and more closely resembles the sort of bullshit that - for example - the western Muslim community has had to endure in recent times. In other words, never mind the claim that it couldn't happen here, because it actually is happening, meaning we as a society need to be seriously fucking vigilant about what comes next.

At least during the thirties, it seems the Reich was keen to downplay the antisemitic aspect of its program in pursuit of a more respectable image, one less likely to sour diplomatic relations with other countries, hence Hitler's disowning the thuggish brownshirt element around 1934 in furthering the support of the respectable middle and upper classes. The Kristallnacht of 1938 in which Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship were ransacked or destroyed seems to have been mainly a spontaneous uprising by the brownshirts, and one about which many of the higher-ups felt distinctly uncomfortable, and which Göring* in particular regarded as insane given the significant role of Jewish business within the larger German economy.

So the antisemitism would seem to have been an expedient use of existing prejudices which spiralled out of control as the Nazis, and particularly Hitler, fell more and more in love with their own mythology. I state this not to diminish its significance, but rather to illustrate that the pattern is something we should immediately recognise rather than dismiss as something which can't happen again because we're much nicer these days.

Toland suggests that had Hitler died in 1937, he probably would have been remembered mostly as a great statesman and orator, which doesn't seem such a stretch given that we've tended to overlook antisemitic or similar tendencies amongst other historical leaders simply because, for whatever reason, we haven't chosen to remember them as monsters.

The strangest, most unexpected detail I take from this biography has been that Adolf Hitler was personable, funny, reasonably intelligent, self-effacing and likable providing you were on the right side of the argument. He was clearly a little odd and self-absorbed as a young man, which hardly makes him unique, but rendered him prone to mysticism and an intuitive faith in what he thought should be right to which he adhered regardless of objective reality. It's therefore not entirely surprising that he more or less completely lost it by the end, thus becoming the monster we remember.

Toland's biography is nine-hundred pages, which is a long time to spend immersed in the most terrible period of human history, but it's mostly fascinating - excepting a few instances of inner circle politics and policy wibbling back and forth for more pages than seems quite necessary. Surprisingly, everyone comes out of it a little better than you might expect, which is also chilling because, as I say, these people were not exceptional and most of them seem unfortunately familiar. It is specifically this rendering of the Third Reich and its cast of colourful characters as approximately regular people which leaves this era seeming, if anything, more horrifying than has been made apparent by the contemporary denouncement of monsters; because it isn't Darth Vader or the Daleks. It's us, regardless of how righteous you may deem yourself to be. We did this.

This must not happen again.

Someone somewhere will read the above and find themselves unable to tell the difference between what I've written and an affirmation of Adolf Hitler being a great man who simply made poor choices, probably additionally pointing out that actually he was a monster; and so it will happen again.

*: I think it was Göring. It's difficult keeping track of them all.

Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall

 

Spike Milligan Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall (1971)
I read this - and this very same copy - when I was fifteen and doubtless pissed myself with laughter. I read it again at some point in the nineties and was left with a vague impression of it being relatively sober in comparison to Milligan's subsequent war memoirs, as though he was still trying to write a proper grown up autobiography without being quite sure why. Now I've read it again and have gone back to my initial reaction, or at least something more in that direction. I haven't actually pissed myself with laughter, but I've chuckled because it's often funny, and the humour has aged well for me. It may also be significant that the last Milligan I read was Puckoon, which mostly tried too hard and failed. However, Puckoon was a novel where Adolf is autobiography, and autobiography describing what must have been a truly terrifying time, freeing the author from the onus of delivering one gag after another, instead allowing his humour to settle in a more natural configuration across the events of the early forties.

It's fascinating for me because I lived within walking distance of the Milligan family home in south-east London for more than a decade, so the account opens on what is very much familiar territory. It's also fascinating because this is the second world war as seen from ground level, from what is very much an authentic working class perspective, part of a narrative which has become very much sidelined in recent times, not least by the current appetite for the past recontextualised as cutesy heritage product in service of some exhausting contemporary dialogue - and if you're waiting for the diatribe about momentary lapses of judgement such as Curry & Chips or the Pakistani Daleks, then you may actually be part of the problem.

There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind: but, were they alive today, they would have been first to join in the laughter, and that laughter was, I'm sure, the key to victory.

The victory he's referring to was - obviously - over Adolf Hitler, Fascism, screaming Nationalism, and the drive to reduce human society to a black and white world of good and evil with dogmatic and definitive answers to complex issues reducing the need for actual cognition. I'm sure we're all aware of the traditional role of the funny man as jester, the one who uses humour to express that which might be otherwise frowned upon. Well, Milligan's work still fulfils that role with devastating wit, humanity, chilling insight, and even poetry. We should try not to forget that.

The New Adventures of Hitler

Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell The New Adventures of Hitler (1990)
I flogged all my copies of Crisis a while back, a decision I haven't had much cause to regret beyond the loss of John Smith's New Statesman - which in any case has since been collected - and the four issues containing The New Adventures of Hitler; which is why I tracked them all down on eBay, seeing as we're obviously not going to get a reprint any time soon with the current political climate undecided as to whether Hitler was actually a bad guy or just someone with some very interesting ideas who went about things the wrong way.

As you may recall, this first appeared in some Scottish arts magazine called Cut and in doing so inspired the resignation of its star columnist, Pat Kane of bewilderingly awful pop duo Hue & Cry. Kane objected that the strip represented a combination of gratuitous shock whilst simultaneously declawing the figure of Adolf Hitler to repackage him as a harmlessly entertaining tit - seemingly a contradiction, but never mind...

Labyani makes the point that fascism wasn't just a standard relationship between producers and consumers of cultural commodities; Jews in the death camp were the actual raw materials of such a process, their bodies being shovelled out of the gas chambers and industrially converted into soap, lampshades, toothbrushes. 'Of all the images of fascism this was the one which Nazis did not dare disseminate,' says Labyani, 'but it must always remain the image by which fascism defines itself.'

The New Adventures of Hitler constitutes an image of fascism which fascists, past and present, would quite like to be seen around: the Fuhrer's early life portrayed like J. Alfred Prufrock's, all bourgeois bumble and angst; references to hip pop music and comics culture; surely then, not such a monstrous man, nor such monstrous times?

The objections seem initially sound, but are unfortunately based on a very specific, somewhat loaded interpretation of no more than the first six pages.

For those who didn't get the memo, these New Adventures occur during a possibly apocryphal but certainly formative era of Hitler's existence, spent mooching off his more successful half-brother in Liverpool, England between the wars. He's basically an unemployable twat with delusions of grandeur, a profoundly underwhelming individual such as any of us might encounter - as based on what we actually know of the man. The point of this is not refutation of the myth of Hitler as a monster - as Pat Kane believed - but illustration of the monster as someone with whom we may already be familiar, someone who walks amongst us empowered and transformed by toxic mythology. It's the mythology of which we should be scared you see, because - as even Alan Moore will tell you - it's the symbols and metaphors which do the most damage. Discussion of Hitler, even as a clown, therefore seems preferable to the kind of enforced silence which fosters the mystery, maybe even the frisson of forbidden fruit, the thing which they don't want you knowing about…

Anyway, the point of this tale is that Adolf's legacy, all that bullshit about the Holy Grail and destiny, very much endures in the present political climate - at least since Thatcher - and that the dreams of this awful little man with a runny bottom weren't entirely put to bed in 1945, contrary to the publicity. It seems like something which needed to be said, and it's said beautifully here in a strip which feels like a peculiar combination of Hogarth and de Chirico, atmospherically speaking - despite the smart-arsed colorisation*.

Third World War and the other stuff in these issues of Crisis is about as good as I remember it being, but Hitler is a masterpiece, and so darkly comic that it's not actually funny. Anyone who comes away from the strip with a higher opinion of its star was probably already on the wrong side of the argument.

*: I recall a phone conversation with Aidan Potts of Inkling magazine describing how two of his colleagues - one possibly being Steve Whitaker - had landed the cushy number of colourising the previously black and white strips for publication in Crisis. 'They're taking the piss,' Aidan chortled, 'using wallpaper samples and everything.' I never really understood why I was supposed to have considered this such a wizard wheeze.

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
I'm sure I remember hearing that it was Céline who first came up with the three little dots signifying a pause, although I don't seem to be able to find any sort of confirmation for this. Never mind.

Anyway, I've been meaning to read something for a couple of decades now, at least since discovering his writing to be an influence on that of Billy Childish, and of course Bukowski, and - as I've eventually realised - pretty much everyone else I'd consider worth bothering with. His innovations mainly seem to have been in introducing a crude - although not lacking eloquence - working class voice to literature, and a willingness to examine all of the gritty details, stains, and skidmarks from which we extrapolate reality at least as much as we do from prettier, less disturbing sights. He was never too worried about delivering a crowd pleaser.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me . . . and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my own class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

Journey to the End of the Night is roughly autobiographical, kicking off with our man's experience of the first world war and the unpleasant truths accordingly revealed.

People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid smelly water. From that moment on we saw, rising to the surface, the terrifying nature of white men, exasperated, freed from constraint, absolutely unbuttoned, their true nature, same as in the war. That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers' festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface. That's when the unbuttoning sets in, when filth triumphs and covers us entirely. It's a biological confession. Once work and cold weather cease to constrain us, once they relax their grip, the white man shows you the same spectacle as a beautiful beach when the tide goes out: the truth, fetid pools, crabs, carrion, and turds.

Driven to the end of his rope, Céline sits out some of the war in an asylum before being sent to French colonial Africa, itself only another variant of hell, from which point the narrative becomes oddly Swiftian, or at least more blatantly allegorical as he becomes a galley slave, rowing to the Americas.

Talk of surprises! What we suddenly discovered through the mist was so amazing that at first we refused to believe it, but then, when we were face to face with it, galley slaves or not, we couldn't help laughing, seeing it right there in front of us…

It's probably just me but this passage immediately put me in mind of Bernal Díaz describing the Spanish forces first arriving in the Valley of Mexico in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain of 1568.

With such wonderful sights to gaze on we did not know what to say, or if this was real that we saw before our eyes.

Of course, if it isn't just me, then the parallel probably constitutes weapons-grade sarcasm, given Céline's time in the Americas representing only a minor improvement on his time in Africa, and that it is characterised by escalating absurdity.

'I believe in the enumeration of fleas! It's a civilising factor, because enumeration is the basis of the most invaluable statistical data! . . . A progressive country must know the number of its fleas, broken down according to sex, age group, year and season . . .'

Indeed, this part of the novel might be taken as a descent into an underworld newly industrialised in the wake of the first world war.

The hall where the business was done was likewise of marble. A kind of swimming pool, but drained of all its water, a fetid swimming pool, filled only with filtered, moribund light, which fell on the forms of unbuttoned men surrounded by their smells, red in the face from the effect of expelling their stinking feces with barbarous noises in front of everybody.

The power of Céline's testimony is such as to deliver something pithily quotable on more or less every other page, hence my thus far having used more of his words than my own. If there's a single theme to the novel it would seem to be humanity revealed as reduced to an industrial resource for the first half of the book.

'But you know, doctor, I'm an educated man. I even studied medicine at one time . . .'

At that he gave me a dirty look, I saw that I'd put my foot in it again, to my detriment.

'Your studies won't do you a bit of good around here, son. You're not here to think, you're here to make the movements you're told to. We don't need imaginative types in our factory. What we need is chimpanzees . . . Let me give you a piece of advice. Never mention your intelligence again! We'll think for you, my boy! A word to the wise.'

...and at the risk of hammering this one into the ground:

It's sickening to watch the workers bent over their machines, intent on giving them all possible pleasure, calibrating bolts and more bolts, instead of putting an end once and for all to this stench of oil, this vapour that burns your throat and attacks your eardrums from inside. It's not shame that makes them bow their heads. You give in to noise as you give in to war. At the machines you let yourself go with the two three ideas that are wobbling about at the top of your head. And that's the end. From then on everything you look at, everything you touch, is hard. And everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron and loses its savour in your thoughts.

All of a sudden you've become disgustingly old.

All outside life must be done away with, made into steel, into something useful. We didn't love it enough the way it was, that's why. So it has to be made into an object, into something solid. The Regulations say so.

The second half of the book describes Céline's return to France where he sets up a medical practice, which in narrative terms allows for further exposition and reflection on both his misanthropy and its attendant self-loathing. Unfortunately, this second half lacks the dynamic of the first, pinning its narrative to events of lesser consequence, and so feeling a little formless in places, at least to me.

Anyway, the significance of Céline should hopefully be apparent from the quotes, in so much as that as a writer he clearly strove to get to the bones regardless of stroked egos, sales, or pleasing images, and yet without going too far the other way and serving up what may as well be Lovecraftian disgust. That he is not so well remembered as might be the case is unfortunate but understandable given his later antisemitism, and not just the sort of thing we tend to pass off as being of its time, but properly antisemitic material written as a vocal supporter of Hitler and the axis powers.

In his defence, or at least in the defence of Journey to the End of the Night, there's nothing antisemitic here, and not even anything particularly racist, which seems noteworthy given the African setting of a few chapters, and when it was written. In fact, given Céline's generally poor view of authority figures, it's far from obvious how he could ever have ended up as cheerleader for the Third Reich. The key is most likely to be found in his enduring misanthropy.

It's no use trying, we slide, we skid, we fall back into the alcohol that preserves the living and the dead, we get nowhere. It's been proved. After all these centuries of watching our domestic animals come into the world, labouring and dying before our eyes without anything more unusual ever happening to them either than taking up the same insipid fiasco where so many other animals had left off, we should have caught on. Endless waves of useless beings keep rising from deep down in the ages to die in front of our noses, and yet here we stay, hoping for something  . . .

Sadly it seems to be a thin line which divides this sort of general realism from that which gets so thoroughly pissed off at everyone apparently wallowing in their own shit as to get misty-eyed over anything punishing which just so happens to entail jackboots; so Celine's slide to the far right should probably be considered reactionary in the literal sense, a move facilitated by the desire to attribute blame - as he himself once acknowledged.

When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.

It's a fucking shame, and that whole argument about whether it's possible to divorce a piece of art from the shithead who created it is more complicated than I have time to really consider right now, and is an issue which should probably be settled on a case by case basis; but for what it may be worth, Journey to the End of the Night is a genuinely great book, or at least the first half is a genuinely great book, regardless of anything else.

The Once and Future King

T.H. White The Once and Future King (1958)
I was about to read Philip Purser-Hallard's Trojans, the final part of his thus far exceptional Devices trilogy, when I saw this in the second-hand book store and bought it with the idea that a little homework couldn't hurt. Devices refers to large chunks of Arthurian legend, and I seem to recall White's book having been described as the definitive work bringing it all together into roughly the shape we recognise today; except it turns out that I was actually thinking of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur of 1485 to which The Once and Future King itself refers and which I am similarly yet to read; but I've started so I may as well finish.

The Once and Future King, rather than being the definitive version, brings Arthurian legend into the twentieth century in so much as that it's a modern novel written in a contemporary style whilst relating a tale set in the twelfth century or thereabouts. All those Arthurian occurrences are traditionally dated to times prior to even Egbert of Wessex, the first Saxon king and arguably the first English king by some definition; so the six-hundred year relocation initially unsettled me. At first it seemed like White just needed a way of bringing Robin Hood into the Arthurverse - curiously something which likewise occurs in Philip Purser-Hallard's The Locksley Exploit albeit with more satisfying purpose, to my mind - which demands the reader avoid thinking too hard about what Richard the Lionheart may or may not have been up to around the same time.

Even more disconcerting, at least for me, was that the first of the four books of The Once and Future King turns out to be The Sword in the Stone, as famously adapted by Walt Disney. I've never seen the animated film but would guess it's probably fairly true to the book, given that the tone of the book, occasionally harking back to the absurdity of Cervantes as it does, somewhat foreshadows Harry Potter and even the Monty Python version of this tale. Try to read this without thinking of John Cleese and the rest:

Sir Ector blushed deeply and called out: 'Ah, Grummore, come over here a minute, will you? I want to introduce a friend of mine, old chap, a chap called Wood, old chap—Wood with a W, you know, not an H. Yes, and this is King Pellinore, Master Wood—King Pellinore.'

'Hail,' said King Pellinore, who had not quite got out of the habit when nervous.

'How do?' said Sir Grummore. 'No relation to Robin Hood, I suppose?'

'Oh, not in the least,' interrupted Sir Ector hastily. 'Double you, double owe, dee, you know, like the stuff they make furniture out of—furniture, you know, and spears, and—well—spears, you know, and furniture.'

I was expecting more frowning, more grunting, more faces set sternly against the northern wind, which isn't to say I was necessarily disappointed so much as that it took more getting used to than I had anticipated. White talks quite directly to his audience as though we're sat before him upon the hearth rug, and so we have references such as to Merlyn putting his fingers together like Sherlock Holmes, and we are left with a strong impression of The Once and Future King having been written for English school boys at the upper end of the 1950s educational ladder.

Children believe such things to this day, and think that they will only be able to bowl well in the cricket match tomorrow, provided that they are good today.

As an aside, even without the references to Merlyn and his unsettling knowledge of centuries to come, anyone who enjoyed Marc Platt's Lungbarrow as I did might appreciate why I should raise an eyebrow at this passage:

'Would you show me your home?'

'Certainly,' said the badger, 'though, of course, I don't use it all. It is a rambling old place, much too big for a single man. I suppose some parts of it may be a thousand years old. There are about four families of us in it, here and there, take it by and large from cellar to attics, and sometimes we don't meet for months. A crazy old place, I suppose it must seem to you modern people—but there, it's cosy.'

At the risk of committing what is probably literary treason, there's a problem with The Once and Future King, or at least I experienced one. It's nothing to do with kids turning into Disney owls, the twelfth century remodelling, the disconcerting contemporary asides, or any of White's screwing around with the source material, all of which is done with a purpose which becomes gradually apparent. The problem is that said purpose takes so long to emerge from the narrative. I can understand the writer not wanting to play all of his cards at once, but as soon as we're past The Sword in the Stone it really gets to rambling and bumbling to itself with no clear indication of where we might be heading, and while the book remains readable throughout, personally I was a little bored in places. I'm putting this down to my never having read Le Morte D'Arthur.

That said, the point of it all is beautifully expressed once it becomes apparent why White felt compelled to write in the first place. The Once and Future King evokes the age of chivalry in contrast to White's era, and unfortunately also to our own - it might be argued. His invocation of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and the pseudo-Darwinian cult of power as its own justification, as given by Agravaine during the first chapter of the fourth book, is hard to miss.

'We could say that we were in favour of a national movement. For that matter, we could join them together and call it national communism. But it has to be something broad and popular, which everybody can feel. It must be against large numbers of people, like the Jews or the Normans or the Saxons, so that everybody can be angry.'

White also seemingly predicted Death in June and other neofolk types who have built careers on simply exploring controversial ideas and imagery, such as the controversial idea and image of Adolf Hitler as a great bloke who was only saying what everybody was thinking.

Mordred had begun dressing with this dramatic simplicity since the time when he had become a leader of the popular party. Their aims were some kind of nationalism, with Gaelic autonomy, and a massacre of the Jews as well, in revenge for a mythical saint called Hugh of Lincoln. There were already thousands, spread over the country, who carried the badge of a scarlet fist clenching a whip, and who called themselves Thrashers.

Once this novel stops messing about and gets down to the business of what is on its mind, it becomes a formidable work, and so much so as to oblige me to forget having been bored; and given the chilling accuracy of White's analysis of the rise of the Nazis, his argument seems unfortunately well-suited to our own era, and to how we respond to what is happening in our world.

At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape—in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.

I suppose now I need to read Le Morte D'Arthur.

Wanted

Mark Millar, J.G. Jones & Paul Mounts Wanted (2004)
Possibly weirdly, I didn't even realise this had been made into a massive box-office destroying Dorito sales vehicle starring Mr. Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and a massive box-office destroying Dorito sales vehicle starring Mr. Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which some people seem to think was decent; and I'm surprised at how much pleasure is to be had from not knowing something.

Anyway, films I'll probably never watch aside, Wanted is another of those big screen - because I'd rather eat my own shit than describe something as epic - revisionist superhero tales which turns up every couple of years; except it sort of isn't because this one's about superpowered bad guys who have managed to eliminate the caped forces of justice from their version of reality - acknowledged here as just one of many - and now rule the world from behind the scenes as an elite cabal. It also has the psychology of an Eminem album - what with the blue collar desperation, violence, father issues, self-loathing and so on - which I imagine is probably deliberate given that the main character so closely resembles the lad.

Obviously this isn't going to be for everyone, not least considering the stomach churning shock and horror splattered liberally all around because that's what Mark Millar does. He's shot himself in the foot a few times, justifying at least some of the accusations made by his detractors, not least being misogyny and homophobia; but when he gets the balance right, deftly scoring the weight of the sick bucket against reasons for which you might need one in the first place, it's some pretty fine stuff. It's relentlessly both gruesome and funny, much like the Shit-Head character who is more or less the Thing formed from the collected faeces of the 666 most evil beings ever to walk the earth... There's a little Hitler in there, a touch of Ed Gein, half a pound of Jeffrey Dahmer... He can make his body diarrhea soft, bloody constipation hard, or any consistency in-between.

My theory is that Mark Millar is more or less the Whitehouse of comics, referring here to the power electronics band rather than the bespectacled publiciser of controversial 1970s television shows. It's horrible not for the sake of sales or gratuitous shock, but because if you buy into slaughter as a form of entertainment, then you probably need a good kicking - delivered here by means of the sort of detail which wouldn't have made it into, for example, a 1980s Punisher comic; and I feel my theory is vindicated by the last two pages of the book, harking back to the gleeful conclusion of Millar's earlier Insiders, as featured in Crisis comic way back whenever, inverting the stereotypically redemptive cliché towards which the narrative appeared to be heading, and which would have been essentially dishonest.

He doesn't always get away with it, but Wanted is fucking brilliant; and you're supposed to feel uncomfortable.

The Changeling

A.E. van Vogt The Changeling (1950)
Another oddity, and fuck - could they really not have come up with a better cover? Not only does this 1976 printing recycle the art of the New English Library's 1973 edition of The Weapon Makers, but messes it up by use of a reproduction with the quality of something taken on a phone, then adds insult to injury with that font one would purchase by the letter from 1970s hardware stores in order to spell out beware of the dog, please shut gate, or whatever name you had decided to bestow upon your newsagent or corner shop; and you can even see the registration marks on the front, between author and title; and the picture has nothing to do with the novel - although admittedly it was already a bit of a stretch linking it to the subject of The Weapon Makers; and the spine of the book is creeping around onto the front cover. The thing looks and feels like it came out of a Christmas cracker.

Never mind.

The overwhelming sense of familiarity I experienced as I began to read this turns out to result from The Changeling having been human-centipeded together with a few shorter stories to form The Beast, one of van Vogt's fix-up novels. The Beast, from what I can recall, featured Adolf Hitler somehow inhabiting the body of a caveman as leader of a breakaway group of Nazis who fled to the moon after the end of the war. It was better than fucking Iron Sky, but was otherwise something of a dog's dinner, you may be surprised to learn. Here in its pre-op state, The Changeling is a little more palatable, if not necessarily the sort of thing to get anyone running out into the street and jumping up and down with excitement. The story is one of those which screams Philip K. Dick read this, it being the tale of an immortal man who doesn't realise he's immortal because his brain cells completely replace themselves more or less every four years, along with his memory. The opening chapters represent van Vogt at his most arrestingly weird, narrating the tale of our man with that characteristically dreamlike sense of constant motion, and each passing moment examined as a distinct state of mind. The random narrative swerves seem to work well, building atmosphere without going too crazy - as tends to happen when van Vogt gets carried away and it feels like you're reading something that's been pulled out of an inverted top hat in random order.

Unfortunately over the brief course of The Changeling's 120 pages, it becomes a little too easy to forget what he's actually writing about, at least beyond a very general impression. Additionally there would seem to be what looks a lot like a horrendously sexist subtext, as typified by the arrival of the equalised women - women who have taken a special drug which renders them equal to men. The equalised women have become a disgruntled minority, shunned by those unequalised gals who would much rather visit the hairdresser, shop for pretty dresses, or perhaps read the latest issue of Woman's Hat Monthly, and shunned by the men who were quite frankly hoping to enter someone a bit more feminine. The book concludes with some sort of general plea for political equality between the sexes, without actually terming it as equality, so I don't think van Vogt's heart was in entirely the wrong place, but he really should have given the issue a little more thought and working out what he actually wanted to say in the first instance would have been a good start. That said, this aspect of The Changeling now reads somewhat like an old Harry Enfield sketch - Women: Know Your Limits, and the like, so there's probably not much point getting angry about any of it, at least not with recourse to anything stronger than a heavy sigh.

The Changeling is a little underwhelming, but is short and seems mostly comprehensible by van Vogt's standards, and the story definitely works better in this form than chopped into pieces and stirred into The Beast.

If I Were You

L. Ron Hubbard If I Were You (1941)
L. Ron Hubbard was the most important science-fiction author who ever lived, and so it is fitting that Galaxy Press should have endeavoured to rescue his many mighty works from pulp obscurity and return them at long last to print - and with this opening sentence I have at least saved you the trouble of reading Kevin J. Anderson's introduction. Galaxy Press seem to be financially although not necessarily ideologically associated with Scientology by some means, existing principally as a vehicle for Hubbard's work; so fair enough I guess. I still think they may have been trying too hard in certain respects given that I would have thought the majority of people picking up copies of these novellas will most likely already be well disposed towards the man. The glowing biographical summary of Hubbard's life in the rear of the book reads somewhat as though puddings may have been over-egged - I'm fairly certain the guy didn't actually invent either science-fiction or fantasy as genres; whilst Anderson smiles beatifically and points out that Shakespeare and Dickens were popular in their days, and that Hubbard's tales in the pulp magazines of the thirties and forties were popular in his day, so L. Ron Hubbard was therefore just like Shakespeare and Dickens for as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose.

If nothing else, this does at least support my hunch that I don't really need to read anything written by Kevin J. Anderson. Oddly - and I realise I am here asking us all to pause and take another look at Hitler's paintings because some of them were quite nice really - I would say that all of this editorial reverence actually does Hubbard's fiction something of a disservice because - quite aside from what one may think of the man and his deeds - If I Were You is good enough to stand on its own merits. I'm not saying it's the greatest thing I've ever read, or that it necessarily represents a little known masterpiece, but Hubbard, if nothing else, was an accomplished writer within his field. Whilst it may be argued that his field was somewhat limited to romps and adventures of the kind which made names for Edgar Rice Burroughs and others, if his tales lack poetry, they were better told than those of many of his contemporaries. That is to say that If I Were You at least reads like the work of someone who knew exactly what he wanted to do and how to do it, and someone who couldn't really be described as a hack with any justification. True, it's the story of a circus midget swapping bodies with that of an unpleasant scheming ringmaster, with a splash of romance and just deserts duly served at the end, but it's an engaging read nevertheless; and I suppose you might also argue that certain themes prefigure the mythology Hubbard later expounded with the Church of Scientology, if you feel inclined to do so.

The Last Drop, the much shorter back up story follows the theme of size by shrinking its protagonists to gnomic proportions, and is less satisfying, but serves as an interesting snapshot of its era nonetheless.

While I'm sceptical of Hubbard's credentials as the neglected genius described in Kevin J. Anderson's introduction, it seems equally dubious to pretend that he never existed or to relegate his writing to a mere footnote in science-fiction history, because for the most part it seems to have been better than you might imagine.

The Beast

A.E. van Vogt The Beast (1963)
I keep trying to give up the van Vogt but it's difficult. His stories range from incomprehensible and headachey to warped and surreal brilliance of a flavour that was almost unique to Alfred Elton himself. Each time I happen upon some hitherto undiscovered van Vogt title secreted amongst the ordinary science-fiction paperbacks, I think of the tower that is my present to-be-read pile, and how I should at least tackle Project Pope, Triplanetary, or The War of the Worlds before shelling out on another novel that will probably read like some guy having a fight with his own typewriter; but then I remember The Winged Man or The Voyage of the Space Beagle, the sheer what the fuck? factor of his best works, and suddenly I'm off the wagon again.

Just to recap with the customary generalisation, A.E. van Vogt wrote to a certain formula, something he cooked up himself entailing dream images, random plot swerves roughly every eight-hundred words, and sentences bolted together for maximum evocation by a method that seems as much modernist sculpture as literary technique. To suggest that the results were sometimes a little weird is an understatement, but when it works, it's amazing.

A typical van Vogt narrative may go in almost any direction suddenly and without warning, and so it makes sense that his regular novels are not always easily distinguished from his fix-ups - the fix-up novel comprising three or more short stories welded together and relentlessly hammered into a single tale, roughly speaking, regardless of how thematically disparate the original components may have been. Some of these novel-length exquisite corpses work better than others - the bewildering and yet strangely fascinating Quest for the Future being a good example.

The Beast combines one of my favourite van Vogt shorts, The Great Engine, with some other stuff. The other stuff in question incorporates moon cowboys dominated by a despotic caveman - formerly a grunting Adolf Hitler substitute in the original war-era material according to the evidently knowledgeable Andrew May - and a drug which enhances women so as to render them equal to men, if you can imagine such a thing. It does its best and tries hard, and almost gets there, but - never mind the usual patchwork of bits and unmatching pieces all sewn together - The Beast reads unfortunately like the author composed the latter third with a food mixer. There is van Vogt goodness here, but sadly not in the right order.

Lovecraft's Book

Richard Lupoff Lovecraft's Book (1985)
It has often been said that in respect of political views, H.P. Lovecraft was simply a man of his time, which is pretty much bollocks unless you subscribe to the notion that Adolf Eichmann was similarly no more than a man of his time. Sadly, Lovecraft was a shocking racist who took a dim view of those not blessed with Anglo-Saxon genes, or at least some tie to cultural traditions harking back to the pastier bits of Europe. The clues are to be found amongst references to all those swarthy and expressly degenerate types forever summoning Cthulhu up from the ocean depths in his fiction, and of course his 1912 poem On the Creation of Niggers might also be considered something of a smoking gun:

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

It seems fair to say that Lovecraft's views were somewhat stronger than just not liking reggae. Happily, whilst such sentiments undoubtedly informed his fiction to some extent, they're most often so deeply buried within the general fog of horror as to be effectively neutered, and certainly there was never a trace of anything that could be described as an agenda - at least none that I ever noticed. Additionally, the man's talents and circumstances were arguably such as to allow us to overlook his being a bit of a twat in some respects, so it's not like reading Lovecraft is quite the same as a reassessment of the oeuvre of Jim Davidson; and, it seems he softened his more unsavoury views in later life as perhaps evinced by his marriage to Sonia Greene - a Ukrainian Jew, and certainly by regrets expressed in  private correspondence and vocal support for the moderate socialism of Roosevelt's New Deal.

Nevertheless, for someone who wrote so many letters, the man remains something of a mystery, and particularly in regard to the evolution of his personal politics. Richard Lupoff attempts to address this, not so much offering an alternate history as a set of pieces which fit existing gaps of the jigsaw puzzle with surprising finesse - a story that almost certainly didn't happen, but could have done.

Lovecraft's Book is in part a spy thriller with actual historical characters connected by improbable but entirely plausible means. Lovecraft is sought by right-wing organisations as the potential author of an American Mein Kampf, a volume to galvanise the masses and supposedly demonstrate why the United States needs to follow in the footsteps of Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy - Lovecraft's naive sympathies being somewhat in that direction, and with his  culturally Anglo-Saxon background likely to grant the title a respectability it might not achieve authored by an American citizen of more conspicuously Germanic or Italian heritage. The story takes in cameos from Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and others; casts the mafia as - well, if not exactly the good guys, at least on the right side; and culminates with H.P. Lovecraft and Houdini's little brother battling Nazis in an underwater base. Lovecraft of course triumphs, defeating a plan to overrun the United States with aquatic blackshirts (who would have risen from the coastal waves to seize power) and in doing so is inspired to write A Shadow Over Innsmouth. More importantly, he gets some of his own shit rubbed in his face and duly learns from the experience, as he seemingly did in real life, although perhaps not for the same reasons.

This could have been one of the most stupid stories ever told, but Lupoff's research is impressive, and for all that the whole idea is ludicrous, it works, and it works well - so well that I'm not sure it could be legitimately termed alternate history so much as over-enthusiastic speculation. In any case, it's a damn good yarn of surprising depth, particularly in its dissection of the psychological appeal of Fascism. Much as I've admired Lovecraft's writing, it has never before occurred to me that he might have been overly endowed with redeeming qualities as a person, but Richard Lupoff has given me pause for a rethink on that score.