Kent
a while ago, I talked of relationships between dominant literary styles or
groupings, i.e. 'mainstream' and 'avant-garde' and underwriting social
conservatism. Clever me. But at the same time of thought I cannot think of,
say, the British secret services as being that efficient, incompetence is
the rule in our society, maybe yours are more efficient, thus tho' these
things undoubtedly exist, I think the assocaitions are largely messy and
ineffictive, except in the cases of some minor figures, who can be very
irritating while alive as they do tend to try control transmission.
But creativity will out, for instance in the matter of TS Eliot who was
avowedly the establishment's boy, tho' I dunno about his spook credentials,
and I'm thinking rather more of the Eliot of Mr Apollinax than The Cocktail
Party. Human creativity is an anomaly, but keeps on happening, despite
those who would stifle it, and they're always with us, unlike I dream the
poor.
Best
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2001 11:19 PM
Subject: Re: Spookpo (from NYT)
> Wonderful, Kent, except for:
>
> a) the suggestion of a relationship between this and the list too
noisiness
> of the last few days
>
> b) Weinberger's lack of analysis of what social forces were at work: he
> falls onto :
>
> > Angleton surfaced in the news in the late 1970's when he was revealed to
> be
> > the chief of C.I.A. counterintelligence, known as the "ultra top secret
> deep
> > snow" unit. He was noted for his deathly pallor, his chain-smoking, his
> > cryptic allusions to conspiracies and an office piled with papers, the
> > windows never opened and the curtains always drawn.
>
> which sounds hilariously like the X-files character 'smoking man'
>
> That 'high literary culture' and the spooks do get mixed up is obvious,
but
> the suggestion of a _necessary_ reationship that the article would, I
think,
> imply is unfounded. Nor is it a justifiaction for destabilizing a list
that
> has left the Cold War, the Counter Reformation and the Hundred Years War
> somewhat I hope behind it.
>
> Yup, these things happen, one of the barmiest associations was that
Patrick
> White worked in war-time intelligence services, I can just see 'The Solid
> Mandala' paving the way for Reaganism. Presumably nobody told the Murdoch
> papers whose side he was on.
>
> And I love the image (implied) of HD at the centre of international
> espionage. Must get out my decoding books on 'Trilogy'.
>
> PS Chaucer was married to John O'Gaunt's lass Phillipa about 400 yards
from
> where I sit now in St Mary de Castro in Leicester. Maybe I'm a spook too.
>
> The swine! They never pay me!
>
> Not that I doubt things do still go bump in the night.
>
> I don't disagree that some of the issues touched on are valid, but what
does
> that justify?
>
> Flaming a list?
>
> Best
>
> David
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "kent johnson" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, June 11, 2001 10:30 PM
> Subject: Spookpo (from NYT)
>
>
> > This classic by Eliot Weinberger. Somehow seems to have some relation to
> > these times of list intrigue, dagger, and murder...
> >
> > Kent
> >
> > ----------
> >
> > Tinker, Tailor, Poet, Spy: Tales of Literary Espionage
> > Date: October 4, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
> > Byline: By Eliot Weinberger;
> > Lead:
> >
> > ON his strange mission to America in 1939 to persuade Franklin D.
> Roosevelt
> > not to enter the European war, Ezra Pound took time from his meetings
with
> > low-level bureaucrats and high-level avant-gardists to travel to New
Haven
> > to visit a Yale student named James Jesus Angleton. Angleton, still an
> > undergraduate, was an energetic litterateur. He had visited Pound in
> > Rapallo, Italy, had shared his enthusiasm for Mussolini. He was chummy
> with
> > E. E. Cummings, met Marianne Moore, lunched with Thomas Mann and had
> brought
> > in the ambiguous William Empson to lecture; he helped James Agee with
the
> > manuscript of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." Now, with his roommate, E.
> > Reed Whittemore Jr., he was editing a poetry magazine called Furioso.
> > Pound's one-page "Introductory Textbook" had appeared in the first
number,
> > and the poet was as eager as ever to tell the young editors whom to
> publish.
> >
> > Details of that encounter are not known; the major Pound biographies
> either
> > grant the incident only one sentence or don't mention it at all. After
> four
> > issues, Furioso suspended publication, to be resumed after World War II
> with
> > Whittemore as sole editor. Angleton was published only once, in The Yale
> > Literary Magazine: a bad poem with a prophetic title, "The Immaculate
> > Conversion." In the middle of the war, Angleton was converted --
"turned,"
> > he would say -- by his English professor, Norman Holmes Pearson, from
> poetry
> > to its twin, espionage.
> > Text:
> >
> > Pearson, a Boston aristocrat, is now remembered for his writings on
> > 19th-century American literature, for the extraordinary "Poets of the
> > English Language" anthologies he edited with W. H. Auden, and as H. D.'s
> > editor and literary executor. In 1943, although he had been a Nazi
> > sympathizer until the invasion of Poland, Pearson was sent to London to
> > become the head of X-2, the counterintelligence branch of the Office of
> > Strategic Services, the wartime spy network. There he learned the
British
> > "double cross" system of psychologically coercing captured enemy agents
> into
> > working for one's own side. Pearson's counterpart (and nemesis) at the
> > British M.I.6 was Kim Philby; his code name was Puritan; in espionage
> > literature he is called "the father of American counterintelligence."
> >
> > Angleton turned out to be Pearson's greatest find. Their relationship
> during
> > the war was close: father-son, or master-disciple. After work at the
> London
> > O.S.S., Angleton traveled in the Pearson circle: T. S. Eliot, the
> Sitwells,
> > Benjamin Britten, Graham Greene, E. M. Forster, Ralph Vaughan Williams,
> > Norman Douglas, Elizabeth Bowen, Compton Mackenzie. He was a frequent
> dinner
> > guest of H. D. and her companion, Bryher (Winifred Ellerman).
> >
> > The O.S.S. station itself was no less literary. Angleton had, in turn,
> > recruited two close friends: Edward Weismiller, the Yale Younger Poet of
> > 1936, and Richard Ellmann, the future Joyce scholar. Fellow agents
> > included -- along with superspook William J. Casey (Ronald Reagan's
> Director
> > of Central Intelligence) -- Donald Gallup, the future Pound
bibliographer,
> > and Louis Martz, the Milton scholar who would later edit H. D.'s
> "Collected
> > Poems." Angleton's secretary was H. D.'s daughter, Perdita. (H. D. seems
> to
> > have been surrounded by spies. It is curious that Bryher was apparently
> the
> > only person outside the O.S.S. to know Pearson's code name.)
> >
> > After the war, Pearson returned to Yale, where he continued to recruit
> > students for the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. He served on
> the
> > board of advisers to Pound's Square Dollar Books, which folded in the
> > mid-1950's after its publishers, John Kasper and Thomas Horton, went to
> jail
> > for instigating riots against school integration in the South. In 1975,
on
> a
> > tour of the Far East, Norman Holmes Pearson fell ill in Seoul and died
> soon
> > after at the age of 66. His wife believed that he had been poisoned by
> North
> > Koreans -- proof that he was still working for the Company.
> >
> > Angleton surfaced in the news in the late 1970's when he was revealed to
> be
> > the chief of C.I.A. counterintelligence, known as the "ultra top secret
> deep
> > snow" unit. He was noted for his deathly pallor, his chain-smoking, his
> > cryptic allusions to conspiracies and an office piled with papers, the
> > windows never opened and the curtains always drawn. He had files on two
> > million Americans, had directed an operation that infiltrated the United
> > States Postal Service and opened and photographed 200,000 personal
> letters,
> > believed that Lee Harvey Oswald and Henry Kissinger were K.G.B. spies
and
> > that the Black Panthers were a North Korean front operation. He had been
> Kim
> > Philby's best friend. For 20 years after the defection of Philby's
> partners
> > Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Philby and Angleton were locked in a
deep
> > game of double and double-double crossing -- a "wilderness of mirrors,"
> > Angleton called it, quoting Eliot -- as Angleton decimated the ranks of
> the
> > C.I.A. in search of double agents, the "moles." Angleton's long-term
boss,
> > Allen Dulles, was kept uninformed of these maneuvers, and Angleton's
wife,
> > after 31 years of marriage, had never known her husband's position.
> >
> > Angleton, who kept reading poetry all his life, claimed in later years
> that
> > he had always tried to recruit agents from the Yale English Department.
He
> > believed that those trained in the New Criticism, with its seven types
of
> > ambiguity, were particularly suited to the interpretation of
intelligence
> > data.
> >
> > Consider, after all, the ways a spy's message may be read:
> >
> > 1) It is written by a loyal agent and its information is accurate.
> >
> > 2) It is written by a loyal agent but its information is only partly
> > accurate.
> >
> > 3) It is written by a loyal agent but its information is entirely
> > inaccurate.
> >
> > 4) It is written by a double agent and its information is completely
> false.
> >
> > 5) It is written by a double agent but its information is partly true,
so
> > that the false parts will be believed.
> >
> > 6) It is written by a double agent but its information is entirely true,
> so
> > that the allegiance of the agent will not be discovered.
> >
> > Moreover, the message is written in code, and liable to the vagaries of
> > translation. And it is written in a highly condensed language, whose
> > meanings can offer varying interpretations. Like a poem, the message is
> only
> > as good as its reader. Roosevelt refused to believe a report on the
> imminent
> > attack on Pearl Harbor; the Federal Bureau of Investigation thought that
> > Pound's "Pisan Cantos" were the encoded communications of a spy.
> >
> > There is a book to be written on poetry and espionage. A spy must know
> where
> > the best information is, collect it without being discovered and safely
> > transmit it. In antiquity, the bards and troubadours were perfect for
the
> > task: they were free to wander, they had access to the royal courts and
as
> > poets they relied on their powers of observation to compose and their
> > memories to recite. The first literary spy is the creation of such a
bard:
> > Odysseus, who (in Book IV of "The Odyssey") disguises himself as a
beggar
> to
> > gather intelligence in a Trojan city.
> >
> > CHAUCER was a spy on the Continent for John of Gaunt. Christopher
Marlowe
> > was recruited by Sir Francis Walsingham -- Elizabeth's great spymaster
and
> > Sir Philip Sidney's father-in-law -- to inform on English students who
> were
> > enjoying Catholic hospitality in Rheims. (And later, according to some
> > scholars, Marlowe was murdered by Walsingham's men because of his
> > involvement with Sir Walter Raleigh, another spy, in a plot to depose
the
> > Queen -- a murder that was neatly staged to look like a barroom brawl.)
> > Wordsworth was a spy in France, the English poet Basil Bunting a spy in
> > Persia. Whittaker Chambers started out as an Objectivist poet, a member
of
> > Louis Zukofsky's group.
> >
> > Split between the power of the poem and the powerlessness of the poet in
> > society, poets have lived the lives of spies. They have believed they
are
> > the unacknowledged legislators, a secret police. They have been
attracted
> to
> > secret societies, from the (possibly apocryphal) Elizabethan School of
> Night
> > (Raleigh, Marlowe and George Chapman as well as the alchemist Walter
> > Warner) to Yeats's Golden Dawn. They have preferred to publish
anonymously
> > or under pseudonyms. They have been -- like Milton writing his elegy
> before
> > he had a suitable corpse -- masters at the counterfeiting of emotions.
> They
> > have banded together into groups and movements that, like Angleton's
> C.I.A.,
> > become obsessed with betrayals from within. They have encoded private
> > messages and secret formulas into their poems. They have believed they
are
> > serving great powers: Stalin, Mussolini, the revolution, the church.
They
> > have walked, like Charles Baudelaire in Paris, Federico Garcia Lorca or
> > Charles Reznikoff in New York, invisibly through the city, watching and
> > listening. They have sat alone in their rooms, imagining the great plots
> > unfolding outside.
> >
> > Mina Loy once wrote: "To maintain my incognito the hazard I chose was --
> > poet." When Angleton died in 1987, aged 69, The New York Times reported
in
> > its obituary that his favorite poets were Eliot and Cummings.
> >
> > This essay is adapted from "Outside Stories," a collection of essays to
be
> > published this month by New Directions. An earlier version appeared in
> > Sulfur magazine in 1987.
> >
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
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> >
>
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