Pg.17 #15

Thus was constituted that terrible trinity whose names are indissolubly associated for all time in the annals of crime. The fate of the three assistants was happier: they were in after life to become those distinguished surgeons, Sir William Fergusson, Thomas Wharton Jones, and Alexander Miller, whose names are yet eminent in the temple of science. It is a strange world.

*

They were all-but forgotten people: the breed that was remembered with a start, or with the unreality of a recrudescent dream. The day of carvings alone brought them into the sunlight and reawakened the memory of former times. For as far back as even Nettel, the octogenarian who lived in the tower above the rusting armoury, could remember, the ceremony had been held. Innumerable carvings had smouldered to ashes in obedience of the law, but the choices were still housed in the Hall of the Bright Carvings.

*

Before then, I’d never been aware of social classes. Suddenly they hit me smack in the face. We lived only a few blocks from some elegant apartment buildings on the Hudson where doormen stood day and night in front of covered entrances helping well-dressed people in and out of their big cars. It struck me for the first time that theirs was a different universe from that of the people who rented cheap rooms or that of my brothers and sisters scurrying to our jobs along with other working-class people.

*

Save existence, they had nothing in common,–came in touch on no single point. Weatherbee was a clerk who had known naught but checking all his life; Cuthfert was a master of arts, a dabbler in oils, and had written not a little. The one was a lower-class man who considered himself a gentleman, and the other was a gentleman who knew himself to be such. From this it may be remarked that a man can be a gentleman without possessing the first instinct of true comradeship. The clerk was as sensuous as the other was aesthetic, and his love adventures, told at great length and chiefly coined from his imagination, affected the supersensitive master of arts in the same way as so many whiffs of sewer gas. He deemed the clerk a filty, uncultured brute, whose place was in the muck with the swine, and told him so; and he was reciprocally informed that he was a milk-and-water sissy and a cad. Weatherbee could not have defined “cad” for his life; but it satisfied its purpose, which after all seems the main point in life.

*

He announces who we are. As he talks I amuse myself thinking of the unprecedented shock in his mind. A short while ago he was Professor Jacobi, a famed and aged man still playing like a fanatic child in his laboratory. He wore a skull cap and occasionally addressed an auditorium filled with dignified and obsequious colleagues. The world paused now and then in its Saturnalia of greed to turn its ears to his voice–a voice that promised calmly and authoritatively that new secrets were being wrested from nature; that science was fashioning new toys from life.

*

Two men in shiny brown coats hovered close to Isaac looking for pigeons to feed. Isaac watched the play of their hands. Their pursuit of birds seemed elaborate to him (Isaac couldn’t locate a smear of pigeon shit in the Place des Etats-Unis). The shiny coats belonged to a dip artist and his squire. Isaac appraised this pickpocket team with a cool turn of his mind. They can’t be from South America. The Guzmanns (a tribe of pickpockets out of Peru) would never wear shiny coats. These are locals from Algeria, or Sicily. Starving kids with the soft, beautiful fingers of a girl.

*

From where I am sitting now I can look out the window and see a pigeon being a pigeon on the roof of the Harvard Club. No other thing can be less what it is not than a pigeon can, and Miss Stein, of all people, should understand that simple fact. Behind the pigeon I am looking at, a blank wall or tired grey bricks is stolidly trying to sleep off oblivion; underneath the pigeon the cloistered windows of the Harvard Club are staring in horrified bewilderment at something they have seen across the street. The pigeon is just there on the roof being a pigeon, having been, and being, a pigeon and, what is more, always going to be, too. Nothing could be simpler than that. If you read that sentence aloud you will instantly see what I mean. It is a simple description of a pigeon on a roof. It is only with an effort that I am conscious of the pigeon, but I am acutely aware of a great sulky red iron pipe that is creeping up the side of the building intent on sneaking up on a slightly tipsy chimney which is shouting its head off.

*

Seven bits of page seventeens. There! I knew there had to be a quicker way to say it.

Classic Crimes, by William Roughead; Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake; A Third Face, by Samuel Fuller; The Portable Jack London, edited by Earle Labor, from the story In a Far Country; The Kingdom of Evil by Ben Hecht; Marilyn the Wild, by Jerome Charyn; The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, by James Thurber, from the essay There’s an Owl in My Room.

Pg. 17

“Lance, there’s nothing so pleasing to most tastes as a good mouthful of molasses. But not too thick. You hate this setup enough to make the story sing. And tears and ink will make any story jump.” Carl placed a paternal arm about his charge. “What do you say, boy? Give Papa some nice molasses — a couple columns of it.”

*

It would be unfair to compare Cocteau with the monolithic classical writers of the twentieth century; for them writing was a profession, while Cocteau wanted only to be himself and say what he felt. He showed childish delight when he was elected to the Academie Francaise but it would be more appropriate to see him as an academy of one.

*

Next day, now look, the picture shows

How lank and lean Augustus grows!

Yet, though he feels so week and ill,

The naughty fellow cries out still —

“Nor any soup, for me I say:

O take the nasty soup away;

I won’t have any soup to-day.”

*

Meanwhile, the disease thus wonderfully generated betrayed more terrible symptoms. Fever and delirium terminated in lethargic slumber, which in the course of two hours, gave place to death. Yet not till insupportable exhalations and crawling putrefaction had driven from his chamber and the house every one whom their duty did not detain.

*

Dick Watchett liked Mr. Rabb, as did all juniors who came in contact with him. The midshipmen adored him. And indeed he was a likeable person, with his crisp hearty voice, his clean mind, and his courteous manner with the young or the poor — the best type of Englishman.

*

With a suitcase full of clothes and underwear in my hand and an indomitable will in my heart, I set out for Vienna. I too hoped to wrest from fate what my father had accomplished fifty years before; I too hoped to become “something” — but in no case a civil servant.

*

Obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD) such as these are recognised in humans and are also found in the domesticated species where, according to some sources, cats are more heavily represented than dogs. In the treatment of such cases behaviourists follow the developments in the human field where the environmental and managemental stress factors, which are contributing to the condition, are removed as far as possible. Medical treatment is also available and its effectiveness seems to be influenced by the presence of conflicts as well as by the time during which the OCD has been apparent. As yet knowledge about the causes and successful treatment of these cases is limited, and so the pooling of expertise within an organisation such as the APBC is invaluable.

*

Me again. I thought that, if I selected seven paragraphs of moderate size from the page sevens of a more or less random selection of books, the passages would begin to talk to one another and perhaps even form a narrative. I was right! I didn’t expect it to be so grimly topical, though.

The extracts come from The Dark Page, by Samuel Fuller; Cocteau’s World, by Jean Cocteau, introduced by Margaret Crosland; Struwwelpeter, by Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann; Wieland, by Charles Brockden Brown; In Hazard, by Richard Hughes; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer (the narrator of this section is Hitler); and finally Why Does My Cat…? by Sarah Heath.

Fox Box

The postman brought this one today. FULLER AT FOX, courtesy of Masters of Cinema, currently my #1 employer for video work.

It was a joy to collaborate, albeit long-distance, with Samantha Fuller, who kindly read her dad’s words in to my video essay, which adorns the HOUSE OF BAMBOO disc. Timo Langer cut it all together and this one seemed to go particularly well, with a terrific end credits sequence made memorable by the score from HELL AND HIGH WATER.

Samantha’s fantastic documentary, A FULLER LIFE, is also included, making this a really terrific set before you even get to the films, which include some of the best work Fuller ever did.