Eric > Books: lurid‎ (45)

Pacing up and down in the Bunker…he would wave a road map, fast decomposing with the sweat of his hands, and explain to any casual visitor the complicated military operations whereby they would all be saved. Sometimes he would shout orders, as if himself directing the defenders; sometimes he would spread the map on the table, and stooping over it, with trembling hands he would arrange and rearrange a set of buttons, as consolatory symbols of relieving armies. In the tropical climate of a court, emotions and beliefs quickly change their direction. No one except Hitler still believed in Wenck’s army, but no one disagreed with his reassurances; and in a moment of time the chorus which had been chanting lamentoso, the dirge of despair and suicide, would suddenly break out allegro vivace, with a triumphant welcome for the army of Wenck.

Why then did the Russians expurgate the revolver from their version of Hitler’s death? There is a perfectly rational explanation which, though conjectural, may well be true. The Russians may well have concealed the manner of Hitler’s suicide for precisely the same reason for which Hitler chose it: because it was a soldier’s death. I myself suspect that this was their reason. After all, it is in line with their general practice. Previous tyrannies of the spirit have sought to crush defeated but dangerous philosophies by emphatic, public executions: the gibbet, the block, the bloody quarters exhibited in terrorem populi. But such spectacular liquidations, however effective at the time, have a habit of breeding later myths: there are relics of the dead, pilgrimages to the place of execution. The Russian Bolsheviks have therefore preferred in general a less emphatic method: their ideological enemies have slid into oblivion in nameless graves at uncertain dates and no relics of them are available for later veneration. I have already suggested that it was for this reason, and in accordance with this philosophy, that they concealed the circumstances of Hitler’s death, hid his bones, and destroyed the scene of his suicide and Nordic funeral. It may well be that when such total concealment was no longer possible and they decided to admit the facts, there was one fact which they thought it expedient to alter. The soldier’s death might seem to the Germans heroic. Suicide by poison might well seem to the Russians a more expedient version.

If this is so, it raises an interesting general question. For my book was also written, in the first place, for exactly the same reason which made the Russians frown on it: to prevent (as far as such means can prevent) the rebirth of the Hitler myth. It would thus seem that we and the Russians, in this matter, seek exactly the same end by diametrically opposite means: they by suppressing the evidence, we by publishing it. Which of these two methods is the more effective is arguable. I will only say that I personally believe in my own. For when has the suppression of the truth prevented the rise of a myth, if a myth is wanted? When has the absence of genuine relics prevented the discovery of false relics, if they are needed? When has uncertainty about a true shrine prevented pilgrimages to a false one? And besides, there seems to me in the Russian argument, if I have correctly described it, a somewhat sinister implication. If they fear the truth, does it not seem that they believe in its power: that they think that Hitler’s reign really was inspiring, that his end really was glorious, and that secrecy is necessary to prevent the spread of such a view? It is a view which I do not share. It seems to me, having perhaps too naïve a faith in human nature and human reason, that Hitler’s reign was so evil, his character so detestable, that no one can be seduced into admiring him by reading the true history either of his life or of his melodramatic and carefully stage-managed end.

It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

Scholars used to assume that nineteenth-century Indian nations were direct and intact survivors from time immemorial in their homelands. In fact, after 1700 most North American Indian "tribes" were relatively new composite groups formed by diverse refugees coping with the massive epidemics and collective violence introduced by colonization.

giving aristocracy a new definition from the jazz age. After his rejection by the Brahmins of Boston, he oriented his world around New York and Hollywood, around the sports and journalism and cinema stars of the roaring twenties. A starlet would have disgraced the better Boston families; but Kennedy displayed his actresses as so many decorations, as signs that he was looking to new centers of power and of popular acclaim. The Boston gentry were exclusive. He would be expansive, open and racy. He was steering his family down the course that made them staples of the tabloids. As he told Gloria Swanson: “The Cabots and the Lodges wouldn’t be caught dead at the pictures, or let their children go. And that’s why their servants know more about what’s going on in the world than they do. The working class gets smarter every day, thanks to radio and pictures. It’s the snooty Back Bay bankers who are missing the boat."

Later, under the dreaded Nixon, celebrators of the New Frontier began to express misgivings about the Imperial Presidency. Schlesinger himself then traced the growth of presidential power, admitting faults in his heroes, Jackson and Roosevelt and Kennedy. But Kennedy’s short time in office was not just an acceleration of prior trends. It added something new—not so much the Imperial Presidency as the Appearances Presidency. The man’s very looks thrilled people like Mailer: “If the nation voted to improve its face, what an impetus might be given to the arts, to the practices, to the lives and to the imagination of the American.” Kennedy was able to take the short cuts that he did, command support for rash acts, because he controlled the images that controlled the professional critics of our society. They had been recruited beforehand on minor points of style. He was not Eisenhower—and that was sufficient achievement for the “eggheads” who had been mocking Eisenhower for years. Kennedy was the Steerforth who flattered and tamed the schoolboys by standing up to their master. He was their surrogate, their dream-self, what all the old second lieutenants from World War II wished they had become. Through him they escaped their humdrum lives at the typewriter, on the newspaper, in the classroom. From OSS to MLA is a rude descent.

If bureaucratic “big government” gets defined, permanently, as a doddering old sheriff, then each presidential election becomes a call for some new gunfighter to face the problems “government” cannot solve. Kennedy’s successors have drifted, steadily, toward this conception of their role. But their appeal to Roosevelt as a model in unjustified. It is true that crises gave Roosevelt quasi-dictatorial power, and that dictatorship in the old Roman sense became respectable again in the thirties. A widespread disillusionment with parliamentary procedures, combined with a fear of the radical Left and with economic breakdown, led to a call for strong leaders—for Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and Salazar. This mood even gave a momentary glamour of menace to American figures like Huey Long and Father Coughlin or an Englishman like Oswald Mosley. But Roosevelt’s achievement, like Washington’s, was to channel his own authority into programs and institutions. In that sense, Roosevelt resisted even while exercising “charisma,” relegitimating institutions at a time when other strong leaders were delegitimating them. This made Roosevelt differ not only in historical moment from the Kennedy period, but even more basically from Kennedy’s conception of power. Theorists of “deadlock” in the Eisenhower fifties felt that the lethargy of the public, the obstructionism of Congress, the external menace of communism made it imperative for a President to seize every margin of power available to him: he was facing so many hostile power centers that only the glad embrace of every opportunity could promise him success. No internal check upon one’s appetite for power was needed; the external checks were sufficient—were overwhelming, in fact, unless the President became single-minded in his pursuit of power. But Roosevelt did not have this ambition of seizing power to be used against his own government. He sought power for that government, and set up the very agencies and departments that Neustadt and his followers resented. He created subordinate power centers, lending them his own authority. He began that process of “routinizing” crisis powers that is the long-range meaning of the New Deal. There is something perverse about the “liberal” attack on Eisenhower’s bureaucracy in the nineteen-fifties, which simply revived the Republicans’ first response to the New Deal.

How then can I write an exhaustive, well-ordered treatise like a detached and haughty scholar, suppressing my uneasiness, my restlessness with a rigor mortis of methodology and the fruitless discussions of disheartened formalists? No, I will weave a capricious book, an agglomeration of wonders, anecdotes, eccentric acts, brief intermezzos and mad encores, and I will be gratified if, in contrast to so much of the printed flotsam and jetsam surrounding us, it is not dominated by boredom…I will fill these pages with scraps of pictures and daguerreotypes, old etchings, prints purloined from the bottoms of chests, réclames, illustrations out of old periodicals, horoscopes, passages from books on alchemy and travel books printed in Gothic script, undated ghost stories, album leaves and keys to dreams: curios of a vanished culture.

Lvovic ze Karásek transformed every church into a melancholy Panoptikum, dwelling on the decay of the altar flowers, the languor of the statues outlined by garments of glossy creased silk, the infirm penumbra of the sanctuaries and the White Mountain dirges. When the Decadents used churches to exalt the corruption of the flesh, the ecstasy of martyrdom and the rapture of sainthood, they were simply indulging in a predilection for the Baroque, a Prague constant…Karásek painted the mystery of Prague’s sanctuaries in even bleaker colors in the novel Gothická duše (A Gothic Soul). The hero, the last scion of a noble line with a long history of insanity, is a Rudolf-like hypochondriac. Fearing he too will go mad (he does in the end—and dies in a mental hospital), he retreats into solitude, his greatest delights the smell of incense and wilted flowers, the sight of “glass coffins containing embalmed cadavers atop the altars.” He also feels drawn to the Barnabites or Discalced Carmelites, who live like moles in the darkness of mystical reclusion. Their lugubrious cloister near the Castle was shrouded in wildly imaginative legends. People said that before taking vows each novice had to remove the ring from the shriveled hand of the terrifying mummy of the Blessed Electa at midnight. During mass the faithful heard the chanting voices of those buried alive coming from the bowels of the church and saw the flickering of troubled eyes behind its rusty gratings. “The altars rose like shapeless catafalques.” “Only the main altar, covered with candles beneath the image of St. Theresa, fervent in her devotion to Christ, shone like a great pyramid of liquefied gold, glowed like an immense castrum doloris.” The church deranges the Gothic Soul; it drives him mad. The by-then jejune motif of the haunted basilica acquires new vigor in the myth of a lifeless, funereal Prague.

Hippocrates learned medicine in Egypt, a shelter housing all the infectious diseases. Imhotep’s bag never had a moment’s rest. Out of it came beautiful surgical instruments and an anesthetic made from vinegar and the dust of Memphis marble, to treat every type of tumor listed in the Ebers papyrus. Perhaps the same diseases existed in Rome and Athens, but Egypt in particular conjures up the image of a sad, sick man and of a wisdom in the shadow of his disease, smelling of iodine and camphor, at the end of a gray ward in an old hospital. (The Romans had instead a cheerful sanatorium whose dry climate attracted everyone who coughed.) Blame it on the museums; they exhibit only ruins from tombs, and welcome you with a long moan, interrupted by the barking of Anubis.

Like intelligent people who suffer from chronic illnesses, the Egyptians were mischievous, humorous, and satiric. The Nile was their perpetual and colossal physician, with the gods in charge of the various wards, followed by throngs of assistants…So much rachitis! So many backs with Pott’s disease! So many spastics! So many dystrophics! So many blind and half-blind! Polio, smallpox, typhus, leprosy, bilharziasis, cholera…They got drunk for relief, and their bellies swelled with liquid…I imagine Egypt as a giant freak show of curved spinal columns, achondroplastics, irregular outlines, and exsanguine profiles, under the protection of dogs, cats, crocodiles, hippopotami, oxen, and monstrous chimeras, the only ones to possess good health in the Nile Valley. And the parasites, permanent guests of the bowels: pend, heft, herxtf, the ruthless corroding worms…the worm of ààà, the unknown disease…Endless torrents of diarrhea…

I am amazed that such big onion eaters were so diced by infectious diseases…Famously flatulent…But at least their kidneys worked…Bread and beer swelled the stomachs—the rohet—of the poor, the bellies of the peasants; game meat and roast gazelle and ostrich inflamed the stomachs of the rich. A people deeply immersed in the mystery of nourishment: they received it from a river god, shared it with the dead and with the heavenly beings, with the breath of the living universe. They mated kitchen and Tomb to invent bread and alchemy. If an invoked deity refused to heal a sick person, the supreme threat of the man of the words was: You won’t get any more to eat.

The terrain above II Corps, where it ran along the Laotian border and into the DMZ, was seldom referred to as the Highlands by Americans. It had been a matter of military expediency to impose a new set of references over Vietnam’s older, truer being, an imposition that began most simply with the division of one country into two and continued—it had its logic—with the further division of South Vietnam into four clearly defined tactical corps. It had been one of the exigencies of the war, and if it effectively obliterated even some of the most obvious geographical distinctions, it made for clear communication…

I’d been talking to Sergeant Dang about the Palace and about the line of emperors. When we stalled one last time at the foot of the moat bridge, I’d been asking him the name of the last emperor to occupy the throne. He smiled and shrugged, not so much because he didn’t know, more like it didn’t matter. “Major Trong is emperor now,” he said, and gunned the jeep into the Palace grounds.

Often you’d hear Marines talking about how beautiful those hills must have been, but that spring they were not beautiful. Once they had been the royal hunting grounds of the Annamese emperors. Tigers, deer and flying squirrels had lived in them. I used to imagine what a royal hunt must have been like, but I could only see it as an Oriental children’s story: a conjuring of the emperor and empress, princes and princelings, court favorites and emissaries, all caparisoned for the hunt; slender figures across a tapestry, a promise of bloodless kills, a serene frolic complete with horseback flirtations and death-smiling game.

Oh, how thoroughly is that classical book—magical. How thoroughly—hypnotic (for Pugachev, all of him, in spite of our reason and conscience, is forced upon us by Pushkin—breathed into us: we don’t want to, but we see him; we don’t want to, but we love him), so much is that book like sleep, like dreaming. All [Grinyov’s] encounters with Pugachev are from that same region of his dream about the killing and loving peasant. A dream prolonged and brought to life. It is because of that, perhaps, that we do give ourselves over to Pugachev, because it is a dream, that is, we are in the complete captivity and complete freedom of a dream. The commandant, Vasilisa Egorovna, Shvabrin, Catherine—all that is bright day and we, reading, remain of sane mind and memory. But as soon as Pugachev enters the scene—all that is over: it is black night. Not the heroic commandant, nor Vasilisa Egorovna who loves him, nor Grinyov’s love affair no one and nothing can over come in us Pugachev. Pushkin has brought Pugachev on us…the way you bring on sleep, a fever, a spell…

In The Captain’s Daughter Pushkin-the-historiographer is vanquished by Pushkin-the-poet, and the last word about Pugachev in us remains forever with the poet.

Pushkin showed us the Pugachev of the Pugachev Revolt, he infused us with Pugachev of The Captain’s Daughter. And no matter how much we may have studied, no matter how often we may have re-read The History of the Pugachev Revolt, as soon as the unknown thing looms black in the snowstorm of The Captain’s Daughter—we forget everything, all our bad experiences with Pugachev and with history, exactly the same as in love—all our bad experiences with love.

For the spell is older than experience. For the tale is older than the record. Older in the life of the earth’s sphere and older too in the life of a human being.

…the infallible feeling of the poet for…well allright, maybe not what was, but what might have been. What ought to have been…

It can be said that The Captain’s Daughter was being written within him simultaneously with The History of the Pugachev Revolt, was co-written with it, that it grew out of every line of the latter, outgrew every line, was being written above the page, formed an order above it, an order, a structure in itself, freely and lawfully, as a living refutation created here by the poet’s hand: of the untruth of the facts—the work wrote itself.

“A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low facts.”

A runner from a Württemberg regiment reported to me to guide my platoon to the famous town of Combles, where we were to be held in reserve for the time being. He was the first German soldier I saw in a steel helmet, and he straightaway struck me as a denizen of a new and far harsher world. Sitting next to him in a roadside ditch, I questioned him avidly about the state of the position, and got from him a grey tale of days hunkered in craters, with no outside contact or communications lines, of incessant attacks, fields of corpses and crazy thirst, of the wounded left to die, and more of the same. The impassive features under the rim of the steel helmet and the monotonous voice accompanied by the noise of the battle made a ghostly impression on us. A few days had put their stamp on the runner, who was to escort us into the realm of flame, setting him inexpressibly apart from us.

“If a man falls, he is left to die. No one can help. No one knows if he’ll return alive. Every day we’re attacked, but they won’t get through. Everyone knows this is about life and death.”

Nothing was left in his voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it. It’s men like that you need for fighting.

Even in these frightful moments, something droll could happen. A man next to me pulled his rifle to his cheek and pretended to shoot at a rabbit that suddenly came bounding through our lines. It all happened so abruptly, I had to laugh. Nothing is ever so terrible that some bold and amusing fellow can’t trump it.

Then you hurled your own bomb, and leaped forward. One barely glanced at the crumpled body of one’s opponent; he was finished, and a new duel was commencing. The exchange of hand-grenades reminded me of fencing with foils; you need to jump and stretch, almost as in ballet. It’s the deadliest of duels, as it variably ends with one or other of the participants being blown to smithereens. Or both.

It’s easier to go into battle against such a setting than in cold wintry weather. The simple soul is convinced here that his life is deeply embedded in nature, and that his death is no end.

In the afternoons, the village was under bombardment from all sorts of weapons and calibers. In spite of the danger, I was always loath to leave the attic window of the house, because it was an exciting sight, watching units and individual messengers hurrying across the field of fire, often hurling themselves to the ground, while the earth whirled and spat to the left and right of them. Peeping over destiny’s shoulder like that to see her hand, it’s easy to become negligent and risk one’s own life.

When intellectuals conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favour of a refined dream, it might seem unfair to condemn them for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller, though outstandingly qualified, was only one among many. But there were too many: that was the point. Too many well-read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking scruples, for being a drum of nature. Among the revolutionary conservative intellectuals, Jünger is the real tragic figure. He saw the light, but too late. In his notebooks he gradually de-emphasized his call for conservative revolution led by men who had been “transformed in their being” by the experience of World War I. In 1943, in Paris, he was told the news about the extermination camps, and finally reached the conclusion that he had been staving off since the collapse of the Weimar Republic he had helped to undermine: one of the men whose being had been transformed by their experience of the Great War was Adolf Hitler. The quality Jünger valued most had turned out to be the only one he shared with the man he most despised.

While a few words used by gay men were made-up terms that had no meaning in standard English or slang, most gave standard terms a second, gay meaning. Many were derived from the slang of female prostitutes. Gay itself referred to female prostitutes before it referred to gay men; trade and trick referred to prostitutes’ customers before they referred to gay men’s partners; and cruising referred to a streetwalker’s search for partners before it referred to a gay man’s

The streets and corners were crowded with the sailors all of whom were on a sharp lookout for girls. It seemed to me that the sailors were sex mad. A number of these sailors were with other man walking arm in arm and on one dark street I saw a sailor and a man kissing each other. It looked like an exhibition of male perversion showing itself in the absence of girls or the difficulty of finding them. Some of the sailors told me that they might be able to get a girl if they went “up-town” but it was too far up and they were too drunk to go way up there. [“Conditions about the Brooklyn Navy Yard, June 6, 1917,” box 25, Committee of Fourteen papers, New York Public Library:]

The story of one black gay man who lived in the basement of a rooming house on West Fiftieth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in 1919 suggests the latitude—and limitations—of rooming house life. The tenant felt free to invite whom he met on the street into his room. One summer evening, for instance, he invited an undercover investigator he had met while sitting on the basement stairs. But, as he later explained to his guest, while three “young fellows” had been visiting him in his room on a regular basis, he had finally decided to stop seeing the youths because they made too much noise, and he did not want to landlady to “get wise.” Not only might be lose his room, he feared, but also his job as the house’s chambermaid. [Chauney’s prose, with quotations from “Report on colored fairy, 63 W. 50th St., Aug. 2, 1919,” box 34, Committee of Fourteen papers, New York Public Library:]

”When a party of four rough looking birds tossed a pitcher of hot water at him as he danced by,” the columnist reported, “he pitched into them. After beating three of them into insensibility, the fight went into the street, with two taxi drivers coming to the assistance of the surviving member of the original foursome.” The story portrayed Malin as claiming his right to move openly through the city as a drag queen. Still, it ended on a suitably camp note. When the fight was over, Malin was said to have had tears in his eyes. Yes, he’d won the fight, he told another man, “but look at the disgraceful state my gown is in!”

Jules, being drunk, camped with them [a bunch of “straight” men:] too, and they tried to date him—even after feeling his muscle: he could have laid them all low: really it’s as wide as this paper.

They came to Virginia City as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separate from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte’s portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in lacquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization.

This was neither the first nor the last of many American filibustering expeditions south of the border during the unquiet years following the Mexican War. The chronic instability and frequent overthrows of the government in Mexico City created power vacuums filled by bandit chieftains and gringo invaders who kept the border in a constant state of upheaval.

I think of Jeff as someone who had no language, or no language other than brutality. Not that he couldn’t read or write, on a primitive level. One of the strangest things about his death were some crude letters—presumably sent back and forth between him and another Marine—that turned up in a closet afterwards. They could only be described as billets-doux—but sick, obscene ones. Full of things like, I going to fuck you cunt, you fucking cunt, suck my dick, scrawled in pencil. My mother told me all about them once, how upset Turk [her stepfather] had been. Turk himself idolized other men but his homoeroticism was sentimental and unconscious. He was diabetic and short and had soft, bosomy breasts. He didn’t like taking his shirt off. He used to say he wanted to kill all the fags. (He politely pretended not to know about me.) The happiest time in his life had been when he was under the North Pole for months in a nuclear submarine. It was so hot and claustrophobic down there, he said, he and the other guys spent most of their time in their skivvies, and sometimes even polished the torpedoes in the nude.

The Sarajevo obsession revealed itself early on: in fact, inspired the great comic episode in this brief golden period. We were walking down University Avenue, Palo Alto’s twee, boutique-crammed main drag, on our way to a bookshop. Sontag was wearing her trademark intellectual-diva outfit: voluminous black top and black silky slacks, accessorized with a number of exotic, billowy scarves. These she constantly adjusted or flung back imperiously over one shoulder, stopping now and then to puff on a cigarette or expel a series of phlegmy coughs. (The famous Sontag ‘look’ always put me in mind of the stage direction in Blithe Spirit: ‘Enter Madame Arcati, wearing barbaric jewellery.’) Somewhat incongruously, she had completed her ensemble with a pair of pristine, startlingly white tennis shoes. These made her feet seem comically huge, like Bugs Bunny’s. I half-expected her to bounce several feet up and down in the air whenever she took a step, like one of those people who have shoes made of ‘Flubber’ in the old Fred McMurray movie.

She’d been telling me about the siege and how a Yugoslav woman she had taken shelter with had asked her for her autograph, even as bombs fell around them. She relished the woman’s obvious intelligence (‘Of course, Terry, she’d read The Volcano Lover, and like all Europeans, admired it tremendously’) and her own sangfroid. Then she stopped abruptly and asked, grim-faced, if I’d ever had to evade sniper fire. I said, no, unfortunately not. Lickety-split she was off – dashing in a feverish crouch from one boutique doorway to the next, white tennis shoes a blur, all the way down the street to Restoration Hardware and the Baskin-Robbins store. Five or six perplexed Palo Altans stopped to watch as she bobbed zanily in and out, ducking her head, pointing at imaginary gunmen on rooftops and gesticulating wildly at me to follow. No one, clearly, knew who she was, though several of them looked as if they thought they should know who she was.

In a representative mid-1960s issue of Movie Mirror, the ads cater to housewives, dreamers, and drag queens—to anyone, particularly a woman, who is unsatisfied with her body or life, and therefore seeks marital aids, bust enlargers, diet secrets, negligees (“the undie world of Lili St. Cyr”), depilatories, star glossies, vanishing creams, inflatable female dolls, vibrators, correspondence courses, cellulite removers, harem jamas, “Shape-o-lette” Lycra spandex corsets, height-increase shoe pads, falsies, muumuus, sea monkeys, false finger nails, hormone creams, and wigs, including maxie wig, swept-back flipper, curly-cue s-t-r-e-t-c-h wig, and a bippy tail that functions as braid, bun, twist, or dome.

In what kind if magazines did icon Jackie appear? Sometimes she materialized in magazines that lived on the border of soft porn. For example, a Jackie Kennedy Onassis souvenir booklet from the late 1960s was published by a company, “Collectors,” that also issued Peter Pecker, Oral Lust, Seduction of Suzy, Drugged Nurse, Queenie, Skirts, Whips Incorporated, Lesbian Foto-Reader, Adult/Lad Lovers, Punishment Journal, Chaplin vs. Chaplin, and Love Stories of a Wayward Teenager. In contrast to these titles, children’s books about Jackie ostensibly aimed to teach youngsters how to read, or to offer moral uplift…It’s bizarre that there should be a children’s bio (“A See and Read Beginning to Read Biography” by Patricia Miles Martin) about Jackie O, since her image epitomizes late 1960s salacious yet safe “adult” pleasures. And yet icon Jackie had the knack of inhabiting the border of porn and pedagogy, and shuttling between the two without blinking: the same picture of Jackie could be a lech’s pinup, a patriotic talisman, and the picture that explained a baffling emergency headline.

struck a note that recalled the Jackie O who had originally captured my affection: reading the C.P. Cavafy poem “Ithaka,” he artfully resummoned her years in Greece with Ari. It was wonderfully contrary to the spirit of the mawkish and idealizing media coverage that Jackie’s Jewish companion should have chosen a poem celebrating the louche and sybaritic virtues for which Jackie O, in the tabloids, had long been recognized. Of particular interest were the lines: “may you stop at Phoenician trading stations / to buy fine things, / mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, / sensual perfume of every kind”—a passage confirming and blessing the acquisitive aspects of Jackie’s reputation that the media momentarily neglected.

The death in misery of La Goulue (1869-1929), one of the great demi-mond

The death in misery of La Goulue (1869-1929), one of the great demi-mondaines of the nineties, petted can-can dancer of the then devilish Moulin Rouge, model for Toulouse-Lautrec in some of his most famous cabaret canvases, and general toast of the whiskered town, afforded her a press she had not enjoyed since her palmiest days. She had charm, a dazzling complexion, and wit. It was the last great heyday for courtesans, and she made hay. Then came her fall. She went to jail after some lark. She became a lion-tamer in a street fair. She became a dancer in a wagon show. Then she became a laundress. Then she became nothing.A month ago she reappeared; fat, old, and dancing drunkenly in a few feet of a remarkable documentary film about the ragpickers of Paris--called, after their neighborhood of wagon shanties, 'The Zone.' A few weeks later her ragpickers took her to a city clinic, where she too died, murmuring as if declining a last and eternal invitation, 'I do not want to go to hell.'