Author: William Bryk

The Collyer Brothers of Harlem

Dr. Herman Livingston Collyer, a successful gynecologist, his wife Susie, and their sons Homer and Langley moved from Murray Hill to 2078 Fifth Avenue, at 128 Street, in 1909. The house was a three-story brownstone mansion, with mahogany paneling

Dr. Herman Livingston Collyer, a successful gynecologist, his wife Susie, and their sons Homer and Langley moved from Murray Hill to 2078 Fifth Avenue, at 128 Street, in 1909. The house was a three-story brownstone mansion, with mahogany paneling, fine antiques, and family portraits dating to the eighteenth century. The Collyers were among New York’s oldest families. Their ancestors came to America on the Speedwell, which, according to Langley Collyer, “…had a better passenger list than the Mayflower.”

Two years after the Collyers’ arrival, African-Americans began settling in Harlem in large numbers. By 1925, Harlem had been transformed from an upper-middle-class white suburb into the center of African-American life.

But while nearly all the other white folks left, the Collyers did not. Dr. Collyer died in 1923, Mrs. Collyer in 1929. Their sons remained in the mansion. According to Trinity Church’s baptismal records, Homer Collyer was born on November 6, 1881. Langley was about six years younger. Both men graduated from Columbia: Homer, who graduated with the class of 1904, earned an MA, an LLB, and an LLM and practiced admiralty law. Langley took his degree in chemistry and mechanical engineering. He never worked for a living, devoting himself to music.

In 1928-’29, Homer worked in the law office of John McMullen, who would become the family lawyer. Homer then worked for City Title Insurance at 32 Broadway, spending his days researching in the Hall of Records. A former colleague described Homer as an affable, courtly, Dickensian type, with old-fashioned clothing, high collars, and elaborate sideburns who wrote with an elegant Spencerian hand.

Langley, who was last photographed in 1946, looked like a stereotype of an aging late Romantic poet, with an old-fashioned bow-tie, formal black jacket and vest, gray striped trousers, a long gray mustache, and longish hair.

By 1917, the Collyers’ telephone had been disconnected because, as Langley explained, they were “being billed for long distance calls they didn’t make.” In 1928, the gas was shut off. The brothers began going without steam heat and hot running water, using kerosene for lighting and cooking. The Encyclopedia of New York City and Jan Morris in Manhattan ’45 claim they had no water or sewer connection; no contemporary sources go that far. Some of the local kids threw stones through their windows and after Langley had spent large sums to replace the glass, he decided it was better to board them up and close the inner shutters.

Most sources agree that Homer last appeared in public in 1932. In 1933, he suffered a stroke, with “hemorrhages in both eyes,” and went blind. Thereafter, Langley cared for him. They avoided doctors, treating Homer’s illnesses with special diet and rest. Langley said Homer ate 100 oranges a week and treated his eyes by consciously resting them: keeping them closed at all times.

Their solitude was first violated by the press on August 11, 1938, when Helen Worden wrote an article for the World-Telegram about Maurice Gruber, a real estate agent who wanted to buy Collyer property in Queens. When the Collyers did not respond to his letters and then his personal visits, Gruber staked out the house. By the following day, Worden found Charles Collyer, a distant cousin working as a ticket agent for the Long Island Rail Road, who suddenly and conveniently became worried that Homer was dead. Worden’s article was accompanied by photographs posing Charles Collyer and his wife on the front steps of the mansion. Worden called Langley “the mystery man of Harlem.” She recapitulated every street rumor that behind the shabby facade was a veritable Arabian Nights’ palace of Chinese rugs, rare antiques and thousands of morocco-bound books, including piles of money that Langley was afraid to put in the bank.

She then staked out the mansion herself. One night she caught Langley slipping out to go shopping and began her interview by calling out, “Good evening, Mr. Collyer. The neighbors tell me you keep a row boat in the attic and a Model T in the basement.”

Strangely enough, Langley responded. “Yes and no,” he replied. The boat, he explained, was his father’s canoe. “He used to carry it to the Harlem River on his head and paddle down to [Bellevue] every morning and back every evening. The auto was his, too. I never got around to putting it together again after he died.”

Langley later claimed all his troubles dated from these articles. Jan Morris writes that “…nobody ever interfered with them it seems, or tried to make them live like everyone else. They were the Collyer Brothers, Harlem’s Most Fascinating Mystery, as the tabloids like to say, and fashionably mysterious they were allowed to remain.”

But they were not left alone. As the Daily News wrote, “folks attempted to see for themselves.” This phrase is ambiguous. The clippings on the Collyers leave a strong impression that from the late thirties, nosy neighbors knocked on the door, nasty kids threw rocks at the house, broke their fence, and smashed bottles in their front yard, and reporters kept interviewing obscure relatives on the steps of the house, expressing concern over poor cousins Homer and Langley.

Another story quoted a neighbor describing Langley as “the ghosty man… He did have a brother, Homer, but nobody’s seen him in a long while. They ain’t seen his ma, either. She was s’pose to be dead, but she never had a funeral… He’s like haunts in graveyards, he don’ come out before midnight.”

Langley panicked. Though gloomy, the house had not been messy in 1938. By 1942, Langley had single-handedly accumulated vast quantities of newspaper, cartons, tin cans and other refuse, transforming the mansion into a fortress. He apparently applied his engineer’s training to arrange packing boxes and cartons in interlocking tiers with concealed tunnels passing from one room or one floor to another. Langley alone was familiar with the maze. Anyone else would have to remove the entire barricade to pass. He also booby-trapped massive piles of newspapers and old luggage with trip wires.

Their final drama began at 8:53 a.m. on March 21, 1947, when a man who gave his name as Charles Smith telephoned police headquarters, saying, “There was a dead man in the house at 2078 Fifth Avenue.” Police arrived around 10 a.m. to find a crowd of Harlem residents outside the house. The police roped off the area. Some officers tried forcing the mahogany front doors. Then the police took them off their hinges. There stood a solid wall of boxes and debris, up to the ceiling.

Other officers entered the unlit, cluttered basement. The way from the basement to the first floor was blocked by a solid mass of packing cases. Then, the police forced the shutters on a first floor window. Within lay a desolation of ceiling-high stacks of boxes, paper, and furniture, crawling with rats. The officers found the stairs to the second floor blocked with yet another mass of packing cases.

Two hours after the police first arrived on the scene, officers finally clambered from a ladder into a second-story room. There they found Homer dead. He was emaciated, bearded (Daily News) or mustachioed (Times), clothed only in either a tattered robe (Times) or a few ragged fragments of clothing (The Sun), and lay with his knees drawn almost to his chin. Dr. Thomas Gonzales, the medical examiner, said that Homer’s body was extremely emaciated and dehydrated. “There is no question,” Gonzales said, “that he had been neglected for a long time.” There was no food in his stomach or his digestive tract, indicating he had nothing to eat or drink for at least three days before his death, which was attributed to chronic bronchitis, gangrenous decubital ulcer (a large, untreated bedsore), and senile pulmonary emphysema.

The story was a wild sensation: on March 22, 1947, even the Times printed a front-page story on Homer’s death. By the end of the second day, according to the Times, the police had removed nineteen tons of debris from the first-floor hallway alone.

As the search for Langley continued, thousands of curious citizens walked or drove by the house. According to the Daily News, “few lingered at the scene. They were driven away by the smells.”

A friend whose father covered the story for one of the dailies told me the cops lit up cheap, foul-smelling cigars against the overpowering stench of organic corruption—”like a blow from a mailed fist.” For not only the newspapers, garbage, and animal wastes were rotting, but as a city housing inspector told The Sun, even the house was rotting: Its floor and walls were saturated because of the open windows and roof leaks, the beams were rotted and buckled from the weight of the junk and bricks were falling from the walls.

The New York County public administrator, a Surrogate’s Court official, took over the search from the police. On March 31, the public administrator hired six professional movers to remove all articles of value from the house. They tore out the basement entrance and began emptying the law library. The 2500 law books were merely a tenth of the volumes in the house. They found numerous family oil portraits. They found Mrs. Collyer’s hope chests, jammed with unused piece goods, silks, wool, damask, and brocade; three bolts of embroidered white curtain material, each containing 54 yards, that had never been unwrapped; and a batch of fine linen dish towels, stamped “Collyer,” that had never been used.

They found telephone directories, three revolvers, two rifles, a shotgun, ammunition, a bayonet and a saber, a half-dozen toy trains, toy tops, a toy airplane, fourteen upright and grand pianos, cornets, bugles, an accordion, a trombone, a banjo; tin cans, chandeliers, tapestries, a portrait camera, enlarger, lenses and tripods, a bowling ball in a canvas bag, bicycles and bicycle lamps, a rolled-up 100-foot rug runner, a nine-foot-tall mahogany clock with a music box inside and pastel painted figures on the broad face; thirteen ornate mantel clocks, including one contained in a metal bust of a girl whose ears and bodice dripped coins, thirteen Oriental rugs, heavily ornate Victorian oil lamps and vases, white plaster portrait busts, and picture frames. They found a static machine, an electrical device manufactured during the 1890s for the treatment of arthritis, rheumatism, and other ailments. They found five violins, at least two dating from the 18th century, two organs and scores of seven-inch gramophone records dating from 1898, including “Round Her Neck She Wears a Yeller Ribbon for her Lover Who is Fur, Fur Away,” “Atta Baby,” and “Nobody In Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine.” They found sheets in braille from Homer’s failed attempts to learn the system. And they found a certificate of merit for punctuality and good conduct awarded to Langley at Public School 69, 125 West 54th St., for the week ending April 19, 1895.

These things merely salted the vast sea of junk and paper.

By April 3, according to the Herald Tribune, the searchers had removed 51 tons of waste. They had only reached two rooms on the first floor. By April 8, nineteen days after the search began, The Sun reported 103 tons of debris removed. Then they found Langley’s body.

He had been buried alive in one of his booby traps while crawling to bring Homer food. He had been only eight feet from his brother. He was wearing burlap draped over his shoulders as a cape, and police speculated this had snagged on a wire and tripped the booby trap. Langley wore no underwear or socks. He had on a bathrobe, three jackets, and four pairs of trousers. Around his neck as a scarf was a white onion sack fastened with a safety pin. He lay on his right side and the rats had been at him. Both The Sun of April 8 and the World-Telegram of April 9 stated that a preliminary examination indicated Langley had died quite some time before his brother. Apparently, Homer had died utterly, horribly alone.

On May 9, 1947, Robert F. Wagner Jr., the city’s commissioner of Housing and Buildings (later Manhattan borough president and mayor), announced the mansion would be demolished as unsafe and a menace to life and property. It was torn down within the year.

Langley was buried in the Collyer family plot in Cypress Hills Cemetery on April 11. The funeral arrangements were made by the public administrator’s office. The numerous relatives produced by the press apparently did little more than attend the services and file claims against the brothers’ estates.

There was no great wealth. The Surrogate’s Court probated the estates in 1949: $60,000 in real estate holdings, $2000 in savings, $4000 from the sale of personal property. Against this were claims for $15,000 in estate taxes and thousands more in city, federal, and state tax arrears. It is unclear whether the forty claimants against the estate ever saw a dime.

The only explanation Langley ever provided for the brothers’ behavior was that they preferred to live alone.

— New York Press, October 5, 1999

The Man Who Was Phileas Fogg

He went four times around the world and inspired Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. He devised the financing scheme for the transcontinental railroad, lobbied Congress to enact it, and made a fortune from it. And at the end, nearly penniless and living in a Greenwich Village single

He went four times around the world and inspired Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. He devised the financing scheme for the transcontinental railroad, lobbied Congress to enact it, and made a fortune from it. And at the end, nearly penniless and living in a Greenwich Village single room occupancy hotel, he made a living as a lecturer, the Champion Crank.

Born in Boston in 1829, George Francis Train had been orphaned before his fifth birthday when his parents and siblings died of yellow fever in New Orleans. He sailed back alone, “with a shipping tag pinned to his coat as if he had been a bag of coffee,” and was raised by his grandmother and maiden aunts (who found the sailors had remarkably enriched the boy’s vocabulary). At seventeen, he entered his uncle’s shipping business as a clerk and, proving imaginative and industrious, became a junior partner.

In 1850, Train first met a president of the United States. He walked uninvited into the White House, presented a letter of introduction from Secretary of State Daniel Webster (a former attorney for Train & Co.) and sat down for half an hour with President Zachary Taylor. Train later wrote, “He wore a shirt that was formerly white…spotted and spattered with tobacco juice. Directly behind me, as I was soon made aware, was a cuspidor, toward which the President turned the flow of tobacco juice. I was in mortal terror, but I soon saw there was no danger…he never missed the cuspidor once…”

Later that year, while changing trains in Syracuse, New York, he saw an animated, attractive young woman chatting with her friends. “Look at the girl with the curls,” Train said suddenly. “Why, do you know her?” inquired a traveling companion. “I never saw her before,” Train replied, “but she shall be my wife.”

He immediately changed his plans, jumped aboard her train, sat down in the same car and struck up a conversation with her chaperone. He learned the charming young woman, Miss Wilhelmina Davis, was stopping to see Niagara Falls. Train suddenly needed to see this wonder of nature. Once there, Train somehow took over the duties of escorting Miss Davis to the Falls. He wrote, “our love was mutually discovered and confessed amid the roaring accompaniment of the great cataract,” and they were betrothed.

Train’s bearing was assured and confident; his manner distinguished; and his wardrobe elegant. His conversation was usually brilliantly witty. In combination with his swarthy features, black curly hair, and flashing eyes, he was irresistibly attractive. He married Willie on October 5, 1851.

At the onset of the Australian gold rush, Train and Willie headed for Melbourne. When they arrived after ninety-two days at sea, they found 600 ships in the harbor and a city grown from 10,000 to 40,000 within a year. Train worked as a commercial agent for American shippers while writing feature articles for American and foreign newspapers, often about himself, his speeches, and his adventures.

He met Lola Montez, whose dancing talents were best appreciated in bed; she had been mistress of the King of Bavaria and now lived off her past by appearing in an operetta entitled Lola Montez in Bavaria. She was tough and imaginative as well as sexy: she dealt with a defamatory news article by horsewhipping the editor; when a sheriff arrived at her hotel with a warrant, she tore off her clothes and insisted that if he would arrest her, he must carry her off naked. The sheriff did not execute the warrant. Train won her friendship, probably because he was generous and funny and didn’t hit on her. (After more adventures, she died in Brooklyn, where she is buried under her true name, Eliza Gilbert, in Green-Wood Cemetery).

Train traveled home by making his first round-the-world trip. At every stop, he cabled articles to various papers. When he landed in New York, he received a blizzard of publicity, including sixteen columns in the Herald devoted to him and his tour of the world. He had written much of it himself. Years later, he would give a friendly journalist an article he himself had written reporting on one of his speeches, saying, “You see, I have put in the cheers and applause where they belong.” He wrote a series of articles on European business for the Merchant’s Magazine, later collected in his books Young America Abroad, An American Merchant in Europe, Asia, and Australia and Young America in Wall-Street.

In 1856, he was presented to the man who molded his politics and even his facial hair for decades to come.

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was a nephew of the first Napoleon. In December 1852, he had overthrown the Second Republic with little bloodshed and reestablished the Empire by plebiscite. Napoleon III had set male fashion by wearing a waxed mustache and a narrow goatee, a combination called an imperial. Like most of Napoleon III’s admirers, Train was most impressed by his transcendence of special interests as “a man who goes neither left nor right but forward.”

Train was in London in 1861 and, at a time when the British establishment largely favored the South, he became the Union’s fiercest champion. He financed a newspaper, the London American, which presented the Union point of view, particularly by reporting the innumerable speeches of George Francis Train. He also gave Sunday breakfasts in his London townhouse for leading politicians and newspapermen. On one side of his invitations was a rakish photograph of Train, his eyes gleaming from beneath his mop of curly hair, and on the reverse: “Come and meet a dozen live men at my round table breakfast next Sunday at eleven.”

He was attacked by the British press: Punch suggested, “The fittest position of all for him would be that of suspension at some altitude from the ground by a ligature embracing his neck with a running noose, and maintaining him in antagonism to the force of gravitation.” In his own country, however, he was hailed as “the Eloquent Champion of the American Union.” In 1862, as he later wrote, “I…returned to my country the most popular American in public life.”

Although he had never held public office, he spoke of himself as a candidate for president in 1864. The Democratic National Convention expelled him; nonetheless, he campaigned. On Election Day 1864, Lincoln polled 2.2 million; the Democrat, 1.8 million, and if “Train got any votes at all, it is not recorded.”

Even while running for president, he started a new deal: Union Pacific. Congress had enacted legislation to subsidize the construction of a transcontinental railroad and agreed to turn over 6400 acres of public land and financial subsidies of up to $48,000 for each mile of track built. The Union Pacific Railroad Company retained Train as their chief lobbyist. In 1864, he persuaded Congress to double the railroad subsidies for construction.

Then he recalled Napoleon III had financed massive public improvements through a bank, the Credit Mobilier. Train organized the Credit Mobilier of America at the behest of the directors and leading shareholders of the UP. Somehow, the UP awarded cost-plus construction contracts to Credit Mobilier, siphoning government money into its directors’ pockets. The construction costs were wildly extravagant. Credit Mobilier became a byword for corruption. But the railroad was built and finished within five years.

In 1866, he campaigned for women’s suffrage in a Kansas referendum. His oratory was astonishing: the Lawrence State Journal wrote: “He came! He saw! He conquered!” Susan B. Anthony credited most of the 9000 votes cast for women’s suffrage to his hard work and thunderous eloquence.

Then he ran for president again. He decided to go around the world for publicity, using the railroad to cross America, and doing it faster than anyone had ever done. He paid his way by lecturing. When he arrived in France, a delegation from the First International called on him at his hotel in Marseilles. They invited him to speak. “Well,” he boomed, “I cannot keep these good people waiting.” Ten thousand people were at the Alhambra theater. He stood up and sang the “Marseillaise.” He was as eloquent in French as in English, and after rousing the crowd to a frenzy, he marched with them upon City Hall, which was seized in the name of the Commune. Within a few days, Train was arrested and deported—in a private railway car, complete with manservant and chef.

Upon his return to the United States, Train announced he had gone around the world in eighty days. This, of course, did not count his month playing revolutionary. But two years later, Jules Verne published Around the World in Eighty Days. The hero, though English, is eccentric, egotistical, eloquent and ingenious. George Francis Train was Phileas Fogg.

His growing eccentricity ended his business career: even the men who knew him no longer trusted his judgment. His oratory was wilder than ever. One writer described it thus: “He double-shuffles and stamps on the floor ’till the dust obscures him; he beats his breast, clenches his fist, clutches his hair, plays ball with the furniture, outhowls the roaring elements, steams with perspiration, foams at the mouth, paces up and down ’till he looks like a lion in a cage lashing his tail.”

His campaign literature introduced him as “The Coming President. The Man of Destiny. First Campaign Gun. Victory, 1872: Six million votes, Nov. 12, for the Child of Fate! Train and the People against Grant and the Thieves!” Again he ran as an independent. Grant polled 3.6 million votes; his Democratic-Liberal Republican opponent, 2.8 million; the Labor Reform candidate, 30,000; the Prohibitionist, 6000. And again, if Train got any votes, they are not recorded in the tabulations.

Three days before the election, Train learned the radical feminist Victoria Woodhull had been arrested. She had been charged with obscenity: One of her newspaper articles on sex had included a phrase from Deuteronomy, “red trophy of her virginity.” Train then published The Train Ligue, a title alluding to his French revolutionary experiences, consisting of Old Testament verses concerning nudity, murder, incest and adultery. Then, he dared Anthony Comstock, the “Roundsman of the Lord,” to arrest him for printing “disgusting slanders on Lot, Abraham, Solomon, and David.” To Train’s delight, Comstock had him imprisoned without bail for public indecency. At his arraignment, Train was asked whether he pleaded guilty to the indictment. He replied, “I am guilty of publishing an obscene paper composed of Bible quotations.” The judge entered a plea of not guilty.

The case became an embarrassment. The court offered to release Train if he would plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but Train refused. He stated he would rather die in jail than be a hypocrite, and cried, “Back to durance vile!”

Meanwhile, as Meyer Berger observed in The Eight Million, Train continued making speeches, even in the Tombs. The guards wearied of his magniloquence and stuck him in an unheated cell. Train wrapped himself in a traveling rug, roaring, “I’ll raise hell in this Egyptian sepulcher!” Then the guards hustled him to Murderer’s Row, hoping this might frighten him. Instead, he canvassed his fellow inmates and won election to the coveted presidency…of the Murderer’s Club. Finally, the warden moved him into solitary confinement. This was enough and he copped to the plea. Train was discharged without having been tried on the charges in his indictment. Upon his release he complained, “My lawyers did not understand me. They are like all lawyers. They think it better to lie your way to freedom than to suffer for the truth.”

Finding his career in ruins, his fortune lost, and his reputation destroyed, Train gradually began living away from his family. As one biographer wrote, “escapade after escapade, eccentric performance after Quixotic involvement, all in bewildering succession, simply made normal domestic life impossible.”

In 1876, he was adjudicated a bankrupt, listing assets of about $100. At the age of 47, he owned merely a watch and the clothes on his back. Now he made his living through his platform speeches, enhancing his marketability by living up to his reputation as an eccentric. He no longer sought the presidency, but dictatorship. He referred to himself as “Citizen” Train. It, too, bore the flavor of revolutionary France and stressed his independence: he was “not a Democrat, not a Republican, not a Catholic, Protestant, not a man marked with anybody’s brand, but simply a citizen…” He became a vegetarian; he refused to shake hands, arguing such contact drained his vital energies, and when introduced to a new acquaintance, solemnly shook hands with himself. He adopted a new calendar, dated from his own birth, and occasionally conducted services as a minister of the Church of the Laughing Jackass. He remained good copy for the papers, writing articles in his telegraphic, allusive style with a double-colored pencil, blue at one end, red at the other.

He made his last two trips around the world in 1892 and 1896. He still believed he was important: in Japan, he made a speech to a crowd gathered to watch the Emperor travel by a later train, convinced they could have come only to see him.

Upon his return, Train moved into Mills House No. 1, at 160 Bleecker Street in the Village, an impressive Italianate hotel designed by Ernest Flagg to provide “…decent accommodations at low cost for people of small means.” There he dictated his autobiography, My Life in Many States and Foreign Lands. Train presented the 19th century as if it had revolved around him, writing, “It is supreme Dictatorship with me, or nothing. I am plaintiff against the whole world. I have been in fifteen jails for expressing my opinion, but I never robbed even a henroost.”

It would be nothing. In 1903, Citizen George Francis Train (“I am sometimes the only Citizen of these United States! There should be more of them!”) joined Eliza Gilbert in Green-Wood Cemetery.

New York Press, October 19, 1999

Diamond Jim Brady

Throughout his adult life, Diamond Jim Brady was a salesman working for pure commission. If he didn’t sell, he didn’t eat. Happily, his diverse and insatiable appetites were all the incentives he needed to earn a million dollars a year. Half a century after his death in

Throughout his adult life, Diamond Jim Brady was a salesman working for pure commission. If he didn’t sell, he didn’t eat. Happily, his diverse and insatiable appetites were all the incentives he needed to earn a million dollars a year. Half a century after his death in 1917, Fortune called James Buchanan Brady the greatest capital goods salesman in American history.

He sold railroad equipment—spikes, plates, shovels, rail cutters, trucks, cars, and so forth—in the old-fashioned way, on the road ten months a year. His first big break had been a sale to George Baer of the Philadelphia & Reading, whose abstract dislike of humanity was crowned by a concrete loathing of salesmen. Brady camped in Baer’s outer office for five days. When Baer finally demanded to know why he was sitting there day after day, Brady said affably, “I’ve been waiting to tell you, Mr. Baer, that you can go straight to hell.” An hour later, he had an order for five million dollars’ worth of freight cars, and he and Baer were laughing and slapping each other on the back.

But Brady’s genius as a salesman paled beside his capacity for self-indulgence. The Cophetua of the Mauve Decade was born on August 12, 1856 above his father’s bar at 90 West Street, near Cedar Street. His father, a loyal Democrat, named him after that year’s Democratic Presidential nominee. At eleven, Brady began working as a bellboy at the St. James Hotel on Broadway and 26th Street. The hotel’s bar, as was then common, offered a free lunch counter for its patrons. Brady took his meals there until the bartender forbade it because Brady was eating for six men.

st-james-hotelFour years later, he began working for the New York Central Railroad. He studied bookkeeping and penmanship (he wrote a magnificently ornate hand and usually signed his name in full, deeming James Buchanan Brady a name worthy of a few flourishes).

In 1879, he began selling railroad supplies for Manning, Maxwell & Moore. Brady spent his savings on his first diamond ring and three superbly tailored suits to go with his Prince Albert coats, stove-pipe hats, gates-ajar collars, and white, round, detachable cuffs. “If you’re going to make money, you’ve got to look like money,” Brady said. As one biographer wrote, “If he may be said to have had a religion, that one sentence formed its ten commandments.”

As Brady traveled the country, he befriended countless railroaders: mechanics, section foremen, road gang supervisors, stationmasters, train crews, hostlers, firemen, and engineers. He gave parties, played cards, and swapped stories. In this way he learned what each railroad needed to complete its equipment. Then he would go to the companies’ front offices, tell the purchasing agents what they needed, and sell it to them. The orders poured in. He was making a million dollars a year by his thirtieth birthday. One day, after checking his accounts, he said, “Hell! I’m rich! It’s time to have some fun.”

He never stopped. He began collecting diamonds. Inevitably, someone would say they were fake. Brady would take one of the stones and write his signature with it in large and flowing letters on a window pane. It made his point while advertising his name.

Then, there was the food. “His gross displacement,” wrote humorist Irwin S. Cobb,  “was awe-inspiring. He had a huge frame to start with and fat was draped upon it in creases and folds.” Another observer describes how when Brady ate, “An oversized napkin would be tied around, not tucked into, his neck.”

The napkin is inevitably placed, for on his knee it would have been as inadequate as a doily under a bass drum. It would have been lost, bewildered, in the shadow of one of the best known stomachs in New York, a stomach that started impetuously at the neck and gained power and curve as it proceeded majestically downwards.

In the morning, after a quart or two of fresh orange juice to tickle his taste buds (“I’m willing to pay more, and I’m willing to wait, but I want my oranges squeezed fresh!”), Brady had a light breakfast of beefsteak, a few chops, eggs, flapjacks, fried potatoes, hominy, cornbread, several muffins, and a huge beaker of milk. Around 11:30 a.m., he might renew his strength with, say, two or three dozen oysters or clams. Then, at 1:00 p.m., he lunched. This meal was apt to be heavier than breakfast and generally consisted of more oysters and clams, a deviled crab or two—or three—perhaps a pair of broiled lobsters (“The snapping and cracking of lobster claws,” one observer noted, “sounded like the descent of a cloud of seven-year locusts on a Montana wheat field.”), then a joint of beef or another steak, a salad, and several kinds of fruit pie. Brady topped this off with the better part of a box of chocolates. He felt it made the food set better.jim_brady

Then came dinner: the big meal. In The Big Spenders, Lucius Beebe wrote that “so heroic were his skirmishes with the roasts, entrees, and pieces montees as to elevate them to an actually epic dimension.

Brady not only ate the full twelve-course dinner that was the conventional evening snack of the early decades of the last century, he usually consumed three or four helpings of the more substantial dishes, beginning his repast with a gallon of chilled orange juice and finishing with the greater part of a five pound box of the richest chocolates available. In between he might well consume six dozen Lynnhaven oysters, a saddle of mutton, half a dozen venison chops, a roasting chicken with caper sauces, a brace or so of mallard or canvasback ducks, partridge, or pheasant, and a twelve-egg soufflé.

There were bets taken on whether or not Brady would fall dead before dessert.

Once, a railroad president’s wife, having set before Brady and shore dinner of gigantic proportions and watched him devour it, even to the seventh helping, asked him how he knew when his appetite was satiated.

“Well, ma’am,” Brady explained, “Whenever I sit down to a meal, I always make it a point to leave just four inches between my stomach and the edge of the table. And then, when I can feel ’em rubbing together pretty hard, I know I’ve had enough.”

Yet he never touched alcohol, tea, or coffee. When he met the great John L. Sullivan at a friend’s bar in 1881, the bartender, knowing both men, gave Sullivan tall seidels of Pilsener and Brady tall seidels of root beer. Sullivan assumed Brady was drinking beer, and Brady did not disillusion him. During the next hour, Brady matched Sullivan drink for drink, never so much as turning a hair, Sullivan’s amazement grew. “By God, Sir!” he roared, “you’re a man. I’m proud to call you my friend! Shake hands again!”

Brady was always dressed at the height of conservative fashion, few noticing the slyly ingenious, perfect tailoring which softened the exaggeration of the ungainly figure. People did notice the dozens of diamonds giving off huge, glittering winks and ripples of light that covered his enormous chest and his cuffs, sparkling like a thousand tiny mirrors with every movement. He wore diamond studs instead of shirt buttons, diamond cuff links, a diamond pin in his tie, a watch and chain encrusted with stones, a boutonniere of diamonds. His belt buckle was a mass of diamonds and gold worked to form his initials, J.B.B. He even had a three-carat stone set in the ferrule of his cane.

He came to own thirty different sets of jewelry: one for each day of the month. They included more than 20,000 diamonds and over six thousand other stones. Each set included a watch, watch chain, ring, scarf pin, necktie pin, shirt studs, collar buttons, vest buttons, belt buckle, eyeglass case, pocketbook clasp, and even underwear buttons. As John Burke wrote in Duet in Diamonds, “…in full panoply, glittering with refracted light from stem to stern, he looked like a Mississippi riverboat at night coming around the bend with all its illumination turned on.”

Brady’s career on the road and his grotesque physique had early inclined him to patronize women of fragile virtue and, often, no virtue at all. His deeply suppressed romanticism escaped only through his efforts to soften the commercial nature of these relationships through giving the girls expensive jewelry rather than cash on the barrelhead.

He was a close friend of Stanford White, as profound a student and practitioner of debauchery as he was of architecture. One of Brady’s biographers found a man who had worked as a procurer for White and described a birthday party White had thrown for Brady in the Hall of Mirrors atop the old Madison Square Garden:

The meal proceeded uneventfully up to dessert. Then, a twinkle in his eye, [White] gave a signal and three of the waiters entered the room bearing aloft a huge Jack Horner–Pie. They carefully placed it in the center of the table, and then handed each of the gentlemen a white silk ribbon. Mr. Brady’s ribbon, I noticed, differed from the others. It was a red one.

At a sign from White, “all the gentlemen pulled on their ribbons” and “the pie fell apart revealing a beautiful and entirely nude girl nestled in the middle of it.”

Mr. Brady kept pulling in his red ribbon which, I could see, was fastened to the girl’s arm. And as he continued to pull, the girl got up and danced down the table to where he was sitting. She then climbed down of off the table and onto Mr. Brady’s lap where, after kissing him several times, she proceeded to feed him his dessert.

The other gentlemen guests were rather envious of Mr. Brady’s good fortune, and they proceeded to show their envy by loud wails and groans. After he had let them do this for a few minutes, the Governor smiled and suddenly clapped his hands. The doors opened and in came eleven other nude young ladies who also proceeded to feed the guests their dessert. It was a very pleasant evening.

lillian-russellYet Brady’s relationship with the most lusted-after woman in the United States—the blonde, blue-eyed, spectacularly voluptuous  Lillian Russell—was entirely Platonic. America’s sex symbol during the 1880s and ’90s, Russell had made her mark as an actress and singer, but she was also a skillful card player and and an unerringly accurate tobacco spitter. Her extraordinarily warm, intimate friendship with Brady lasted  for over thirty years. He was her frequent escort; they traveled and vacationed together; they confided in one another. She came to love him dearly. Sex, however, never entered into it.

Unlike many self-made men, Brady remained sunny, generous, and sympathetic. He was a notorious soft touch. George Rector, the restaurateur, recalled once suggesting that people were taking advantage of Brady. “He looked at me, closed one eye in a wink, and said, ‘George, I know they’re all pullin’ my leg; but did you ever stop to think it’s fun to be a sucker, if you can afford it?'”

By the late winter of 1917, Brady was paying for a lifetime of heroic indulgence: ulcers, angina pectoris, diabetes, and malfunctioning kidneys. He did not complain, believing one’s capacity for taking losses to be a measure of one’s manhood. On Friday, April 13, 1917 he died in his sleep. Three days later, he was buried from St. Agnes’ Church on East 43rd Street, off Lexington. The congregation was jammed with actors, athletes, politicians, steel magnates, rail barons, gamblers, stock market speculators, and Lillian Russell, who wept.

New York Press, December 29, 1998

Hard-Boiled Charlie Chapin

In the golden age of American newspaper journalism, those 60 years between 1890 and 1950, New York had as many as 14 English-language dailies, with telegraphs and telephones to speed the news-gathering, even as high-speed presses printed tens of thousands of newspapers an hour. The radio was not

In the golden age of American newspaper journalism, those 60 years between 1890 and 1950, New York had as many as 14 English-language dailies, with telegraphs and telephones to speed the news-gathering, even as high-speed presses printed tens of thousands of newspapers an hour. The radio was not a serious competitor and the television became a mass medium only after World War II.

Some of the journalists of that day still survive in memory: publishers such as Hearst or Pulitzer or reporters such as Gene Fowler, Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht. Editors, however, being behind the scenes, are more obscure.

Some weeks ago, I picked up Johns Hopkins University’s elegant reissue of City Editor, a minor classic by Stanley Walker. Walker discusses the great editors whom he admired. He calls one, Charles E. Chapin, city editor of the New York Evening World before 1918, “the ablest city editor who ever lived.”

He is an interesting choice. Chapin’s autobiography, published in 1920, is on its face a splendid memoir, often amusing, and utterly sane. Until the closing chapter, one never realizes its writer was serving a sentence of 20 years to life for murdering his wife. The book is fascinating in context as a masterpiece of self-delusion. To read it, one might think Chapin was a nice guy who worried too much about money. However, nearly anyone who had ever worked for Hard-boiled Charlie described him as a cruel, sadistic tyrant.

Yet he was more than that. He instituted the legman/rewrite system of news-gathering, where a reporter gathered the facts and telephoned a rewrite man, who wrote the story. He envisioned reporting news as it happened, without prejudice, color or individual style, the reporters and rewrite men working as machines.

As importantly, he forced his reporters to use the summary lead, which puts the important facts-who, what, when, where, why-into the first sentence, and the inverted pyramid story form, which works from the lead down to the less important facts. This meant that he forced his reporters to abandon lengthy and winding news articles structured by chronology and usually written in an ornate, self-consciously literary style of “fine writing.” To be sure, Chapin alone did not change this. The expense of transmitting news by telegraph favored concision. Others argue that public education created a semi-literate reading public without the patience to decipher fine writing. However, Chapin’s importance as city editor of one of the nation’s most famous papers made his judgments stick.

Charles Chapin was born to poverty in Watertown, NY, in 1858. He taught himself to set type and take shorthand. For a few years, he was an actor with a traveling theater company; his reporters rejoiced to learn he had played Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In 1879, he married Nellie Beebe, an actress: it was a love match that would endure for 39 years. He then almost immediately became a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. One of his first editors defined journalism as “the art of knowing where hell is going to break loose next and having a man there to cover it.” He took it to heart: by his 25th birthday, he would be city editor of the Chicago Star.

At 33, he visited New York with Nellie for the first time. On an impulse, he walked into the World Bldg. and introduced himself. They knew his work; they hired him immediately. Tall, slender and erect—he stood like a pouter pigeon, shoulders back and chest thrust out—Chapin dressed with an exaggerated elegance: wasp-waisted tweed or herringbone suits, always with a calendula or gardenia in his buttonhole; spats; and selections from his collections of pearl tie pins, watch fobs, studs and flamboyant ascot ties in such colors as “baby blue, pink, orange, purple, and red.” His thin gray hair was trimmed daily and he exuded bay rum. He was grim-faced and square-jawed, with an ashen complexion and a military mustache. And his voice was a nasal blend of snarl and whine.

Allen Churchill’s admirable Park Row describes his response to the greatest single loss of life in the city’s history before Sept. 11. The General Slocum, an excursion steamer, burned in the East River. The final death toll was 1021. Eyewitnesses saw “women on fire and holding children in their arms running about the deck…women and children going over the rail by the dozens…” Charred and mangled bodies lay in piles along the beach or floated in the blackened water.

At the World, the rewrite men taking down the details burst into tears. Some vomited. However, Chapin strutted about the city room, humming a happy tune. “He would run up and down, peering over shoulders to read the nauseating details of the tragedy as they were typed out. Then, standing erect, he would shout, ‘Women and children jumping overboard with clothing afire! Water full of charred bodies!'” The dead and bereaved were immaterial to his good fortune: he was editing a great paper that was covering a great story.

Thus, when New York City Mayor William J. Gaynor was shot in 1910, a World photographer kept snapping pictures. When the photographs came out of the darkroom, Chapin rejoiced: “Blood all over him, and an exclusive, too!” A World story led to the arrest of a swindler for murder. Chapin rubbed his hands together. Walker wrote that someone “remarked that he seemed to be feeling his oats. ‘Why shouldn’t I be happy?’ asked the spirit of sweetness and light. ‘I’ve started a man on the way to his electric chair.’”

He loved firing people: for being two minutes late, for staying home to minister to a sick family, for being knocked unconscious in pursuit of a story. He even fired Joseph Pulitzer Jr., his boss’ son, for absenteeism and lateness. The father said not a word. Chapin once took a dislike to a particular piece of copy and fired its writer. As the reporter headed for the door, Chapin barked to the entire city room, “That is the 108th man I’ve fired.” Perhaps this explains why Irvin Cobb, one of his best reporters, was present on the unusual day when Chapin telephoned the office to report sick. “Let us hope,” Cobb said, “it’s nothing trivial.”

Chapin wrote, “I was boss of the office for more than twenty years and…in all those twenty years I never saw or spoke to a member of the staff outside the office or talked to them in the office about anything except the business of the minute. I gave no confidences, I invited none. I was myself a machine, and the men I worked with were cogs. The human element never entered into the scheme of getting out the paper. It was my way of doing things.”

He expected his men to know what they were doing. If they did, he allowed them complete freedom to do their work. If they did not, he fired them. Once a reporter asked Chapin what to do next about covering a fire. Chapin snapped, “Go pick the hottest place and jump into it.”

Walker writes that a reporter, writing of the discovery of a body in the East River, referred to the “melancholy waters.” “Pretty good phrase, that,” said Chapin. He was overheard. For days, the Harlem River, the Gowanus Canal and the Spuyten Duyvil all developed melancholy waters. Chapin ordered that the next man who used the phrase would be fired. A new reporter had not heard the warning. The next day, his first story was of a suicide in the Hudson. The article began, “The melancholy waters of the Hudson…”

Chapin called him over. “You’re fired. ‘Melancholy waters’! Now, look here, in all sense how could the waters of the Hudson be melancholy?”

“Perhaps,” the young man replied, “it was because they had just gone past Yonkers.”

“Not bad,” Chapin said. “You’re hired.”

He came to speak almost exclusively in newspaper terms. Churchill claims he couldn’t say, “Hurry up with the story of the child who was killed.” Rather, it was, “Hurry up with TINY TOT WITH PENNY CLUTCHED IN CHUBBY FIST DIES UNDER TRAIN BEFORE MOTHER’S EYES.”

Chapin’s lavish lifestyle, complete with limousine and yacht (he had lived in the Plaza from before the day it opened to the public), concealed a morass of debt. He had been related by marriage to Russell Sage, the financier and usurer. After moving to New York, Chapin had cultivated the old miser, who had led the editor to believe he would inherit a fortune. Chapin anticipated his inheritance in luxurious living. When Sage died, he left Chapin almost nothing.

By the summer of 1918, Chapin was wiped out and he began to go mad. There is literally nothing in the record to indicate anything other than mutual devotion in his marriage. However, he obsessively believed Nellie would be unable to bear his financial collapse, and so he resolved to kill her.

Perhaps it was more a matter of the guilt being unbearable for him. (Interestingly, Eugene O’Neill, who had a copy of Chapin’s autobiography in his library, has Hickey use a similar rationalization for murdering his wife in The Iceman Cometh.)

Chapin spent the weekend of Sept. 15-16, 1918, at home with Nellie. He mailed a suicide note to the World’s business manager, Don C. Seitz, on the evening of Sunday, Sept. 16. Around 6 a.m. on Monday, as Nellie slept, Chapin drew a police special from under the bed, pointed it at a spot slightly above her right ear and pulled the trigger. For two hours, she moaned in agony. Chapin held her, weeping, speaking of nothing but love and beauty and joy. Then she died.

Chapin breakfasted and dressed for the office. He hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door to his suite. Then he began traveling the subways and elevated railways to Central Park, Bronx Park and Prospect Park, where a police officer came along as he was raising the revolver to his head.

Meanwhile, Seitz had received his letter. Mail was delivered much more quickly for three cents in 1918 than for 34 cents now. He telephoned Chapin’s hotel. The hotel manager and a police officer entered Chapin’s suite with a house key.

Chapin left the subway at W. 66th St., where he bought a paper and saw his name staring up at him from the headline: CHARLES CHAPIN WANTED FOR MURDER.

Then he became sane again. He surrendered at the nearest police station and never breathed again as a free man. In mid-January 1919, he pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life. He complained of how the newspapers handled the stories of his crime. “What’s the newspaper business coming to?”

Chapin adapted to prison life. In 1919, he was asked to edit the prison newspaper, The Star of Hope. According to James McGrath Morris’ Jailhouse Journalism, Chapin transformed the paper into an advocate for inmates’ rights. The prison authorities shut him down. Major Lewis E. Lawes, a new warden, who later wrote bestsellers such as Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, suggested that Chapin expand his autobiographical articles into a book, which he did.

Chapin took up gardening. Lawes let him direct a Garden Squad, which transformed the bleak compound with flowers. Chapin would probably have been paroled in 1933. However, in the fall of 1930, Lawes told him Sing Sing was being renovated. The garden would be ploughed under.

Chapin took to his bed. Lawes visited him. “Do you want anything?” “Yes,” Chapin replied. “I want to die. I want to get it over with.”

On Dec. 16, 1930, Hard-boiled Charlie turned his face to the wall. He had believed he would die in Sing Sing from the moment he had been assigned the number 69690. The individual digits totaled 30: the number a newspaper reporter types at the end of a story.

New York Press, April 16, 2002

The Wickedest Man in the World

In the summer of 1916, while staying in a New Hampshire cottage, Aleister Crowley crucified a frog that he had baptized Jesus of Nazareth. The man who called himself the Beast 666 offered it gold, frankincense and myrrh; he worshipped it as God incarnate and then arrested and charged it

In the summer of 1916, while staying in a New Hampshire cottage, Aleister Crowley crucified a frog that he had baptized Jesus of Nazareth. The man who called himself the Beast 666 offered it gold, frankincense and myrrh; he worshipped it as God incarnate and then arrested and charged it with blasphemy and sedition. He cried out:

All my life long thou hast plagued me and affronted me. In thy name, with all other free souls in Christendom, I have been tortured in my boyhood; all delights have been forbidden unto me; all that I had has been taken from me, and that which is owed me they pay not in thy name. Now, at last, I have thee: the Slave-God is in the power of the Lord of Freedom. Thine hour is come; as I blot thee out from this earth, so surely shall the eclipse pass; and Light, Life, Love, and Liberty be once more the Law of Earth. Give thou place to me, O Jesus, thine aeon is passed; the Age of Horus has arisen by the Magick of the Master, the Beast that is Man; and his number is six hundred and three score and six.

Then he condemned the frog to be mocked and spat upon and scourged and crucified, and it was done.

The Beast had landed in New York in late October 1914, after an uneventful voyage from Southampton aboard RMS Lusitania, and settled on West 36th Street. He had come to sell copies of his more esoteric published works to John Quinn, the lawyer and Maecenas of prewar New York.

Some thought Crowley a poet and adventurer. In 1900, he had scaled Mexico’s 17,000-foot extinct volcano Ixtacihuatl and the 14,000-foot Popocatepetl. A year later, he climbed the Himalayan peak known as K2, going higher than any man had before, without oxygen cylinders or elaborate equipment. In 1905, he attempted Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world.

But others knew him as an occultist. They thought him a fraud, pervert, traitor and black magician. Some whispered he was a Satanist. A few thought him the Antichrist.

Thus, Somerset Maugham’s The Magician, published in 1908, had presented Crowley, very thinly disguised, as the monstrous Oliver Haddo. After the book’s publication, Crowley murmured to Maugham, “I almost wish that you were an important writer.” He then published, under the pen name Oliver Haddo, an article illustrating Maugham’s flagrant plagiarism of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau as well as books on magic and medicine.

Edward Alexander Crowley (from early manhood he had used the Gaelic equivalent of his second name, Aleister) was born on October 12, 1875, in Leamington, Warwickshire. He was the only son of a wealthy brewer. His parents were rigidly puritanical. Crowley seems to have been a difficult child: By his own admission, at the age of eleven, he tested his cat’s nine lives on Christmas Eve 1886 by poisoning, chloroforming, gassing and defenestrating the animal, which failed the test.

His father died while Crowley was young, and Aleister inherited 50,000 pounds when he came of age, roughly equivalent to two million dollars today. He went through it in fifteen years.

His talents were undeniable: He was intelligent, poetic, and skilled at mathematics, chess, and mountaineering. He was witty: During Crowley’s stay in America, Theodore Dreiser, hunting for the word for a young swan, asked Crowley, “What is it? What would you call a young swan?”

“Why not call him Alfred?” Crowley replied.

But he was unstable. Perhaps there was not one but many Crowleys. He seemed to imagine himself a different man at every moment: the English gentleman and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; the visionary; the mountaineer; the world teacher; the debauchee.

He was a superb poetic technician with an exquisite, jeweled Swinburnean style. He also delighted in inventing witty, if obscene, limericks on the spur of the moment. Thus, his clerihew on the Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni de’Bazzi ended: “They called him Sodoma/ Which was not a misnomer.”

One may imagine where ends the poem whose lines include “my mistress, my Great Dane, and I,” or the content of “Necrophilia” and “A Ballad of Passive Paederasty.” Most of these appear in his best-known collection, White Stains, first published in 1898 by Leonard Smithers, then Britain’s leading pornographer.

He reacted to his parents’ religious fanaticism by rejecting Christianity. Yet his work’s effect relies on Scripture, even to his self-assumed title, from the 13th chapter of Revelations: “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”

He was fascinated by magic (or, as he spelled it, magick). This was wholly different from mere prestidigitation-the parlor tricks of a David Copperfield, for example. Crowleyan magic might be defined as the disciplined exercise of a wholly focused and trained consciousness upon a given task, summoning an occult force to influence the effects of natural law. This is done by a particular ritual which must be correctly performed at a cosmically suited time to put the desired force into action. As Francis King wrote in Ritual Magic in England, “All the adjuncts of Ceremonial Magic-lights, colors, circles, triangles, perfumes-are merely aids to concentrating the will of the magician into a blazing stream of pure energy.”

To these, Crowley added drugs and sex. He experimented with peyote and other psychedelic drugs long before Timothy Leary, or before Aldous Huxley wrote Doors of Perception. Crowley believed his lust drove him to commit acts of magic, not perversion. He wrote, “Some see a phallus in every church spire. Why not see a church spire in every phallus?”

It is simply factual that he engaged in animal sacrifice, heterosexual orgies, bloody scourgings, bestiality and sodomy. Though he considered his more intimate male relationships to be such as “the Greeks considered the greatest glory of manhood and the most precious prize of life,” he did not shun promiscuous, anonymous bathhouse sex. He liked to think he had revived the religious mysteries of classical times and that his “Orgia,” whether with woman, man, dog or goat (or any three together) were like those in the Golden Age.

Yet despite what might seem (and what might have been) self-indulgence, he did not lack self-discipline: He had learned to meditate with a profoundly focused contemplation; he had learned yoga in Ceylon, mastering through the day-to-day drudgery and discomfort of repeated practice the positions, the breathing, the mantras by which he forced his mind into concentration.

But he lacked humility and true self-knowledge. His growing self-confidence swelled into megalomania, and he believed he had so developed his occult talents as to rise beyond the human: He wrote of passing over the Abyss, the gulf between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, and then of becoming first a Master, then a Magus, and finally Ipsissimus, which is to say a god.

Thus, according to Crowley, on April 8, 9 and 10, 1904, while he was in Egypt, a nonhuman entity named Aiwass dictated to him a prose-poem in three chapters totaling 65 pages, Liber AL vel Legis, The Book of the Law. It referred to the Beast, who appears in the Book of Revelations, as the prince priest of a new age and to the Scarlet Woman as his partner. It enunciated the dogma, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

Crowley saw this book as the basis of a post-Christian religion. To further its cause, he created an order, an occult fraternity (after all, a magician without an order is like a politician without a party). He borrowed from the ritual and degree structure of the Golden Dawn, in which he, William Butler Yeats, and others had been initiates, and drew on its teachings and practices, rewriting them into a more comprehensible form while grafting onto them his interests in yoga and other Oriental practices.

But he exhausted his funds, and so he came to New York. He published occasional articles in Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, including a series entitled, “The Revival of Magick.” More importantly, he was reintroduced to George Sylvester Viereck, a fine poet and writer who was also a hopeless Germanophile. Crowley, with his usual gratitude for material favors, described Viereck as approaching him “with extended hands, bulging eyes, and the kind of mouth which seems to have been an unfortunate afterthought.” Viereck offered him a job writing pro-German articles for the magazine The Fatherland, which was probably subsidized with German secret service funds. Crowley was also hired to edit another Viereck magazine, The International, which he largely wrote himself; it was the only salaried job he held in his life.

Crowley later argued he was in no sense a traitor to his country; rather, he was serving it by writing propaganda so silly as to bring Germany into disrepute. He might have been telling the truth. He wrote an article in which he compared the Kaiser to Parsifal. In another, he wrote about German air raids on London: “A great deal of damage was done at Croydon, especially at its suburb Addiscombe, where my aunt lives. Unfortunately her house was not hit. Count Zeppelin is respectfully requested to try again. The exact address is Eton Lodge, Outram Road.”

In the meantime, he sought a Scarlet Woman to be his regular partner in acts of sex magic. Several of them came and went, more than one repelled by Crowley’s insistence on anal sex, which he called intercourse “by the unspeakable vessel.” He treated them without tenderness: One mistress, whom he named the “Dog-headed Hermes or Anubis,” was usually called the Dog for short; he called another the Camel.

In January 1919, he met Leah Hirsig, a New York City schoolteacher whom he found overpoweringly attractive, and asked her to be his Scarlet Woman. She accepted, no doubt considering this more agreeable than life in the classroom. Then he marked her with the Sign of the Beast. John Symonds, Crowley’s biographer and literary executor, wrote in The Great Beast, “He branded her breast with a Chinese dagger already heated in the fire, with the Mark of the Beast: the cross within the circle, or the sun, moon, and balls dependent.

Thereafter, they lived together at 63 Washington Square South.

He saw the third volume of his magazine, The Equinox, through the press. In December 1919, the Great Beast sailed for England, leaving a trail of bouncing checks.

Ahead lay his adventures in Sicily, where he attempted to perform a rite Herodotus had observed in a temple in Egypt of the Pharaohs: a priestess copulating with a goat. Leah, who may have endured as Scarlet Woman longer than anyone else, was more than willing. The goat, not having been brought up to respond to a human female, refused. “I atoned for the young He-goat at considerable length,” wrote Crowley in his diary.

Mussolini’s government expelled him, and he became a penniless wanderer, living on the fees and offerings of his followers, still writing, publishing and teaching. Even his signature became obscene, as he chose to form the A as a penis, with a small loop at the base of each arm of the letter. He went from one furnished room to another, spending his last two years in Hastings, a seaside resort town, at Netherwood, a boarding house run by a man with an odd sense of humor. His “House Rules” included:

Guests are requested not to tease the Ghosts.

Breakfast will be served at 9 a.m. to the survivors of the Night.

The Hastings Borough Cemetery is five minutes walk away (ten minutes if carrying body), but only one minute as the Ghost flies.

Guests are requested not to cut down bodies from trees.

The Office has a certain amount of used clothing for sale, the property of guests who no have no longer any use for earthly raiment.

Here, the Ipsissimus died of bronchitis and cardiac degeneration on December 5, 1947. At his funeral in the chapel of the Brighton municipal crematorium, an old friend recited Crowley’s Gnostic Mass, including the violently pagan and erotic “Hymn to Pan,” and closed with this collect:

Unto them from whose eyes the veil of life has fallen may there be granted the accomplishment of their true Wills; whether they will absorption in the Infinite, or to be united with their chosen and preferred, or to be in contemplation, or to be at peace, or to achieve the labor and heroism of incarnation on this planet or another, or in any Star, or aught else, unto them may there be granted the accomplishment of their wills; yea, the accomplishment of their wills.

Then they gave up his body to be burned.

New York Press, September 7, 1999

The Unsubtle Knife

Several recent obituaries of June Carter Cash referred to her early years as part of the Carter Family, singing over XER, a border blaster, one of the extraordinarily powerful radio stations broadcasting to U.S. audiences from south of the Rio Grande. XER was founded in 1931 by Dr. John R. Brinkley, whose scalpel made, as one admirer said, “the dead bough quicken and turn green again.” Brinkley took roughly $12 million between 1917 and 1942 from aging men who wanted to be “sweetly dangerous among the ladies once more.” His secret: goat glands transplanted into the scrota of some 16,000 men.

As early as the 1840s, according to David M. Friedman’s A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, German physiologist Arnold Berthold was experimenting with transplanting rooster testicles. Shortly after World War I, Russian surgeon Serge Voronoff began transplanting testicles obtained from apes into elderly men who reported “renewed vigor.” He eventually performed more than 1,000 procedures at $5,000 a pop.

Gene Fowler, the Hearst journalist who organized the first known American monkey gland transplant as a publicity stunt to increase his newspaper’s circulation, had feared being unable to find “a man who [would] permit a doctor with a knife in his hand to start fooling around with his swinging trinkets.” Thousands of limp and flaccid men soon proved him wrong.

Though aspects of his autobiography varied from telling to telling, John Romulus Brinkley consistently claimed a birthday of July 8, 1885. He reported having been born in a log cabin and graduated from high school in Tuckasiegee, North Carolina. In 1908, while a Western Union telegrapher in Chicago, he began attending Bennett Medical College. He dropped out before his senior year. Four years later, Brinkley obtained a Tennessee license to practice medicine as an “undergraduate physician”—apparently some kind of learner’s permit.

He worked for one Dr. Burke, who was a “men’s specialist,” his office decorated with papier-mâché models of male organs that illustrated the wages of indiscretion. Once a prospect had been terrified by the prospect of tertiary syphilis, selling him a treatment was easy. Then Brinkley opened a medical office in Greenville, South Carolina. He advertised in the local daily, asking “Are You a Manly Man Full of Vigor?” The suckers came in droves. Brinkley gave them injections directly into the hip at $25 a shot. He claimed it was salvarsan or neo-salvarsan; it was really distilled water. Two months later, Brinkley skipped town, stiffing both landlord and newspaper.

In June 1913, Brinkley resurfaced in St. Louis, Missouri, where he received an M.D. from a diploma mill, the National University of Arts and Sciences, for a few hundred in cash. It fooled Arkansas, which licensed him as a physician; the Arkansas license, in turn, persuaded Kansas to license him too. Brinkley later obtained a second M.D. from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City, Missouri, whose proprietor, Professor Date R. Alexander, once rebuked a reporter for printing that he sold medical diplomas for $200. (“That’s a deadly insult,” Alexander complained. “I never sold one for less than $500.”)

Brinkley’s career in World War I was brief: one month and five days on duty and one month and three days in hospital, followed by release as unfit, partially due to multiple rectal fistulas. The former lieutenant drifted to Milford, Kansas, which had no sidewalks, electric lights, or water system. But he was down to his last twenty-three bucks, so he rented an old drugstore for $8 a month and began a general practice.

One night a man came in, a self-described “flat tire” who complained of being “All in. No pep.” Somehow, the subject of goats came up. “You wouldn’t have any trouble if you had a pair of those buck glands in you,” Brinkley said.

“Well, why don’t you put ’em in?” the man replied affably.

Brinkley performed the operation in his back room. The procedure involved administering a local anesthetic, opening the scrotum by incision from both sides, and—as he later wrote—“[placing] the glands of a three weeks’ old male goat…upon the non-functioning glands of a man, within twenty minutes of the time they are removed from the goat.” Within two weeks, his first patient had “regained his pep.” Within a year, the man and his wife had a healthy child, named Billy to honor the goat. Then another man came in, with a … kidney problem. Brinkley whetted his scalpel, and the second patient reported complete rejuvenation. Thousands would follow. Brinkley had found his niche.

The medical establishment held that a recipient’s immune system would either encapsulate or entirely reject animal glands. Nonetheless, Brinkley firmly maintained that goat glands renewed their recipients’ physical and mental vigor; indeed, he eventually asserted that his procedure transformed its beneficiary into “the-ram-that-am-with-every-lamb” while also curing insanity, acne, influenza, and high blood pressure. Numerous patients publicly swore the procedure worked. Soon, the Doc was charging $750—in advance—and the patient selected his own goat.

By 1923, Brinkley was also running a radio station—KFKB (Kansas First, Kansas Best)—that broadcast weather reports and live country music as well as “Medical Question Box,” in which Brinkley himself read letters from listeners, mostly women, on their ailments and complaints. The medications he prescribed over the air were coded (e.g., “Dr. Brinkley’s No. 101”) and could only be filled by druggists who carried Brinkley’s products, kicking back $1 to the Doc for each prescription. With a warm, down-home voice and a knack for providing listeners with the answers they wanted to hear, he was perfect for radio.

Despite his affability, the Doc was amazingly vain. Sadie Luck, one of Milford’s public librarians, later recalled:  “He autographed everything with his initials. I counted them on his Cadillac once and, hubcaps and all, his initials were on that car seventeen times!” In 1928, vanity finally overcame common sense. Hygeia, the American Medical Association’s magazine, called him a quack. Brinkley sued for libel and lost. The AMA then denounced him to the Kansas Board of Medical Registration and Examination, which revoked his medical license for immorality and unprofessional conduct.

Worse, the Federal Radio Commission yanked his broadcast license after a hearing on June 20-22, 1930, holding that his operations were not serving the public interest. Some argued that Brinkley’s candor about sex had been fatal; others noted that the politically influential Kansas City Star‘s radio station was losing advertisers to KFKB. Of course, the commission might simply have thought Brinkley a fraud and swindler.

Still, KFKB had made Brinkley famous. He believed his licenses might be regained through political influence. Although only forty-two days remained until election day, and it was too late to have his name printed on the ballots, Brinkley announced his write-in candidacy for governor of Kansas. As his attorneys had appealed the commission’s decision to the federal courts, the actual suspension was delayed until the appeal could be heard. Thus, he stayed on the air throughout his campaign.

The Democrats and Republicans thought him absurd. His name wasn’t even on the ballot and his platform promised something for everyone: free school books, free auto tags, lower taxes, better times for the working people, lakes in every county, and increased rainfall. But Brinkley was a great salesman, with a knack for anti-establishment rhetoric in a state sliding into the Great Depression.

Every day, after several hours on the radio, he would stump the state in his sixteen-cylinder Cadillac limousine and his private plane. He drew enormous crowds to mass gatherings that mixed “elements of a fundamentalist revival meeting with the mood of a state fair.” One witness wrote, “The man glittered. Standing on the platform with the sun shining on his white beard, his gold-rimmed spectacles, his rings, watch-fobs, cuff-links and tie-pins, he seemed to glow, wink and twinkle like a…Christmas tree. And, could he talk… We hung on every word, our mouths agape… The man was magical, and his words were wonderful. I didn’t understand any of it.”

In the last days of the campaign, the state attorney general ruled that only ballots bearing precisely the words J.R. Brinkley would be counted for the doctor. This saved Kansas for the system. On Election Day 1930, as many as 50,000 ballots bearing variations on his name, such as Dr. Brinkley or John Brinkly, were discarded. Even so, the vote was Woodring (Dem.), 217,171; Haucke (Rep.), 216,920; and Brinkley, 183,278.

Brinkley relocated to Del Rio, Texas, just on the Rio Grande. In the neighboring town of Villa Acuna, Mexico, Brinkley built a transmitter with towers some 300 feet tall. XER (“The Station Between the Nations”) went on the air with 100,000 watts on October 21, 1931. Soon, thanks to Brinkley’s lobbyists in Mexico City, the station began using 500,000 watts, then one million watts. (The most powerful U.S. stations were limited to 50,000 watts. ) XER thus blanketed North America, unrestrained by U.S. regulations.

XER broadcast folksy lectures from Doc Brinkley, who answered questions from listeners about anything from astronomy to religion. Brinkley held forth on his special “x-ray and microscopical as well as chemical examinations” designed to diagnose properly “the disease that’s in your body, the disease that’s destroying your earning power, the disease that’s causing you to keep your nose to the grindstone and spend every dollar that you can rake and scrape.” He pleaded with those listening, “You men, why are you holding back? You know you’re sick, you know your prostate’s infected and diseased… Well, why do you hold back? Why do you twist and squirm around on the old cocklebur…when I am offering you these low rates, this easy work, this lifetime-guarantee-of-service plan? Come at once to the Brinkley Hospital before it is everlastingly too late.”

XER had Bible-thumping preachers and astrologers. Entrepreneurs pitched get-rich-quick schemes: oil wells, real estate deals, lottery tickets, all spectacular opportunities for enrichment, and 100 percent guaranteed. Frank the Diamond Man sold genuine simulated diamond rings. There was The Lord’s Last Supper Tablecloth, the man who sold false teeth by mail, and the cures for hemorrhoids, flatulence, and that tormenting rectal itch. XER was also the first major national radio station to broadcast country music, from the Carter Family to Hank Williams.

During the late 1930s, Brinkley, who increasingly blamed his legal troubles on Jewish doctors, began broadcasting rabble-rousing anti-Semites such as Father Charles Coughlin and Rev. Gerald Winrod, the Kansas Hitler. In 1938, while staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, Brinkley met William Dudley Pelley, chief of the fascist Silver Shirt Legion of America, and gave him $5,000.

During the early days of World War II, he opened a flight school. Its XER advertisements claimed untruthfully that its students would receive draft deferments. Hustling to the end, Brinkley died on May 26, 1942. He was only fifty-six. One of his patients summed him up: “I knowed he was bilking me, but that’s okay. You see, I liked him anyway.”

New York Press, May 28, 2003

Wild Rose MacDowell

On December 14, 1894 Edward MacDowell performed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl. Although it had been first performed in Boston some five years before, the concerto had not previously been performed here. After all, before

On December 14, 1894 Edward MacDowell performed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl. Although it had been first performed in Boston some five years before, the concerto had not previously been performed here. After all, before the advent of the phonograph and the radio, orchestral music could be heard only in live performance.

Thus, the piece was in a very real sense new to New Yorkers—and MacDowell himself was a magnificent pianist at the top of his form. He triumphed, and in the hour of performance, his work seemed to stand on the edge of immortality. W. J. Henderson of the New York Times found the concerto impossible to speak of “in terms of judicial calmness, for it is made of the stuff that calls for enthusiasm…here is one young man who has placed himself on a level with the men owned by the world.”

In fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, the New York–born MacDowell was world-renowned as America’s greatest living composer. His concerti, sonatas, tone poems, and song cycles were being performed throughout Europe, in Japan, even in South Africa. Some contemporaries—Seidl in particular—declared him superior to Brahms. Yet today, he is nearly forgotten.

He was born Edward Alexander MacDowell, at 220 Clinton Street in Manhattan, on December 18, 1860. His father was a prosperous wholesale milk dealer who loved the arts; his mother, having seen to it that he knew French, Spanish, German, Latin, and Greek, arranged his first piano lessons. In 1876 he was sent to the Paris Conservatoire, then as now one of the world’s leading conservatories.

At sixteen MacDowell was the youngest applicant in a pool of 300, and his performance in the entrance examinations won him one of the two scholarships awarded that year to foreign students. Yet he found the Conservatoire’s method of teaching piano—which relied heavily on sight-reading skills—to be pointless and absurd. His instructors wanted him to play music with the score turned upside down or to transpose it into a different key, and directed him to correct the work of earlier composers, such as Bach, so as to make it conform to the Conservatoire’s notions of what constituted proper composition. MacDowell wanted to work and felt he was being taught to play games.

After hearing the Russian virtuoso Anton Rubenstein burn up the piano in a bravura performance of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in B-Flat Minor at the Paris Exposition of 1878, he resolved to leave Paris, where he would never learn to play like that. Despite his youth (he was now eighteen), he won a place at the Frankfurt Conservatory, where most of his classmates were closer to 30. There he found instructors who, as McDowell wrote, dared to teach and play the classics “as if they had actually been written by men with blood in their veins.”

One day, one of MacDowell’s teachers, Joachim Raff, a composer, interrupted MacDowell while he was supposed to be practicing. He was actually just fooling around at the keyboard. Raff asked about the piece MacDowell was working on. Embarrassed at being caught idling, MacDowell, though usually candid, said he was working on a composition. Raff asked to see it when it was done. Feeling trapped (and liking Raff, as well), MacDowell chose to deliver. He wrote his first piano concerto over the next two weeks. Raff glanced at it. Then he scribbled a letter and said, “Take it to Liszt.”

Franz Liszt had created the stereotype of the great Romantic pianist and lived the rock star’s life, groupies and all. Now, in the fall of 1881, he lived in semi-retirement in Weimar. MacDowell arrived at Liszt’s home with Raff’s letter and the concerto’s manuscript. Shyness overcame him; he could not raise his hand to the doorbell, and so he sat in Liszt’s garden for an hour. Then the old man himself came outside and escorted MacDowell into his house. After MacDowell had warmed himself, he played the concerto. Liszt knew a good thing when he heard it and used his influence to have MacDowell’s work placed on concert programs. He also persuaded his own publishers to take the piano concerto.

MacDowell remained in Germany for the next decade, teaching, composing, and performing. He married one of his students, a young American woman named Marian Nevins, in 1884. The marriage was a wonderful success: Marian later wrote, “There was an extraordinary camaraderie between us which we never lost… Until he died, he gave me what few women ever have [from a man], his absolutely undivided affection…”

The first concerto premiered in 1885 and made MacDowell famous overnight. Stirring in mood, dazzling in technique, it provided him with a splendid vehicle for concert performances. So did his fiendishly difficult Witches’ Dance, a bit of showmanship that knocked their socks off across Europe. Critics hailed MacDowell’s mastery of the keyboard, his supreme power and control, as well as his striking stage presence. Tall, slender and broad-shouldered, with muscular arms and hands, he had jet-black hair and flashing blue eyes. All this, along with a flamboyantly waxed dark red mustache, must have made him irresistible.

In 1888, the MacDowells came home. They settled in Boston, then the center of American musical life. There MacDowell taught and went on national concert tours. His piano miniatures Woodland Sketches and New England Idylls, his settings of “To a Wild Rose” and “To a Water Lily” were on drawing room pianos throughout the country even as his larger works were being performed from Portland to San Francisco. During his Boston years, he wrote four massive piano sonatas, the Tragica, Eroica, Norse. and Keltic, each investing (or warping, as MacDowell self-deprecatingly said) the sonata form with symphonic grandeur.

On January 23, 1896 MacDowell gave a return performance of his Concerto with the Boston Symphony at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Seth Low, president of Columbia University, was in the audience. Earlier that year, Columbia had received a grant to establish its first professorship of music. In April 1896, Low offered MacDowell the job. He was thirty-five years old.

MacDowell was the music department. He taught seven year-long courses, each meeting two to three hours weekly, and—without teaching assistant or secretary—dealt with everything from purchasing desks, pianos, and library books to hiring outside lecturers, ordering chalk, and keeping the instruments in tune. (He often retuned them himself—it was easier than fighting with the university’s business managers, who refused to understand that pianos do go out of tune.) MacDowell slaved over the organization and content of his lectures to have them appear spontaneous, and also provided substantial individual instruction and individual examinations.

In 1901, Seth Low was elected mayor of New York and resigned from Columbia’s presidency. His successor, Nicholas Murray Butler, was a very different kind of man—a power seeker, far more interested in administration and in the idea of the educator than in ideas themselves, though he had taught philosophy. A mere five years in the classroom had convinced Butler that education was a science. He had founded Teachers College, successfully lobbied for compulsory state licensing of teachers (all of whom were required to have a degree in education, thus promoting the interests of the education industry), and advocated the centralization of the New York City schools, all reflecting Butler’s faith that centralized authority in the hands of men such as himself inevitably led to improvement.

Unfortunately, MacDowell chose this moment to propose restructuring Columbia’s curriculum, passionately arguing that some education in at least one of the fine arts was as essential as in science or history. Butler opposed the idea, largely because the mainstream faculty felt threatened and it seemed more politic to soothe their feelings. But MacDowell persisted. Butler saw this as a challenge to his own authority and vision for Columbia. He was not above spreading sly, personal speculations about MacDowell’s character, temperament, and intelligence among colleagues—all behind the composer’s back. MacDowell’s proposal was definitively turned down in September 1903. He resigned the following February.

In March 1905, MacDowell was knocked down by a hansom cab at Broadway and 21st Street. One wheel rolled over his spine: the injuries were physically and emotionally debilitating. He had been depressed since his resignation; now his depression darkened. Over the summer, his hair turned white. By November, his gait had become unsteady. His physicians never quite diagnosed his illness: Alan H. Levy, his most recent biographer, speculates that his depression, deepened by his physical injuries, led to a progressive aphasia. By the winter of 1905–06, he was dying. Friends raised funds to defray his medical expenses. Seth Low privately gave $2,000 to Marian MacDowell and lent the MacDowells his car. Butler didn’t even send a get-well card.

Now he was attended by a full-time nurse and a servant who carried him about. By the summer of 1907, he no longer recognized his parents. On January 23, 1908 his wife said to him, “Won’t you give me a kiss?” He managed to pucker his lips. He looked at her for the first time in days with something like recognition. Then he stopped breathing. He was forty-six years old.

His reputation was as the wild rose that fades. By the 30s, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, who should have known better, dismissed MacDowell and his contemporaries as genteel, over-gentlemanly, and bourgeois. Copland claimed that none of them wrote with fire in the eye: “There were no Dostoyevskys, no Rimbauds among them; no one expired in the gutter like Edgar Allan Poe.”

Alan H. Levy has called this phenomenon “the great erasure.” He suggests that the Copland generation wanted to believe itself the first American composers in whom the nation could take pride. They weren’t, of course, but the eclipse of MacDowell and the composers of his generation reflects how the Depression-era seizure of the nation’s musical establishment by the left sent much of America’s musical culture down the memory hole. Thomson finally admitted, shortly before his death, that MacDowell’s reputation might supplant that of MacDowell’s contemporary Charles Ives, whose cantankerous personality and freakish originality long charmed the critics. Only in the last few years have people begun quietly admitting that most of Ives’s so-called major works are unlistenable.

Nicholas Murray Butler remained president of Columbia until 1945. During World War I, he purged the faculty of antiwar professors and did the same to leftists during the 1930s and 1940s. The Republicans nominated him for vice president in 1912; he sought their presidential nomination in 1920. His support for the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928, one of many attempts between the wars to achieve peace without creating a means to enforce it, won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. He, too, is almost forgotten.

New York Press, April 30, 2003

Mayoral Election Digest: The End of Ideology

The revolutionary left did not contest this year’s municipal elections. The Communist, Socialist, Socialist Labor, and Socialist Workers tickets were not on the ballot. Somehow the ballot seemed incomplete without the SWP’s striking emblem: a lightning bolt shattering the chains of capitalism

[From New York Press, December 4, 2001]

The revolutionary left did not contest this year’s municipal elections. The Communist, Socialist, Socialist Labor, and Socialist Workers tickets were not on the ballot. Somehow the ballot seemed incomplete without the SWP’s striking emblem: a lightning bolt shattering the chains of capitalism wrapped around the globe. As for more idiosyncratic candidacies, one daily reported that Kenny Kramer, the Libertarian mayoral nominee, received 2620 votes, a shade less than one-fifth of one percent of the poll.

Kramer’s claim to fame is derived from Jerry Seinfeld, who used his appearance and personality in creating a character, also named Kramer, in his television comedy. Kramer is merely the latest attempt of the Libertarian Party (in most states, a party of ideas; in New York, a party of stunts) to gain attention by nominating a celebrity to high office. Some may recall the Libertarians nominated Howard Stern for governor some years ago. Stern withdrew from the race on learning that he would have to file public reports about his income and investments—something that all candidates for state office and many civil servants do as a matter of course.

The other minor celebrity in the mayoral race, Bernhard H. Goetz, subway gunman turned vegetarian activist, polled only 1300 votes as the Fusion Party’s candidate. Goetz failed to publish his platform in the city’s Voter Guide. If he had, he might have polled more votes: apparently, upon taking office, Goetz intended to appoint Rudy Giuliani his first deputy mayor and let him continue running the city.

When Kenny Kramer, whose activities largely involve milking his false celebrity, outpolls Bernie Goetz, there may be no justice in this life. At least Goetz performed a socially useful, albeit violent and unlawful, act by shooting four punks who were threatening him on the subway. Thus, for a few weeks, Goetz was among the most popular public figures in the city. Jimmy Breslin seems to have consistently argued that Goetz’s odd, nerdy demeanor at the time of the incident was an open invitation to the punks: that he wanted to be attacked by muggers so he might kill them, in self-defense, of course. Other than Breslin, no one taken seriously suggests this, and not even Breslin argues that a law-abiding subway rider, however odd his appearance, should be harassed with impunity.

The Fusion Party is controlled by Dominick Fusco, an elderly Bronx lawyer of considerable self-importance. His tiny party’s name has historical resonance. Fusion, in New York City politics, traditionally refers to the legal device by which a single candidate, nominated by several parties, aggregates the votes cast for him on each party line. Fusion became synonymous with the reform movement—something wholly different from the so-called Reform Democrats—which historically advocated honest, nonpartisan government in the interests of the wealthy elite. The other piece of any successful reform campaign was the Republican Party, which elects mayors only in coalition with some Democratic splinter group or reform-minded new party.

The City Fusion Party arose in 1933 in response to the scandals in city government revealed by the Seabury hearings. Fiorello La Guardia, nominated by the Republicans and the City Fusionists, polled nearly half his votes on the new party’s ticket. However, the Fusionists had no interest in patronage—the loaves and fishes by which one builds a permanent mass movement. Enthusiasm flags in the absence of a paycheck. By the 1950s, the party had nearly faded away. Its tattered remains—largely the right to use a four-leaf clover as a ballot emblem—became the property of Counselor Fusco, a Republican turned Democrat turned Perotista. No election since the late 1960s has been complete without Fusco or his friends somewhere on the ballot. Fusco last ran for citywide office in 1997, when he polled fewer than 1000 votes running for mayor as a Fusionist. This year, he ran for comptroller on the Fusion ticket with Bernie Goetz and polled 6989 votes. From the Little Flower to the Subway Gunman—what a fall was there, my countrymen. As far as ideas are concerned, Fusco’s remain a mystery: he, too, published no platform in the city’s Voter Guide.

Last and least of the mayoral candidates was Kenneth B. Golding, the nominee of his one-man machine, the American Dream Party. Probably the Board of Elections was too busy running the primary, runoff, and general elections within a few weeks to notice that the very name of Mr. Golding’s party was illegal under section 2-124 of the Election Law, which forbids the use of the word “American” in a party name. But, then, no one noticed Golding, including the voters. I met him briefly on election night, when I was going home from the gym: he was standing near the top of the escalator leading down to the E and F trains at 53rd Street, distributing his fliers and urging people to vote. His platform seemed a tissue of idealism and gentle good will. This didn’t count for much in an age of anxiety: Golding polled 583 votes to come in ninth of nine candidates.

During my ride home, a panhandler entered my subway car, demanding alms because he didn’t rob people or use drugs. The reappearance of the permanent homeless on subway benches seemed somehow symptomatic of the Mayor’s loosening of the reins as he moved toward the end of his second term. Instead of maintaining general public order, the police power seemed focused on punishing ordinary citizens for the crimes of terrorists by forcing us through intrusive personal searches. Liberty—one of the ideas for which this country supposedly stands—is a negative thing. It is simply the right to be left alone in the peaceful conduct of one’s affairs. That right has been destroyed with no effective protest.

One saw it coming even before September 11. Earlier this year, a police officer prevented me from leaving the building in which I work. He simply told me that I couldn’t leave the building. I attempted peaceably to go my way. Then his sergeant came up and said I couldn’t leave the building because the President was in the vicinity. I attempted to step past him. He threatened me with arrest.

Now, I had been convicted of no crime, made no disturbance and was not subject to any court order restraining my passage on a public street. I had not consented to the restraint. However, as I told the sergeant, I obeyed him because he had a gun. Naked force counts for a lot with an unarmed man.

Now some Neanderthal security guard can paw through my briefcase when I enter a public library as well as when I leave one. Deputy U.S. marshals examine my clients’ papers when I enter a federal courthouse. I am compelled to offer the contents of my pockets for examination on entering the Brooklyn and Manhattan municipal buildings. Amidst all this, I keep remembering Ben Franklin’s epigram: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

If one can be so cynical as to suggest someone can earn a public office in the gift of the people, then within the context of New York City’s political system Mark Green had earned the mayoralty. As commissioner of consumer affairs and public advocate, Green had held city offices giving him publicity without power, which meant he made no serious mistakes while becoming and remaining one of the city’s best-known politicians. I had been acquainted with Mark Green for more than two decades, since we opposed each other for a Democratic congressional nomination in 1980. I found him arrogant and condescending. He seemed compelled to prove his intellectual superiority by insulting people. Nonetheless, I voted for him at the 1980 general elections, being a good loser, and voted for him again when he ran for U.S. senator in 1986, as he seemed more qualified than his opponents.

Over his decade in public life, as he ducked and weaved from left to center, he reminded me of the suggestion of Pierre Laval, a brilliant French politician of the years between the World Wars. He once told a youthful rightist, “You’ve made a strategic mistake. When you are young, you should go to the Left. Go as far to the Left as you can. And spend the rest of your life coming back. They’ll think you’re a statesman.” Laval began his career as a revolutionary socialist. He ended up against the wall, shot as a traitor. With Green, one’s distaste stemmed from the sense that his politics had moved to the center from calculation rather than maturity or conviction. This is the sort of thing that weakens one’s faith in a politician’s sincerity. You should believe in something, even if you only believe you’ll have another drink.

Perhaps Green believed—his arrogance can rise to the level of delusion—that his independence of the usual Democratic Party constituencies would enable him to govern without having to pay off the leadership of the unions, the teachers, the blacks and the gays. As we now know, however, you have to win the election before you can govern, and if your party’s constituents don’t turn out for you, you will lose.

This is a kind of institutional veto, and not a bad thing. As a longtime regular Democrat and clubhouse lawyer put it to me as we leaned on the brass rail at Dusk on W. 24th Street, “Mark Green,” he remarked, before pouring most of his Maker’s Mark down his throat, “is a man who has no friends. We”–gesturing grandly to encompass the entire city–“would have been fucked.” The election of Green’s opponent doesn’t guarantee that we won’t be. It proves we knew enough to try to avoid it.

December 4, 2001, New York Press

Albert Jay Nock, Superfluous Man

In 1910, Albert Jay Nock, then forty, joined the American Magazine. His writings, unusually good, were his best credential. Otherwise, no one knew much about him. Writing about Thomas Jefferson years later, he would characterize him as “the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of

In 1910, Albert Jay Nock, then forty, joined the American Magazine. His writings, unusually good, were his best credential. Otherwise, no one knew much about him. Writing about Thomas Jefferson years later, he would characterize him as “the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of acquaintance, impossible of knowledge. In a sense Nock was describing himself.

His secrecy achieves epic grandeur in his brilliant autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943). He does not disclose the place and year of his birth (Scranton; 1870), the names of his parents or the occupation of his father (Joseph Albert Nock, an Episcopal clergyman, and Emma Jay, a descendant of John Jay), the name of his college (St. Stephen’s, now Bard), his twelve years as an Episcopal priest, his failed marriage (he left his wife after his second son was born in 1905), or his brief career in minor league baseball. He felt such information was unnecessary. Memoirs, the book’s publisher noted, was a “purely literary and philosophical autobiography.” A reader might know Nock’s mind through his work without needing to know him.

To our culture, Nock’s secrecy is unnerving. When he worked for The Nation during World War I, he refused to provide his superiors with his home address. During the early twenties, when he was editing The Freeman (a peer of H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, Harold Ross’ New Yorker and Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair for consistently brilliant writing), his editorial staff believed, according to his literary editor, Van Wyck Brooks, that Nock could be contacted outside the office only by leaving a note under a certain rock in Central Park.

Nock read by the age of three. He taught himself in his father’s library until he was eight, when he began studying Latin and Greek with some slight assistance from his father. At fourteen he began formal classical studies while developing his taste for German beer and the local “alfalfa-fed” girls. Then he went to St. Stephen’s. According to Nock, the college was, outside of certain Jesuit institutions, “possibly the last in America to stick by the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.” At graduation Nock felt himself prepared for living, albeit in proud ignorance of the natural sciences since Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny, or any history since 1500, including that of the United States. His education, he believed, had left him without a “lumber of prepossession or formula to be cleared away.”

Nock then bounced among universities, receiving an advanced degree almost by accident, and played minor league baseball. He was ordained in 1897 and served in various parishes until he left the priesthood in 1909. As a journeyman muckraker in New York, Nock wrote memorably about William Wirt’s experiments in progressive education in Gary, Indiana and the lynching of an African-American millworker in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. He knew offbeat reform politicians, including New York Governor Martin Glynn and Mayors William J. Gaynor of New York and Brand Whitlock of Toledo, Ohio.

In 1915, during the first year of WWI, Nock traveled to Europe as an agent of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. According to Michael Wreszin’s The Superfluous Anarchist, Nock was to investigate State Deptartment employees’ surreptitious cooperation with British agents. Apparently, Bryan had no one else he could trust. However, Nock returned to America on Bryan’s sudden resignation on June 9, 1915. What he found and would have told Bryan is unknown.

Nock then worked for The Nation, which so strongly opposed American intervention that the government closed it down. In 1920, he organized The Freeman, which he intended as a radical publication.

Great editors inspire great magazines. Nock claimed only two gifts as an executive. One was judgment of ability: he claimed, “I can smell out talent as quickly and unerringly as a high-bred pointer can smell out a partridge.” The other was his belief that “a good executive’s job is to do nothing, and [one] can’t set about it too soon or stick to it too faithfully.”

Nock never gave orders, assigned subjects or set general policy. He sought merely writers (1) with a definite point of view, (2) stated clearly, (3) using “eighteen-carat, impeccable, idiomatic English.” He told one would-be contributor, “Now you run along home and write us a nice piece on the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you can put it over those three jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would rather do something on a national policy of strangling all the girl-babies at birth, you might do that—glad to have it.”

Nevertheless, the paper had a distinct point of view. When The Nation welcomed The Freeman to “the ranks of liberal journalism,” Nock replied that he didn’t want to seem ungrateful, “but we hain’t liberal. We loathes liberalism and loathes it hard…”

Within two years, success became a bore. On February 10, 1924 after an extended sick leave and a dispute with his backers, Nock announced the magazine would fold with the issue of March 4, 1924. A day later, he sailed for Brussels, his favorite city, where he largely remained for fifteen years.

In 1926 Nock published Jefferson, the first of three biographical studies that occupied him for the next thiteem years. Richard Hofstadter, the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics,dismissively suggested Nock had created a Jefferson with the inner vision, aspiration and values of Albert Jay Nock. Nonetheless, the critics found it “provocative and insightful” and “sparkling, charming, witty, and all the other adjectives inevitably called forth by Nock’s inimitable prose style.”

After lecturing on education at Bard and the University of Virginia, Nock published The Theory of Education in the United States (1932). Education, to Nock, was a preparation for living, to see things as they are. Getting a living is merely a question of training. Few are educable; all can be trained. Certain intellectual and spiritual experiences are open to some and not to others: to Nock, this was simply a fact of nature, such as one’s height.

Nock argued that the distinction of education and training had been destroyed because the meanings of equality and democracy had been perverted. The first now meant “the rabid self-assertion…of ignorance and vulgarity.” Similarly, as he later wrote in Memoirs, “…the prime postulate of democracy is that there shall be nothing for anybody to enjoy that is not open for everybody to enjoy. Hence, despite human experience, everybody must be educable.”

Nock’s intellectual framework shifted in 1932 when the self-professed radical and Jeffersonian stopped believing in the improvability of man. This was catalyzed by Ralph Adams Cram, a distinguished architect, whose essay, “Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings,” appeared in the September 1932 issue of The American Mercury.

Cram’s reputation as an architect (he redesigned the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights) obscures his social criticism. In his essay, he argues that most men do not behave like human beings because they are not human. They are Neolithic barbarians with delusions of grandeur. In Cram’s view, the doctrine of progress—that the most recent stage of human development is superior to earlier stages—is unsupported by recorded history. Cram argued that anthropologists had erroneously categorized all men as human.

Nock soon professed his new faith. He wrote of momentary distress at seeing a man scavenging in a garbage pail. A few minutes later, he was undisturbed at seeing a dog do the same thing. Then he realized his erroneous presumption: that the man was a human being, rather than merely a man. Now, he no longer found any anomaly in a man’s behaving as a brute and not as a human being. To Nock, the distinction between the mob (which he called “mass-men”) and the few who were a glory to the human race (which he called the “Remnant”) was greater than that between the mob and certain higher anthropoids.

Oddly, he claimed he no longer hated anyone or lost patience with anybody. He wrote in Memoirs, “One has great affection for one’s dogs, even when one sees them reveling in tastes and smells which to us are unspeakably odious… One can hate human beings…but one can’t hate subhuman creatures, or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them unkindly… If cattle tramp down your garden, you drive them away but can’t hate them, for you know they are acting up to the measure of their psychical capacity… The mass-men who are princes, presidents, politicians, legislators, can no more transcend their psychical capacities than any wolf, fox, or polecat in the land. How, then, is one to hate them, notwithstanding the appalling evil they do?”

In this frame of mind, he wrote Our Enemy, the State (1935). Nock saw the state as antisocial, commandeered by one group or another of “mass-men” to legalize their appropriation of the product of others’ work without compensation. Revolutions merely reapportioned “the use of the political means” for such exploitation. He argued that most liberal reforms, such as the income tax, merely enhanced state power to further exploitation. If “Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so many trade names for collectivist Statism,” he asked, why should one think more of Roosevelt than of Hitler?

From 1933 to 1939 Nock contributed a current affairs column, “The State of the Union,” to The American Mercury. He consistently assaulted the New Deal’s swineries, both foreign and domestic, and after 1936 argued American foreign policy was conducted to provoke war. In 1941, he published “The Jewish Question in America,” a two-part article in the Atlantic Monthly. Wreszin calls it “subtle and restrained.” Indeed, the prose is elegantly polished; the tone is serenely analytical; the venue is respectable; and the argument favors excluding the Jews through apartheid. Nock claims, as Wreszin says, “that he wished to launch a meaningful dialogue whereby intelligent Americans might probe the bigotry that infested not merely the lower orders but all society…” He claims to be charting “quicksands and rock formations so the piers of some future structure might be secure.”

He argues that Jews, being Orientals, cannot understand or communicate with Americans, who are Occidental. He suggests the Jews have failed to know their place, and anticipates seeing the “Nuremberg Laws reenacted and enforced with vigor.” Finally, Nock dismisses criticism by claiming Jews would be peculiarly unable to understand his meaning.

Thereafter, fewer editors accepted Nock’s articles. He began appearing in Scribner’s Commentator, an odd mixture of general essays and Nazi apologia, until it folded after Pearl Harbor. Finally, he was reduced to reviewing books in the Review of Books, published by Merwin K. Hart’s National Economic Council, a front for the few rightists openly opposed to the war after Pearl Harbor.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man appeared in 1943 to great praise. Clifton Fadiman, that most energetic of second-rank men of letters, wrote, “I have not since the days of the early Mencken read a more eloquently written blast against democracy or enjoyed more fully a display of crusted prejudice. Mr. Nock is a highly civilized man who does not like our civilization and will have no part of it. He is a rare bird, one of an almost extinct species, and as he very properly puts it, a superfluous man. We are not apt to see his like again.” The New York Herald Tribune’s Isabel Paterson wrote, “Whether for instruction or for entertainment, this is a unique book, of instant timeliness and permanent value.”

In Memoirs, published two years before his death, Nock wrote of being asked what he thought were the three most degrading occupations open to man. He replied that the first was holding office in a modern republic. The second was editing an American metropolitan newspaper. As for the third, he was unsure whether it was pimping or managing a whorehouse. He died on August 19, 1945, ten days after the bombing of Nagasaki.

New York Press, January 21, 2001

The Young Lion of Wrath

The rushed decisions are the worst. Imagine being a politician: not an orator or a legislator, but an administrator, one who governs, daily responsible for implementing policies devised by others. Imagine constantly making decisions with incomplete understanding and insufficient knowledge and not enough time to fill either gap; living with the paranoia—after all, does not the word bear translation as “higher knowledge”—that nearly everyone around you has a hidden agenda and plays you for a sucker….

(Pontius Pilate, by Ann Wroe. Random House, New York, 2000. 412 pg., $25.00)

The rushed decisions are the worst. Imagine being a politician: not an orator or a legislator, but an administrator, one who governs, daily responsible for implementing policies devised by others. Imagine constantly making decisions with incomplete understanding and insufficient knowledge and not enough time to fill either gap; living with the paranoia—after all, does not the word bear translation as “higher knowledge”—that nearly everyone around you has a hidden agenda and plays you for a sucker.

Make things darker, more personal, and more dangerous. Your spouse is your only confidant. Your colleagues, the men with whom you work, eat, drink, and relax, would abandon you at a finger snap. The people you govern mistrust you and sometimes hate you enthusiastically.

Worse still, you can draw strength only from the love you bear the institution you serve, from your sense of its tradition, greatness, and enduring glory. Yet the man who gave you the job is monstrous, as are most politicians: a tissue of lusts rising to perversion, insecurities shading to paranoia, and self-confidence curdled into megalomania. Your dinner guests gossip of his misconduct. You “listen in the awful, sinking knowledge” that this man has made you what you are, and sometimes his obscenity sickens you.

Ann Wroe, who edits the American section of The Economist, has written the most remarkable book I have read this year: a biography of a minor politician of the first century. Merely writing the book seems an insuperable challenge. There are nearly no records. Even his numerous public works (an aqueduct, military roads, and public buildings, all probably padding his pocket—bribes were an accepted prerogative of the job, called unguentaria, ointment money)—have vanished. All that remains is a single limestone block found amidst the ruins of Caesarea, bearing a fragmentary inscription with his name and office:

PONTIVS PILATVS
PRAEFECTVS IVDAEAE

Though one of the most famous men in world history, Pontius Pilate, fifth Prefect of Judaea, is a difficult subject. As Wroe found, even the evidence of his existence is fragmentary. Though his name has been uttered daily in prayer for nearly two thousand years, even this is a fragment: we do not know his first name, the praenomen, “the name his mother and wife and friends called him by.” None of his writings survived—not even a leaf of a decade’s daily reports to the Emperor. He must have made thousands of decisions during his decade in power. We remember only one.

Today, the contemporary documents of his existence might be transcribed onto three or four typed pages, double-spaced. Flavius Josephus, a Romanized Jew, mentions him not unfavorably in The Jewish War, written four decades after Pilate’s return to Rome. Philo of Alexandria knew Pilate. He savages him in a few pages of his voluminous works. But Philo hated all Romans and the portrait is two-dimensional. Tacitus mentions Pilate once in the Historia. Even that is a fragment: Tacitus’s chapters for the early thirties are missing and may have said much more. Last, the Dead Sea Scrolls call him “the Young Lion of Wrath.”

Starting with these materials, Wroe studied the Apocrypha (the religious works excluded from the official Bible, early victims of consensus reality) and Pilate’s hagiographies (the Ethiopians consider him a saint, as the means by which the prophecies were fulfilled and one of the first to believe in the Resurrection: “I believe that you have risen and have appeared to me, and you will not judge me…”). She read the surviving Roman literature from his lifetime or shortly before or after for a sense of how he would have seen the world; the “fairy tales, legends, travelogues, guidebooks, to follow where his ghost had walked around Europe”; and numerous lives of Christ to see how commentators have seen Pilate over the last two centuries. She viewed or read the modern works in which Pilate appears as a character, including Antonio Ciseri’s historicist masterpiece, Ecce Homo, which graces the cover.

The result is a beautiful, compelling study of the man who ordered the Crucifixion. Pontius Pilate was a professional soldier, probably not much older than thirty, the statutory minimum for a Roman governor. His temperament and character reflect a man not yet smoothed by experience, efficient but not mature, “enthusiastic, sarcastic, nervous, occasionally brutal.” The Gospels suggest he had a short fuse. All the sources unite on this: he was a man of action, not reflection.

He probably disliked the Jews because they despised him. Even the high priests and Pharisees who dragged Jesus to Pilate’s palace in Jerusalem refused to pass its doors, for Pilate and the Romans were unclean. Then there were the rebels, “mavericks, prophets, and impostors,” the usual cross between bandits, vandals, and freedom fighters. Roman policy favored their comprehensive elimination. His predecessor Gratus crucified hundreds; his successor Varus would crucify thousands. Yet, as his foes agreed, he kept the peace for ten years. The most important messianic disturbance of his rule was suppressed with only three crucifixions.

Wroe notes that his clan, the Pontii, was not Roman but Samnite: Italian tribesmen conquered by the Romans in the third century BC. His family was thus probably respectable, but second class: members of the knightly class, special administrators, and trouble-shooters, never rising to patrician rank.

His cognomen, Pilate, comes from pilatus, “one skilled with the javelin.” It meant more than this, of course: his father or he had excelled with a difficult weapon, showing traits of “decisiveness, strength, straightness of aim.” Yet, the evidence of his political life shows little of that.

Perhaps these traits were unnecessary. As Wroe observes, the Emperor Tiberius preferred unknown quantities in high office. It may have amused him. At best, Tiberius looked for decent behavior and good character. In a pinch, even decent behavior might be dropped: Tiberius appointed Pomponius Flaccus governor of Syria on the strength of a thirty-six hour orgy, endorsing his commission with “A good fellow at all hours, day or night!”

The Emperor was tall, robust, and handsome, slow spoken, with something of an affected drawl, shrewd, suspicious, and devious. He was an alcoholic with a taste for naked swimming-and-sex sessions with minors of both sexes. We are told that some, whom he called his “minnows,” gave him particular pleasure by swimming up to him underwater and taking him in their mouths.

The Emperor believed the revelation of his thought a calamity.  Dio Cassius wrote, “he put many to death for no other offense than having grasped what he meant.” He trusted no one, and of his twenty or so intimates over his seventy-seven years of life, all but two or three were put to death. In a killing mood, “which lasted for most of the time Pilate was governor of Judaea,” he executed people “on the least word of any informer, and informers were everywhere.” Perhaps this is why Pilate, as presented by John the Evangelist, flinches when the Jews suggest that if he spares Jesus, “You are no friend of Caesar’s.”

This mediocrity is the hinge of Western history. The Evangelists were fond of citing famous events to provide a temporal reference for their story. Thus, at the time of the birth of Jesus, Caesar Augustus commands a census be taken so all the world may be taxed. The head tax, literally per capita, could be audited only by taking a census. It was unpopular: Copronius, one of the first prefects, crucified Judas the Galilean, a tax protester. So one would remember, or remember hearing from one’s father, about the census and then paying the tax. Thus, Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas the high priest, Herod the king, were not merely names, characters in a narrative, to the Christians who first read the Gospels, but men, as real in the memory of the First Century as FDR or JFK are in our own.

Pilate is more important than the others, as Wroe observes, “because he stands at the center of the Christian story and God’s plan of redemption. Without his climactic judgment of Jesus, the world would not have been saved. Without Christ’s death, pronounced by Pilate, there would have been no Resurrection, no founding Christian miracle.”

She describes the book in her introduction as a collage of biographical scenes, drawing on a diversity of traditions and writings. Perhaps it is the only way to sketch someone so unknowable. “We long for records, letters, diaries, the memories of friends,” Wroe writes.

As she notes, we cannot presume the Romans to be just like us, save for their clothes and haircuts. We would find them alien. Their sensual appreciation of blood is repellent; their admiration of suicide repugnant; as Wroe notes, Marcus Aurelius, among the noblest men who ever lived, considered putrescence a thing of beauty.

Yet, we know one thing that intrigued Pilate as it does us. At the trial of Jesus of Nazareth as presented by St. John the Evangelist, the defendant and judge endure a frustrating exchange. Pilate asks direct questions. When Jesus answers at all, he is responding on a different plane. The two men are simply not talking about the same things.

At last, Jesus states that he has come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Pilate replies with a question so strange that you know he said it: “What is truth?” or, in Greek, then still the working language of the eastern empire, “Ti estin aletheia?”

Wroe points out the subtle difference: Pilate is speaking of a narrow, particular truth: the truth of facts and testimony and evidence. But Jesus was speaking of “he aletheia”—absolute Truth. Wroe observes, “Jesus was referring to a truth that was overpoweringly different: as different, Polybius had once said, as when a galley rower, trained on skeleton ships on dry land, suddenly felt in the live ocean the pull of the oar and the craft’s response.”

And Pilate? Perhaps, as an Academician, he believed the way of wisdom was acknowledging the uncertainty of knowledge, and he felt the claim of Jesus was recklessly certain. Or perhaps, as Kazantzakis wrote, the Roman believed in nothing at all, “neither in gods nor in men, nor in Pontius Pilate.”

What is truth? The question is relevant to Pilate’s biography, too. In writing the life of a man nearly two thousand years dead, who disappears from the record after his recall from office, one is not transcribing a life. One seeks the truth, or at least, the truths, with a certain resolute desperation.

Yet Wroe gracefully presents the alternative theories of the essential moments in Pilate’s career and of his background (the Italians call him a Spaniard and the French and English a German) without stalling her narrative. Her prose is clear, supple, and quite beautiful. She captures the texture of power, particularly the confusion and exhaustion stemming from its exercise, with clarity and common sense. Anyone who has wielded limited authority has been there: to be tired, confronted by someone who wants something very badly, about which you care little save as it may affect your mission. To grant it is unjust. Yet if you give it to them, they will leave you alone.

She captures this so well. She brilliantly juxtaposes images spanning two millennia—the Dead Sea Scrolls, David Bowie, 19th century academic painters, modernist playwrights—with a dexterous ease that betrays intellectual power and integrity.  Pontius Pilate is impressive, concise, and fast moving, with eloquence that naturally flows from the grandeur of her material rather than a rhetorician’s self-conscious flourishes.

Ann Wroe has not written a book so much about Pilate as all our Pilates: how each generation projects on the tabula rasa that is this man our image of how he lived and saw the world. Yet somehow she gives us the sense of “a man actually walking on a marble floor in Caesarea,” a narrative pieced from a thousand fragments into the outline of a life.

New York Press, June 7, 2000