Tuesday, November 30, 2010

The telegraphist (conclusion)



The reply was almost instantaneous:



Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Of empires and dreams

At first glance, the life of Roger Casement, the British diplomat turned Irish nationalist who was executed for treason in 1916, might not seem an obvious subject for a Peruvian novelist, even one as cosmopolitan as the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature. But after narrating, in the first third of what is at times as much a novelized biography as a biographical novel, how Casement's investigations of atrocities in the Congo led to the unraveling of Leopold II of Belgium's empire in Africa, Mario Vargas Llosa begins a new chapter and a likely explanation emerges:
When, on the last day of August 1910, Roger Casement arrived in Iquitos after some seven weeks of exhausting travel...
Iquitos, where Casement, after the conclusion of his mission to the Congo, was dispatched by the Crown to investigate similar abuses and atrocities on the part of a British-incorporated rubber company, is of course familiar territory for Vargas Llosa, who set parts of several of his earlier novels in that hub of the Peruvian Amazon. But though the chapters devoted to Casement's activities in Peru make up the longest section of the book, they don't overshadow the rest. Tying the novel together, and alternating with the narration of Casement's activities, in the Congo, South America, and Europe, are scenes from Casement's last days, as he awaits execution in a cell in a British prison and reflects on the events of his life.

Born to an Irish Protestant family (his mother retained Catholic sympathies and secretly baptized Roger in the faith), Casement shipped out to Africa as a young man and worked for a time alongside the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Over the course of the twenty years he spent in the Congo he became increasingly disturbed by the ruthlessness with which Leopold's colonial enterprise was being conducted. Ostensibly in the name of civilization and Christianity -- but in fact almost entirely in the service of greed -- the African inhabitants of the Congo Free State were subjected to a pattern of kidnappings, forced labor, savage whippings, amputations, and outright murder, all to ensure that the flow of rubber continued unabated. The number of victims, directly or indirectly, of Leopold's reign is reckoned in the millions. Casement's report to the British government, published in 1904, was instrumental to the successful international campaign to wrest the Congo from the king's control.

Subsequently posted on routine consular duties to Brazil, Casement was soon sent to Iquitos to verify reports of atrocities committed by the Peruvian Amazon Company. During his mission he traveled to remote areas of the Amazon basin that lay well beyond the reach of the government in Lima. His investigations revealed not only abuses at times more horrific than those in the Congo, but also a pattern of official collusion and of persecution of those few journalists and officials who were brave enough or foolhardy enough to try to document the atrocities. As Casement began to name names his own life began to be at risk, and during his second visit to Peru he was dissuaded from venturing into areas that were effectively under the Company's control.

If Casement had withdrawn from public life after presenting the findings of his Peruvian report to the Crown, he would probably be universally regarded as a hero of the anti-colonialist and human rights movements. But there was one more chapter in his eventful life. Increasingly identifying himself with his heritage, he retired from the British Foreign Office and was drawn into the Irish nationalist movement, becoming a friend and ally of militant leaders like Patrick Pearse and Eoin MacNeill, and when war broke out in 1914 he was dispatched by the nationalists as an emissary to the Kaiser's Germany. After attempting with little success to organize a corps of pro-independence soldiers from among the ranks of Irish POWs, he arranged for the delivery by Germany of a shipload of guns and ammunition intended for use during the Easter Uprising of 1916. Infiltrated into Ireland by a U-boat just before the uprising, Casement was quickly captured by the British and subsequently convicted of treason and hanged. His remains were buried in an unmarked grave within the prison grounds, and only repatriated to Ireland in 1965.

Any novelist or biographer depicting Casement's life must deal with the vexed question of the "Black Diaries," ostensibly in Casement's hand, portions of which were revealed by the British government as he awaited execution. The diaries, which describe a series of furtive sexual encounters with other men, were used to help discredit Casement at a time when a number of British and Irish intellectuals (among them George Bernard Shaw, but not Casement's old friend Joseph Conrad) were urging clemency. The controversy over whether or not the diaries are genuine has never been fully settled; Vargas Llosa takes a compromise position, suggesting in an Epilogue -- and perhaps not entirely convincingly -- that though the diaries are genuine some of the events that they narrate may not be.
My own impression -- that of a novelist, to be sure -- is that Roger Casement wrote the famous diaries but that he didn't live them, at least not entirely, that in them there is much exaggeration and invention, that he wrote certain things because he wanted to but could not live them.
El sueño del celta ("The Dream of the Celt," "the Celt" being a nickname given by some of Casement's friends because of the passion he came to develop for Irish history and culture) has just been published by Alfaguara. As the novel would seem to pose no major obstacles to translation (unlike some of the author's earlier works), an English-language version can probably be expected in a year or so.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Thanksgiving in the Five Points (1852)

In the 1850s, the Five Points area in lower Manhattan, a now obliterated slum occupying the area adjoining what are now the Foley Square district and Chinatown, had the reputation -- no doubt to some extent exaggerated -- as the most squalid and depraved neighborhood in New York. The missionary ladies of the Five Points Mission, when not inveighing against drinking, Roman Catholicism, and other perils, organized an annual feast for the children of the mission school and as many of the other local denizens as they could feed. The following description is from The Old Brewery and the New Mission House, by the Ladies of the Mission; New York, Stringer & Townsend, 1854. The feast was held in a large tent in a park called Paradise Square.

The morning of Thanksgiving dawned in cloudless beauty, and as the day advanced, not a shadow dimmed the horizon. The cool, pure atmosphere, and the glowing sunshine, seemed to inspire every heart with courage.

We met in the office of the Old Brewery, formerly the liquor store of the establishment. This was a low, long room, with cracked and stained walls, its only furniture, besides the Missionary's bookcase, being some benches, and the boxes of clothing supplied by our kind friends from abroad. Provisions began to arrive and soon it presented a most ludicrous aspect. Turkeys, chickens, and meats of every kind mingled in sweet confusion with cakes, pies, fruits, &c. — evergreens on the floor, crockery on the window-sills and benches, huge piles of clothing waiting for distribution, visitors pouring in, childish faces peeping through every window and open door — commands, opinions, directions issuing from every quarter.

The tent is sixty feet in diameter, and very lofty. It is circular in form, and around it were tiers of seats, meeting at a small platform, where the speakers stood, at the temperance meetings, and on the Sabbath, to preach.

Eleven o'clock arrived, and notice was given that the tables in the tent were ready for the ladies. The seats had all been removed, and four tables, nearly the length of the tent, and about three feet wide, had been arranged, two on either side of the furnace, leaving wide passages between for the visitors. Soon the evergreens were festooned around by the gentlemen, then the floor was strewed with clean straw, and table-cloths of white muslin laid over the tables. By this time, hundreds of ragged, dirty children, had collected around the tent and Brewery. The food, all gathered in the Brewery, had to be removed to the tent. A door-keeper was stationed at each place, a passage-way cleared, and then ladies and gentlemen were transformed into carriers and waiters, (we could not trust any of the little rebels to help, though we had plenty of offers.) As they passed through rank and file of the hungry watchers, loud cheers were given for each successive turkey, and three long and loud for a whole pig with a lemon in his mouth, and it was difficult to conclude whether it was most appropriate to cry over the want displayed, or laugh over the temporary plenty provided.

During the time of these preparations, others of a different character were transpiring. The ladies were trying to select, first our Sunday school children, and next any who seemed hopeful. These were washed and dressed, and then each received a ticket which admitted them to the Mission-room, where friends received and entertained them. In the tent was a scene of activity — gentlemen carving the meats, ladies cutting the pies and cakes, and forming them in towering pyramids, the younger girls filling paper bags with candies and fruit, workmen hanging the lamps, others filling a large wicker-stand with dolls and toys of various kinds. At half past four all was ready. On our tables were sixty turkeys, with beef, ham and tongue, in proportion, and sundry chickens, geese, &c. Pies, cakes, bread, and biscuit, celery and fruit, and candy pyramids filled the slight intervals, and the whole presented an appearance inviting to the most fastidious appetites. Plates and cups were arranged around for more than three hundred; the lamps were lighted, and the signal given. Hundreds of visitors stood in silent expectation, and in a moment the sound of childish voices was heard, and they entered in regular procession singing —
"The morn of hope is breaking,
All doubt now disappears,
For the Five Points are waking
To penitential tears; [..]"
They took the circuit of the tent, and were then arranged, standing around the tables. They stood, with folded hands, while all sang the doxology, and the Missionary asked a blessing upon the occasion. Not a hand was raised, not a voice was heard, until the ladies and gentlemen who had charge of the tables supplied their hungry visitors with food. Then all was glad commotion, and then was the time for joyous tears. Three hundred and seventy poor, neglected, hapless children, placed for an hour in an atmosphere of love and gladness, practically taught the meaning of Christian kindness, wooed and won to cling to those whose inmost hearts were struggling in earnest prayer for grace and wisdom to lead them unto God. [...] They ate and drank without restraint until all were satisfied, then again formed and commenced singing. In the central aisle was placed the stand containing the toys and cornucopias of candy, and another filled with oranges and apples. By these, two ladies were seated. The children marched by them, in as much order as the dense crowd would permit, singing as they went, "We belong to this band, hallelujah," and in each hand the ladies placed a gift as they passed, until all were supplied. Then all the children left the tent.

There was now an interval of a few moments. The tables were hastily replenished, and then notice was given to the visitors, that the company now about to assemble were the "outsiders," about whom we knew nothing, save that they were poor and wretched, and all were warned to take care of their watches and pocket-books.

They came in scores, nay in hundreds; they rushed in and surrounded the tables, men, women, children, ragged, dirty, forlorn. [...] And the children who accompanied them, miniature likenesses, both physically and morally. Alas! alas!
"It needed no prophetic eye to see
How many yet must the same ruin share."
And we could scarcely hope to snatch these from the vortex. We spoke to them words of kindness and encouragement, and they partook until not a fragment was left, and then quietly left the tent.

More than a half-century later, in 1904, the Five Points Mission was still organizing Thanksgiving dinners, by then for more than a thousand children of the Lower East Side.

Update (2013): Below is a solicitation for donations for the mission's 1867 Thanksgiving Dinner. The return mail envelope is addressed to the Rev. James Newton Shaffer (1811-1901), who served for thirteen years as the organization's superintendent.

Dear Friend : —

We are making arrangements for our usual
for the Children of this well-known poor neighborhood.

May we ask you to enclose to us in the directed envelope a contribution to this object? If more than enough for the Dinner is received, it shall be faithfully used in providing for the sick and poor as far as it will go, through the winter.

You are cordially invited to visit the Mission, and acquaint yourself with its work and its success.

J. N. Shaffer,

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The telegraphist (II)

At the beginning of the seventh week all communication with Z---- was broken off again, this time for three days. It resumed promptly and without explanation on the fourth morning at 0600 hours, but two days later it ceased and did not resume. A slave to protocol, he submitted no daily reports, since none had been requested. To break the monotony he began to make his morning rounds in a counter-clockwise direction. He was struck by how different an aspect the oasis revealed when examined in this fashion, but after a few days the novelty wore off. He began to alternate, walking clockwise one day and counter-clockwise the next, and this seemed to be the most tolerable arrangement.

After the second full week of silence he caught himself softening his steps, listening for the engines of the relief party that by now was overdue. He heard none, nor were there any unexpected visitors, suspicious or otherwise. The worst of the heat of the dry season, suffocating and blinding, lay upon the desert, and he spent as much time as he could asleep with wet rags over his eyes. Scarcely animate, the lethargic mule stared at him from its stall with unblinking and (he half suspected) unseeing eyes, and barely summoned the energy to eat.

He was writhing on his cot in a semi-delirious state, somewhere between night and morning and between sleep and waking, when the alarm rang. He leapt up and rushed to the telegraph. It wasn't the operator at Z---- but the outward post, and the message, as ever, was incomprehensible:
Ba bara sabara rebapara azera ba STOP Sarabara berisa seribisarabisa serata bezera razara ra STOP Berisol sorisoriso bazara sarisarasarisab STOP
He transcribed this seeming gibberish into his logbook, returned an acknowledgement, then relayed the message to the operator at Z----. There was no response.

The following day, at around the same hazy hour of dawn, another message came down:
Saraba barisaserisab azarasaraza bazirazep STOP Azirasora sarizap borisoq qrabba oraseraborisep prebanamarasarasap STOP Azapep STOP
Again he acknowledged, transcribed and forwarded the message, and received no response from Z----. To his surprise, however, an hour later an identical message arrived. Perplexed, he carefully compared it with the previous one and acknowledged it, but almost immediately a third came, and then a fourth. He duly forwarded each transmission, but when the fifth and sixth arrived he held back. Clearly the operator in the hinterlands was not receiving his acknowledgments and was repeating himself in the mistaken belief that his messages were not getting through. There was no point in annoying the authorities at Z----, if they were indeed listening, with obvious repetitions. For several hours the wires carried message after identical message, dozens, scores, eventually hundreds. He transcribed each one, for a while, then simply gave up, walking away and returning every hour or so to see if the incoming transmission was the same as the others. It always was.

The messages trailed off in late evening, then sputtered to a halt. He was awakened once during the night, then again around 0500, and after that the pace began to pick up again until the incoming transmissions had become a virtually continuous stream of characters. He walked away from his desk and went outside. The wind had gathered and a sandstorm was obscuring the horizon, but the heat was as relentless as ever. The mule stood motionless and he wondered whether it had died standing up during the night and had simply neglected to fall. He threw it some hay regardless.

When he went back inside the telegraph was still chattering. He recorded a few lines, then threw his chair back in a huff and started to walk away, rage rising within him. On the verge of losing control completely, he was about to smash the instrument and put an end to his torment once and for all when he caught himself, finding that a greater fury was welling up inside him, and coldly and meticulously typed out a message to the operator on the other end:
Raberaparabep barabap parabarabagarap garap baregatarat top barop roparaoparop bererep qrabab STOP Garep arepabap gop STOP
These syllables, though they meant nothing to him, he transmitted without a single pause. To his surprise, the machine did not pick up where it had left off. Instead there was silence for a few moments, then a brief acknowledgment, and then it lay still.

No further transmissions arrived until late that evening. He was dozing in the cot, his spoon rattling in the empty can of beans beside him with every labored breath, when the alarm woke him and a message trickled out:
Garabarep farabara barana marabap amar raba raba barabaramop STOP Garabananana badarap badar badar badarap bada STOP
He wrote out the message, then tore it roughly out of the logbook and paced the room, reading it over and over. He had been instructed in the making and cracking of basic ciphers during his initial training, but this fit the pattern of nothing he had ever seen. He leafed through his logbook, carefully examining old entries. There seemed to be too few unique letters, too much obvious repeated filler, for the messages to contain any but the most rudimentary communication. No doubt there was a key, known to the operator on the other end and also at Z----, or maybe not even there, maybe the transcriptions were referred to another operator at some distant headquarters, perhaps even all the way to the home country, to some intelligence officer in the national palace, who perhaps decoded them for the eyes of M. le Président himself. One way or another it was clearly beyond his ken.

While he was considering this the alarm sounded again, and another string came through, this one identical to the last:
And then it seemed to wait, patiently, expecting an answer. He put his hand on the key and tapped, hesitantly at first, then fluently:
Morarerabap aramara marabeparepamar berererapap STOP Beraqraba garab megaraba babap babap babap ma garabarap STOP Serabep arbaraba barapep a pep perapebabep merera baramabap STOP
A brief acknowledgment followed, and then nothing for the rest of the night.

(To be continued.)

Monday, November 15, 2010

The telegraphist (I)

He was the last one left. Just before decamping the legionnaires loaded up the barrels of gunpowder that remained onto carts, piled on all the old carbines and anything else that was portable, and blew it all up at the edge of the desert. The shock wave whipped the overhead wires that hung slack between the weatherbeaten poles and blew out two windows of the command post, but the adobe walls held firm. The little generator in the next room, after skipping a single beat at the initial concussion, resumed its steady chugging, brushing off the aftershocks that echoed, ever more faintly, for the better part of an hour.

They left him a mule and some fodder, a rifle and cartridges, and enough fuel and food and water for two months, three if he was careful with it, and not very much rum at all. By the time his provisions ran out, if he was lucky, he would be relieved; in the meantime his presence would be essential to communication along the line, sporadic though it might be. In the absence of the lieutenant, who had never returned from a reconnoitering expedition the year before and was assumed to be among the casualties of war, the sergeant formally transferred his authority in a brief ceremony several times interrupted by boisterous outbursts on the part of his subordinates, all of whom were in varying states of drunkenness and immune to the sergeant's halfhearted rebukes. They wished him good luck, embraced him one by one in turn, and clambered into the back of the hulking, wheezing truck just as the driver, who perched alongside the sergeant was by no means the soberest of the lot, ground on the gears until he managed to cajole the reluctant vehicle into lurching forward, blowing up clouds of dust and sand as it lumbered haltingly to the edge of the oasis. He watched them drive off for a moment, waved his cap three times over his head, and returned to his desk.

During the first few weeks his duties kept to their normal routines. He slept in a cot in the office within earshot of the alarm. Each morning, at precisely 0600 hours, the office at Z---- would transmit an identical message inquiring for his report. He would respond that all was well and await instructions. A few moments later the machine would jigger into life again, with a one-line order to expect a further communication at 1800 hours. After breakfast and coffee he would make a brief circuit of the immediate environs of the command post in order to stretch the kinks out of his legs, he would feed and water the mule, and then go back to sleep until evening, when there would be a similarly terse exchange with the operator on the other end. He would warm up a few more spoonfuls of canned rice and beans, knock back a single precisely measured shot of spirits, and call it a night. On rare occasions and at unpredictable hours a brief message came down from further up the line, transmitted by an operator in some even more isolated and woebegone outpost. When that happened he tapped out an acknowledgment and promptly relayed the information; as these messages were usually encrypted and he had not been entrusted with the key this entailed the careful replication of a string of apparently meaningless syllables, a task for which, he decided, he was particularly suited.

Only twice did he see any sign of life other than the vacant and imperturbable mule. One morning, during his constitutional, he discovered the faint traces of hoof prints across his path. That the marks were visible at all, considering the incessant drifting of sand over every square inch of the oasis, proved that they had been made the previous night, perhaps just before dawn. He traced their origin back as far as the last palms, but no further, then reversed course and followed them to the point at which they trailed off into the desert. He determined that there had been three camels, that their riders had never dismounted, and that they had found nothing of interest to detain them or even to cause them to veer from their course. A week later, by chance, on one of the few relatively windless days, he spied a small caravan -- twenty riders or so, from the look of it -- very far off, but it never approached and he lost sight of it, even with his binoculars, after an hour. His report of each incident was duly noted and acknowledged, but nothing more was said of either one.

It was somewhere near the end of the fourth week, or perhaps the beginning of the fifth -- he had become increasingly indifferent to the calendar -- that his orders failed to arrive on schedule for the first time. He wasn't alarmed by this. Interruptions along the line, due to downed poles or balky generators, weren't particularly unusual or unexpected. The lack of communication posed no imminent danger, as the front lines -- to the extent that those could be defined in a guerrilla conflict in inhospitable and poorly charted terrain -- lay hundreds of miles off, and even the odd raiding party, should it by chance happen to break through, would have no reason to venture into a region that offered little in the way of opportunities for pillage. The telegraph remained dormant through the evening, but when at 0600 the next morning the alarm sounded and the operator at Z----, making no reference to his silence of the previous day, inquired for an update on local conditions, the telegraphist neither sought an explanation nor gave it a second thought.

Monday, November 08, 2010

Night piece (North)

Possibly it's the end of the world, she's not the one to say, but if so as luck would have it the end of the world finds her in a city far from where she was born, where they speak a different language she never quite masters though no one seems to mind, where it's lovely along the lake in summer but winter comes hard and fast. She meets a man who has many friends but no ties and before long they find they are bound by love and she moves her things into his apartment three flights up and two blocks down a crooked alley from the center of town. In the evenings, when they come home from their jobs, he browns stew meat and onions on an old gas stove and she settles into a chair in a corner underneath a lamp where she can continue to draw after the sun goes down. He leaves the radio on while he cooks, too low for her to decipher the words but she likes the music, the strains of accordion and fiddle that bend around the singers' voices. After dinner they disconnect the phone, sometimes they put a record on and dance slowly and silently for a while but mostly they just sit by the window. In the beautiful chill night, above the muffled sounds of the city, the vault of heaven is filled with uncountable stars.

Monday, November 01, 2010


Until about ten days ago I had no idea that Andy Irvine had a new record in the works, and now here it is, whisked over the seas from Ireland to drive away the oncoming November chill. Andy jokingly refers to Abocurragh as "the album of the century," meaning it's his first solo album since Way Out Yonder, which was recorded in 1999. Old friends are on board -- Dónal Lunny and Liam O'Flynn from Planxty, Bruce Molsky, Nikola Parov, and Rens van der Zalm from Mozaik -- but there are some new sounds in the mix this time (new to me at least), including Hardanger fiddler Annbjørg Lien and guitarist Lillebjørn Nilsen from Norway.

Andy's in fine mettle and voice and the selection of songs is a strong one, maybe his best solo set except the wonderful Rain on the Roof. There are no strictly instrumental tracks this time (three of the ballads segue into instrumentals), but as you would expect there's some great mandola and bouzouki playing by Andy and plenty of support from his mates on accordion, uilleann pipes, fiddle, and guitar, not to mention Nikola Parov on more exotic instruments like the nyckelharpa and kaval. No record from Andy would be complete without a couple of rousing songs about the Wobblies of the IWW, and this one has two, of which "The Spirit of Mother Jones" is more successful than the Balkan-flavored "Victory at Lawrence" (though the latter piqued my curiosity enough to induce me to dig out my copy of Bruce Watson's Bread and Roses). The heart of the album, though, is in the ballads, both original and traditional. Andy's got a wry sense of humor, so it's no surprise if the lyrics here stray a bit into unexpected territory, whether the eventual outcome is tragic or comic. (In both cases, there seems to be a common cautionary theme about the dangers of picking up strange women!)

The final cut, "Oslo / Norwegian Mazurka," is one of Abocurragh's best, with some delicious Hardanger fiddle by Annbjørg Lien and some earthy, off-kilter humor. The song narrates the events of an excursion through Norway some years back, after which, Andy says:
I was completely knackered when I got home to Ireland and decided to write a song about it. Unfortunately I could remember nothing, so this may or may not be true! No one will ever know.
True or not, the story is hilarious and provides Andy with a chance to spin some of his best lyrics:
In the Dubliner we played a gig, though we were all a bit hungover
A man got up and tried to dance a jig it looked more like a Bossa Nova
I had some beers and I began to flirt
And very soon I was on blonde alert
You're too late you know, thirty years or so,
she laughed and went home to her mammy
The song's best lines come later on, and concern the origin of clouds, but for that you'll have to buy the record.

Abocurragh, which is expertly produced by Dónal Lunny, is probably not available in stores in the US but can be ordered directly from Andy through his website or through various online sources.