1998
27 July 2000
2001
13 April
15 June
(1) Producer Richard Dominick (“If you want to save the whales, call Oprah. If you’re dating a whale, call us.”)
20 June
Today Dog Boy would be a rainbow influencer. He was just before his time.
3 July 2002
Ten blocks of that, winding down curved rainswept streets, under the steady drip of trees, past lighted windows in big houses in ghostly enormous grounds… windows high on the hillside… I came out at a service station glaring with wasted light, where a bored attendant in a white cap and a dark blue windbreaker sat hunched on a stool, inside the steamed glass, reading a paper. I started in, then kept going. I was as wet as I could get already. And on a night like that you can grow a beard waiting for a taxi. And taxi drivers remember.
Early in The Big Sleep, that passage about Marlowe slipping away from a murder scene is not from my favourite of his books. I’m very fond of the tongue-in-cheek feel of The High Window but The Long Goodbye is too long, The Little Sister is too full of Hollywood and perhaps the most famous one of all, Farewell, My Lovely, is a case of some parts being greater than the whole. For example, Marlowe’s conversation with the black hotel porter is magic conjured from nothing. With its cluttered plot, though, the novel has the feel, at the end, of a rushed tiling job.
Chandler’s California is not just composed of sun-baked streets and smog but also contains unexpected features like dusty pines and coastal fogs and mists. Offering a panorama not seen in his other novels, The Lady in the Lake is so well paced, it’s a real trip, and so very quotable from various angles, from Marlowe feeling typically sore and perplexed one evening in his office:
An elegant handwriting, like the elegant hand that wrote it. I pushed it to one side and had another drink. I began to feel a little less savage. I pushed things around on the desk. My hands felt thick and hot and awkward. I ran a finger across the corner of the desk and looked at the streak made by the wiping off of the dust. I look at the dust on my finger and wiped that off. I looked at my watch. I looked at the wall. I looked at nothing.
I put the liquor bottle away and went over to the washbowl to rinse the glass out. When I had done that I washed my hands and bathed my face in cold water and looked at it. The flush was gone from the left cheek, but it looked a little swollen. Not very much, but enough to make me tighten up again. (…)
I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.
… to Mr Grayson’s explanation of the logistics of blackmail;
I have come across traces of them in my work. Unsecured loans, long outstanding. Investments on the face of them worthless, made by men who would not be likely to make worthless investments. Bad debts that should obviously be charged off and have not been, for fear of inviting scrutiny from the income tax people. Oh yes, those things can easily be arranged.
… to the police captain’s comparison of his game to politics;
“Police business,” he said almost gently, “is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get – and we get things like this.”
… to the tableau of the Indian Head hotel;
At the cash desk a pale-haired man was fighting to get the war news on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potatoes were full of water.
… to the atmosphere of the final, climactic drive into the country;
This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall.
Lastly, it should be noted that in The Lady in the Lake, the most attractive female character is not a baddie.
Chandler’s letters, published after his death, are also extraordinary but for some reason the most heartfelt one that I’ve seen was not included in the best-known collection, Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962). I found it instead in a memoir by John Houseman.
It is a struggle of all fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt society. It is an impossible struggle; he can’t win. He can be poor and bitter and take it out in wisecracks and casual amours, or he can be corrupt and amiable and rude like a Hollywood producer. Because the bitter fact is that outside of two or three technical professions, there is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a decent affluence in life without to some degree corrupting himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is always and everywhere a racket. (…) I didn’t create him [Marlowe] at all; I’ve seen dozens like him in all essentials except the few colourful qualities he needed to be in a book. (A few even had those.) They were all poor; they will always be poor. How could they be anything else? When you have answered that question you can call him a zombie.
Houseman’s Chandler references have otherwise always struck me as odd, especially but not only because they come from someone who claimed to be his friend. They are also odd because, by their stuffy and superior insolence, they seem so out of tune with the views of most others who knew the subject and his charm, despite Chandler’s honest description of himself as a “contentious fellow” and his even greater thirst for whiskey when he took the studio buck to work on poppycock.
At least Alfred Hitchcock’s biographer Patrick Gilligan’s account of the disastrous last meeting of the two men is plausible in the context of a film project (Strangers on a Train) on which they had strongly opposing views as to its merit and preparation. Their personal chemistry had gone up in smoke by the time of Hitchcock’s last visit to Chandler’s home in La Jolla in 1950.
Chandler, in his cups that day, began a scathing rant about why Hitchcock should stick to the book and forget all his devious plot and camera tricks. The director let him go on and on. (…) At the peak of Chandler’s oration, the director simply stood up, opened the door, and left the house. (…) An amazed Chandler followed, shouting… The director paused to let [his assistant] plunge into the car first… Chandler called the director a fat bastard, and worse, as they drove off. (…) Hitchcock… gazed out the window for a long time… Halfway back to the studio he finally… said simply, “He’s through.”
In 1958, in a happier meeting of minds, Ian Fleming interviewed Chandler in London for the BBC. On Fleming’s request, Chandler explained in great detail the mechanics and logistics of a typical Mob (“Syndicate”) assassination, which, for the sake of illustration, was carried out by a putative pair of hit men flown in from a hardware store in Minneapolis. Chandler in turn asked Fleming why he always included a torture scene in the James Bond books.
“He’s got to suffer something in return for all this success and, I mean, what do you do? Dock him something on his income tax? I’m very tired of the fact that the hero in these, in other people’s thrillers, gets a bang on the head with a revolver butt and he’s perfectly happy afterwards. Just a bump on his head.”
“That’s one of my faults, I recover too quickly. I know what it is to be banged on the head with a revolver butt. The first thing you do is vomit.”
To humour someone long ago, I picked up a Stephen King book and read a bit of it. I don’t recall the title but the one thing I do remember is that the word “incredibly” appeared at least once on every page. On that score, King has, in recent days, with the supreme confidence of his culture, endorsed a war criminal.
It’s only now that the fictional Ron Burgundy can retire. King has corroborated in documentary fashion that egomania and any scrap of common sense are never seen in the same room, and that, like Ron, he will say anything in response to a cue and a prompt.
King took a call from someone pretending to be the Ukrainian president in what undoubtedly had to be a normal wartime diversion for Zelensky, i.e. shooting the breeze with an American celeb in a friendly hat.
When the caller turned the screw, he omitted any mention of the many Polish victims of the “national hero” for dramatic effect. He had introduced a historical character whose record, he conceded, contained some, eh, “not so big” crimes against Jews (“accidentally”), and it still never dawned on King that it might be wiser to confess to his unfortunate ignorance of the name Bandera.
But no, like a possessed ventriloquist’s dummy, he incredibly praised him as a great man.
Stay classy, Maine.
Photo (c) The Guardian
What Alice Sebold did to Anthony Broadwater at eighteen seems just a little bit more understandable or even forgivable (in the circumstances) than what she did at thirty-six, when she creatively rewrote the facts of his trial to flog a book.
When the truth emerged, it took this woman by her own account EIGHT DAYS to try to “comprehend how this could have happened” [sic] but at least we all now know the truth of how it went down.
A new low in writers exploiting other people’s lives, it’s sadly emblematic of the depravity tolerated in the arts world.
PS … Raymond Chandler on writers, 23 June 1950
PPS … https://johnflynn64travel.wordpress.com/2020/07/20/the-prefect/
A government of cynics is often tolerant and humane…
– H. L. Mencken
Laissez les bons temps rouler.
– Edwin Edwards
A French speaker, a four-time Governor, an eight-year Federal guest, a civil-rights champion – he never forgot his school bus sloshing past black children in bad weather – the all-round Louisiana legend Edwin Edwards (93) died last Monday. An artist of politics, he was the author of the (being caught with) “a dead girl or a live boy” quip that outlined the pair of unlikely scenarios in which he could be embarrassed into losing the 1983 election.
Other notable Edwards quotes of that race included a response to the GOP candidate, Gov. David Treen, who accused him of talking out of both sides of his mouth (“It’s so people like you with only half a brain can understand me”). To reinforce the point, he claimed his opponent took an hour and a half to watch the CBS show 60 Minutes.
In dire need of money to clear the debt accrued by that victorious campaign, Edwards filled two jumbo jets with donors, who paid ten grand each for a seat, and took them off to France. The climax of the trip was a banquet at Versailles, at which he crowned himself with a waiter’s powdered wig.
In the early Nineties he came up against the Grand Wizard David Duke. The ladies’ man claimed the only thing he and Duke had in common was that they were both wizards under the sheets. He also feigned concern for the health of the man from the Klan – over smoke inhalation from “so many burning crosses” – but his supporters’ bumper stickers were still more memorable, such as
Vote for the crook. It’s important.
Vote for the lizard, not the wizard.
They did. Edwards won the run-off by 400,000 votes. I had thought that Edwin’s most exciting electoral joust was versus Duke (1991) but I was wrong. During the 1983 campaign, one of his brothers was murdered by someone to whom he (Nolan Edwards) had stopped lending money.
To say Louisiana life is merely colourful would be too black and white. Edwards’ career was marked by “events, dear boy, events” (Harold Macmillan), in which, typically, some clown or other, usually in a position of responsibility, left a financial and/or violent mess for Edwards to try to sort out, in an oil State with an unstable tax base.
On the unresolved matter of dodgy deals and donations, the Feds finally got a conviction in 2001. Back in the Eighties, when they couldn’t lay a glove on him, legally if not politically, the Governor had loftily proclaimed
It was illegal for them to give but not for me to receive.
After he was acquitted in a 1986 corruption trial, the jury’s hotel complained to the press that half the jurors had made off with their hotel towels. The Governor’s reaction?
A man is entitled to be judged by a jury of his peers.
2021
22 June, Tuesday
It’s late and there’s been a light rain for hours and I suspect after seventy pages of Less Than Zero that I won’t have anything to add to what I wrote on the second reading twenty years ago.
2001
19 August, Sunday
Finished Less Than Zero (again) tonight, fifteen years on (almost exactly). Some of the products have vanished (e.g. Betamax, Tab), some are absent because their time had yet to come (e.g. CDs, mobile phones). I remembered the name of the girl (Blair), the suntan lotion, the snuff film, the twelve-year-old girl tied to the bed, the turning on of MTV (with the sound turned down), the elusive ‘friend’ and the dead body in the alley with a cigarette left in its mouth. Certain phrases and lines came back to me too as I read and it was funnier* than I remembered, deadpan funny, but I don’t think there really was anywhere to go (for Ellis) after that. I’d forgotten that he goes back to his old elementary school near the end. It [i.e. the cumulative effect] remains numbing; an extreme on a spectrum against which one can measure other ways of life.** Serial killing isn’t a way of life, no matter if the protagonist is a yuppie.
*Two examples are the photographer and the psychiatrist.
** One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and everything in between. I wouldn’t include Auschwitz, where, as Primo Levi observed, “mental illnesses were healed” (The Drowned and the Saved, p. 65).
The swelling has yet to go down in America but the fatal looting and vandalism of the Capitol in a way recall events described in John Julius Norwich’s A Short History of Byzantium. It’s not so much the Nika riots, which weren’t deliberately incited by Justinian, but the era of iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth centuries.
Kicked off in the year 726 by Leo III ordering the destruction of a huge golden icon of Christ over a palace gate facing Hagia Sophia, the long wrecking crusade was, in large part, a reaction against an idolatry that went so far as to include the gender-bending practice of making godparents out of holy pictures.
… several thousand… monks and nuns… suffered ridicule, mutilation or death in defence of the icons. The strategos [military governor] of Thracesion [in western Asia Minor] commanded every monk and nun to marry… He is also said to have set fire to the beards of intractable monks and committed whole libraries to the flames.
The monasteries in the Empire had indeed multiplied to a dangerous degree. Huge areas of Asia Minor were still desperately underpopulated, particularly after the bubonic plague of 745-47 removed a third of the inhabitants. Manpower was urgently needed… Instead, more and more of the population, male and female, were opting for a life utterly useless to the State.
… the edict of 815 unleashed a new wave of destruction. Any holy image could be smashed by anyone at any time, without fear of punishment. Vestments… were torn to shreds… painted panels were smeared with ordure, attacked with axes or burnt in the public squares.
In America, in society as in Congress, the stand-out unproductive yet over-represented way of life is not that of monasteries but of law firms. The Byzantines were much more literate than Western Europe but that literacy rarely extended down from the middle class and the foot-soldiering enthusiasm for smashing sacred symbols did not often rise into it.
What made me stick with Joseph Brodsky’s On Grief and Reason was the enjoyable description of how he was ingeniously robbed in Rio while on a Seventies culture junket. There was a dog involved. It was trained to distract gringo sunbathers by tugging at their pants.
There is a pattern among Russian oracles – at least those sheltered in the West – in that they seem incapable of imagining how the world looks to the more circumspect, little-guy countries. It isn’t only Russians either but anyway, there was even a time, back in Leningrad, when Brodsky shared Solzhenitsyn’s (and Nabokov’s) deranged enthusiasm for the Vietnam War but, by the time of this book, there was merely the condescension of a crackpot scheme set out in an open letter to Václav Havel. It was envisaged that Havel would enforce by decree (“although I don’t think your parliament would object”) the serialization of the following writers in Czech daily newspapers.
By giving your people Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Platonov, Camus, or Joyce, you may turn at least one nation in the heart of Europe into a civilized people.
It now seems a little easier to answer the question as to what on earth Brodsky was doing with “four hundred bucks” on him at the beach in Rio. It remains a minor mystery why he had taken off his watch. (Did he not want a tan line on his forearm?) He wasn’t going for a swim, as the German consul had warned all these cultural gringos that two Hungarians had been eaten by sharks there the week before. Where did he think he was? At home in (non-Latin) America?
The other really instructive piece in this light is the strange meander around Kim Philby, about whom he openly confesses his ignorance.
A country, especially a large one, gets only two [options]. Either it’s strong or it’s weak… Who cares what country one grows up in…
Of Philby’s life… I know only the bare bones… intuition will suffice.
Why Philby did it is the most interesting question, not least from an Irish perspective. By that I mean asking what it really was that repelled Philby about Britain. That kind of concern however sails over the head of Brodsky who only offers a few trite remarks about English diffidence.
Brodsky’s hero was English. It was Auden, about whom Beckett occasionally voiced his irritation. For example, Beckett reasonably queried a well-known Auden line from the Thirties, about Yeats (“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”).
What in the blazes is that supposed to mean?
The last piece in Brodsky’s book was written in memory of Stephen Spender but his hero and the “truly transatlantic texture” of his speech also feature prominently in it. As it happens, in Spender’s Journals there is a memorable line about Auden’s standing in Oxford in 1955, given the latter hid out in the States during the war.
I think that Auden has a hard time in the Common Room at Christ Church, where several of the dons twit him about being an American.
In other words, they were pulling at the pants of his post-war credibility, like that dog on the Copacabana. In their humour there was also a recognition that Britain no longer knew it all and had come down in the world, as America had risen, to be followed by Germany. It is the same humour evident in Jeffrey Bernard’s later vision of paradise, which sounds like somewhere not too far from Rio.
Sitting beneath the palms… I can hear the fizz of frying prawns, the dying hiss of a lobster and the rattle of a cocktail shaker and, with luck, the scream of a German tourist treading on a sea urchin.
Bertolt Brecht appeared in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on 30 October 1947. Facing him that morning was the Chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, born John Parnell Feeney, who had not only changed his name but also his denomination, to Episcopalian. Feeney’s political career ended soon afterwards. In 1948 he was indicted and subsequently jailed for defrauding the Federal government.
Other members present were Reps. John McDowell (died by suicide in 1957) and Richard Vail (d. 1955). Most of the questions were asked by HUAC Chief Investigator Robert E. Stripling, a Texan who, a year later, assisted Richard Nixon in his pursuit of Alger Hiss. Nixon, though also a Committee member, was not present on the day.
Brecht was flanked by two lawyers, Bartley Crum (died by suicide in 1959) and Robert Kenny, and an interpreter, David Baumgardt, about whom a committee member can be overheard at one point interjecting, I can’t understand the interpreter any more than I can the witness.
The only foreigner called up on a Hollywood list of “unfriendly” witnesses, Brecht left the country the very next day, never to return. He was too clever for them and they ended up thanking him for it.
It was like Kafka’s Trial but in reverse.
The links below are to parts one and two of the full show, with later commentary by Eric Bentley.
The reader is now directed to the audio link part one above, from 18:22, as follows
STRIPLING: Now, I will repeat the original question. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of any country?
BRECHT: Mr. Chairman, I have heard my colleagues, eh, and they considered this question not as proper but I am a guest in this country and do not want to enter in any legal arguments, so I will answer your question fully as well I can. I was not a member or am not a member of any Communist Party.
CHAIRMAN: Your answer is, then, that you have never been a member of the Communist Party?
BRECHT: That is correct.
STRIPLING: You were not a member of the Communist Party for Germany?
BRECHT: No, I was not.
STRIPLING: Eh, Mr. Brecht, is it true that you have written a number of very revolutionary poems, plays and other writings?
BRECHT: I have written a number of poems and songs and plays in the fight against Hitler and, of course, they can be considered, therefore, as revolutionary because I, of course, was for the overthrow of that government.
CHAIRMAN: Mr. Stripling, we are not interested in any works that he might have written calling for the overthrow of Germany or the government there.
From the start of part two, above, Stripling asks about a play called Massnahme, which was one of two Brecht adaptations of a particular Noh play from Japan, but Bentley tells us that Brecht’s explanation relates to the second adaptation, not that Stripling or the Committee spotted the difference.
STRIPLING: Now, Mr. Brecht, will you tell the Committee whether or not one of the characters in this play was murdered by his comrades because it was in the best interests of the Party, is that true? Of the Communist Party.
BRECHT: No, it is not, eh, not quite so in the story.
STRIPLING: Because he would not bow to discipline he was murdered by his comrades, isn’t that true?
BRECHT: No, it is not really so in the play. You will find, when you read it, carefully, that like in the old Japanese play where other ideas were at stake, the young man who died, uh, was convinced that he had done damage to the mission he believed in and he agreed to that and he was ready to die, in order not to make greater such damage. So he asks his comrades to help him and all of them together help him to die. He jumps into a… abyss and they lead him, eh, tenderly to that abyss. And that is the story.
CHAIRMAN: Well I gather from your remarks, from your answer, that he was just killed. He wasn’t murdered. (laughter)
BRECHT: He wanted to die.
CHAIRMAN: So they killed him?
BRECHT: No, they did not kill him, not in this story. They, he killed himself. They supported him. But, of course, they had told him it were better when he disappeared (laughter) … for him and them and the cause he also believed in, up ’til the end.
From 09:32 in part two, above, Stripling leaves the issue of party membership aside to press Brecht on whether he ever attended any dubious assemblies. More laughter ensues.
STRIPLING: Eh, Mr. Brecht, since you have been in, eh, the United States, have you attended any Communist Party meetings?
BRECHT: No, I do not think so.
STRIPLING: You don’t think so.
BRECHT: No.
CHAIRMAN: Well, aren’t you certain?
BRECHT: (chuckles) I am, I am certain, I think, yes.
CHAIRMAN: You are certain that you have never attended?
BRECHT: Yeah, quite. I think so (laughter). You see I am here six years, I am here six years, I do not think so. I do not think I attended, that I attended, eh, political meetings.
CHAIRMAN: No, no, never mind the political meetings, but have you attended any Communist meetings in the United States?
BRECHT: I do not think so. No.
CHAIRMAN: You’re certain?
BRECHT: I think I am certain.
CHAIRMAN: You think you’re certain. (laughter)
STRIPLING: You don’t know what a, what it, what a –
BRECHT: No, I have not attended such meetings, eh, in my opinion.
From 27:23 in part two, the final joust plays out, leading to the longest laugh of all.
CHAIRMAN: Some people did ask you to join the Communist Party, didn’t they?
BRECHT: Uh…
KENNY (lawyer): In Germany or…?
BRECHT: In Germany, you mean in Germany?
CHAIRMAN: No, I mean in the United States.
BRECHT: No, no, no.
CHAIRMAN (to Kenny): Now you let, you let him, he’s doing all right, he’s doing much better than the other witnesses that you’ve brought here (laughter) … (to Brecht) You don’t ever recall anyone in the United States ever asked you to join the Communist Party?
BRECHT: No, I do not recall anybody having asked me.
The Chairman then asks each of his colleagues in turn if they have any more questions.
STRIPLING: I would like to ask Mr. Brecht whether or not he wrote a poem – a song, rather – entitled, Forward, We’ve Not Forgotten.
McDOWELL: Forward we’ve what?
STRIPLING: (louder, irritated) Forward, We’ve Not Forgotten.
Stripling then recites an entire lyric lost in translation.
STRIPLING: Did you write that, Mr. Brecht?
BRECHT: No, I wrote a German poem but that is very different… (extended laughter) … from this thing.
STRIPLING: Eh, that is all the questions I have, Mr. Chairman.
CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much, Mr. Brecht. And you are a good example to the witnesses of Mr. Kenny and Mr. Crum.
A gavel then bangs for a recess until that afternoon.
On the tape Bentley then recalls meeting Brecht a year later near Zürich, when Brecht laughed at a recording of the show. He added that he had chosen to risk disregarding Bartley Crum’s advice to tell them he was a communist party member (though it was not true) in case a membership card was later forged to ensure a perjury conviction.
They weren’t as bad as the Nazis. The Nazis would never have let me smoke. In Washington they let me have a cigar and I used it to manufacture pauses… between their questions and my answers.
1976
Willie Sutton’s autobiography denied that he’d ever explained why he robbed banks by saying “because that’s where the money is”. Though the apocryphal quotation became known as Sutton’s Law, he dismissed the story but, at the same time, admitted that, had anyone ever asked him, he probably would have said it.
Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life.
1711
To reduce the power of the privately-owned Bank of England, a plan was hatched by Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford, for a group of merchants to assume parts of Britain’s national debt in return for an annual payment of three million pounds for a set period and a monopoly of the trade to the South Seas i.e. South America. The group then assumed the title the South Sea Company. Extravagant notions of the available riches in faraway fields were fostered and the company’s stock flourished until, in early 1720, it offered to take on the entire national debt. The British state’s creditors were encouraged to swap what they were owed for company shares and speculation then carried South Sea stock to ten times its nominal value. Then the chairman and directors sold out, the bubble burst and the stock collapsed. Thousands were ruined.
Companies of all kinds had been floated to surf on this tidal wave of interest in South Sea stock. They soon got the nickname of Bubbles, the most appropriate description that the popular imagination could invent. Some of them lasted for a week or a fortnight, while others were only around for a day. The most preposterous of all showed the complete madness of the people sucked in. It was started by an unknown adventurer who is definitely a candidate for the title of the unknown soldier of cynicism. His venture was entitled a “company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is”. The genius who mounted this bold and successful test of public gullibility merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of one hundred pounds each, with a required deposit of two pounds per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to one hundred pounds per annum per share.
How this enormous profit was to be obtained he did not inform them at that time. Instead he promised that after a month full particulars would be announced and a call made for the remaining ninety-eight pounds of the subscription. The very next morning, at nine o’clock, this entrepreneur opened an office in Cornhill in London. Crowds flocked to his door and when he shut up shop at three o’clock, he found that the deposits had been paid for one thousand of his shares. He was thus, after five hours, the possessor of two thousand pounds. Content with his day’s work, he set off that same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.
1715
With the death of Louis XIV, the finances of France were in a bad state but the Duke of Orleans became Regent and this meant everything to a Scottish gambler called John Law who was a friend of the Duke and a man convinced that no country could prosper without a paper currency. In May 1716, a royal edict authorised Law to establish a bank. He made all his banknotes payable at sight and in the coin current at the time they were issued. This was a masterstroke and immediately made his notes more valuable than precious metals. The latter were constantly liable to depreciation by the tampering of the government.
Law publicly declared at the same time that a banker deserved to be put to death if he issued notes without having sufficient security to answer all demands. It was not long before the trade of the country felt the benefit and branches of his bank were established in several cities. In the meantime, Law started the project that has handed his name down to posterity. He proposed to establish a company that would have the exclusive privilege of trading to the Mississippi river and the province of Louisiana, where the country was supposed to abound in precious metals. This company was set up in August 1717.
It was then that the frenzy of speculation began. Law’s bank had brought about so much economic good that any promises for the future were swallowed but, when the bank became a public institution, the Regent ordered a printing of notes to the amount of a billion livres. Law helped inundate France with this paper money, which, based on no solid foundation, was sure to cause a crash, sooner or later.
Law otherwise devoted his attention to the Mississippi project, the shares of which were rapidly rising in spite of the opposition of Parliament. At least three hundred thousand applications were made for fifty thousand new shares. Every day the value of the old shares rose and new applications became so numerous that it was deemed advisable to create three hundred thousand new shares so the Regent could take advantage of the popular enthusiasm to pay off the national debt.
From the tremendous pressure of the crowds, accidents continually occurred in the narrow rue de Quincampoix where Law lived. A story goes that a hump-backed man who stood in the street made considerable money by lending his hump as a writing surface to the speculators. The great masses of customers and spectators drew all the low life of Paris to the spot and constant riots and disturbances occurred. At nightfall, it was often found necessary to send in a detachment of soldiers to clear the street.
Thus the system continued to flourish until the beginning of 1720. The warnings of the Parliament that this massive creation of paper money would bankrupt the country were disregarded but, despite every effort made to stop its exodus, the stores of precious metals in France continued to be smuggled to England and Holland. The little coin that was left in the country was hoarded until the scarcity became so great that trade could no longer be conducted. An edict then forbade any person to have more than five hundred livres (then the equivalent of twenty pounds sterling) of coin in his or her possession, under threat of a heavy fine, plus confiscation.
It was also forbidden to buy up jewellery, plate and precious stones. Informers were encouraged by the promise of getting half of any amount they might discover.
Lord Stair, the English ambassador, said that it was now impossible to doubt the sincerity of Law’s conversion to Catholicism, as he had established an inquisition after having given ample evidence of his faith in transubstantiation by turning gold into paper.
All payments were then ordered to be made in paper and even more notes were printed – to the tune of more than a billion and a half livres – but nothing now could make the people feel the slightest confidence in something that was not exchangeable for metal. Coin, which the Regent aimed to depreciate, only rose in value on every fresh attempt to reduce it.
The value of shares in the Mississippi stock had also tumbled and few people still believed the tales that had once been told of the immense wealth of that region. A last trick was therefore tried to restore public confidence in the Mississippi project.
A general conscription of all the homeless in Paris was made by order of the government. More than six thousand of the poorest of the population were press-ganged, as if in wartime. These unfortunates were provided with clothes and tools and told they would be shipped off to New Orleans to work in the gold mines. They were then paraded day after day through the streets with their picks and shovels before being sent off in small detachments to the ports to be shipped to America. Two thirds of them never reached their destination but melted into the countryside. There they sold their tools for whatever they could get and returned to their old way of life. In less than three weeks, half of them were back in Paris.
1907
Sometimes cynicism is wrapped up in a man simply knowing his strengths and limitations. Take JP Morgan in the 1907 American financial crisis, sitting alone in a room in his home, smoking cigars, while all the ordinary bankers were huddled in the next room, presumably with ties loosened and pencils perched over their ears. When a servant entered and ventured to ask him if he had a plan, he said, “No.” By way of reassurance, he added that he knew someone would come through the door with the right plan and then, he also knew, he would be the person to know it was the right one. Who knows that much today?
1940
W. C. Fields made The Bank Dick. In this film, Fields plays a drunk named Egbert Sousé who trips a fleeing bank robber and becomes a security guard at the bank as a result. Upon being introduced to his daughter’s boyfriend, Og Oggilby, an official at the bank, Egbert remarks, “Og Oggilby… sounds like a bubble in a bathtub.”
Egbert talks Og into embezzling money from the institution. In order to divert a bank examiner from discovering the theft, Egbert takes him to his favourite bar and asks if “Michael Finn” has been in yet – a signal that the barman, one of the Three Stooges – is to spike the examiner’s drink. During Fields’ career, Hollywood standards demanded that good be rewarded and evil be punished but, in The Bank Dick, Fields’ character lies, cheats and steals and yet at the end is rewarded with wealth and fame.
Dr. John Flynn 