Green Market Press Blog

Sometimes it’s fun to open an old journal at random and see what pops up.

 On April 17, 1993, I was attending a dinner at a faculty colleague’s, where another diner told of an acquaintance—often in trouble with the law—who was convicted of recklessly remaining too long in a voting booth. He tried to get on a jail work-release team, picking apples, but was told, “We’re afraid you’d get loose and try to vote again.”

FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE

It’s very difficult to say simply what Farewell, My Concubine is about—even after seeing it four times.

It is certainly about Chinese history from the 1920s to the 1970s, with echoes from much earlier. It is about Peking Opera, recounting the lives of two celebrated actors. It is about fate and “karmic retribution.” It is about homosexual love, though perhaps less about this than some viewers suppose. Its title refers to the semi-legendary King of Chu, who, surrounded by foes, found only his horse and his concubine still faithful to him.

When I first saw the film in Taipei a few years ago with an American friend, I thought it was about the ruthlessness of artists, an idea that surprised him. “Are artists ruthless?” he asked.

Looking at it again months later, it seemed more a story of loyalty and betrayal—and various kinds of love.

The principal male characters, Duan Xiaolou and Cheng Dieyi, grow up together in a brutal Beijing acting school, later winning fame for their portrayal of the King of Chu and his concubine. Dieyi “becomes” Concubine Yu, living the role on and off stage and fighting fiercely for Xiaolou’s affections. His chief rival is Juxian, a prostitute whom Xiaolou marries on a whim.

Around these three spin the world of Peking Opera and the tumult of Chinese history, from the warlord era of the 1920s through World War II to Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution. The film abounds in fascinating minor characters: the acting school manager who beats his charges savagely when they fluff their lines; the Manchu aesthete who offers his patronage and perhaps more to Dieyi; even Chiang Kai-shek, who appears in a silhouette eerily like that of the real Chinese leader.

Xiaolou is the film’s Everyman—a merely talented artist, who strives to live a human life outside the theater. Weak and overwhelmed by events, he eventually betrays those dearest to him.

Dieyi’s obsession with the theater and the role of Concubine Yu drives him to artistic greatness, but wreaks havoc in the lives of those around him. His only real loyalties are to Xiaolou and to his art. At the film’s most intense moment, amid the human wreckage of the Cultural Revolution, he can exclaim only, “How will Peking Opera survive this!”

The innocent victim in this trio is the former prostitute Juxian, whose loyalty to Xiaolou is both absolute and doomed.

The film’s subtheme of “karmic retribution” is set early when Dieyi’s mother brings him to the acting school and cuts off an extra finger on one hand so that the troupe’s manager will accept him. Later, Dieyi also challenges fate by adopting a baby who has been left to die of exposure. As an adult, the baby becomes the agent of fate in undoing Dieyi and the other characters.

But this may make the film seem more straightforward than it is. It is a film of ambiguities, not the least of them sexual. The makers did not portray Dieyi as any sort of conventional gay figure. It is unclear to the end exactly what his sexual orientation is—or rather how much of it belongs to him and how much to his portrayal of Concubine Yu. As one character remarks, “Has he not blurred the distinction between theater and life?”

The triumph of this film, which somehow got out of mainland China despites its critical look at Communism, is in such ambiguities. There are no heroes or villains—or rather the main characters are both. One sympathizes with Xiaolou at his weakest moments and with Dieyi at his most obsessed. Farewell, My Concubine is a reminder that life is far more complex than any rules people may try to bind it with.

(I wrote the following essay for a little newsletter, Ethics, etc., published for a time at Franklin College in the mid-1990s. Not much has changed.)

INSTANCES OR PRINCIPLES?

I once went to the library in search of a definition of ethics. There were dozens of dusty volumes on something called “moral philosophy,” and in one of the newer ones, by Jacques Maritain, I found this:

“As far as ethics is concerned, it must be admitted that the proportion of errors . . . mingled with certain discoveries or certain intuitions, and with certain grandiose views, has in modern times been such that moral philosophy finds itself in complete disarray. And this is true not only of moral philosophy, but also of large segments of the common consciousness of contemporary humanity.”

Maritain also warned the student of ethics “against descending to the commonplaces of the immediate utilitarianism of popular morality.”

Alas, those commonplaces are where journalism spends most of its time. Its ethics tend to be both immediate and utilitarian. After the lawyers have promised us we won’t be sued, we consider what remaining obligations we may have to our souls or to the collective conscience. “It’s legal, but is it ethical?” is a question common in thoughtful newsrooms, but the answer is usually a philosophical fast draw, a quick testing of the story against conventional wisdom, and then a charge on into print.

That conventional wisdom involves—to use the moral philosopher’s phrase—“certain discoveries, certain intuitions,” and also sometimes “certain grandiose views.”

Let’s look at some of the places where ethical questions arise for journalists.

In dealings with news sources: How candid should one be with them? Is lying to them ever justified? When should one “burn” a source (i.e., go back on a commitment not to identify the source)? How far should one badger a source in pursuit of a story? Should one tell a source when the tape recorder is running?

In dealings with readers and viewers: How truthful is one being with them? Is one hyping stories or engineering conflict for the sake of readership or ratings, or to advance the reporter’s career? Is one oversimplifying to the detriment of the thoughtful reader?

In one’s own actions: Are they free of conflicts of interest? Does one have axes to grind? Or to take a different tack, is one being “responsible” because it’s easier and more comfortable to do that than to publish painful and controversial facts?

In obtaining news stories: Ought one to bribe a source, or buy a story, or accept documents one suspects are stolen? Do the ends justify the means? What does moral philosophy have to say?

Not much, it might seem at first. There is hardly one good text on journalism ethics, because in the current atmosphere it would have to be an endless list of what every journalist did in every situation. There are plenty of ethical questions and plenty of one-time answers, but few principles.

The press’s refusal to seek general ethical principles or set limits for itself may be behind the public’s feeling that it is fed nothing but bad news and sensation, and that the press “only wants to sell newspapers.” The public may be more ethical than we are—or less non-ethical. (The dean of my old journalism school has just canned the managing editor of the Columbia Missourian because it took stands on current questions. Readers in the community reportedly are unhappy with his decision—and so am I.)

I’d like to suggest that there is, or could be, an ethical journalism that is as good or better than the current kind. There have been perceptions of it. The founding dean at Missouri, Walter Williams, once wrote that a journalist “should never say anything in print that he would not say as a gentleman.” That sounds old-fashioned—we’ve lost the sense of the word gentleman, and that’s part of the problem.

A gentleman, in Williams’s eyes, was someone who acted on ethical principles—ones that are not wholly personal or situational, but grounded in the wisdom of human life and community. A journalist who has this ethical sense does certain things and forgoes others because of his belief that, in the general ruck of things, his conduct counts for something—that whether anyone else knows of his actions, he knows, and that this matters.

Plans are moving along for a small exhibition during the Christmas season honoring my uncle, Stephen Bridges, on the occasion of his centennial.The exhibition will be in the Johnson County Historical Museum, and I’ve been working with curator Brenna Cundiff and the outgoing museum director, Sarah Rogers, to plan it.

A centerpiece will be three of the Christmas trees that Stephen painted, on brown wrapping paper, for family holidays. These are large—roughly three feet by eight feet—but the good folks at Generation Frame in Franklin have worked out a method of temporary mounting that will work. Once they’re mounted, Sarah will collect them in her pickup truck, and the museum will Velcro them to the wall on one side of the spacious upstair museum hall (which was the main lodge hall when Franklin Masons occupied the building).

There will also be five or six of Stephen’s paintings, and a portrait of him by Vesper George, director of the Vesper George School of Art in Boston, where he studied.

But none of these touches on his main work, as one of the country’s foremost stained-glass designers. For that, I’ve put out lines for information and photos to his former studio, Rambusch, in New York as well as some institutions where his windows can be seen. These include an abstract series at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., and three rose windows in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., the largest U.S. Catholic church.
And I hope to get to Newton, Massachusetts, during a November visit to the Boston area, to see and perhaps photograph some of his windows there.

I wish we could somehow transport a real stained-glass window to the museum, but at least we may be able to display a small medallion he made—a swan done in rough glass that was probably excavated from the old Sandwich Glass Co. site on Cape Cod while Stephen was working for the Connick firm in Boston during the 1930s.

It will all be fun, and the first real tribute to Stephen in the town where he was born and grew up. The exhibit should be up through most of December.

I commented (on 7/27 and again on 9/2) about reading Sarah Ruden’s new translation of Vergil’s Aeneid on the five-pages-a-day plan. I finished up last weekend, on schedule, and this is a brief final report.

Ruden’s Aeneid is a joy to read as an English poem, just as Garry Wills said it would be, in his article for the New York Review of Books. I went back recently and re-read Wills’s review. This time I paid more attention to his remarks about the “Harvard School,” which he says tends to re-interpret classical authors as slyly trying to weaken the underpinnings of authority. Its effort to recruit Vergil to this cause is wrong-headed, Wills believes—while Vergil may write with a certain sadness about the cost of founding an empire, he never doubts that the cost is worth it. Ruden doesn’t try for a postmodern Vergil, and it obviously pleased Wills to be able to praise her. After all, she’s a graduate of that same Harvard classics program!

As I read Ruden and Wills, I thought how much we still live in the afterglow of Rome, from the words of our language to the laws that shape our societies. Hard to see this sometimes in our frantic, media-obsessed world, but the underpinnings are there. Jove spoke truly when he promised that Aeneas’s heritage would last forever.

Any reviewer ought to make one quibble, to validate his praise. Wills objected to one line, and I added a couple of my own, but it would be captious to list them. Three weak lines out of 9,895 is hardly an indictment. And there are some marvelous passages, like this one:

All of us who laid waste to Troy have paid
Horribly for our crimes throughout the world.

Now and then Ruden achieves something that eluded another excellent translator, Robert Fagles, as in her rendering of “oculos dejecta decoros”—“her fine eyes, cast down”—to describe Lavinia, Aeneas’s bride-to-be. Fagles translates it as “lovely Lavinia with downcast eyes,” which makes her beauty seem merely ordinary.

Candace Moseley, my mentor on this project, asked if Ruden’s translation owed anything to her being a woman, and I think—as in the above—she has an especially keen appreciation for the women of the Aeneid, including the chief of them, the implacable Juno.

I hope Candace won’t demur at being called a “mentor,” even though we’ve simply exchanged a few e-mails. At several points her comments and her much deeper knowledge of Vergil and his times have crystallized something for me. She observes in one message that “War is ugly and without glory in the Aeneid. Wounds are grotesque and pitiful. Vergil is writing in a Roman world that was sick of war, especially the civil wars that had raged for more than a century until Augustus ushered in the new golden age.”

Another comment sent me back this week to re-read Aeneas’s dream of Hector, in Book II. It’s worth quoting Ruden here, not only because (as Candace notes) Hector’s appearance is in such pathetic contrast to Homer’s depiction, but also because it’s very fine Ruden:

I saw a desolate Hector in my dreams,
Streaming with tears and black with dust and blood.
His feet were swollen with the thongs that pierced them
When he was dragged behind the chariot.
How different from that Hector who returned
Wearing the plundered armor of Achilles
Or hurled our Trojan torches onto Greek ships!
His beard was dirty; dried blood caked his hair.
He had the many wounds he got defending
His city’s walls. And in that dream I wept . . . .

I’ve now read the Aeneid twice this year, in different translations. I’m glad to have done this, but am not ready to start on a third, just yet anyway. “It cost so much to found the Roman nation,” wrote Vergil (and Ruden). Worth it, no doubt, but Christmas is coming and I’m ready for a season of peace.

If anybody were counting (besides me), they would know that today is the eighth anniversary of the first and only Pig Day at Franklin College.

In fact, I had forgotten the exact date. But when it came up in conversation recently, I was able to go back into my files (I never throw anything away) and reconstruct this historic event from the fall of 2001.

Pig Day happened, basically, because another professor and I wanted to invite a poet, David Lee, to campus. Lee, the poet laureate of Utah, was known for his excellent poems about pigs. Indiana is also famous for pigs. What could be more appropriate (and more fun) than to surround Lee’s visit with other pig-related events. For some reason, perhaps a moment of academic absent-mindedness, the college let us go ahead with this plan, and Pig Day was born.

I have our publicity flyer in front of me: “What do you get when you mix a scientist, a poet, and the Three Little Pigs: Pig Day 2001!”

The program eventually included, beside a reading by Lee, a lecture by a professor from Eastern Michigan on “Integrity and the Food We East: Pig Farms in America.” Elementary-school art with the theme of the Three Little Pigs was displayed on campus. Students were invited to guess the number of pennies in a glass pig. And there was a showing of the movie “Babe.”

“Don’t miss out on the people, the poetry . . . and the pigs?” another publicity flyer said.

As I recall, Pig Day was a big success and Lee read some really splendid poetry (not all of it about pigs). In my file are a number of the poems and this bit of prose, one glorious sentence called “Loading a Boar”:

“We were loading a boar, a goddam mean big sonofabitch and he jumped out of the pickup four times and tore out my stockracks and rooted me in the stomach and I fell down and he bit John on the knee and he thought it was broken and so did I and the boar stood over in the far corner of the pen and watched us and John and I just sat there tired and Jan laughed and brought us a beer and I said, ‘John it ain’t worth it, nothing’s going right and I’m feeling half dead and haven’t written a poem in ages and I’m ready to quit it all,’ and John said ‘shit young feller, you ain’t got started yet and the reason’s cause you trying to do it outside yourself and ain’t looking in and if you wanna by god write pomes you gotta write pomes about what you know and not about the rest and you can write about pigs and that boar and Jan and you and me and the rest and there ain’t no way you’re gonna quit,’ and we drank beer and smoked, all three of us, and finally loaded that mean bastard and drove home and unloaded him and he bit me again and I went in the house and got out my paper and pencils and started writing and found out John he was right.”

STROLLING THROUGH THE IRON CURTAIN

By WILLIAM BRIDGES
United Press International

BERLIN, Sept. 17 [1960]—Like more than 8,000 West Germans in recent days, I approached Communist police this week to ask about getting a special visa to visit East Berlin.

My American passport was hidden away in a pocket as I asked the “people’s policeman” at the Brandenburg Gate where to get the visa, which the Communists have been requiring for all West German visitors going to East Berlin.

“Are you a foreigner?” he asked, smiling faintly and inspecting my button-down shirt and American suit. After a moment, he pointed to a columned building at the left of the gate and said, “Second floor.”

Six uniformed East German policemen were loafing on the first floor, drinking milk and lemon soda.

One pointed me upstairs to a small room where three more policemen were questioning two women and a man.

On their desks were propaganda pamphlets entitled, “The People’s Plan for Germany” and “Globke and the Eradication of the Jews.” (Hans Globke, aide to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer is a favorite Communist target because he wrote a commentary to Hitler’s racial laws in the 1930s.)

My interrogator was polite, a bit unkempt, and looked about 19 years old. I told him I was an American living in West Germany and asked if I needed the new visa.

Not at all, he explained carefully. Americans need only their passports. I got the puzzled smile again as I left.

The suspicious policeman was still outside, and this time I handed him the passport. He riffled through it and said, “Where are you going?”

“East Berlin,” I said, since I was facing that way. He shrugged and waved me on.

Whatever the future holds, a not-too-bright American can still walk whistling through the Iron Curtain here.

DON’T WORRY

When Keats put Cortez on the Pacific
with a gravity too specific,
it wasn’t cause for commotion.
He had the right Spaniard,
just the wrong ocean.

 
©2009 William Bridges

THE HANDS OF ESAU
(A GeeGee Dapple mystery}

Charles George Gordon Dapple—GeeGee to his friends, and the Tall Terror to generations of copyboys on the Lincolnshire Reflector—was singing happily, to a tune of his own devising, what he liked to think of as “The Editor’s Hymn:”

“I stand a wreck on Error’s shore,
da-dum, da-dum, da-dum . . . .”

 He gathered up the contents of his letterbox and marched toward the kitchen, where morning tea—a ritual of his solitary retirement from the newspaper to the village of Silk Willoughby—was waiting.

“Where is the promise of my years,
Once written on my brow?
Da-dum, da . . . . ” Hullo, what’s this?

The song broke off as GeeGee weighed on his right palm an envelope with the London return address of The Literary England Poetry Annual. The envelope was lighter and thinner, he noticed with surprise, than the one containing five poems that he had posted five months ago, in answer to an advertisement. He opened it with slightly more haste than usual and took out two rejected poems and a letter.

“Congratulations, Mr. Dapple,” the letter began. “The editors of Literary England are pleased to inform you that three of your poems—“Silk Willoughby Summer,” “February Evening,” and “Nightscape”—have been accepted for publication in the next Annual. You will receive . . . .”

A veil of discretion should be drawn over the scene of a poet’s first acceptance, especially when the poet is a retired newspaper editor of more than 60 winters, with a reputation in Lincolnshire journalism for skepticism, sobriety, and scholarly calm. Let it be said that GeeGee recovered more quickly than some. Within minutes he was able to finish reading the letter from Hubert Arthur, editor of Literary England.

“You will receive a complimentary copy of the magazine,” it said. “Your presence is also requested in the magazine’s chambers, Great Russell Street, at 7 o’clock on the evening of June 17, during which it is hoped you will read one of your accepted poems. A prize of 100 pounds will be presented to the author of the best contribution to the Annual.”

So it was that on a balmy June evening, GeeGee found himself in a dusty, first-floor hall in London, on a low dais behind a standing microphone, facing the predicament of anyone six feet or taller who has ever followed a five-foot-tall speaker to the platform. Twenty seconds of battle with a balky adjusting ring brought the microphone to the neighborhood of GeeGee’s chin, and he heard himself reading:

Nightscape
 
Great constellations riding on the night
are anchored in our failing human view.
Our reckonings err, by a parsec or two;
our eyes confuse the new and ancient light.
So we make neighbours of two stars that keep
cool distance in the universal deep . . . .

When he had finished, GeeGee sat down amid warm applause from his 20 fellow poets. He was followed to the platform by a short and tubercular youth wearing a primrose boutonniere, and a second Battle of the Microphone was fought. Other readers came and went, until at last Mr. Hubert Arthur, rotund and beaming, stepped forward to announce that the anonymous but distinguished jurors had awarded the Grand Prize of 100 pounds to Lady Hyllerie Thomas for “Swallows.”

The applause this time was more than warm. Lady Hyllerie, whose name GeeGee vaguely recalled, had been a sensation from the moment the audience glimpsed her mane of auburn hair, Grecian features, and snowy shoulders rising from the perianth of an aquamarine evening gown. Now she inclined her tall beauty above the fortunate Mr. Arthur, accepted the magazine’s cheque, and said a few soft words, lost to everyone beyond the first row of chairs. A camera flashed, and the evening dissolved into the rattle of teacups and literary chat. It was, GeeGee reflected later as he prepared for bed in his hotel, a little world of its own and a long way from Silk Willougby.

Yet not such a long way, he discovered two days later upon opening his Reflector. Also on the night of June 17, he read, thieves had broken into the home of Lord Edmund Thomas on the north edge of Lincoln and had stolen a wall safe containing nearly a million pounds worth of jewelry, including the Star of Madras diamond. The theft had occurred while Lord Edmund and Lady Hyllerie were in London attending, respectively, a meeting of his company’s directors and a literary reception.

The thieves had entered through a window, cutting the glass expertly to avoid an alarm. They then had removed the small safe in its entirety from the wall behind a sliding mirror. The break-in had been discovered the next morning by Lady Hyllerie’s personal secretary, who had helped the Thomases board the train to London the previous day. The jewelry was fully insured, the story concluded.

GeeGee considered the incident as he drank his morning tea at the kitchen table. He now clearly recalled Lord Edmund and Lady Hyllerie—a handsome young couple whose names and pictures appeared from time to time in the Reflector.

Something stirred faintly in GeeGee’s memory. He reached for the telephone on the worktop, rang a Sleaford number, and waited for his sister to make her slow progress to the telephone under the stairs. At 89, GeeGee reflected, Vicki might be England’s last unalloyed Victorian. Her name, Victoria Regina Dapple, matched the décor of her home and the moral convictions forged during 30 years as headmistress of a girls’ school. She had raised the four orphaned Dapple boys; one reason GeeGee had stayed in Silk Willoughby after his wife’s death was to be next door to Sleaford, without being quite next door to Vicki.

That voice that finally said “Yes?” somehow conveyed in that syllable a disdain encompassing not only the telephone but the whole of the modern world.

“Vicki,” GeeGee said, “I know you detest the telephone, and I try not to ring you oftener than once a month, but I have an odd question . . . .

“Charles.” The rusted murmur at the other end silenced him firmly. “You may forgo the tedious apologies. You ring me at least once a week, and I’m grateful. Also, no question of yours could possibly surprise me. You have been asking them since you were five years old and your brother Raglan put you up to asking me whether all things were possible to God, and, if so, whether He could make a stone bigger than He could lift.”

“As I recall, you successfully avoided answering,” GeeGee said, “but this question is easier. I seem to remember your saying something once about Lord Edmund Thomas’s wife Hyllerie. Something that happened when her grandparents were sending their children to your school.”

There was a long pause. “Yes, well.” Vicki’s voice was like a whisper from across the galaxy. “You must already have realized, Charles, that there is something very wrong with that business in the Reflector about the stolen jewelry. Hyllerie Thomas was a Millborough. The Millboroughs lied for each other. When I had Hyllerie’s mother as a student, she could lie like a bishop.”

GeeGee posed his own doubts the next day to an old friend, Inspector Wilfred Crabbe of the Lincoln police, who received them and GeeGee skeptically in his office. “Something peculiar about the robbery?” he repeated. “I hardly think so, old chum—although the insurance company would dearly love it if we could find something.”

“Unfortunately for the company, it all looks very straightforward. Nobody in the house. Housekeeper had been let go two months back. Lord and Lady Thomas turned on the window alarms and locked up before they left, and everything about the break-in itself was tickety-boo. Footprints under the window and all that. The safe was small, but it took metal torches to cut it loose from the steel wall moorings. Very professional. The insurance lads would like to show that the jewelry wasn’t properly protected, but that safe was proof against any amateur. Those gents cut it right out of the wall. It must have taken them half the night.”

 “You don’t suppose his Lordship might have hired some safecrackers and split the take with them, do you?” GeeGee suggested.

“Not bloody likely,” Crabbe replied. “Who’s going to turn over nine-tenths of a haul like that after doing all the work? And there would always be the threat of blackmail. Sorry, but this one looks like a straight heist.”

“And you’re sure the jewelry was actually in the safe?” GeeGee asked.

Crabbe sighed. “The secretary saw Lady Hyllerie put it in earlier in the day before they left for the station. Lady Hyllerie was showing her a weakened clasp that had finally broken. The jewels had been in the family for generations, and the secretary knew them as well as she knew her own bracelets. Anyway, one could hardly mistake the Star of Madras in that famous silver brooch.”

“And the secretary?” GeeGee persisted.

“Sixty-eight years old and a pillar of rectitude,” Crabbe replied. “She had worked for Lord Edmund’s mother, and Lady Hyllerie took her over after the mother’s death. Also, she had an airtight alibi. Twenty minutes after the train pulled out with the Thomases aboard, she was drinking tea at her daughter’s house, and she was with the daughter and family the whole night.”

“Somehow I suspect that Lord and Lady Thomas have equally good alibis,” GeeGee said.

 “They do,” Crabbe replied. “Lord Edmund met with the directors of his company early in the evening—they’re going through a bad patch right now, I’m told—and then about 10 p.m. he and Lady H. came back to their hotel, the Regency, where they’re well known. Room service took champagne up about midnight. Hyllerie had been at some sort of literary tea fight earlier, while her husband was at his meeting. We talked to the editor whose magazine threw the party, and he confirmed everything—even gave us a picture of Lady Hyllerie receiving an award.”

Crabbe rummaged through the welter of papers on his desk and produced a glossy print of a familiar scene—Lady Hyllerie accepting a check for 100 pounds from Hubert Arthur, the editor of Literary England. A sloppy photo, GeeGee thought, with the microphone obscuring her chin, though not her décolletage. A Reflector photographer would have done better, or he would have answered to Charles G.G. Dapple.

 “I don’t see how she could have a better alibi,” Crabbe concluded, “unless you were at the party and saw her yourself.”

“As a matter of fact,” GeeGee said glumly, “I was and I did.”

In the post next morning was GeeGee’s complimentary copy of The Literary England Poetry Annual. He read over his poems and those of Lady Hyllerie Thomas. Without the sensational gown, “Swallows” struck him as no more than ordinary.

 Two days later, GeeGee became a Literary Figure. His morning Reflector carried a headline, “Lincolnshire Poets Honored,” above a small, inside story about Lady Hyllerie’s award. Next to the story was the picture Crabbe had shown him, with a credit: “Photo by courtesy of Literary England.” There was nothing slow about the magazine’s publicity department.

The last paragraph read: “Charles G.G. Dapple, editor emeritus of the Reflector, also had poems chosen for inclusion in the Annual.” At the very moment, GeeGee thought wryly, some former colleague at the Reflector was probably tacking the cutting on the paper’s bulletin board and appending a bawdy comment.

 Ah, well, what did they know, the Philistines? Doomed to labor in the muck of daily journalism, what could they understand of the creative air in which the contributors to Literary England lived and moved and had their being? GeeGee thought of those contributors as a lonely and rather brave band, toiling in isolation until the magazine brought them together from across England. Even then, he thought, they might have remained almost strangers had not Mr. Hubert Arthur bustled about, praising their work, introducing them to each other, and posing them for the photographer. And of course the stunning Lady Hyllerie had thrown everyone else into the shade.

GeeGee examined the Reflector’s picture again. It was an excellent likeness of Lady Hyllerie, even to the mole on her right cheek. GeeGee had noticed it during the reception: the only blemish on an otherwise perfect face. He would have liked to have seen the whole face again, with that perfect Grecian chin . . . .

At that moment, GeeGee knew, with awful clarity, that he had been a fool, and that no matter what his former colleagues were scrawling across the cutting on the bulletin board, it was no more than he deserved. He rang inspector Crabbe and spoke earnestly and confessionally with him. Crabbe was decent enough not to laugh, at least until he got off the phone. When the inspector called back two days later, his tone was matter of fact.

 “You were quite right, GeeGee,” he said, “but how did you happen to notice the microphone? Nobody notices things like that. It’s just part of the background—or foreground, in this case.”

 “You damn well notice it when you’re 6-foot-4 and can’t even say thank you without adjusting the thing,” GeeGee replied. “Hubert Arthur had just announced the check presentation, and he’s a short, round little chap. When Lady Hyllerie came up to accept, she didn’t use the microphone, because it was too low for her. And when she spoke, nobody could hear her.

“But in the photo, the microphone was level with her chin. So the photo couldn’t have been of the actual presentation.”

Crabbed cleared his throat with a sound like a lorry shifting gears and described his interview with Lady Hyllerie. “She’s an accomplished liar,” he said, “and she gave us the full treatment. How dare you suggest such a thing about us of the upper classes, and all that. As though she hadn’t grown up as a butcher’s daughter in Grantham.

 “She caved in, though, when we showed her the blow-ups of the picture Hubert Arthur gave to us and to the newspaper, and of the same shot taken by the photographer at the reception. Arthur squealed on the photographer, who was quite happy top give us his undeveloped reception film.

 “The difference in microphone heights stuck out, of course, but there were some other differences—a few age lines makeup couldn’t hide and a little difference in the cheekbones. The mother is more classically beautiful than Lady Hyllerie, although they did their best to look exactly alike, even to the mother’s putting on a mole to match Hyllerie’s.

“The disguise was quite good enough to fool the Regency staff. Lord Edmund and his mother-in-law were drinking champagne to celebrate the success of the scheme about the time Hyllerie was finishing lifting the safe at the house.”

“Genesis 27:22,” GeeGee said. “The oldest con—the voice is Jacob’s but the hands are Esau’s. That explains why the mother didn’t use the microphone.”

He paused a moment before adding, “But didn’t you say the robbery was a professional job?”

 “It was, very nearly,” Crabbe replied. “Lord and Lady Thomas had been working on the safe supports with torches for weeks—ever since they sacked the housekeeper—and covering the work with quick-drying plaster during the day. All Hyllerie had to do was cut the last quarter-inch and drag the safe to her car. Then it was off to a fence who could dispose of the safe and get the jewelry to the buyer. The cash plus the insurance settlement would have just about saved Lord Edmund’s business.”

“You’ve got to hand it to them for nerve,” Crabbe added. “A year of planning. Soliciting poems and printing an issue of a phony magazine. Sending out the publicity picture of the real Hyllerie getting the check. Drawing everyone’s attention to ‘Lady Hyllerie’s’ smashing gown and having the real Hyllerie walk around outside the house in men’s shoes. They were cool customers.”

 “But who in the world was Hubert Arthur?” GeeGee asked.

“A professional actor and a cousin of the mother’s,” Crabbe replied. “The photographer knew something was up when he shot the scene in the empty hall with Arthur and Lady Hyllerie—then came back and shot an identical scene a week later at the party. But they paid him well, and Arthur seems to have had something on him about phony passport photos.”

GeeGee looked wistfully across the kitchen table at his copy of a very rare publication. “It seems a lot of trouble to go to,” he said, “and someone could have tripped them up at any time.”

“Yes,” Crabbe said, “but the important thing was to make the lie big enough—to have an alibi no one would even think of questioning. They didn’t want us or the insurance company to begin doubting.”

“And you know these struggling literary sorts,” Crabbe added. “Desperate to get published, touchingly grateful when they are, not inclined to ask questions.” There was the faintest ghost of a chuckle as the inspector hung up.

GeeGee picked up The Literary England Poetry Annual and slipped it into a drawer. A scrap of song flitted through his head once more:

Where is the promise of my years,
once written on my brow . . . .

He remembered that the lines were by Adah Isaacs Menken, an actress known mostly for appearing on stage half nude and strapped to the back of a horse. She also wrote poetry.

“Nightscape” wasn’t half bad, GeeGee decided, and it hadn’t really been published. It might be just the thing for Pumpernickel: A Poetic Potpourri. He turned to his typewriter and began to type and hum.

©2009 William Bridges

[Last of four pieces on the 2008 presidential campaign.]

END OF THE TRAIL

 Nothing is more over when it’s over than an election. (Except pregnancy, Karen says, and then—like elections—there’s a whole new set of problems.)

 It’s hard to believe that less than a week ago I was furiously involved in a 14-hour get-out-the-vote campaign, which was actually the wind-up of a furious four-day GOTV campaign. I now live in a blue state, at least for the next four years. The air seems fresher somehow.

 But it was just as close as the polls predicted. Obama won by a skimpy 23,000 votes out of 2.6 million cast. As it turned out, he didn’t need Indiana, but that was fine. We were one of the last four states to be declared, at 2 in the morning. By then I’d gone to bed.

 I’ve been trying ever since to figure out what really happened, especially here in Johnson County. My  beatific vision that our little red corner of the state might somehow turn blue was dispelled. I’d been seeing a lot of people on doorsteps who were voting Obama, and they seemed enthusiastic about it—no Bradley Effect that I could discern. But among the not-at-homes, the no-commenters,  and the quickly closed doors there turned out to be a solid Republican majority. Johnson County is still part of the “ring of fire” around Indianapolis.

 But looking beyond that, the story gets more interesting, if you can stand a few statistics. The county voter turnout (including a huge early vote) went up from 60 percent in 2004 to 64 percent this year. Bush took the county by 75 percent to 25 percent for Kerry. McCain managed only 63 percent to Obama’s 37 percent. The raw numbers are also interesting. Rounded very roughly, 6,500 more people voted than in 2004. Obama got 8,700 more votes than Kerry did, and McCain got 2,200 hundred fewer than Bush. So in a sense, Obama got all the new voters and 2,200 of the old ones.

Those are faulty statistics, of course, since they don’t take into account a bunch of variables. But in a rough way they’re exactly right. Obama outperformed Kerry and McCain underperformed Bush. That was the story of the night all over the state. Gary, Indianapolis, and Evansville didn’t have to do it all—our rural counties also helped out.

 How that came to pass is part of the larger story of the fascinating Obama campaign.

 The primary here was a home-grown effort, operating mostly out of a city park in the northern part of the county. The Obama campaign supplied direction with an overworked college student or two, and it clearly had some idea that Indiana might be worth attention. Obama himself—in the effort to head off Hillary—had already begun making what became nearly 50 visits to the state (compared to two or three by McCain). Hillary won Indiana too narrowly to give her any help, and I figured my campaigning was done—Indiana would be red as usual in November.

 But the Obama campaign kept chugging. It opened a real office, with a roof this time, at the north edge of the county. Then, amazingly, it opened a second one, in Franklin. This was a sort of stealth office, because it was unpaid space in another business—and the Republican building manager wouldn’t allow any advertising or signs. Still, it was a place to operate from, where Oliver Harwood, the Obama operative, could stay up all night and put together “walk packets” for volunteers. (Oliver was on a year’s rustication from Cornell and just back from playing soccer for an Italian league.) I was happy because I could campaign close to home, instead of making the hour round-trip to the northern office. I think Obama ended up with 44 such offices in the state, compared to about half a dozen for McCain. In effect, the Obama organization took over for our moribund Democratic county committee.

 A lot of money certainly was spent, just as McCain complained. The handouts and doorhangers for volunteers were glossy, up to date, and changed weekly. We had lists of targeted voters to call on, although these were somewhat slapdash and not always up to date. For Nov. 3 and then for Election Day itself, the doorhangers were different, and personalized with the polling places of the prospective voters—I found this fairly amazing, in view of the complexities of four-color printing and split runs.

 I finished up my door-knocking on Saturday and Sunday, having reached a total of 600 doors since September plus several hundred more in the primary. For Monday and Election Day, Oliver put me in change of the volunteer walkers. I sat all day in the office, handing out packets, logging the lists back in, and making sure each volunteer was profusely thanked.

 Not everything went as planned. Lists and doorhangers had been prepared for parts of the county so remote than even I barely knew where they were. “We’re going to get to every one of them!” Oliver exclaimed. I knew better, but played along—on my private tally sheet these were grouped as “Outer Darkness.” Oliver gave up about noon, and had the phone bank call them instead.

 There was also something called the Houdini Operation, at three polling places where Republican shenanigans were feared (although none developed). The Obama camp had poll book watchers at these, who were also supposed to listen for voter’s names as they signed in, then phone these to a central location. In turn, someone there would notify our local office so we could tailor our voter contacts minute-by-minute and not call people who had already voted. That was too much! The plan broke down and was abandoned by 10 a.m., but just the fact that someone had thought it up and given it a try was awe-inspiring.

 Probably the weakest part of the effort was a shortage of volunteers. Some of the better ones were working the polls. I was stuck in the office doing bookkeeping. People wandered in on no particular schedule, had packets and maps thrust into their hands, and were shooed out the door. I got to the office at 4:45 a.m. to get the packets organized in some rational way. Rich, my chief assistant (from whose computer business we were operating), arrived an hour later and spent the next two hours trying to wake up. “I never knew 5 o’clock came twice a day,” he groaned. But he and his buddy Mike eventually got moving and by 3 p.m. had covered five walk/drive areas all by themselves. By then I was down to one undistributed packet (other than the abandoned ones in Outer Darkness), and so went to work on Rich and Mike to do one more run. “There are two voters up on Graham Road who are sitting home wondering why nobody from Obama has been by,” I told them. “As Graham Road goes, so goes the nation.” Pissing and moaning, they went back to work. (There are some parallels here with motivating reporters.)

 And then it was all over and gone, like Shakespeare’s great globe itself, without a wrack left behind. I don’t even have a souvenir Obama button, having given mine away to an eager voter on the last day. Already it’s hard to remember what I was doing last Saturday, and everything else is fading—all the campaign craziness, the punditry, Tina Fey, the hate mail from the Republican state GOP, and the idiocy of our local county clerk (in charge of ensuring a fair election), who was caught leaving fliers on her employees’ desks, describing Obama as “a young black Adolf Hitler.” Ah, Indiana—you may look blue for now, but you’ve still got a lot of red in your veins.

 PS The day after the election I got a nice e-mail thank-you note from Barack for all my work. We are on a first-name basis now. I think I’ll apply for a post as chargé d’affaires in some small, warm country.