My father, Louis, and some thoughts on spys.

My father was born the fifth of April, 1901. I was born on the 28th of December, 1942. Not being a numbers person, having been born at the very end of the year became confusing. For about 99 percent of my birth year I didn't exist.  It would have been simpler to say I was born just a little bit before 1943. And my father, well, he was "almost", the same age as the century. So, when I was five, the Old Man was almost but not quite 46.

That having been cleared up, let me explain what I'm getting at. Let's suppose we go back to when I was five. I was beginning to get glimpses of the biographies of my parents.They made the 1920s and thirties seem exciting and glamorous. (A five year old can record an amazing amount of colorized context.) Much later, I would read F. Scott Fitzgerald, and feel I was on familiar territory.  

Louis was a big part of my father's story of himself in those days and he retold his being "influenced" by Louis on numerous occasions. Louis Adamic was well known as the author of the best selling book Dynamite, a story about violence between labor and management in the U.S. from the 1890s up to the 1930s. But for my father the Adamic book he referred to most often was The Native's Return.

 

In my book The White Fence, I mention that when my father and mother first met, Ray excitedly told his future bride that he was a peasant, and that, inspired by that great Adamic book, he was going back to his birthplace,Yugoslavia, to reclaim his roots. Within the year, he in fact did that, meeting up with Adamic in Ray's home village, Muo, in the town of Kotor in the the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where a great feast was put on for the two American success stories.That feast became part of my father's myth of himself. He was an artist, after all.
I have come to believe, after having worked for years doing oral history, that everyone has a story, and that we need our stories. Life is stories. 

Louis wrote many books, but toward the end of his life he was blacklisted when he was sued for slander by Winston Churchill. He had written a book about Tito, I'm not sure it was the same one in which he mentioned Churchill, but while most people seem to have thought it was a positive, Pro-Tito book, the Dictator did not.  (It's not good to upset the Dictator.)
I was probably about ten when my father got a phone call and later announced to my mother that Louis was dead. Was it suicide? Or a political assassination? That is still not clear to this day. Also still not clear is whether Louis was a spy, [most likely yes], and if so, who's side was he on?

                                            Louis office - photo courtesy Veronika Vogler

 

 

Now we were in the 1950s and spies were big. Spies and Communists were all over the newspapers and that new media outlet, television. I was as tuned in to the whole Cold War environment as any kid, at least any kid that cared about the news. Without veering off into a historical timeline though, let me just say this about those times. Along with probably a large percentage of the population, I never expected to be alive after  the Cold War!  

There have been many unexpected turns of events that have rocked my world, but, before 9/11, the two most important were probably the evacuation of Saigon, and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. History is different today. But it is far from over. And it is important, no doubt, for the future of humanity, that the 20th century be taken very, very seriously.  

Which leads me to this. I'd like to recommend to my readers a short list of books that I've read and felt were of particular interest over the past decade or two, which concern Spies and Communists and The American Left:

First, two books with the same title; Partisans, by David Laskin, (non-fiction), and Partisans, by Peter Mathiessen, (fiction); ....The Secret History of The CIA, by Joseph Trento; ...Early Cold War Spies, by Hanes & Klehr; The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev; The Amerasia Spy Case, Klehr and Radosh...The Mighty Wurlitzer, How the CIA played America,  by Hugh Wilford;   and The Sword and The Shield, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.

 

Although there have been droves of 20th century spy books, the above I found particularly helpful in understanding the workings of modern intelligence. However, there are a couple of other standouts I want to mention. One is not a book, or not Just a book, and that is Reilly Ace of Spies. I've yet to have a chance to sit down and chat with someone who is as much a fan of this story, the television series version of it, as I am. Sam Neill is great as Sidney Reilly. (You can Google a summary of the story of Reilly, and save me paraphrasing the same.) Here's a for-instance, from a Washington Post review. [His Russian Military family were anti-Semitic] "He was 16, at school in Vienna, when his mother died and he couldn't get back in time for the funeral. His uncle remarked, 'What can you expect from a Jewish bastard?' And that's how he discovered he was illegitimate; and Jewish. ..."He faked a suicide, ran away to South America and never saw his family again."
Reilly is believed to have been the source for the fictional story of James Bond. The series is directed by Martin Campbell and Jim Goddard.

The theme music is the romance movement from The Gadfly Suite, by Dmitri Shostakovich. For fifty years, from 1929 till he died in 1970, Shostakovich was the most prolific writer of movie soundtracks in The Soviet Union. The Suite was originally written for a Soviet film titled Gadfly. Stalin liked Shostakovich so much that he refrained from killing him!
The theme is my favorite meditation. I assume for the duration the being of Sam Neill, as Sidney Reilly, seducing one beautiful Russian woman after another, meanwhile conducting layered levels of negotiations between countries and world industrial powers. (Alright, I suppose that's not exactly meditating, but it works for me.) I did something similar in the early 1960s when I thought I was Marcello Maestroiani. I have a certain taste in music. It's mine. That's all I can say, except, that I think it is similar to love. It's in the ear of the beholder.


Then there's a book that really knocked my socks off. Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers; titled simply Whittaker Chambers; by Random House; NY 1997. I read about it in the NY Times Book Review and planned to read it but then one morning while watching the Imus show on TV, a radio show that was also broadcast over The Fox Network, I heard Imus raving about the book. So I went out and bought it and read it, and then read Chamber's book Witness. Imus continued to rave on and on about it for weeks on-end to the point where his sidekick, Charles McCord, went ballistic. If it was an act it was a good one. Seemed like he was having a stroke. He was sick of hearing about Whittaker Chambers. I got the joke. Imus was OCD.
And, so was I. I did the same thing to my own audience, which consists for the most part of only one person, Martha, my Significant Other, and she was driven to read the book. All in all it was a lovely time had by all, except for poor McCord.
Now I know that Imus died recently; I also know that he wasn't to everyone's taste. I apologize for liking him. I'll try to be more tactful in the future. But after sharing Tannenhaus's book with The I-Man, I feel like we were close.   

 

 

Out-takes, thoughts, and The Outsider.

The nice thing about our apartment is that it has a nice big window that looks out on a nice flat stretch of lawn, a typical square Florida reservoir pond, a typical South Florida canal, and a rather upscale horse farm, just on the other side of the canal, not one hundred feet from our two television-watching recliners; at which farm until recently I rode a little, until I felt I was getting too old and could get hurt. From this window I watch the horses and riders, some practicing Dressage, and some of whom, both horses and riders, I know personally, and also, the birds. (Whom I like to think I know well.)

The most permanent residents are the Muscovy ducks, birds that many think are common and vulgar, but not me, I like them. [see; contrarian] 

But also, there are Ospreys, Cattle Egrets, Ibises, Black Ducks, an occasional Pin-tail, Marsh Hens, and Shore Birds including Lemkins, [sp.], (I call them Lipkins, after a former landlady), Storks, (I forget which kind), and everybody's favorite, the Roseate Spoonbill.* There's another one, a red bellied something, a small duck, I've forgotten his name. The hardest part of this blogging is remembering names. Oh, and one of my favorites, the Kingfisher. 

One day, not long after my friend Einar had died, I was telling my riding coach about old Ein, and along came a Red Headed Woodpecker who landed right in front of me not twenty feet away. [Einar had red hair before it turned white], I felt it was a visit from Ein, perhaps to tell me he had made it to the Akashic Reading Room.  

I started out with this post wanting to carve out a place to put random thoughts, thinking I had a serious need for such a place, but now I've misplaced all those thoughts. I've been visited lately by another old friend, someone who gifted me, right around the time when I found out that when a Sasquatch wants to make a friendly gesture towards a Sapien Sapien, they leave hawk feathers by their nest.  I've been Hawk-feathered. 

When I talked to my sister before my birthday she wanted to know what I wanted. I've already made it clear, for over the last seventy years or so, that I "Don't Want Nothin", my way of saying I'm not going to get you anything, but being her, she's a stubborn Virgo, (are Virgos stubborn?) By the way, actually I wish my sign was Mule, which animal by the way is not stubborn, just extremely intelligent. (Analyze That!) 

Anyway, that very day, I'd restrained myself from buying another Rebecca West book, The Court and The Castle, and so I told her she could buy me that, used, from Amazon, and it showed up a few days later. I needed it because in another post as I mentioned, that great biographer Carl Rolyson had said it was one of her best, so I'm reading that now. 

How's my book ban coming?  Well, O.K. I guess...,  this week.  So now I'm reading the West book just mentioned; and a tiny book by Sara Churchill, Tapestry something; still sort of slowly hacking away at The Haunted Wood; Ingo Swann's Secrets of Power, Vol. 1; Holism and Evolution, (hacking away at that too), by Jan Christian Smuts, still hacking away at something by Luce Irigaray, maybe I'll focus more on her later, and also, you'd think this might confuse me, but not so far, The Outsider, by Colin Wilson, something I've had on the shelf for too many years.