Trotsky

The TV series on Netflix called Trotsky is a Russian production with English subtitles, and the Russian spoken sounds rough and sinister. Maybe that’s because of the way the actors deliver their lines, or the nature of the subject, I’m not sure. But I found the treatment of the subject compelling.
In the first scene Trotsky, then known as Lev Bronstein, is in prison, and begins a riot in protest about a beating administered to one of the prisoners. The head of the prison takes him to his office, challenges him to a chess match (a game at which Russians are particularly adept), and lectures him on how to use power. Impressed, Bronstein takes the name of the warden as his revolutionary pseudonym: Trotsky.
In the next scene he is in the armored train he used as head of the Red Army he did much to organize as the Russian civil war began in the wake of the Bolshevik coup in November of 1917. He has a group of soldiers shot for running from battle, but then inspires the rest to return to battle and win.
In the next scene he is living in Mexico with his wife and being interviewed by a Frank Jacson, whom those familiar with the story know as the assassin sent by Josef Stalin to murder him. Jacson poses as a writer for a magazine sent to write about Trotsky. He criticizes Trotsky, but has a reluctant admiration for him. Trotsky is justifying his career to Jacson, though he pretends he doesn’t care about his opinion. This becomes clear when the series shows him talking to dead people from his past. To one Trotsky insists he doesn’t fear death. The specter replies that people who don’t fear death are already dead.
From there the story moves to a Socialist meeting where some of the stars of the Russian party were meeting, like Plekhanov (more or less the grand old man of the group), Lenin, and Parvus (a paradoxic character who was very well off, but who turned out to be a double agent). Trotsky, brilliant and arrogant, is disrespectful to all of them. One scene has him walking out of the meeting and Stalin seeking to greet him. He ignores Stalin, suggesting this is where Stalin’s resentment of him began. I don’t know if that’s historically accurate.
Principal actors in the series manage to closely resemble the characters they represent (except Stalin is too tall), to the credit of the casting director, incidentally.
At the same time as the conference Trotsky was meeting his wife. He had had two children with a previous “wife” who had insisted he leave Siberia (where he had been exiled) without her. In London he met his second wife, Natalia, with whom he stayed for the rest of his life. The film portrays her as a sophisticate who invites Trotsky to a party in which the guests are using drugs. He denounces them for that.
Later they travel to Vienna where, according to the film, he meets Freud, and pretty successfully debates him, though Freud also has insights into his character. I’m not too sure about historical accuracy in this case either. It’s possible he could have met Freud, but I haven’t heard of any documentation, especially not of Trotsky successfully debating Freud.
Another scene of doubtful accuracy occurs during the depiction of the revolution of 1905. An incident that helped set off that revolution was a group of workers led by a priest to petition the Tsar which was fired on by Cossacks with many casualties. Trotsky is shown organizing another protest group, then sending them home when they’re confronted by troops. Good for him if he actually did that, but I find no mention of it elsewhere.
Almost the only place in which he is less than confident is in 1917 when he has returned to Russia after the Tsar has abdicated and finds himself confronted with anti-Semitism. Russia, like most European countries, didn’t like Jews. He and some of his children are rescued by a worker who has read and approved of Trotsky’s work, and wants to be friends with him. Trotsky is less than enthusiastic, despite the help this worker gives him, including getting him released from prison and prompting Alexander Kerensky, leader of the interim government, to escape the country. When Trotsky has the chance he sends the worker to the front where he is killed, later admitting it was because the man had seen him vulnerable.
The film also has Trotsky beginning the Bolshevik coup two days before it was planned by Lenin and others. He then presents the leadership of the government to Lenin because Lenin had previously told him that Russians would never accept a Jew as their leader. The historicity of this incident is questionable too. Trotsky was certainly brilliant and able (which aroused jealousy among other Bolsheviks, especially Stalin), but this seems unlikely.
His next assignment was negotiating a peace treaty with Germany. The treaty was very unfair to Russia, as German soldiers had penetrated deep into Russian territory, so Trotsky had little leverage. He attempted to get more by publishing all the secret treaties found in Russian diplomatic headquarters, something I thought was a very cool thing to do, something like the Wikileaks of today. He hoped this would help start the world revolution Bolsheviks were looking forward to, but it didn’t. He had to accept the treaty, but the USSR repudiated it before long.
He then began organizing the Red Army, which initially didn’t have enough men and wasn’t well trained. He insisted on using soldiers from the previous regime to make the army effective, with political commissars assigned to each general to make sure they weren’t trying to prevent the army from winning, a system that was carried over into World War II.
After that he tried to oppose Stalin’s growing power. Stalin was General Secretary of the party, and was able to give people he liked jobs so they would support him. He began getting a bit arrogant, and insulted Lenin’s wife. Lenin asked Trotsky to help him denounce Stalin at the next party congress, but Lenin had a stroke just before then, and wasn’t able to speak at it. Trotsky didn’t bring the issue of Stalin’s rudeness up. It’s doubtful it would have mattered if he had. Stalin had created a strong foundation for his power. Had Lenin’s health allowed, removing him might have been possible, but Stalin had a genius for building and retaining power. Nor is it entirely certain that Lenin really wanted to oust Stalin from the government, though he may have wanted  to punish him.Trotsky alone wasn’t able to oppose Stalin, at least partly because he’d alienated other Bolsheviks as well. From that point on it was a matter of time until Trotsky was ousted from the government and then the country.
The TV series doesn’t cover that. Trotsky spent time in a number of countries trying to oppose Stalinism, but not very successfully. His last stop was in Mexico, where he was killed in 1940. The series has a different take on that too. When he and his wife realize who Jacson is (his real name was Ramon Mercader)  they are at first frightened. Then Trotsky says, “Don’t worry, it will be okay.” Then he goads Jacson into killing him with an ice axe (used for mountain climbing, I think). According to the portrayal, he really wasn’t afraid of death. Maybe he even desired it.
The real Trotsky was a giant. The Bolshevik movement attracted quite a number of very able people, though in retrospect we wonder how they could have been so misled. They were fanatics, absolutely sure that what they were trying to do was right. People in Russia had been talking about revolution since the 1820s, to the alarm of some, and with the support of others. The Tsarist regime was an autocracy, and the people wanted freedom. The Bolsheviks may have believed they wanted it too, but power took precedence: once they had it they built a military and secret police to keep it, and Trotsky wasn’t the least of those. He was prominent in building the Red Army, he restored the death penalty, and helped set up labor and concentration camps, many of the mechanisms that Stalin was able to use against him and millions of others. If Trotsky and the others did believe in freedom, it was vastly ironic that they made a government much worse than the one they replaced.
More ironic than that was the forced collectivization which disrupted Russian agriculture and killed millions of people, but did give the government the money to modernize their armed forces, which enabled them to beat the Nazis and play the major role in winning the European part of World War II. They did need a great deal of aid from Britain and the USA in the form of tanks, planes, telephone wire, and other things, but they had to do the fighting, and did it very well. The commander in chief of Britain’s armed forces said he hadn’t believed the Russians could win. Hitler thought he could beat them quickly, and very nearly did. We would prefer to believe it took a democracy to beat Hitler, but that wasn’t so.
But there’s a reason the war is referred to in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. Stalin wasn’t stupid enough to ask the Russians to fight a war to save Communism. Had the Nazis been less brutal in their invasion many Russians might have sided with them, but that’s not how it happened.
Would things have been different if Trotsky had been leading the country, and not Stalin? I find Trotsky somewhat more sympathetic, but not a great deal. Executing soldiers who don’t want to fight, backing the Red Terror, labor and concentration camps I find difficult to sympathize with. I would never be in a position to make such decisions, but if I did have to I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t do much the same. Not to do at least some of those things might mean not surviving myself, and giving up the dream that Trotsky and a great many others had put a great deal of labor into. Too bad the manifestation of the dream turned so horrible, but at the same time Communists have certainly not been the only people to use unsavory means.

Twelve Years a Slave

I didn’t really want to watch Twelve Years a Slave. I was already convinced that slavery was pretty horrible. But my wife wanted to see it, so I did watch, and it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.

It was bad enough. Imagine being kidnapped away from your family, being sold, and no longer having any semblance of freedom. The man, Solomon Northrup, survives at the cost of scars from a whip on his back and frequent humiliation, but possibly worse is what he sees around him.

A black woman also apparently kidnapped has her children sold away from her and can’t stop crying. Northrup (now being called Platt) tries to get her to stop, but she rebukes him. Then we see her being dragged away, and she doesn’t come back. We don’t know what happens.

As he runs an errand he comes across several white men hanging a black man, a fate he barely escaped himself, after having antagonized an overseer. He had been saved from hanging, but left with the rope around his neck and his feet barely touching the ground for hours before being released. There’s nothing he can do about the man being hanged, but he sees it happen as he passes by.

One young woman slave consistently picks more cotton in a day than any of the men, earning her owner’s attention and appreciation. He shows his appreciation by having sex with her. Not long after she comes to Solomon and asks him to take her down to the swamp, hold her under water and drown her. He can’t bring himself to do it. Some time after that she visits a neighboring plantation to get soap because she feels dirty. When she returns, the owner says she’s late, and begins whipping her. Northrup tries to intervene, and is forced to whip her himself.

The young woman excites the owner’s wife to jealousy. Apparently the couple don’t get along well, and she can tell he’s attracted to the slave, so she hurts the young woman at a sort of party at which she gives each slave a pastry she’s fixed–except the young woman. We hear her cry out, but don’t see what happened–until later, when we see one of her eyes is bloodshot.

The movie is based on a true story. Solomon Northrup was kidnapped from Saratoga, New York in about 1841, and freed about twelve years later. In the movie he persuades a white artisan to write to his family, they send his identification south (I guess he is enslaved in Georgia, from an early scene), and the local sheriff or lawyer frees him. I don’t know if that was accurate, but it may have been.

At the end of the film we’re told Northrup tried twice to sue the two men who had kidnapped him, but that they were acquitted both times on technicalities. He wrote the book on which this movie is based, lectured around the country, and became involved with the Underground Railroad. We’re also told, though, that nothing is known of where or when he died, leaving open the ugly possibility that he might have been kidnapped and sent south again. Of course we can’t assume that.

The movie may well have soft-pedaled what a slave’s life was like. Some years ago I began reading Black Jacobins, an account of the revolution in what is now Haiti, which overturned the regime and expelled all the slave owners, the only such revolution we know of to have been successful (though Haiti’s subsequent history has been unhappy).

The book began by talking about the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas, something which I knew had gone on, but hadn’t known the details of.

The kidnapped blacks were placed aboard a ship, almost stacked on top of each other and shackled in place so they had no choice but to void their bladders and move their bowels where they lay. Occasionally they might be allowed on deck for exercise and fresh air, but too often some jumped overboard, or tried to, so that wasn’t allowed often.

According to the author of the book, the Middle Passage was so stressful that women rarely gave birth until two or three years after the voyage–if they survived.

That wasn’t guaranteed. Slaves had to work very hard, and were frequently punished. Sometimes logs or other large pieces of wood were chained to a leg while they worked. Metal helmets were placed on their heads to keep them from eating the sugar cane, St Domingue (as that portion of the island was then known) being a sugar producing colony, and the most profitable colony in the world at that time.

There were also whippings, of course, and if the owners or overseers were really irritated, sometimes castrations. Slaves were also sometimes stuffed full of gunpowder and blown up.

I found myself unable to read much further.

There has always been slavery in human history, and still is. The institution may be gone, but it still remains in practice, especially sexual slavery, though that’s not the only kind. I’m sure slavery in the ancient world wasn’t pleasant either, but it seems to have become especially toxic in the New World, where it became associated with race, as it had never been before, though indentured servitude wasn’t much different, and was also difficult to survive. In the ancient world some slaves at least were able to attain a status of trust in which they could rise very high (in the bureaucracy of ancient Rome and the later Ottoman empire, for example), and frequently buy their freedom. The latter was sometimes, but not often, available to slaves in the Americas too.

Why did the slave owners of St Domingue treat their slaves with such an extremity of violence? The main reason seems to be fear, because they were greatly outnumbered.

I don’t think that’s the whole story, though. The masters and overseers were supposedly Christian, but behaved in very unChristian ways. Much of the story of the New World is the story of exploitation, even though many of the immigrants settled with the specific aim of establishing a religious utopia. Of course that wasn’t the case in Haiti, nor in most of the southern colonies in what became the USA. There was slavery in the North too, but not as much, since the climate was unsuited to the kind  of intensive agriculture that made plantations profitable.

Much of the motivation must have been to rise to wealth, if not from actual poverty, at least from some kind of position of insecurity. A gigantic opportunity was presented the colonists in a whole continent of natural resources that must have seemed inexhaustible. It was only necessary to obtain the land from its native inhabitants and then enlist them (or someone else) to do the intense manual labor necessary to unlock the new land’s riches. Doing the work one’s self (though owners must have had to do some of it) wouldn’t have yielded enough profit. The fear wasn’t merely of the slaves, but of the poverty that these entrepeneurs must have felt was relentlessly pursuing them.

After all, there’s no guarantee of success with agriculture. A bad crop can ruin a plantation owner, especially since the market has no guarantees either. The same is probably true of almost any product, though later entrepeneurs discovered ways to at least come close to ensuring a steady income.

There were fringe benefits, though. Slave women could fulfill many men’s fantasies, with the added advantage that any children they had could eventually be put to work or sold. Considering the wide range of different shades of color today, it’s clear that there was a good deal of intercourse between black and white, probably from the beginning of the trade, despite the avowed horror of miscegnation. And the most likely culprits were the slave owners, since they had the power to indulge with minimal adverse consequences. This was less true for black men and white women, though such pairings probably did happen occasionally.

As it happens, we have documented evidence of black and white relationships. Most will have heard of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. James Hammond was another prominent slave owner who at one point was a governor of South Carolina, and later a Senator. He took a slave woman as a mistress and slept with her until her daughter was 12, when he switched to her. His wife (through whom he owned his plantation), told him to choose between her and his slave, and he chose his slave. After five years he and his wife reunited.

There was also an active internal market in slaves. An article in the Smithsonian magazine recounts how a slave owner from Virginia took a number of his slaves to Natchez, Mississippi, a hub of the slave trade, and sold them for enough money to pay his debts. This must have been a fairly frequent occurrence, as well as the practice of selling recalcitrant slaves to plantations in the deep southern states.

Of course it’s tempting to forget about the sufferings slaves had to undergo, and how their descendants are often still affected by the trauma suffered then and since. The stories are horrifying,  but that’s what makes them still interesting, too. For many of us, movies like Twelve Years a Slave show us an unfamiliar world. Unfortunately, for too many people, probably living in the same places many of us do, but invisibly, that’s not true.

Black Movies

I live only a few blocks from a nonprofit theater. It plays some of the films other theaters do, but also some art movies. Since it’s Black History month they’re showing a series of films about black issues.

The first shown was Iinvictus (which means, unconquered), after a poem quoted in the movie. It’s set in the Union of South Africa in the 1990s not long after Nelson Mandela was elected president, and was very concerned with reconciling white and black citizens. One way he chooses to do this is by supporting the national rugby team on the eve of the country hosting the rugby World Cup.

Rugby is a very rough sport reminiscent of American football. When Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) hears that the African National Congress wants to change the name of the team, the Springboks, he goes to the meeting and urges them to reconsider. He says changing the name will confirm what whites believe, that the blacks want to take everything away from them. A bit later Mandela is interviewed by a sportscaster who asks him if he hadn’t been one of the blacks who refused to root for the team. Mandela replies that he had been, but that if he couldn’t adjust to new circumstances he couldn’t expect anyone else to, either.

He follows up by inviting the captain of the Springboks (Matt Damon) to tea, and asking him and the team to put on clinics. They’re not initially enthusiastic, but seem to enjoy the clinic shown, which is in a black slum. This is all nice symbolically, but there’s little more of substance. The rest of the film concentrates on the games the rugby team plays on their way to winning the World Cup (having begun as an underdog), being wished good luck individually before every game by Mandela, who has taken the time to learn the name of each team member. Not terrible, but I would have liked to learn more about the substantive efforts Mandela made to bring the country together.

The second film in the series was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. I had seen it when it first came out, but had forgotten most of the details. I think most people know it’s about a black man and white woman wanting to get married and asking for her family’s blessing. The young woman is so bubbly she seems almost brainless, but nobody else takes the issue that way. Everyone (including the couple playing Sidney Poitier’s parents and the young woman’s family’s black servant) are shocked, and initially feel it’s a terrible idea.

The irony of this is that the young woman’s father is a liberal (Spencer Tracy), owns a newspaper, and his been an anti-racist all his life. His friend,  a Catholic priest points out that this is the time where his ideals meet reality. Reality can be disconcerting for anyone, I suppose, particularly those with wealthy and protected lifestyles, as the young woman’s family has. Part of the reason everyone is upset is because the couple have only known each other 10 days, and the young woman in particular wants them to get married as soon as possible. That doesn’t give people much time to get used to the idea. Of course besides the concern about the dislike a mixed couple attracts, there’s the problem of children who could face discrimination because of their mixed blood. Whether or not that’s the main issue is debatable.

I don’t remember exactly what she said, but felt that the woman playing Poitier’s mother had some of the best lines in the movie, I think saying that the couple seemed very sincere about how they felt about each other. This helps persuade the young woman’s mother (Katherine Hepburn), and the two eventually influence the men.

I remember a review from the time saying that it’s hard to understand why there’s any objection from a liberal, since Poitier’s character is a doctor with several degrees who has been working in Africa and has plans to train as many Africans as possible to provide medical care to people there. As portrayed, he could hardly be more perfect or desirable as a son-in-law–except for a slight pigment problem.

In Poitier’s memoirs he says that the studio didn’t really want to make the film.  It tackled a taboo, which meant most Americans (especially white Americans) would be uncomfortable with it. Stanley Kramer only told the studio in very general terms what it would be about while he was making preparations. Eventually he had to tell then the details, and then they tried to stop it, but by then they weren’t in a powerful position. Kramer had been making popular movies for some time, Poitier had already won an Oscar, Tracy and Hepburn were legends, and they were running out of time to use this team, as Tracy was no longer a young man (it was, in fact, his last role). The film was almost guaranteed to make money.

Poitier, in his memoir, notes that the New York Times later published an article entitled, “Why Do White Folks Love Sidney Poitier So?”  Some people, perhaps especially in the black community felt that Poitier was in a way compromising the anger he felt to portray black men who are nearly perfect. Was his message that these were the only kind of blacks white Americans could accept? That blacks ought to pretend to be something they weren’t? That there were refined individuals in the black community (which there were), and white Americans ought to know and accept them as such?

Ten years before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Poitier had made The Defiant Ones in which he and Tony Curtis escape from prison together. In the last scene they’re running from the police, trying to get onto a train. Poitier is able to climb into a boxcar, but Curtis can’t quite grab his hand to be pulled onto the train. Poitier jumps off the train.

There were people in the black community who asked him why he’d done that. They thought his character should have forgotten Curtis’s, and escaped by himself. In Poitier’s view, the movie was about two men from much different backgrounds who had gone through enough together to become friends. He thought that made the scene valid, whether or not it was realistic.

By the time Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was made the Civil Rights movement had been through some changes. It had begun by blacks standing up for their rights without expressing their emotions. Malcolm X was probably the main person who encouraged blacks to express the anger they all felt, but couldn’t safely express. By 1967 they had begun to do so, and one of the results was riots–with one difference to previous riots. These were carried out by blacks, not whites, unlike the Tulsa riot of 1921 in which an estimated 100-300 blacks were killed, many black businesses burned, and black neighborhoods were actually bombed from airplanes.

Did Poitier feel anger over such past and present incidents? He says he certainly did, He had grown up in the Bahamas in a black majority society before moving to Miami, Florida. When Florida tried to tell him what the rules were “…it was too late. You see, by then I had already fashioned my own rules–quite contrary to what Florida was then saying to me.” He tried always to behave in ways he could live with.

Why, he asks, did Gandhi, Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela become public figures? Because they were angry, but more than that, they transformed anger from a negative self-destructive force to a positive fuel. In Invictus, the actor playing Mandela says that of course he was angry and afraid when released from prison. He had lost 27 years of his life, his family had been dispersed (if not destroyed), and his health had suffered from the hard work he was forced to do. But he realized that if he allowed his anger to rule him that would be allowing himself to continue being imprisoned. He adds that forgiveness is a very powerful weapon. Poitier says that he too finds forgiveness necessary to him, and the anger that he felt he tried to transform into fuel for his work. I think it’s fair to say that he succeeded admirably.

The situation in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is one in which the characters are almost forced to be suspicious of each other. The young woman is not, but she’s the exception. Black is suspicious of white, white of black, and even black of black. It’s the ostensible reason for lynching that may have still been going on at the time the movie was produced, even though the characters are trying to be reasonable and live up to their beliefs in tolerance and racial equality. Whites marrying blacks still hit an exposed nerve in America, whether that was rational or not. I found myself unexpectedly on the edge of tears for much of the film, and I’m not sure why, except that the actors must have found that the theme resonated deeply with them.

By now interracial marriage is no longer so unusual or so frightening. We know there have been many biracial children, and many have done well with the increased opportunities since the 1960s. We also know that miscegenation has regularly occurred in the United States. Fear of it has been a form of projection and paranoia.

In the time of slavery some black men may have impregnated white women, but probably few of them on large plantations. Black men had too much to lose. The more likely scenario (for which there is documentary evidence) is that white slave owners frequently had sex with female slaves. That must be a major reason for the range of color in the black community. It was white men who had the power to so indulge themselves without suffering major consequences.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner ends with a long monologue by Spencer Tracy. Again, I wish I could actually remember what he said, but it was an effective ending to the film. It meant hope that black and white could harmonize for the good of their respective communities and their country.

Unfortunately, the backlash against the Civil Rights movement and all that went with it is still with us. People are still afraid, whether it’s still about the same issues or not. Questionable shootings by police seem to tell blacks that their lives still matter less than those of whites. And whites, still the predominant ethnic group and culture, are still (maybe increasingly) afraid of  minority groups too.

Sidney Poitier in his memoir in talking about forgiveness, says that at some point there must be accountability. When people can admit they’ve done wrong they can then forgive themselves, a process he considers sacred. Until the dominant culture can do this, they will still fear, and lash out at the people they fear, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, but without understanding WHY they fear.

A different example is when parents have a child murdered. It’s natural to want revenge on the person who did such a thing, but some parents manage to transcend that feeling and concern themselves with how hurt and angry the murderer must have been, and try to salvage his human potential. That’s an unusual response, but a noble one.

It might be similar to the black musician who started making friends with members of the Ku Klux Klan, and inspired them to quit the organization. When asked about it, he said that many of them just wanted someone to listen to them. Listening is something I don’t do as well as I should, but it’s a good aspiration.

Ross MacDonald

Ross MacDonald has been called the author of the most distinguished detective series in America. I don’t know if many people still feel that way. His career ended more than forty years ago, and I was a bit shocked when I discovered (at least a decade ago) that his books had been eradicated from the shelves of the library I often visited. I think it’s a shame if younger people can’t discover his novels anymore.

His writing career began in the late 1930s when his wife was pregnant and they badly needed money. He wrote anything he could sell, and was able to pay doctor bills and others. His wife wrote too, which helped them make it through World War II, during which he served.

His first novels seem to have been exploratory, trying to find out what he wanted to write about. Eventually he settled on the hardboiled detective genre, probably influenced by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and others, and found a protagonist, whom he named Lew Archer.

Archer tells the stories in the first person, but we don’t learn a great deal about him. He was in the service during the war, a policeman for a while after, and married a short time. In the novels he seems to have very little personal life and few friends outside his work. But he’s an observer of human beings, which is brought out more after the first decade or so of Archer novels.

In the early novels Archer is more physically aggressive, fittingly for a hypermasculine genre, and gets beaten up relatively often. Later he’s still verbally aggressive, but picks his spots about getting physically violent. The emphasis in the later books is plot, but also motivation, identity, and how crime impacts not only criminal and the obvious victim, but how it casts a shadow over the next generation too.

Several of the novels are built around a young man (or sometimes woman) trying to understand the trauma that happened when very young, and which cast a shadow over his or her life. Sometimes the search ends happily, but it can just as easily end in the death of the searcher. One young foreigner takes a job in a private club, sees a girl with whom he falls in love, and vows to marry her. He does, too, but is almost immediately murdered by the man she really loves. She has married him for money so she and her previous lover can be together. The young man took a chance with a false identity and stolen money. It didn’t end well.

Sometimes the motive for murder is money, sometimes it’s jealousy or covetousness in a different sense. Important characters in two novels kill because of jealousy, wanting to exclusively own another person. Another kills because she feels terribly unloved after her husband has been unfaithful to her, and her adopted son discovers his birth mother and likes her better. Families and individuals are destroyed because of uncontrolled desires and failures to apologize and forgive.

As far as I can tell, MacDonald didn’t have personal contact with actual criminals, certainly not the professional kind. But as someone (P.D. Ouspensky, I think) put it, the history of humanity is the history of crime. All of us are vulnerable to the temptation to be dishonest and mistreat others to obtain what we want. MacDonald uses that canvas for his observations of human beings. Since Archer is a private detective, and can only serve people who can afford to pay him, the people he observes tend to be well off, and he finds them no happier than poor people. The relationships surrounding the crimes he investigates can seem dizzyingly complicated. and murder seems the only tool criminals can use to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions. Confession apparently would be too painful, even apart from legal consequences.

I doubt that private detectives behave in real life much like the way MacDonald and other writers depict them. One blurb describes Archer as a “mobile conscience”. Archer disdains detectives who specialize in divorce work, but I wonder how many actually can make a living doing much else. Their popularity in fiction I think has more to do with archetypal desires of the reading and movie-going public. We yearn for people obsessed with seeking truth and justice. The private detective fits the image for many, as well as the policeman and cowboy. , Unfortunately, the image may not be very accurate. The canvas can still be at least an interesting one, though.

MacDonald’s last novel was published when he was about 60, and it was one of his best. It differed from his earlier work in that Archer seems to have found a relationship with a woman that might last (in previous novels he has occasional liaisons that don’t last, though MacDonald was actually married for more than 40 years), and seems to feel the need for relationship more than ever before. The title of the novel is The Blue Hammer, and refers to the throbbing of a vein in his girl friend’s body which he hopes will keep throbbing forever. It is to be a distinction between the two of them and the murderer he has just helped catch, who slew his brother to take his identity, and ended imprisoning himself in falsehood.

According to Buddhism, many are desperate for identity, to the point of taking on negative identities: consider a person wishing to be a celebrity without first wanting to be something to be celebrated for, and being willing to work to achieve that something.  Some have even wished to become serial killers.  How much sadder can an ambition be?

But it’s worth considering that we all have a true identity we know little or nothing about, and that most of us have a neurotic emotional structure (also expressing itself physically in muscular tension) consisting of defenses against pain which also preclude  us from authentic experience and expression.

In the foreword to a book of three of his novels, MacDonald says that the question of identity was an important one to him because, after being born in California, he was brought up in Canada, and returned to California as an adult, feeling like neither a Canadian nor an American. That experience gave him some insight into people for whom identity may be an even more acute question.

MacDonald’s portrait of Southern California is of a secular world perhaps materially secure, but bereft of meaning. The Indians of the area no doubt lived a less secure and more primitive life than the modern world, but there is much testimony that  native Americans also had a more meaningful life than the white Americans of the post-war world, many of whom are either predators or prey, and whose wealth frequently doesn’t protect them. MacDonald wrote parables to try to oppose the lack of meaning, but being as lonely as his character, could only influence a few. Artists can warn. It’s up to the rest of us to act.

I wish we could have had more of his novels, especially since he seemed to be moving into new writing territory, but MacDonald died of Alzheimer’s before the age of 70, which seems pretty early. I’d guess his last few years weren’t very happy.