by Miles Mathis
My title here—which would be le siècle volé in French—is a double nudge of la génération perdue of Hemingway: the “lost generation.” It is now not only a generation we have lost, but more than a century; and, as I will show, it was not lost but stolen.
Before we get to who stole it, I will give you a hint. In my last paper we saw John Irving attacking Tom Wolfe. Irving has also recently attacked Ernest Hemingway. Although there would seem to be no connection between Wolfe and Hemingway, there is. It appears Irving may know something we don't.
My readers may think my last two papers have read like a whirlwind, and they will find the wind gusting even harder here. Charybdis has taken us down and we are now in her inescapable maw. Those who have traveled over to my science site will know that my discovery of the charge field has allowed me to unravel a remarkable number of mysteries in a short time. I have called it the key to every door. Well, I have recently found a similar sort of skeleton key for the mysteries outside of physics. Although my discovery in physics contained a bit of method along with my usual serendipity, I have to admit that here the method was almost entirely lacking. Either I was very lucky or someone fed me the information: there is no other way to explain it. During a break from my physics papers, I was just following my nose on some non-scientific topics. Somehow I came up with a paper on Theosophy and the Beat Generation, and although that was only a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't tell you how or why I hit on those subjects to write about. It dropped into my lap, so to speak. I think someone mentioned Theosophy to me, I realized I didn't know much about it, and I began researching it. In that research, I saw a red string and I began to pull on it. It unraveled and unraveled, and before I knew it the whole cloak had turned to a pile of yarn. The red string trailed off into another room, I entered that room, and again all the garments and curtains and rugs unraveled. I have been following that red string ever since.
For those of you who have seen the Jodie Foster film Little Man Tate, I recommend you to the math scene, where the floating numbers come together above the head of Tate. That is the way this feels to me. Or for a less cinematic example, think of how a formerly dark room changes when the bright sunlight floods it in the morning: suddenly you can see all the seams in the walls beneath the sheetrock. When I read these pages—whether on physics, art, biography, or anything else—the inessential parts just sort of fade out and what remains are the lies. It is like they are already circled for me. Reductionists would say it is just an ability to sort data, refined over the years by collating massive amounts of both truth and lies—and having a strong sense of how each looks in the complex patterns of language. There may be more to it than that, but whatever the mechanism or inspiration, it is as strange to me as it is to you.
This time I was sent to research Hemingway, though again, I can't really say why. My recent papers proving that the CIA has been involved in the promotion of Modernism have given me suspicions about absolutely everyone famous in the arts, but logic would tell me that many are far more suspicious than Hemingway. I have never even thought of Hemingway as a Modern, though my research now informs me I was wrong about that. All I knew before today is what is left of my old readings and conversations. We were assigned A Farewell to Arms in my junior year in high school, and I disliked it for many reasons. These reasons match up very well with the reasons John Irving gave in The New York Times in the summer of 2012: he hated the short sentences, the sparse journalistic style, and the macho posing. In addition, I also hated the cardboard characters, the emotionless and humorless
weird photo of a bloated man leering at his uncomfortable daughter,
who is trying to remove the kittens before he eats them
narrative, and the plots that I found to be totally uninteresting. I couldn't understand then why the novel was so famous or why we were assigned it, and I still don't. No one has ever given me a satisfactory explanation of it, the explanations I have gotten from teachers, critics, historians, and others all seeming to be some sort of misdirection boiling down to this: it is famous because it is famous. “All those things you hated, other people loved. They loved the short spiky sentences, the 'muscular prose,' the 'Iceberg Style' where all the important stuff (including, I suppose, the emotion, the humor, the meaning, and the depth) was all 'submerged' and invisible.” When I asked why they loved these things, I got no meaningful answer, just the assurance that they did.
Another reason I disliked Hemingway also matches Irving's. Like him I got to Hemingway after Dickens. I had already read all of Dickens before I got to my junior year, and loved it. I can still remember pulling Barnaby Rudge off the shelf early in my sophomore year, which led to David Copperfield and the rest. I would have been 14 at the time. Even at that age I never felt inconvenienced by the long sentences or the commas, and I felt at home in their cadence. I also felt at home in the exposition, in which the characters were fully drawn. You knew what they looked like, what they thought, what mannerisms and quirks they had. You knew their bodies, minds, and souls. With Hemingway you got none of that, just flat dialog and a list of facts.
I will be told this is the beauty of the Iceberg Theory: the reader has to build all that himself. It is good for your imagination. It gives you more freedom. It makes the reader more creative. If you don't know, the Iceberg Theory is a theory someone came up with after the fact as an apology for Hemingway. Maybe Hemingway came up with it, maybe he didn't. We don't have his whole life on tape. The Theory is that writing like Hemingway's only gives you the top layer, suggesting the depths beneath—like an Iceberg, you see. There's a little bit on top and lot on the bottom.
Problem is, I don't buy it. They have been saying that about all of Modern Art since the beginning: it may look shallow, uncreative, naïve, and absurd, but it is really very deep. You have to rebuild the hidden depths yourself. Of course you could say that about anything, and it is now said about anything and everything. This is part of the “blurring” we saw in my last paper: blurring of the distinction between high art and low art, or between good art and bad art, or between art and non-art. If you fail to rebuild a magnificent castle on that sandpit, it is your fault, not the artist's. The artist implied the whole world beneath his toothpick construction or his paste-up words thrown into the air. If you can't see that, you are just, well, an aristocrat—an outmoded person whose every argument and opinion can be ignored.
Notice that this is why no one could ever show me why Hemingway was great. With the Iceberg Theory, you can't point to any evidence. The evidence is all invisible and implied. Those depths are there only because you are told they are. There is no evidence for them in the actual writing, but that is immaterial, you will be told. Hemingway is famous, the critics insist the depths are there, therefore they must be. But as with Quantum Mechanics or String Theory, all proof is permanently beyond our reach. As Karl Popper would have put it, Hemingway's fame is unfalsifiable. The bottom of the Iceberg is unfalsifiable. Since all the words are in the top part of the Iceberg, what do you point to in the bottom part, to prove the depths?
My opponents will claim I am not good at reading between or beneath the lines. I am creatively limited, they will say or imply. But again, they will say that against all evidence. As the easiest answer, we could just pile up all my creations against theirs, and weigh the pile. But for the fuller answer, we would have to study everything I have done and everything they have, as a matter of quality. We could then see how many walls I have seen through and broken through, versus how many they have. I am seeing through a wall right now in this paper, so claiming I cannot see what is there may be the most absurd argument of all, and the most counter to all evidence. Their protestations are just the brick in the wall crying out to the hand, as the hand tosses it aside.
We see more evidence of this by returning to John Irving. Although Irving stated his opinion much more quietly than I have here, he was nonetheless jumped on from all quarters. Why? We almost never see anyone contradict the Modern dogma, quietly stating they don't like something they were ordered to like, but when they do the roof caves in. Why? In a society that was really free and pluralistic—and all the other adjectives we are ordered to place before “our society” in every sentence —John Irving saying he didn't like Hemingway would not be a news item. No one would care. John would be allowed to say whatever he wanted, especially regarding what he liked and didn't like. But clearly he isn't. Why is that? Please ask yourself that question. Why is it so important to those running the media and the world to run interference for Hemingway and Einstein and Joyce and Feynman and all the other canonical ones? Why is negative commentary so frowned upon? This by itself is one of our clues here.
But back to Hemingway. Being more open minded than you probably think I am, after high school I left open the possibility I was wrong. I thought I might be too young to appreciate it. I had already found this to be the case with The Catcher in the Rye, which I also did not like when I was 15 or 16. On a first reading, I thought it didn't hold up very well after David Copperfield. I can remember thinking, “This is stupid: it all takes place over about three days!” But I reread it in my 20's and liked it a lot. I ended up thinking it was brilliant. I left open the possibility the same might happen with Hemingway. I thought it might be an acquired taste, like beer. So I waited a few years, drank some beer, learned to like it, found some lovers—which I did not have to learn to like—and generally “grew up.” I even had some fistfights, which should—according to the literature—have led me directly to an appreciation of Hemingway. But nothing doing. I read For Whom the Bell Tolls in my mid-twenties, and then The Sun Also Rises in my late twenties. I then reread all three books in my thirties, plus To Have and Have Not, The Old Man and the Sea (again), The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Green Hills of Africa, and A Moveable Feast. I felt the same thing I felt the first time, except now three times as strongly. Whereas I had only disliked Hemingway in high school, I now despised him. The awful reading experiences, along with decades of hardsell, had not only made me despise Hemingway, but also those people who were selling him. I was now pretty sure something was either very wrong with the literary world or with me. Based on the evidence at hand, I was fairly sure it was the former. Pretty much everything I had read of 20th century “literature” affected me in a similar way, and I read a lot, so I wasn't basing my conclusions on prejudice or ignorance. I also read a lot of criticism, trying to understand the opposing view. I had thousands of latenight conversations with my brainy friends, trying to get to the bottom of it. But I never did. Not one of the critics or one of my friends ever gave me a reasonable explanation for the fame of Hemingway or of any of his books.
Still, although I will admit to despising Hemingway, I am prone to strong emotions. I have never been interested in tepid responses to anything, so my “despising” Hemingway is not all that extraordinary. There are a lot of famous people I despise much much more: Warhol, Duchamp, Bohr, Susskind, etc. It's a very long list. So I don't really know why I jumped on Hemingway today. Probably something to do with the fact that he is so big, so influential, and such a mystery to me. Plus, I already know these other guys are fakes. I have researched them and written about them to the extent they are transparent to me. Whether I can now connect them to Intelligence is almost immaterial. Discovering they were attached to Intelligence couldn't lower my estimation of them, since it is already at zero.
I think it is easier to hide behind a novel than behind a scientific paper or a work of art. It is not difficult to figure out an Andy Warhol or a Leonard Susskind—or it wasn't for me. But a novel is much more opaque. Especially a novel like that of Hemingway. The Iceberg Style not only submerges the real content of the novel (supposing it has any), it also submerges the author. In fact, this may be its real purpose.
The first time I saw a Warhol work, I knew he was both a terrible artist and a fake artist. That is, I knew he wasn't just bad, he was also manufactured. I didn't know if he was manufactured by the gallery or the critic or the CIA, but I knew he was manufactured. Same with Susskind. His entire persona was a giveaway. But I couldn't say the same of Hemingway. I thought it might just be a matter of taste. Maybe he was just bad for me. By my standards, he was a terrible artist, but that didn't make him a fake artist.
I have to think that is why I never considered him Modern. For me, “Modern” is synonymous with “fake.” A Modern artist isn't just a bad artist, by which I would mean an artist who can't create beautiful or meaningful works. He or she is also a fake artist: a person who isn't even trying to create beautiful or meaningful works, by any possible standards. A fake artist is someone who manufactures himself—or is manufactured by someone else—to look like an artist, with no concern for art by any definition. This pose is created for money, fame, propaganda, or some other non-artistic purpose. Many Moderns pretty much admit this about themselves (see the Dadaists, the Futurists, or just about any artist after 1980), so I am not stating anything extraordinary here.
But Hemingway was never sold this way, and I never imagined it of him. I found him to be a rotten writer, giving me nothing I looked for in a book, but it never occurred to me he might be fake. It never occurred to me he was Modern.
I don't like to have to go to artists' bios to figure out their works. I shouldn't have to. Which may explain why I have never gone to Hemingway's. If the novel can't make me feel anything, the novelist's bio certainly won't, so why bother? Which is not to say I didn't know the basic story: the army, the bullfights, the fistfights, the booze, the many wives, the famous people carousing in Paris and Madrid, the later homes in Cuba and Key West. You can't be a reader in this country and not know an outline of Hemingway's life. But I had never read his life with any real interest until now. Taking up the question again, I was interested not to finally digest the hagiography, but to look for discrepancies. I was now looking for red flags, and I found them.
The first red flag worth mentioning is found in A Moveable Feast, supposed to be an account of his time in Paris in the 20's. The book is simply not credible on many—or I should say on most—counts. Just as the easiest example, in an article from American Literature called “Hemingway's Gender Trouble,” the author admits most of Hemingway's sexual bragging in the book (and all along) was deflection from real sexual troubles. While we could have guessed that, and while I am not too interested in pursuing Hemingway's “androgyny”—which I am not sure I believe in—what interests me more is the admission in this article that many other things are false as well. For instance,
the clumsy "created" nature of the young Hemingway in A Moveable Feast is well-established as fraudulent (e.g., Hemingway had access to large sums of money during the time he was in Paris, yet portrayed himself as "starving").**
Pound and other characters in this story do the same thing, but instead of correcting the narrative, the mainstream allows Hemingway's own story to continue to dominate the public imagination. The lost generation was originally sold as a set of marginal characters, flying by their bootstraps, and the public has preferred to keep that story, since it is more romantic. No one wishes to replace that story with the truth, which is that all these young people were not only privileged, they were fed in a pipeline from one rich connection to the next. Stein was just one of these rich people channeling funds.
In a current update to this story, we find Woody Allen continuing the propaganda with his recent film Midnight in Paris. I consider it by far the worst thing he has ever done, and I thought it before I began to unwind any of this. For the record, I was once a big Woody Allen fan, and I suppose in some ways I still am. But this latest film is plastic, stilted, and excruciatingly shallow. It looks like it was written and filmed not by Allen, but by a set of cyborgs from Intelligence. Which would explain why it fawns over its old characters like a silly teenage girl. It would also explain why it has by far the highest box office of any Allen film. Since it continues the old propaganda, re-kitschifying what was already kitsch, it was sure to be promoted for all it was worth. [You may consider this aside into Woody Allen a diversion, but I consider it another red flag.]
The third red flag is Gertrude Stein. We are told Stein was an early mentor. What? Why would macho man Hemingway be hanging around the dowdy bald lesbian Stein? In 1922, when Hemingway joined her circle, she had published almost nothing and was not known for her writing. What she had published even her brother Leo called “an abomination” (see Three Lives, for instance). To this day, almost all people who like Hemingway think Stein is awful. Hemingway got his muscular prose from the Kansas City Star's style guide, not from Stein, so how in hell was she a mentor? To me, she doesn't look like a mentor so much as a contact. She was wealthy and knew people. But what was she really up to? Who did she know and why?
To find out, I researched her earlier life. I found that she had studied under William James at Harvard (Radcliffe). I thought, Oh Boy, here we go again! James encouraged Stein to go to medical school at Johns Hopkins, and for two years after her graduation from Radcliffe, she did. Why? It is admitted she had no interest in medicine or medical school, so what was she doing? James had wanted to be an artist, but was compelled by his father to go into science. But Stein's life never reads like that. As a rich girl, she was a free agent. She did what she chose at all times. Knowing her personality, it is doubtful she was compelled by James to do anything. So why would she go to medical school when she had no interest in it? Well, maybe she was at medical school and maybe she wasn't. To see what I mean, we have to follow up on a thread at Wikipedia, where we are told she spent the summer after graduation at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studying marine biology. Again, maybe she was studying marine biology, maybe she wasn't. Woods Hole is on the extreme southwest corner of Cape Cod, and of course the Ocean Institutes aren't the only things there. When Stein was there, the homes of the Boston Brahmins were also there, including top executives at J. P. Morgan, Lee Higginson, and Banker's Trust. Even more interesting is that Woods Hole was also connected to Naval Intelligence. Where you have Ocean Institutes you will also have the navy, for obvious reasons. Remember, Intelligence has been run out of the navy from the beginning, and the Office of Naval Intelligence is still the ranking arm of military intelligence. You can see the link between Woods Hole and Naval Intelligence here, although a little research will yield much more.
Look how short all those guys in the front row are, including James, Freud, and Meyer! This could be a group photo from Wonkaland. We are never taught that, but a photo gives it all away. Freud is listed at 5'7”, but he is clearly less than that here, even with shoes on. Maybe 5'5”, while James and Meyer are 5'3”. I could write a psychology paper on that, and I may. It represents another lie, if nothing more.
We get another clue by pursuing the thread to William James. We find that William James joined the Theosophical Society in 1882, which takes us back to my first paper, which got us into this mess. I have already shown you that the Theosophical Society was founded by Henry Steel Olcott, who was in military intelligence. Why would the pragmatist James be joining the Theosophical Society? In Olcott's inaugural speech for the TS in 1875, he said,
If I rightly apprehend our work, it is to aid in freeing the public mind of theological superstition and a tame subservience to the arrogance of science.
Although I freely admit the arrogance of science, I still find this statement strange, especially in relation to William James and American psychology. James is often called the father of American psychology, and psychology has wished to be a hard science from the very beginning. If that is so, why would James risk his reputation and the reputation of his entire field by joining a society that was trying to free the public mind from subservience to science? It makes no sense.
I also encourage you to notice that Wikipedia downplays James' founding of the Society for Psychical Research as well as his membership in the Theosophical Society. We get one short sentence on each.
James' entire career needs to be unwound, but I am not going to do that here. Instead, let us return to Gertrude Stein. Stein is sold as a great promoter of Modernism, so most would assume she was progressive. Was she? Not at all. It takes very little research to discover her direct links to fascism. She was a vocal supporter of Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and was also a supporter of Hitler and Mussolini. She said Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Although Jewish, she was a collaborator with the Vichy government in France, even translating some of the speeches of Marshall Philippe Pétain. She also provided an introduction for these speeches, comparing P étain to George Washington. Remember, this is the Vichy government that deported 75,000 Jews to German concentration camps, where 97% of them died. As late as 1944, Stein said of Pétain's policies that they were “really wonderful so simple so natural so extraordinary.” This was in the same year that the Jewish children of Culoz were forcibly removed and sent to Auschwitz. Stein was then resident of Culoz. She continued to praise Pétain even after he was sentenced to death for treason. If, as some have said in her defense, she had befriended Pétain only to save her own skin, why was she still praising him after the war and after he was dead?
Stein also hated Roosevelt and the New Deal. This put her firmly with the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and all the other fascist old families in the US, who didn't like to see any re-redistribution of money they had already redistributed into their pockets. I can see some reading this and going, “The Kennedys?” Do your research. Joseph Kennedy was one of the great opponents of the New Deal and of Roosevelt.
Stein wasn't too difficult to unwind, as you see. It took all of one paragraph. I haven't yet linked her unambiguously to Intelligence, but I have proved she was a fascist. What about the others in her “salon.” One of those said to be closest to Hemingway in Paris at that time was Ezra Pound. Here is what Hemingway said of Pound in 1925:
He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. ... He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide.
Curious, to say the least. Sounds a lot like a handler, to me. But let us back up. On one of his early trips to Spain in 1906, Pound “just happened” to be outside the Royal Palace during the attempted assassination of King Alfonso. It gets curiouser and curiouser if we study that assassination attempt. Although the bomber shot himself when captured by police, a man named Francisco Ferrer was tried for conspiracy and incarcerated for over a year. Just five years previously, Ferrer had opened The Modern School (Escuela Moderna) in Spain. Notice that name. The Modern School. Coincidence? After his release in 1908, Ferrer published a book The Origins and Ideals of the Modern School, which was translated into English by Joseph McCabe and published by the Knickerbocker Press in 1913. Even before that was published in the US, the first Modern School opened in New York City in 1911. Although these Modern Schools are now sold to us as Anarchist, they were actually Marxist.
You may still have in your head the old idea that Marxism and fascism are opposites, but besides the many alliances between them we saw in my last paper, I beg you to remember Russia, China, and many other countries where Marxism and fascism go hand in hand. Over and over again, we have seen Marxism used as the door that opens to fascism, and that is what was being promoted here in the US as well. As we will see again here, the Marxists weren't allied to the Democrats—although the two theories would appear to be linked via the rights of the lower classes. Instead, we find the Marxists allied to the fascists and to the major wealthy families. Although I won't be able to pursue the idea to its end in this paper, I beg you to consider the possibility that Marxism was created to do just that. Notice that it is a variant theory of the underclasses, promoted to compete with or replace Democracy or Republicanism. It was promoted after 1848, the year the Communist Manifesto was first published. Why is that year important? Well, we have to look at what else happened in 1848: the Republican revolutions in France, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Switzerland, Ireland, Hungary and Brazil. While Marx and Engels were writing about a Marxist revolution, the Republican revolutions were already in progress. Marxism was used to splinter and misdirect these Republican movements.
Although Marx himself may not have been involved in this use of Marxism, I will give you a hint about who was. Marx began writing for the New York Tribune in 1852. This in itself should look extraordinary to you, seeing that Marx was already seen as a revolutionary in Europe, having been tossed out of both Germany and Belgium. The Tribune was not a revolutionary paper. It was a mainstream Whig/Republican newspaper of the time, promoting not revolutionaries but people like Abraham Lincoln. Marx's contact at the Tribune was Charles Dana, another Harvard man. When Dana left the Tribune in 1862, he was immediately appointed by Secretary of War Stanton to be a special investigating agent for the War Department. Does that ring a bell? In my paper on Theosophy, we saw that Henry Steel Olcott was also appointed to be a special investigating agent for the War Department. These agents were what we would now call Intelligence. Henry Steel Olcott, founder of Theosophy, also worked at the New York Tribune in the 1950's. Olcott's editor was Charles Dana. After the war, when Olcott was investigating spiritualism for the New York Sun in 1874, guess who his editor was again. Charles Dana. The pieces are coming together, are they not?
[To see them come together fully, you may now read my newer paper on Marx, exposing him as an agent.]
But let us make our way back toward the main line here. We have seen that Marxism was being promoted in the US before the Civil War, apparently by the government itself. As in Europe, this promotion of Marxism was used to splinter, confuse, and misdirect growing Republican sentiment. The rich families in the US were witnessing too much local solidarity with the 1848 revolutions in Europe and South America, and they used Intelligence and the media to weaken this solidarity. We have seen Marxist schools opened by Francisco Ferrer, under the name Modern School. We have seen Ezra Pound mysteriously linked to these Marxists in Spain by 1906 (when he was 20). So let us go back to Pound for a while.
We find that by 1908, he was in London, already hooked up with Yeats. We are told Pound managed this with only his book of poems A Lume Spento, but that is unlikely. It is dreadful, and should be retitled A Spent Mule. More likely is that Pound's people knew Yeats' people through the Golden Dawn, an offshoot of Theosophy. Although he arrived in August, by October he was lecturing at the Polytechnic and by January he was attending the literary salons of Olivia Shakespear. Not a bad four months for a 22-year-old popping into London on a lark. That simply doesn't happen without major strings being pulled, and we may assume that Pound's grandfather had links to military intelligence. Thaddeus Pound had been Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin and a member of US Congress. His ambitious grandson was probably snapped up by Intelligence while at the University of Pennsylvania.
By the next year, 1909, Pound already had another volume of poetry published, Personae, and it was reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Telegraph, the Cambridge Review, and other top papers. I don't think Keats, Shelley or Byron were noticed that fast by the major London papers. The first two papers gave it glowing reviews even though, as the more honest Rupert Brooke at Cambridge admitted, it was marred by “the unmetrical sprawling lengths” of Whitman. Although they undoubtedly hated Whitman at Cambridge, that was putting it very kindly. In short it was another Spent Mule, published and reviewed only at the request of British Secret Service. There is no other way to explain the meteoric rise of Pound from nowhere in just a year. Pound then became a literary critic in the next year (1910, at age 24), an architecture critic in the next, and then returned to London after a short time in the US in 1911 to write a weekly column for the Marxist journal The New Age.
By 1914, Pound was a contributor at several small magazines, but since he wasn't the founder or editor of any of them, and still hadn't hit 30, it isn't clear how he was able to promote James Joyce and T. S. Eliot to them. Since all his writing was still garbage at that time, it is hard to understand his wide influence. Pound himself admits that Ford Madox Ford was rolling on the ground laughing at how bad his poetry was. It appears from the history of that time that Pound was always shouting, but it is harder to understand why anyone was listening.
Pound simplified his language after 1912, but it didn't help, as you can see from the excerpt from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly posted at Wikipedia.
Beneath the sagging roof
The stylist has taken shelter,
Unpaid, uncelebrated,
At last from the world's welter
Nature receives him;
With a placid and uneducated mistress
He exercises his talents
And the soil meets his distress.
The haven from sophistications and contentions
Leaks through its thatch;
He offers succulent cooking;
The door has a creaking latch.
That is from 1920, so Pound has now hit age 35, but that is still dreadful poetry. It has no flow, all three rhymes are forced, and it teeters on the edge of sense throughout.
In 1921, Pound moved to Paris, where he quickly took up with Duchamp and the Dadaists. Remember, Pound was at this time already moving directly toward fascism, and that is admitted in the mainstream literature. Also remember that the Dadaists and Futurists were tied to fascism. They were also stridently anti-art. So what was Pound—supposedly the consummate artist—up to?
Ezra Pound, John Quinn, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce
Again, we can't understand without knowing who is behind Pound. The picture above tells us, literally, since the man standing behind Pound is our clue. Yes, we finally have clear evidence in 1924, when Pound secures funding for Ford Madox Ford's Transatlantic Review—which contained works from Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Hemingway. We are told the money came from John Quinn. Who is John Quinn? According to Wikipedia,
He worked for British Intelligence services before, during and after World War I. In this role he acted as case officer for, among others, Aleister Crowley, who was an agent provocateur posing as an Irish nationalist in order to infiltrate anti-British groups of Irish and Germans in the United States.*
Wow. We have, at one swoop, connected Hemingway, Crowley, Stein, Joyce, Ford and Pound to Intelligence, and we have done it without leaving the whitewashed pages of Wikipedia. We also have to look back to A Moveable Feast in a new way. Aleister Crowley makes an appearance in A Moveable Feast, to the astonishment of most people. It is only a cameo, but still. Why would Hemingway mention in 1957 passing by Crowley on the street in the early 1920's? Of all the things he experienced in that period, of all the things mentioned in “his notebooks saved in old steamer trunks,” why that mention of Crowley? Is Hemingway giving us a hint? Is this why A Moveable Feast wasn't published during his lifetime? Was the Crowley story changed or edited later? It is known that the book was heavily edited at least twice, once by Hemingway's wife Mary and once by Sean Hemingway, his grandson. These edits have caused much controversy [see Hotchner] for lesser reasons, so there may be larger controversies still hidden, or forever destroyed by these editors.
Not only was Quinn a member of British Intelligence, he was the organizer and spokesperson of the 1913 Armory Show. He opened the exhibition with the words,
It was time the American people had an opportunity to see and judge for themselves concerning the work of the Europeans who are creating a new art.
Note that: the Armory show was organized by Intelligence, and the opening words were delivered by an agent. As a corporate attorney, Quinn convinced Congress in the same year to overturn the four year old Tariff Law. Since this law charged a duty on new art coming in from Europe, it would have made it difficult to promote Modernism in the US. He also defended in court the US publishers of Ulysses in 1921. He lost, and the book was banned until 1933. Quinn was also a major supporter of Yeats and Joseph Conrad. I said in my last paper that Yeats looked to me like a dupe, but the case is building against him. I may have to revisit that conclusion. Just because Yeats was talented doesn't mean he was a dupe. We will see that some agents have had talent in the fields of art they were inserted into, including of course Joyce. In the picture above, Joyce is the talent, Pound is the snowman, Ford is the editor, and Quinn is the money.
Of course, this explains why the Armory Show was exhibited at the Armory. This was the National Guard Armory on Lexington in New York City, built to house the 69th Infantry Regiment (which it still houses). Seems like a strange place to have the first avant garde art show, doesn't it? Let me just ask you this: is the military normally seen as avant garde or progressive? No, just the opposite. But now that we see that military intelligence was promoting Modernism at the behest of financiers like the Rockefellers, we understand why they chose to place the exhibit at the Armory. It was what they had available. They didn't have to rent an exhibition hall: they could just use their own.
History has been rewritten to make us think the artists Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn organized the Armory Show, but they were just hired as fronts. Kuhn worked for John Quinn and Wikipedia even admits that. We are told he was his “art advisor.” We are also told that Kuhn “acted as the executive secretary and was delegated as one of the men to find European artists to participate.” Delegated? Delegated by whom? If he were really one of the founders of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), and they were really running the Armory Show, he wouldn't be “delegated” anything. Curious wording. We can now see he was delegated this task by Quinn.
One of Davies' exhibits at the Armory
Why else would the agent John Quinn been given honorary membership in the AAPS? He was neither a painter nor a sculptor, and it should have been seen as gauche (at the least) for an artists association to be awarding honorary membership to Quinn only for his money. As we now see, they weren't. Most likely, the AAPS was Quinn's idea from the beginning, and he couldn't keep his name out of it. We know for a fact that Quinn is the one who incorporated the AAPS.3 He then fronted the organization with the flunkies Kuhn, Pach and Davies. As for the Armory Show, 77 of the foreign works were from his private collection. He was responsible for most of the promotion. He was also responsible for lining up the art critics Frederick James Gregg and Henry McBride.4 This was basically his show, and even when Kuhn and Davies went to Europe to pick up more work, they were just on errand from Quinn. Quinn “sent letters to his contacts in Europe to announce Arthur B. Davies' and Walt Kuhn's trips abroad to coordinate loans from European artists.”3 Although the mainstream books and encyclopedia entries still try to whitewash the Armory Show as the idea of American artists, the New York Public Library admitted in 2013 that it was Quinn's baby from the start.3
Another way that Quinn promoted the show was by buying works. He and Arthur Eddy were responsible for most sales during and after the show. Since most of the works could then be bought for a song, this isn't saying that much, but we are led to believe it was a big deal. Total sales were pegged at $44,000. With 1,400 lots and 200,000 alleged visitors, that was not a stupendous sales figure, even for the times, although we are told it was. The rather less stupendous truth is that Eddy, like Quinn, was probably assigned his role as buyer, as part of the government operation. In Armory Show promotion, we are told that Arthur Eddy was just another attorney like Quinn, but he was much more than that. He was from a very wealthy family from Flint, Michigan, that owned the main newspaper there in the late 1800's. He then married into a far wealthier family, that of Crapo. Henry Crapo had been governor of Michigan, and William Crapo Durant founded General Motors. Bill was a cousin of Arthur's wife Lulu. Eddy was then involved in the consolidation of the National Carbon Company, the American Steel Foundry Corporation, the National Turbine Company, the American Linseed Oil Company, and the Bridge Builder's Society. Again, it is implied that he was involved only as attorney, but again that is not the case. For instance, it is known that he was director of the National Carbon Company5, which controlled 75% of the carbon market. This company supplied materials for batteries, and was the precursor to Eveready, among other things. So like Rockefeller, Morgan, and the rest, Eddy was a titan of industry.
Another company Eddy was involved in was American Steel Foundries, which was the largest maker of steel castings in the U.S. These castings were used on railroads, in oil fields, on ships and trucks, and were heavily used by the armed forces. Which brings us back to the Armory, which housed the National Guard. Eddy's company sold steel castings to the army, and then he turned around and bought paintings exhibited at the army's Armory. Oh, the tangled webs they weave. That is a connection that is never made for you between the Armory and Mr. Eddy, right? You saw it here first.
So, like Quinn, Eddy was not just an attorney who collected art. But like Quinn, his bio has been scrubbed. Why? Probably because Eddy's forays into art were not based on connoisseurship. Although his interest in art may have begun as genuine (when he was collecting Whistler and Rodin in the 1890's), by 1910 it is very doubtful it remained so. We now know that the interest in art of these other oligarchs like the Rockefellers was not based on any sort of aesthetics, so our suspicion should fall on Eddy as well, especially given the effort of historians and art critics to hide his identity. If Eddy had really just been an honest collector, why would so many expend so much effort hiding his business connections to this day? Probably because, unlike the Rockefellers, Eddy was directly tied to the Armory Show from day one. He needed to be whitewashed while the Rockefellers didn't. Also, since Eddy was less prominent than the Rockefellers, and less known after 1920, his scrubbers could have some hope of success.
We are made to think the American artists of the time were in favor of the show, but they weren't. Since they weren't avant garde, why would they? Of course Thomas Eakins reviled the show, but even the more “progressive” painters like Robert Henri were angered by many of the European entries. Most of the other American entries were American Impressionists or Ashcan painters—realists of one sort or another, that is. They had nothing in common with Duchamp, Braque, Picabia and the others, and had they known the true lay of the land (Quinn's Intelligence connections), they would have boycotted the whole thing. But they had no idea the show was manufactured from the ground up, in order to lay the groundwork for the Rockefellers' takeover of the art market, and the ultimate destruction of art history.
They would have also lynched Arthur B. Davies, who we can now see as a traitor. Even at the time, Robert Henri had some inkling of this, though he had no idea the extent of it. He and Davies were bitter enemies, Henri considering Davies to be a sell-out to the rich. But Davies wasn't just a sell-out to the rich, he was also a pawn of military intelligence. He wasn't just a hack who painted whatever the rich told him to paint; he was much worse—like all Modern artists now, he was a traitor to Art herself and all her Muses. He kissed the cheek of Art and collected his thirty silver pieces.
But let us return to John Quinn's protégé in Europe, Ezra Pound. In 1925, Pound was praising Lenin in This Quarter, so we see him promoting both Marxism and fascism at that time. You should see this as extraordinary as well, since by 1925 Russia was in ruins, being decimated by both the Red Terror of Lenin and the Great Famine of 1921 (caused by Communist policies). Although many original Marxists had soured on Marxism by 1925, Pound's enthusiasm was just then peaking. And in hindsight we can guess Pound was so enthusiastic because Marxism was doing what it was promoted to do: created havoc and destroy Republicanism. But even that wasn't enough for him. In 1933 he went to Italy to meet Mussolini—either moving from Marxism to fascism or promoting them both simultaneously—and by 1939 Pound was already raving. In 1940 he began pamphlet writing and radio broadcasts from Italy, though it took him two years to convince those in Rome he wasn't a double agent. Were they right the first time? Was this all a pose?
We can't understand the Pound of 1940 without understanding the Pound of 1908 or 1920, and as we have seen, the mainstream material hasn't helped us do that. We have been misdirected all along. But if Pound was an agent in 1908 and 1920, then only one of two things can explain his behavior in 1940. Either he was still an agent and the whole thing was manufactured; or he cracked, turned on his handlers, and began attacking them. Although the latter might at first appear to be more likely, since it more easily explains his time at St. Elisabeth's mental ward, the evidence indicates to me that it is the former. If he had really cracked and turned against Intelligence, the main target of his insane rants would have been Intelligence. Since the main targets of his rants were Jews, capitalism, usury, the armaments industry, and so on, it appears that Pound was simply being used as an Anti. In other words, in creating an Anti, Intelligence has someone act insane and at the same time attack all the things they wish to promote. Those watching this spectacle will naturally think, “That man is mad, and he is attacking Jews, capitalism, and the army. Therefore Jews, capitalism, and the army must be innocent.” Think of it like opposite-day. Remember, Pound as a madman also promoted Hitler and Mussolini during World War 2, from inside Italy. But it's opposite-day, so this promotion was intended to backfire. Pound was a double agent, and the Italians were simply fools. I will prove that in a moment.
Since Pound had lost his usefulness as a promoter of Modernism by 1925 (Abby Rockefeller and many others were by then doing all that was needed from within the US), he was groomed after that as an Anti. Intelligence didn't care a fig about Pound's art, and neither did he, so there was nothing to prevent them from pursuing this new tack. The only thing they had to do is prevent his new assignment from corrupting his previous assignment. They had to be sure the main promoter of Joyce and Eliot and Hemingway becoming a fascist madman didn't tarnish the reputations of these writers they had spent so much time polishing. But, as with Gertrude Stein, this was no problem. If Stein's fascist rantings couldn't tarnish her own biography, why would Pound's fascist rantings tarnish the work of Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway? Intelligence was so completely in control of all the promotion and bios
—and the readers were so easy to sway—no one would notice anything they weren't supposed to notice. As we have seen, the information about Stein is up on Wikipedia to this day, but because they stress the positive and downplay the negative, no one is the wiser. Most people won't digest anything that isn't forced down their throats several times, so mentioning a thing once is the same as not mentioning it at all.
But if Pound was an agent all along, why did he agree to spend 12 years in a mental hospital? He didn't. You are assuming that everyone they say is in jail is in jail, and that everyone they say is in a mental hospital is in a mental hospital. You are simply underestimating Intelligence once again. If Intelligence can manufacture half the events of the 20th century, don't you think they can manufacture someone being in a mental hospital? Do you have any evidence Pound was in that hospital every day for 12 years, or are you just taking their word for it? Notice, for example, that when Pound was captured in Italy in 1945, he was taken immediately to the Counter Intelligence Corps. That wasn't standard procedure. Nor was his interrogation by an FBI agent assigned by J. Edgar Hoover personally. And although he was now supposed to be a prisoner, we are told he was allowed an interview with a reporter from the Philadelphia Record, in which he said more scripted crazy things. That is completely against all protocol, military and civilian. The only protocol it matches is Intelligence protocol, since the job of Intelligence is propaganda. You can't create propaganda if you don't get it in the papers. Anytime you see prisoners being allowed to talk to reporters, you can be pretty sure you are witnessing a manufactured event.
For more evidence the whole thing was manufactured, we find strange court proceedings, whereby Pound was arraigned on the charge of treason, indicted, but never found either guilty or not guilty. He went in front of a jury to determine his sanity, but the charge of treason never went to trial. In normal circumstances, we would expect a trial on the charges for which he was arraigned. If he was determined to be insane, the finding by the jury would then be not guilty due to insanity, or guilty but insane. In either case he would be sent to the mental ward, but the trial would have a determined outcome. In Pound's case, no determination on the charges was ever made. Since the trial on the charges never occurred, Pound had no legal record. Not only that, but they never sentenced him to a definite term of detention. He was simply sent to the ward at the discretion of the doctors and the hospital director. Unprecedented. And since he wasn't sentenced to a term, if he had been caught outside the hospital, he would not have been breaking any sentence or any law. Not only is Pound the only person ever to dodge a treason charge using the insanity defense, he is the only person to dodge a treason trial due to an insanity defense. This huge red flag points directly at Intelligence and government complicity.
We have other later evidence to support this conclusion, including Pound being awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1948 while in the mental hospital. He was awarded the first Bollingen Prize, so it appears the prize was created just so they could give it to him. We are told the prize was funded by Paul Mellon, but we now know Mellon was just a conduit. The prize was established by the CIA. 1 The Prize is now awarded from Yale University, and you may wish to remember that a founder of the CIA and graduate of Yale, James Jesus Angleton, had been working with Pound since the late 1930's (see below). Angleton had published Pound in Yale's Furioso magazine. The CIA was founded in 1947 and the Bollingen Prize was established in 1948. Curious, no? To give the prize an aura of authenticity, a committee of poetry editors were convened to vote on the award, but the committee was loaded by the CIA. Karl Shapiro, the editor at the time of Poetry, was the only one to vote against Pound (Paul Green abstained). This is how he put it at the time: “Eliot, Auden, Tate, [Amy] Lowell—all voted the prize to Pound. A passel of fascists.” [Others who voted for Pound included Katherine Anne Porter, Conrad Aiken, and Theodore Spencer.] That denunciation was not hyperbole, either, since these people really were fascists. Pound was an actual fist-pounding fascist, doing radio broadcasts in Italy in favor of Mussolini just three years earlier, and had served less than two years of what would be twelve years in hospital. So you would have to be a fascist to think that giving him a major prize in 1948 was a good idea. The only explanation for it is that these people had already become so dizzy with their new power they couldn't see anything around them. Either that, or they just didn't care.
Here are some other winners of the Bollingen Prize, just so you know: Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Auden, Aiken, Tate, MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, Delmore Schwartz, Cummings, Roethke, Frost, Robert Penn Warren, W.S. Merwin, A.R. Ammons, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, John Asbury, Gary Snyder, Donald Justice, Stanley Kunitz, and Mark Strand. Curiously, Karl Schapiro accepted the award in 1969, so his scruples apparently weren't as strong as he originally implied. I guess he needed the money. If you ever wondered why poetry is what it is, you now know. It is what it is because the CIA wanted it to be that way. It is remotely possible later poets weren't aware of the real status of the prize, but Wallace Stevens couldn't have pleaded ignorance in 1949. And, obviously, Karl Schapiro couldn't have pleaded ignorance in 1969. Also notice how incestuous the award is, as usual. Those sitting on the committee in one year receive the award the next. Even if the CIA weren't behind the whole charade, it would just be a group of insiders giving themselves awards.
We have even more evidence that all these people were Intelligence assets in the Letters of Marshall McLuhan. I was alerted to this by a reader. In a February 1952 letter to Ezra Pound, McLuhan says this:
Last year has been spent in going through rituals of secret societies with fine comb. As I said before I'm in a bloody rage at the discovery that the arts and sciences are in the pockets of these societies. It doesn't make me any happier to know that Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, yourself have used these rituals as a basis for art activity...
You may say by secret societies he meant Thelema or Golden Dawn or something. But he is obviously aware that the secret societies themselves are in the pockets of Intelligence, since he adds,
Now that I know the nature of the sectarian strife among the Societies I have no intention of participating in it any further, until I know a good deal more. To hell with East and West.
Note that “east and west.” Who was mainly concerned with the battle of east and west in 1952? The CIA, of course. The editor of these Letters reminds us that Wyndham Lewis also complained of the same thing in the same period, mainly in his Time and Western Man. The editor again tries to make us think this complaint was against Freemasonry, but in this case Freemasonry should mainly be read as code for Intelligence. Maybe the Freemasons were pulling the strings of Intelligence, maybe they weren't: the important thing is that we now know—via these declassified documents—that Intelligence was the direct puppetmaster, and that behind Intelligence were the Rockefellers and others. That is bad enough without bringing the Freemasons into it. In fact, we should note that the Freemasons were never interested in destroying art in previous centuries, or turning it totally to propaganda. Why should they make this one of their top projects in the 20th century? As usual, I read Freemasonry as a diversion away from those we know to be pulling the strings: the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and so on. These families are from the financial sector, anti-aristocracy, and if they are Freemasons, they have turned Freemasonry wildly from its old paths. Remember, Freemasonry is usually traced back to Francis Bacon, among others. Well, Bacon was closely allied to the English aristocracy, and may have been a bastard child of the queen herself. For us to believe the Rockefellers are Freemasons, we have to believe the Freemasons have completely switched sides. I for one don't tend to believe it.
I have now compiled enough evidence to indicate that these Modernist salons in London and Paris were manufactured or infiltrated by Intelligence, which means that most or all of the artists promoted by them—including my original target Hemingway—were also manufactured. I haven't proved it beyond the shadow of a doubt, but I think the chain of evidence indicates it strongly enough to merit a full investigation. It looks very much like Intelligence was already doing by 1900 what it admitted it was doing in the 1950's with Rothko, Pollock, etc. But this time I have shown you that no one was on “a long leash.” Many of the artists were probably agents themselves, and the others could not have been ignorant of the program.
No one here was promoted on merit, and although that was obvious from the start, it should now be crystal clear. These weren't the best writers or painters of their time, they were the most salable product Intelligence could come up with at short notice and arm's length. Many of them were physically attractive or charming (in 30-second bursts), which, as we in the MTV generation know, is 90% of the sale. More importantly, they were sons and daughters of the wealthy and privileged. They were insiders twice, since they were willing to do what was necessary not only from patriotism but from familial obligations. But of course this fatally undercuts any idea that they were Democrats, true Marxists, revolutionaries, or part of any lost generation. The term “lost generation” is perfect misdirection, since these people couldn't have gotten lost if they had wanted. They were watched over like only the children of the wealthy can be.
I also encourage you to notice the recycling of ideas here. In the 1920's, you had the Lost Generation. In the 1950's, the Beat Generation. We have seen that the Beats weren't beat and the Losts weren't lost: they were all from privileged families. But both words imply the same sort of manufactured angst. Both generations were coming out of world wars, so there were people beat and lost in those times, but our created heroes weren't among them. They were sold as cast-off urchins to gain your sympathy, but they were just the opposite. They hadn't been cast-off, they had been recruited. They weren't confused, they were selling confusion. They weren't creative, they were destroying art. They weren't heroic, they were pathetic. And though some of them photographed well, if you had known them up-close, you would have found them not charming, but disgusting—just like the current batch of over-photographed stars.
Disgusting. Exactly the sort of small, puffed-up man I always thought was behind The Sun Also Rises. I don't judge his writing based on these photos. No, the photos only confirm what I already suspected from age 15: in these famous books we are in the presence of a myrmidon; we are captured by the tight, restricted imaginings of a desk clerk-cum-artist. This is what happens when the rich boy who should have become a bureaucrat instead becomes a novelist. Sure, he appeals to all the bureaucrat-cum-novel readers, but he destroys the novel in the process.
This tangent needs a whole new paper to address it, but I will suggest quickly a few things you may not have thought of before. First of all, we are always told that Hemingway's sales figures are very high. We are assured he is very popular. But we saw in my last paper that the same thing is said about Fitzgerald, and it isn't true. There, we caught the military buying large quantities of his books and distributing them for free. And we now know that Intelligence is promoting Modernism, and has been for a long time. We know it not just from my paper here, but from that 1995 article in the Independent, where the CIA admitted it, not only with regard to artists but with regard to writers, historians, and critics. Putting these two things together and returning to Hemingway, we see that his sales figures may be manufactured from the ground up, like everything else. If the interbank rates can be fixed (see LIBOR) and the stock market rigged and the mainstream media controlled, why should we believe book sales figures? What is to stop the government from buying tens of thousands of copies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Joyce and the rest of these bastards every year, and distributing them free to schools, libraries, and other institutions, and using those numbers to prop up sales figures? For that matter, what is to stop them from doing it with David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo and Stephen Hawking and Tom Wolfe and everyone else? Think they can't afford it? They can. They could afford to actually take delivery of every book sold, and pulp them. But of course they don't have to do that. They can do what they do now with voting machines: just make the numbers up on the screens.
But even if Hemingway is popular with some demographic, that demographic would be bureaucrats— other myrmidons like himself. This would explain whatever sales figures he does have, since at the college-degree novel-reading level, the US is a nation of bureaucrats. While the female side of the bookstore is dominated by Oprah, the male side is and has long been dominated by books for office workers. This by itself is enough to explain the death of all art, and it goes a long way to explaining why art was already almost dead before Intelligence began replacing it a century ago. With Hemingway, his overlords were just simplifying the language of the novel down to the level of its targeted readers, so that they could comprehend the propaganda more efficiently. In the 20 th century, the point of the novel wouldn't be to take you on any aesthetic journey or imaginative ride or—least of all—to teach you anything about truth, self-reliance, responsibility, or honor. No, the point of the new art would be propaganda from start to finish. The artform would be stripped down just enough to get you in and hypnotize you, which is why with Hemingway you get some plodding Jake Barnes story about people with tiny minds trying to do something interesting which they never end up doing. You get the skeleton of a soap opera, and the sentences clicking by like a watch swinging on a chain, and before you know it you are in a trance, ready for Mesmer to plant the seed. Instead of finding these people in the novel you have been attached to becoming larger and more wise, you see them become smaller and smaller, drinking themselves into hospital, swapping lovers, buying things they don't need, crashing automobiles, shooting one another, and saying things that get stupider and stupider as the story progresses. All so that you, the reader, can come out of the ass-end of the novel smaller and more confused than you were when you went in.
Please take time to trip over my “watch swinging on a chain” metaphor. Yet another entire paper or book might be written on the use of a certain sort of simple declarative sentence and sentence cadence to create a suggestive state. I know that from the very beginning I felt this with Hemingway's structure. Intuitively I felt something wasn't right. It now occurs to me that the monotonous subject-verb-object structure, with few commas and fewer parenthetical flowerings, may have been developed to mesmerize the weak-minded.
Also remember that the Intel Agencies are, at bottom, bureaucracies. Counting up all the present agencies yields something on the order of six million mandarins, and a majority of them are men. Intel would only have to buy up these bestseller books and distribute them in-house to account for the reported sales figures. I am not saying all agents enjoy either Hemingway or Don DeLillo, but those agents with taste can simply pass on their bookbags to Joe down the street, who can donate it to the library, which can sell it for 50 cents to someone who then burns it as cheaper than heating oil.
You may also wish to consider the possibility that the novel was destroyed on purpose. Discussions of the novel always seem to go back to Dickens, and both Irving and I did that here. We aren't the only ones. As a matter of color, characterization, variety, sentiment, and pathos, Dickens is the peak against which all after have been measured. Problem is, Dickens was also a progressive of the old sort, and all his novels concern social injustice and reform. The timing also leads us in this direction, since we have already seen 1848 as a turning point. That was exactly the time Dickens was writing. His greatest novels came out in the 1840's and 50's, and his popularity was very inconvenient for the anti- democratic old families of Europe and the US. By the standards of his time, Dickens was seen to be as strident and opinionated as I am here. Although the government couldn't very well forbid novel writing, it could infiltrate the field, and this is the context you should see Ulysses in. Just as Duchamp was trying to destroy the easel painting and the museum work, Joyce was trying to destroy the novel. This was the whole point of minimalism, too, across all fields, and Hemingway is admitted to be a sort of early minimalist, stripping down the complex and flowery sentence structure of Dickens and replacing it with 8th-grade declarative sentences. All of Greenberg's recommendations to unload conventions worked to the same purpose. With a stripped-down art, you simply couldn't do as much damage, and this is what they wanted.
All the arts were becoming entirely too popular in the second half of the 19 th century, and they were beginning to have a real political effect. The governments therefore had to find a way to replace this real popularity with a sort of fake popularity. Modern art is sold as an art of the people—therefore “popular”—but in fact the people have never had anything to do with it. Modernism wasn't and isn't popular, as we can see from attendance at local Modern museums. Modernism is supported only by paid academics. Even Pop-Art was never popular. These words are only Newspeak. Pop-Art borrowed it forms from popular culture, but it was never popular itself. Most people aren't impressed by blown-up cartoons or soup-can labels in a museum. But by replacing art that was popular with Pop- Art, you defused the power of real art. Relevance has been the catchword of the 20 th century, but it was inverted like everything else. The art of the 20th century was increasingly irrelevant, on purpose. The novels of Dickens had been far more relevant and powerful, but that isn't what was wanted by the governors. They wanted art that was called relevant, but which really wasn't. So they replaced the real thing by an inverted facsimile, and sold it as new-and-improved. But again, this topic could seed a book by itself. Let us return to Hemingway.
We are supposed to be impressed by Hemingway's stories about the corrida (the bullfight), but only arrested adolescents—of the type who also enjoyed swinging cats by their tails—could enjoy bullbaiting. For myself, I always root for the bull. I would go to the corrida only if I were guaranteed to see at least one overconfident famous person of the Hemingway sort come down out of the crowd and be gored to death. I almost got my wish here:
That's him directly in front of the bull, we are told. My guess is Hemingway wasn't even a good boxer. Since all the rest is lies, and since he looks like a slow man with a short reach, we must assume the only men he could beat were other lumbering lummoxes like himself. I also don't believe he was six feet tall.
Unless both these women are giants for that time, he looks about 5'8”-5'9” and 140-150 lbs—with narrow shoulders and a sunken chest. [It doesn't really matter, of course, except that it indicates once again that we are in the grip of an illusion.] And he wasn't “big” later, he was fat. Being fat doesn't make you a better boxer, it just makes you slower with a bigger head to score points on.
Was he even injured as an ambulance driver during the war? Maybe, maybe not. Although we are told both legs were filled with shrapnel, we get lots of pictures of his legs later on, and we never see any scars.
You may want to sit down, because here comes the clincher. You will say we have no evidence Hemingway ever worked for Intelligence, so this whole paper is push to a conclusion. But we do. It is now known that Hemingway worked for Intelligence in WW2. He not only worked for OSS (the precursor to the CIA), he worked for Navy Intelligence ONI, the FBI, and even worked with the Russian Intelligence agency NKVD (the precursor to the KGB). How do I know? The CIA admits it on their own website.2 Of course they try to spin it in their own way, but for my thesis here it doesn't much matter how they spin it. The admission by itself is fatal to Hemingway, since I can now ask you this $64,000 question: if you can believe Hemingway was with Intelligence in WW2, what is keeping you from believing he was with Intelligence during and after WW1? The time period in question in this paper (the peak of the Stein salon) was only about 15 years earlier than 1941. I have just shown you a lot of evidence that Hemingway was always in Intelligence, and since I have just proved it beyond any doubt for the period after 1941, you may wish to look again at the evidence before 1941. Supposing you weren't already convinced, I recommend you re-read everything above in light of this admission from cia.gov.
We also have firm evidence of T. S. Eliot's connections to British Intelligence during and after WW2. What got me started on this whole line of research, remember, is tripping across that article at the Independent, written by Frances Saunders in 1995, which I have referenced in all three recent papers. Well, Saunders published a book† a couple of years later, expanding the research she did for that article. I ordered that book and am now padding out this paper with her research. It turns out Eliot worked with the British Society for Cultural Freedom, which was the British counterpart of Tom Braden's Congress for Cultural Freedom, which as we have seen was a CIA organization to promote certain Modern artists. Allen Ginsberg, of all people, admitted this in 1978 in a sketch titled “T. S. Eliot Entered my Dreams.” Here is an excerpt:
Ginsberg to Eliot: What did you think of the domination of poetics by the CIA? After all, wasn't Angleton your friend? Didn't he tell you his plan to revitalize the intellectual structure of the West against the so-to-speak Stalinists?
Eliot: There are all sorts of chaps competing for dominance, political and literary. . .your Gurus for instance, and the Theosophists, and the table rappers and dialecticians and tea-leaf readers and Ideologues. I suppose I was one such. . . .‡
Wow. Not only do we get an indication (from Ginsberg himself) that Ginsberg and Eliot were connected to Intelligence, we get admission of that connection for Ginsberg's Gurus [Suzuki, Watts, Chogyam Trungpa, Gehlek Rinpoche, Bhaktivedanta Swami, etc.?] and Theosophy. I started my first paper with an analysis of Theosophy, coming to this conclusion with no help from anyone else's research or commentary, and now I have come full circle.
We also have piles of evidence linking Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams and others to US Intelligence via their relationships with James Jesus Angleton as far back as the 1930's. Angleton, remember, was chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, but had probably been recruited while at Yale in about 1937. He was one of the founder-officers of the CIA in 1947. It was discovered in 1975 in the Senate hearings that Angleton was in control of CHAOS during the 1960's—the infamous domestic spying program allied to the FBI's COINTELPRO. All this information is at Wikipedia, so I am not leaking anything here or doing any deep research. We know he was OSS during the war, stationed in London, so that takes us back to about 1942. We also know he visited Pound in Italy in 1938, just before Pound went “rogue.” Ostensibly he was in Italy as editor of Yale's Furioso magazine, which published Modern poetry at the time (Angleton also considered himself a poet). But that now looks like a cover. You should find it very curious that a future founder of the CIA should be visiting Pound in 1938.
I also encourage you to notice that Angleton had two children named Guru Sangat Kaur Khalsa and Siri Hari Kaur Angleton-Khalsa. They joined the Sikh community near Los Alamos, NM, and became leaders of the movement in the US. This brings us back to my paper on Theosophy and specifically the importation and promotion of Eastern religions into the US for political purposes. You may follow up on this thread if you wish.
Although we have been sold a patchwork of lies, these early characters in the Modern script were at least smart enough to create something that resembled art, which in the first years was helpful. Hemingway was no master of the art form, but at least he could construct a plot—more than most could do after him. Later on, Intelligence realized this residual ability wasn't a necessary ingredient, since the public turned out to be even easier to control than they thought. Intelligence found it could prop up anyone and anything as art, even mental patients and bums, and within a couple of decades the Agency was simply playing a game to see what they could pass off as art and an artist. They saw this as an indication of their power. It was found that most people didn't care about art one way or another, and that even those who claimed to care—even those who claimed to be experts or connoisseurs—usually didn't. What these fake connoisseurs liked was the society or the attention, so they were easy for Intelligence to buy off. The very very few who actually cared for art were such an astonishing minority, they could be utterly ignored. It had been thought going in that real art had a large number of protectors, but once the war against art began, this was found to be an error. Almost all previous claims of love, connoisseurship, and patronage turned out to be lip service, since when pressure was applied, it all evaporated. In others words, it was found that real art was already nearly extinct even before the government decided to start strafing it. Though Intelligence was armed for a long war, it didn't even find a short battle. The greater part of the opposition caved with just a nudge, and those left standing after the first skirmish were already so outnumbered they hadn't a chance. All that was necessary at that point was to quit publishing them and wait for them to die.
The role of Intelligence in the rise of Modernism has been missed by most people for the same reason I missed it for so long: we forget how far back the Agencies go. Most people know the CIA wasn't created until 1947, and since it came out of the Office of Strategic Service—which was an agency of the Second World War, we then take Intelligence only back to 1938 or so. But there was Intelligence in the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. There was Intelligence in Caesar's armies and in the armies of Alexander. Like prostitution, it is as old as the race itself. Cain and Abel were spying on one another, and plotting, and before that the snake—the first agent—was watching Eve from the tree, trying to insert himself in the place given to Adam.
Although the evidence for the central role of Intelligence has always been there, it of course hasn't been promoted, and it has retreated into the shadows. The evidence can even be found in the works of the Moderns themselves, as I showed previously with Burrough's Naked Lunch. The same is easy to show with Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist, in which Joyce talks about the British spies in Dublin Castle. And in Dubliners (p. 96), Mr. Henchy “knows for a fact” that half the Radical Nationalists in Dublin are “in the pay of the Castle.” Who would have thought that Joyce himself was among them, or soon would be? I haven't (yet) found any evidence Joyce was subverting the Irish causes, but since he was certainly promoting the Modernist causes, he was in the service of one of the main Intelligence programs of his time. Since this program served the rich families at the expense of art history, we see that Joyce is an anti-hero in a different way that you have thought. Although he showed real early talent in both poetry and novel writing, he chose instead to sell out his birthright as a real artist for the money and fame of a bought one. Ulysses is the public record of that sell-out.
As you come down from this paper. . . No, I should say, as you crawl out of the Matrix on your hands and knees, pulling the plugs from your neck and limbs and shaking the cytoplasmic fluid from your hairless body, consider this last problem. Since we are seeing that large parts of history have been manufactured, faked, pushed, and invented, we should ask if anyone is keeping track of what actually happened. What I mean is, since all the mainstream histories you read appear to be false, have the governments at least thought to write down what they have done? Is there some great archive somewhere containing the real history?
Of course the agents will know what they have done recently, but what if we go a couple of generations back, when memories fade? Has the manufactured history simply become the real history, with no one left to tell us the difference? I only ask because at some point in the future, society may decide to go straight, as it were, swearing off the lying and the spying. At that point, our descendants might wish to know what really happened in these centuries. Will they be able to? Or will it require a total recreation from old evidence and logic, like I have done here? If we aren't keeping this correct record, I suggest we do so immediately. We will look a lot less stupid in the future if they know that the top art of the 20th century was not the best we could do, but only an invention of Intelligence.
Which brings us to another question. Is all of history as corrupted as the last century? How far back could we take my method, and what would we find?
*This requires a footnote, since it will assuredly be taken down from Wikipedia at some point. Spence, Richard B. (2008). Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult. Port Townsend: Feral House. pp. 54–57, 60–61. ISBN 978-1-932595-33-8. Already, someone has added a sentence to Wiki saying that there is no evidence Quinn was in British Intelligence. But Spence did not make it up. See The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, Revised Edition, Yale University Press, p. 829, where it is confirmed.
**Kennedy, J. Gerald. "Hemingway's Gender Trouble", American Literature, Vol. 63, No. 2, Jun 1991.
†Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War. See p. 103 for just one example. Although I think Saunders' book is more misdirection, it does contain some good information. To spin information, Intelligence has to give you some, which is bad for them, good for me.
‡City Lights Journal, Spring 1978.
1Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War. pp. 34, 250.
2 Reynolds, Nicholas. “Ernest Hemingway, Wartime Spy.” Studies in Intelligence, volume 52, number 2 (June 2012).
3 http://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/12/05/john-quinn-1913-armory-show. New York Public Library Archives, 2013.
4 McBride began his 36 years at the New York Sun in 1913. That is not a coincidence. He was installed at age 45 in that position with the connivance of Quinn and U.S. Intelligence. One of his first assignments was not only the promotion of the avant garde painters of the Armory Show, but the anti-promotion of the Eight and the Ashcan School. Robert Henri was a prominent member of both.
5Directory of Directors, City of Chicago, Audit Company of New York, 1902. p. 69.
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