RSSby Tom McCarthy
In Search of Terror’s… orig pub in Strange Attractor Issue 1, London 2004
‘A screaming comes across the sky.’ So begins Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s vast 1973 novel about the V2 Rocket Bomb. Hurtling down on London in the final months of World War Two, the V2 brought with it a terror deeper and more insidious than that instilled in London’s populace by years of more conventional, plane-dropped bombs. At least you heard the old ones coming. With the V2, you were never sure there wasn’t one ten feet above you, or even millimetres from your skull, tickling your hair for one immeasurable fragment of a second on its way down. Why? Because the rocket travelled faster than the speed of its own sound - the first man-made projectile so to do. If you heard the scream of its approach, then you were fine: the subsequent explosion had already happened and you had survived it. ‘The reversal!’ Pynchon writes. ‘A piece of time neatly snipped out… a few feet of film run backwards…’ The V2 bomb undid the basic ontological order of things: cause and effect, past and present. It messed with people’s minds because it messed with time itself.
Gravity’s Rainbow’s first V2 explodes before its time: a premature airburst showering down burning lumps for miles along the Thames. Only one small fragment retains any sort of shape, and that one falls on Greenwich - on the First Meridian, to be precise, the place from which all time throughout the world is measured. Pirate Prentice, agent of the ultra-secretive Special Operations Executive, knows that the airburst is no accident: the fragment holds a message for him from a fellow agent based in Holland, where the bomb was launched. ‘Incoming mail,’ he murmurs as he sees it glistening at dawn above the curved Earth over the North Sea. The message, it turns out, is written in Kryptosam, a synthetic ink that only shows up when mixed with sperm. The Dutch agent has thoughtfully drawn on top of it a pornographic image ‘after the style of von Bayros or Beardsley’. Prentice, working double-shift for England, activates the message in the only way he can: manually.
Many influences lurk beneath the surface of this episode. Its codes and secret orders hark back to Elizabethan intrigue (Christopher Marlowe, the great playwright-spy, was murdered not a mile away from Greenwich). Its conjoining of desire and violence in a longing for the message borne by the messenger-who-destroys invokes the terrifying angels of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Calvinist theology is in there too: Prentice’s dream on the morning of the bomb’s descent is of ‘a judgement from which there is no appeal’. But if I had to bet good money on what was most playing in the back of Pynchon’s mind when he exploded his first bomb above the First Meridian I’d go for Joseph Conrad’s book The Secret Agent.
This novel, written in 1907, involves a plot to blow up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park. A foreign diplomatic service employs a London-based agent named Verloc to launch an attack on ‘the sacrosanct fetish of the day’ - science. Verloc, who as a cover runs a shop peddling Victorian pornography (dirty von Bayroses and Beardsleys), gets his brother-in-law Stevie to carry the bomb to the Observatory. Stevie, a half-wit who sits to the side of anarchist meetings drawing endless overlapping circles (what Conrad calls ‘the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable’), manages to set the bomb off prematurely, showering lumps of himself all over Greenwich. The Secret Agent, so similar to Pynchon’s novel in its subject-matter of time going wrong on the site of the very zero point of time, written by the pioneer of the narrative time-shifts at which Pynchon is so adept, ends on a note of dull terror, as a depraved latter-day Archimedes, The Professor, shuffles through London’s streets with a bomb in his pocket whispering: ‘Madness and despair! Give me those and I’ll give you a lever to move the world!’
Conrad, too, had influences: the violent revolutionaries of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the scheming nihilists of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. But most of all he based his novel on an actual event. On the afternoon of the fifteenth of February, 1894, a terrorist blew himself to pieces on the slope beneath the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, two or three feet from the meridian line itself. He was an out-of-work French tailor named Martial Bourdin, brother of the Tchichell Street tailor Henri Bourdin. In his pockets were found a membership card of the Autonomie Club in Windmill Street, two tickets to a masked ball in aid of the Revolutionary Party and several recipes for explosives. These, combined with an iron fragment that dropped out of his abdomen as his body, or what could be reassembled of it, lay on the mortuary slab in the Royal Seamen’s Hospital, left police in little doubt that he had been an anarchist, killed as he carried (as The Times put it) ‘an infernal machine deliberately constructed to work out an infernal purpose.’
Problem solved, the literary sleuth in us might say: this is our zero degrees, our point of contact with the real. The problem is, the more one looks into the Bourdin case, the less certain do the facts appear. News reports of the incident conflicted, failing to agree even on its date. Its motivation was equally unclear. Had Bourdin been actually trying to blow up the Observatory itself? The Autonomie Club was rumoured to have been under surveillance; one theory advanced to explain Bourdin’s actions was that, anticipating a raid, he was trying to get rid of incriminating evidence by hiding it under a bush in another part of London. Another theory held that he had wanted to try out his bomb in the secluded park; yet another that he was transporting it to France. Conspiracy theories multiplied through underground magazines and self-published pamphlets. Most of these advanced a version of the belief that Bourdin had been put up to his attempt by his brother-in-law Henry Benjamin Samuels, widely suspected of being a police spy. Lord Salisbury’s Aliens Bill, which proposed a weakening of the asylum laws, was being read in parliament: an outrage by foreign undesirables might help its passage into law. Conrad certainly believed this theory, and based Verloc straight on Samuels.
But what were European anarchists doing in London in the first place, and why would the authorities have gone to such extreme lengths as to attempt to blow up the jewel in the crown of British scientific ingenuity, the very temple to the Empire’s dominion over all time-zones, to kick them out?
To appreciate the context of the Bourdin incident, you have to go back over the preceding thirty years. The late nineteenth century was a time when anarchism reached its zenith on the continent. In 1865, the year that Proudhon, ‘le Père de l’Anarchie‘ and author of What is Property? (answer: theft) died, the anarchists Bakunin and Reclus set up the secret International Brotherhood in Naples. Three years later Bakunin founded the International Alliance of Social Democracy in Geneva. In 1873, two years after the brutal quashing of the Paris Commune, Spain was shaken by insurrectionary outbreaks. At Sanlucar bakuninist trade unions set up a local government that lasted for a month; another local anarchist government was formed at Alcoy, near Valencia, but lasted only three days. In 1874 there was an uprising in Southern Italy and disturbances rocked St. Petersburg in 1876.
In 1876 Bakunin died and a new figurehead arrived on the European anarchist scene: Prince Peter Kropotkin, a distinguished Russian geographer who had graduated from an exclusive military academy and even served as pageboy to the Tsar. After turning down the prestigious post of Secretary of the Russian Geographical Society, Kropotkin went to the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, where he was converted to anarchism. His host-indoctrinators were watchmakers, keepers of time. Later he would write: ‘The History of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum that takes centuries to swing.’ Kropotkin’s vision of social relations was entirely mechanical, and he saw anarchism as the logical analogue to positivist science. Even his escape from a Russian gaol in 1887 showed a engineer’s powers of time-and-motion reasoning: noticing that the distance between himself (A) and the open prison gate (B) was more or less equal to that between himself (A) and his guard (C), which was also pretty much the same as that between his guard (C) and the gate (B), he calculated correctly that, if he broke into a sprint, his guard would not run straight along the line CB but rather on a curve set by the triangle CAB, and that assuming the speed at which he could run was equal to his guard’s top speed, he would therefore get there first. Arriving back in Switzerland after escaping, Kropotkin launched the journal L’Avant-Garde and called for ‘propaganda by deed’: ‘We are for the violent way. Let us go for the guns hanging on the walls of our attics.’ An assassination attempt on the Tsar followed, then violent demonstrations in Rheims and Montceau, bomb attacks in Lyon and assassinations of Austrian bankers.
In 1885, when Kropotkin’s Paroles d’un Revolté was published in Paris, anarchism became hugely popular among French artists and aesthetes. There was the writer Octave Mirbeau, who had his debauched priest Jules tell his young protégé that ‘justice is a farce, love is a pigsty, god is a chimera’ in L’Abbé Jules and who wrote in The Torture Garden that ‘murder is the very bedrock of all our social institutions.’ There was Félix Fénéon, elegant dandy and editor of several magazines who, dressed in a silk top hat and dark-red gloves, would leave bombs in flowerpots on the windowsills of the exclusive restaurants the politicians liked to eat in. There was Alfred Jarry, whose Ubu Roi painted a grotesque picture of political power. Fin-de-siècle decadence found a perfect bedfellow in anarchism, and luminaries such as Barres, Claudel, France, Pisarro, Luce and Blum all joined in the fun.
In 1892 the ‘Ere des Attentats‘ began. In March of that year the extraordinary ‘Ravachol’ (his moniker would enter the French language; it’s even one of Captain Haddock’s insults), a thief, murderer and desecrator of tombs, flung a bomb into the Paris flat of law-court president Benoît and another into advocate-general Bulot’s home. Over the next two years eleven anarchist bombs exploded in Paris alone, most notably Vaillant’s in the crowded Deputy Chamber and the charming and well-educated Emile Henry’s in the Café Saint-Lazare. This is Pink Panther stuff, Carry On Bombing: farcical dramas of bluff and double-bluff punctuated by He went thaddaway!s and, of course, by explosions. In an attempt to discredit anarchism a London magazine funded by the police publishes the absurdly savage Anarchist’s Feast, urging the wholesale slaughter of the bourgeoisie; a Spanish anarchist reads the article but misses the irony and is inspired to throw a bomb from the balcony of Barcelona’s opera house, where it kills thirty people. Fénéon relaxes at a café as his bomb explodes around the corner. ‘It came from the Luxembourg Palace,’ says the waiter. ‘I think you’ll find it came from the Café de l’Odéon,’ says Fénéon, aesthetically sipping his drink; ‘Another absinthe here, my good man.’ The police find one of Henry’s unexploded bombs and take it back to the station to defuse it, where it blows up in their faces and destroys the station. ‘What intimate charm in this story,’ writes Fénéon, aesthetically flicking ash from his long, thin cigarette.
Ultimately, the era of ‘propaganda by deed’ all but ended continental anarchism, bringing on the repressive lois scelerats. By 1894 hundreds of French anarchists and sympathisers were in prison - philosophers and editors as well as terrorists. It was around this time that England, famed for its liberal asylum laws, began to swell with what The Times called ‘political desperadoes of all nationalities’. German revolutionaries outlawed by Bismark, Austrians, Bohemians and Russians (especially Russian Jews: the Tsar’s assassination had involved a Jewish seamstress, sending anti-Semitic feeling even higher than usual) all flocked to London, to the East End. Journals such as The Anarchist, Commonweal, Freedom, The Torch of Anarchy and Arbeter Fraint (Yiddish: The Worker’s Friend) sprung up and the Autonomie Club became world-famous. But, on the understanding that the anarchists’ rights of asylum were safe only as long as they refrained from committing outrages in England, no bombs went off - that is, of course, until Greenwich Park.
Whether or not Bourdin’s bomb was planned by the secret services, it certainly inspired an onslaught of xenophobic diatribe in the press. ‘The British public may wonder,’ mused The Times, ‘that it is possible to carry the theory of “liberty for everyone on British soil” a little too far.’ The Morning Leader less subtly thundered: ‘Too long has England been an asylum for European murderers, forgers and thieves.’ When the Autonomie Club was eventually raided on the seventeenth of February Inspector Melville confided in block capitals to a Leader scribe who ‘happened’ to be there that ‘we HAVEN’T FOUND A SINGLE ENGLISHMAN in the place.’ The foreign press joined in: ‘Those mindful of international propriety do not wish the capital of the British Empire to become the den of the Old Man of the Mountain, the acts of whose adepts gave rise to the term assassin,’ grumbled the French Liberté. As arrests, censorship and expulsions followed El Pais murmured its approval that ‘after long hesitation England seems to have understood its duty to give anarchists the reception they deserve’ - in other words, none.
In the far-left press, the story ran and ran. One South London anarchist, David Nicoll, published pamphlets asserting Samuels’s collaboration in the alleged conspiracy for years to come. Eventually he was committed to an insane asylum (by a doctor friend of Samuels, no less), and ended his career by fantasising homosexual plots levelled against him by the Vatican. Among art and literary circles, too, the story was taken up: Isabel Rosetti, writing under the pseudonym Isabel Meredith, mentions the incident in her semi-autobiographical A Girl Among the Anarchists. She, too, subscribes firmly to the right-wing conspiracy version. Rosetti was a friend of Conrad, as was Ford Maddox Ford, whose close involvement with the anarchist movement belies Conrad’s claim that knowledge of the Bourdin case ‘came to me in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend’ who ‘if he had seen once in his life the back of an anarchist that must have been the whole extent of his connection with the underworld.’ The Secret Agent’s most remarkable character, The Professor (he makes no secret of his bomb-carrying antics, and even taunts the police, daring them to try to take him out: ‘There isn’t even a cat near us, and these condemned old houses would make a good heap of bricks where you stand. You’ll never get me at so little cost to life and property, which you are paid to protect.’) was initially deemed cartoonish and two-dimensional by critics, but turned out to be based on a real character who appears in the January 1885 issue of The Alarm, an American anarchist journal that surfaces in The Secret Agent as The Gong. Professor Mezzerof, the article’s headline announces, ‘Carries a Bomb in His Pocket.’ ‘I can take tea and similar articles of food from the family table and make explosives with them more powerful than Italian gunpowder,’ writes Mezzerof. ‘Not long ago I was travelling with some friends in a streetcar, and an old woman came and sat down on the two bombs I had with me. A good little nitric and sulphuric acid, with pure glycerine, such as ladies use, and five or six pounds of it, such as could easily be carried the pocket, would destroy the big post office down town.’ ‘But,’ he sportingly adds, ‘don’t use dynamite until the government becomes autocratic and you cannot obtain your rights at the polls.’
Then again, is Professor Mezzerof real after all? Or is he perhaps a creation intended to discredit revolutionaries, in the manner of The Anarchist’s Feast? If he is believed to be real, does it make a difference? Perhaps it is no coincidence that the history of this era is so interwoven with art and literature. Wasn’t science itself emerging, during the late nineteenth century, as an elaborate construct with its own narratives - a fiction that, like all fictions, is infused with and executes an array of ideological functions? What are newspapers but narrative arrangements of the debris generated by events, as speculation-ridden as a novel, global trade or theories postulating escape routes from time or prison or the prison of time? And what, then, are readers and historians but Pirate Prentices, bent double over incoming mail that destroys the post office itself as it arrives? ‘It has happened before,’ writes Pynchon. A screaming comes across the sky: perhaps all that’s real, really real, is the blast - but that is the bit, ironically, that if you are in it you will never know about.
Tom McCarthy 2003