39 Hilldrop Crescent

Why Hawley Harvey Crippen did it has puzzled many but surely there's no puzzle in it. For the overall picture you need to read the whole of Joseph Geringer's take but this is a summary:

# Crippen was a small, serious man from Michigan, in his mid-forties who'd become an MD and his future wife Belle was a loud, buxom, high spirited and promiscuous woman.

# He liked her spirit. She saw in him a way up out of her social class.

# They ended up in Britain and while he worked, she went on stage but audiences laughed. She loved the nightlife and met a meathead, Bruce Miller.

# Ethel Le Neve was 18 years old when she met Hawley Crippen; at that time 39. She became his private secretary and bookkeeper and though it was romance, it was still honourable. He may have wanted it so, in contrast with his wife.

# Meanwhile Belle had redecorated her home in pink - the lampshades were pink, the vases were pink, and even the lights were pink. Crippen found her taste nauseating but learned to ignore it and went to Ethel.

# On December 6, 1906, Crippen came home earlier than usual and found one of their two lodgers in bed with Belle. He and Ethel referred ever after to December 6, 1906, as their "wedding day".

# Ethel and Belle met in person and the wife raged and bullied and Crippen quietly snapped inside.

# Ethel admitted that she was pregnant.

# Belle hoped to either scare Crippen out of the house or enrage him so that he would divorce first. She used intemperate alnguage about Ethel.

# Moving to February 1, 1910 and the present tense, the story seems to be that Crippen administers a toxin to his wife and realizes he's botched the dose when Belle begins to scream. Afraid that neighbours will be roused from their beds by her screams, he panics, grabs a revolver and shoots his wife in the head.

# Now Crippen must dispose of the evidence - the only solution is dissection in his enameled bathtub. He reduces her body into parts, cutting off arms, legs and head. After filleting her, he stores the parts in the cellar and dustbin.

# At the time he would normally get up for work, he rises, dresses, shaves and heads to work, arriving at the dental office on time, as if nothing has happened.

# That evening, Tuesday, he goes straight home, eats dinner. Grabbing the sack of body parts and some bricks, he walks the few blocks to the canal and drops the package into the water.

# Crippen makes a mistake by sending a letter, ostensibly from Belle, to the Townswomen's Guild, saying she was going to America. From that moment on it's all downhill for him.

# Crippen appears at a Music Hall Ball, arm in arm with Ethel Le Neve, wearing some of Belle's jewellery.

# He is interviewed by the police. He and Ethel board the S.S. Montrose as father and son, travelling to start a new life in Canada.

# Reports say: "During the day, they sat together on deck, chatting quietly about the sea and the weather. But as the voyage continued, Captain Kendall's suspicions were first aroused when he noticed Master Robinson's trousers were too large for his slender body and were held in place by means of a large safety-pin."

# Harry Kendall, the captain, had been watching the tall, slim boy and soon realized that his hips swayed unnaturally for a male and "his" hair was very soft and feminine despite the hat that covered most of it.

# Kendall makes history when on July 22 he sends the first-ever wireless telegraph that results in the capture of a criminal, from a point 120 miles west of Cornwall, to the White Star Company in Liverpool.

# It hits the newstands in Britain and becomes a sensation, even as the couple is still unaware, aboard the liner.

I won't steal Geringer's thunder entirely and the last act is almost as interesting in itself but the brief of this post was to try to understand Crippen's motivation.

It seems pretty clear, psychologically. That's Ethel, below, at the trial.

[Cross-posted at Ian Appleby's Imagined Community.]

Atiq Rahimi Earth and Ashes

Atiq Rahimi is an Afghan who now lives in France. Earth and Ashes is a deceptively short novella but a very impressive contribution to the way that we think about war and society. Rahimi writes here about a family in his native Afghanistan that is split and sundered through the effects of war. The novel though isn't about that temporal and physical separation as much as it is about the psychological dramas that grief produces. Rahimi subtly guides us into the mind of the novel's protagonist, a grandfather going with his grandson to visit his son and his grandson's father to tell him about how war has effected them. But inside that very simple story Rahimi actually endeavours to do two much more interesting things- as well as many others that I'm not able to narrate effectively here.

The first is that he uses the narration of the story to demonstrate to us the way that war effects consciousness. The narration is all in the first person, it mixes dream and reality in a sequence- you get no warning about the transition from what is to what appears and back again, you have no idea at various moments about whether what you are reading is a dream or a reality though by the end you perceive a very certain and simple storyline. He writes like shrapnel- by which I mean that he writes presenting us with shards of a consciousness blown apart quite literally by the force of tragedy. At one point, the only real character outside the family presents as a truism that grief can be water and spirt out of your eyes, that it can be a sword which swipes and stabs or it can be a bomb ticking in silence and then exploding. Very much what we have here is the discontinuity which every image- the eye weeping single tears, the sword making single thrusts and the bomb exploding concrete into shards- involves. The way that grief is discontinuous- that in moments it can be forgotten or can be realised in fond memories, then in moments can wrack the conscience in different ways, then take the image of a lost and loved one and in a different context express itself as a desire for revenge upon that lost or loved one for leaving so quickly and so unexpectedly is all contained in this slim knowledge. The narrative is as broken up as the soul of the grandfather who speaks it.

The second major aspect of this story is that at its end, the goal to which the grandfather, our narrator proceeds, is a goal he turns down. He refuses it because he sees that some members of his family have not paid their tithe of grief. Throughout the story, anger at those who cannot feel, anger at those who inquire without knowing the story he has to tell, anger at useless comiseration comes through. The grandfather whose mouth expresses the tail has a silent fury about him- he wants to blow the world and its pathetic consolations sky high, he wants to see those who can truly greive the way he can, truly see their world come to an end like he has seen his come to an end. He wants to speak to his family who have suffered like him and when he finds that members within his family have not suffered in the same way, how for them the events which have destroyed him have become part of a normal working day, he feels wrath. He feels angry with his grandson who cannot understand because he is too young and because the grandson is become deaf and cannot be made to understand. In a much more profound way though the grandfather as he says himself has become deaf whereas his grandson can hear- like a blind man, blinded by a day's events, he wonders in a valley of the sighted and feels both envy and wishes that they shared his condition so that someone might understand. Because they do not pay the proper tithe to death, he reckons that they cannot understand his grief and cut away in the loneliness of his tears and his dreams, his mourning becomes the expression of a solitude passing our understanding.

Death and the way that society copes with it are things that to us living in the peaceful west it is difficult to understand. Reading this short novel, one remembers that Afghanistan has suffered many times over the last fifty years- that its history has been a history of conflict, disaster and the resulting trauma. The fact that by the end of the novella, our character refers to his grief as a bomb which might go off at any time- is a pointed reminder that grief and trauma can have political consequences. Understanding the way that grief gives way to desperation, that trauma produces problems for us to navigate as people and politicians is amongst the first steps to wisdom and Rahimi has provided us with an apt guide to the Afghan dimensions of loss, regret and sorrow.

The Importance of Rites

Bert Keizer has written a very illuminating article about the importance of rites in our society. A rite might be defined as a performance which we use to deal with something that otherwise is so vast in its implications that we can't comprehend it. Whether you are religious or not, the moment of death for example is so vast that its difficult to comprehend its reality, its difficult to work it out. Having talked to Christian friends and from my own experience, the rite of a funeral is an amazing gain in this sense- it allows you to understand what has happened, to feel you have made some effort, some action, some, even, atonement for what has happened and you can move on. Keiser argues that rites for us are the ultimate human displacement activity. Evolutionarily biologists have often observed for instance that cocks can often in the middle of combat get confused evolutionary signals and not know what to do- so they peck the ground instead of each other. Similarly we find it useful to do something in order to assuage our grief about something that we can't effect. I'm not sure about the evolutionary theory- but the idea that a funeral is a way of reasserting control over death is something that I think is very true- the process of organizing it, meeting your loved one's friends and exchanging memories is incredibly therapeutic- it is activity and sometimes where there is no basic understanding (whatever your metaphysical beliefs the reality of death is something that is hard to cope with), activity is all that we have.

Psycho-sexual terrorism

Until now I'd been unaware of the American thinker, Ellen Willis, and have just become aware of her, thanks to Professor Cutler's blog which contains some interesting thoughts about the right, left and her place within that dichotomy. Despite this ignorance, and in the grand tradition of political blogging, I want to comment on something that Willis wrote in response to the terrorist phenomena which has permeated so much of political discussion for understandable reasons since the events of September 11th 2001.

Willis's essay on the mass psychology of terrorism is definitely one to read. She charts more interestingly than most theorists have at the moment the psychosis of terrorism. By linking terrorist atrocity to threatened sexuality, to threatened identity, she provides a much more coherent and interesting case for why young men and women become terrorists than has been provided in the past. Simple economic explanations such as that advanced here by Marwan Bishara fail to explain why citizens from so many countries with different economic expectations and also citizens from so many classes turn to terrorism to express their rage. Willis's analysis of the threat provided by "modernity" makes more sense of this phenomenon and links it rather more cogently to the violent rhetoric of other religions. Willis is right therefore to argue that there is a psychological background to what is going on and the psychological explanations she provides make a lot of sense- the threat especially to sexuality from female liberation is something that is often underplayed and underexposed as a source for the frustrations of modern politics. The fact that men, to paraphrase Dean Acheson on Britain, have lost an empire and not yet found a role, has led to all sorts of instabilities within the modern world- instabilities that Willis is right to note emerge in different contexts and are connected to other rationales.

Willis's analysis is not however complete. Part of the problem lies in the way that we in our society deal with the religious impulse within human kind. Psychological research done by many practitioners throughout the world has found that religious experience is an almost universal feature of the human psyche. Almost 10% of the population claim to have heard voices at some point, the number of Americans claiming to have been abducted by aliens stands at around 4 million, my own research into the New Model Army in 17th Century England shows that one of the ways that people cope with extreme situations and mass casualties is to fall back upon religion. As Richard Noll's anthropological research of Native American Shamans showed the diagnosis of schizophrenia and the state of Shamanism share simularities- indeed Richard Bentall has claimed that one of the distinguishing factors about more traditional societies is that they deal with some varieties of delusional belief in a different way to the way that modern societies do. In that sense the capacity of modern society to deal with delusion as opposed to older societies has been diminished and one of the consequences might be the terrorism we all perceive.

One of the problems with her article is that missing that aspect misses the timelessness of this phenomenen. The Children's Crusade, the Assassins in early Islam and many others illustrate that beleivers in a cause have often been casual about the loss of their own or other's lives. Terrorism is as much a function of technology as it is of modernity and can't be linked as simply as she has linked it to psychosexual frustration.

Despite these caveats, Willis has picked up on something interesting- the sexual rhetoric of the Islamist or indeed of some rightwing Christians and Jews is fascinating. Her article as a brief survey isn't able to deal with the nuances of the situation- the American reaction to modernity is not the same as the Egyptian- though Said Qutb and Pat Robertson would be revolted and were revolted by the same aspects of American modernisation. Each kind of reaction comes attached to its own cultural context and economic context- those contexts influence the ways that that reaction is pursued. Furthermore each reaction comes with its own individual context- I react in a different way from you to the reordering of society.

Willis's paper is interesting and worth reading. She delineates one of the most important changes in the history of the world, a change in many ways which we are still living through and whose implications will govern the rest of our lives. That change has yet to find a mould in which to settle itself- our structures are largely those evolved within patriachal society- but they are evolving under new pressures and one of the birthpangs of the modern World may well be the emergeance of terrorism- we should just be cautious about being too absolute in our claims about this.

Sophie Scholl, the White Rose and the nature of heroism

Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.- Traudl Junge, Secretary to Hitler in the closing frame of the film Downfall.



Turning to the Nazi regime, its easy to forget both its popular support and the fact that people could and did find out about it. Recently a film was made about one such group of people, or rather one character within that group- Sophie Scholl. Scholl was a member of a group of students called the White Rose who during 1943 postered and pamphleted through southern Germany against the Nazis- messages which got through even to the concentration camp at Dachau, arrested and later executed alongside her brother she became a symbol of the fact that some Germans had indeed known and had resisted however helplessly. For Traudl Junge- she served even in a new millenium as a mark of how far Junge and most of the German nation had failed.

The story of Scholl and her friends is one of the most interesting therefore around for a film maker to tell- the central question being what distinguished them? What made these Germans so conscious of the ills of the Third Reich that they resisted and resisted to the point of death? Consequently its no surprise to find that Scholl has become the subject of a recent film, Sophie Scholl Die Letzen Tage. The film makers here simplify the story by concentrating on the lonely figure of Scholl herself but they use the actual SS files on her interrogation in order to script much of the central part of the film. Shining a spotlight on Scholl they pose her as an alternative to Junge, the central character of the film Downfall about Hitler's fall, and ask what made her special.

Consequently much of the film focuses intimately on Scholl herself, her reactions, her feelings, and her death. Thankfully in Julia Jentsch they found an actress capable of carrying the role. Scholl as here painted is an ordinary young woman- we first see her playing discs with a friend, we see her thinking about her fiance on the Russian front, we see her with her brother. But one thing comes out of the film and that is her faith. Scholl's christianity is referred to again and again, particularly in the scenes in which she discovers she will die and retreats to her cell to confess her feelings to her cell mate. Scholl is offered a way out which she refuses upon grounds of faith- the position of the film is that Scholl's faith in many ways is the animating principle of her life, without it this would be an ordinary girl, with it she becomes corageous enough to take on the Third Reich.

Curiously this leaves the film rather flat, Scholl's character is almost so internally strong that she gives no sign of growth and her feelings are merely there to be combatted and not to sway her. The most visible example of this is the interrogation scene where proceeding from denial to admitting what has happened, she abandons a posture of defence to come out with an attack in which the film shows her as being partially successful. Because the heroine is so heroic, rejecting temptation at every moment, the film can't show us what temptation is. Scholl in this sense becomes almost inhuman in the way that she strides purposefully to her death- she knows the end and she wills the end. In many ways this film is not a film in the conventional sense- but a freeze frame of defiance.

Therefore this film aims to be disappointing, because it aims to show us a resistance that could not be overcome and cannot be explained by rational methods. The actions of the White Rose echo through history and yet were personally full of folly- there was no question that eventually they would be caught and that mere pamphleteering was a gesture not a strategy to bring down the Reich- once caught there was no question that open defiance would end in death- and yet they continued down that path. By staying faithful to that problem, the film fails to satisfy as a film but it does portray the emmense psychological certainty that religious belief (or any belief for that matter) can give someone- even in the depths of a Nazi jail.

The Pity of War: Jean-Yves Le Naour The Living Unknown Soldier

Anthelme Mangin was found in France in 1918, a veteran of the first World War, amnesiac and sufferer from what was then called daementia praecox. Mangin over the next twenty four years until his death in 1942 stayed within various mental asylums, being battled over by various groups of people who claimed to be his relatives. Le Naour's biography of Mangin is an incredibly interesting book which sums up a life filled with sadness and pathos- a life that in many ways stands for so many lives within that generation. Lives that were blighted not merely by the obvious effects of the war, deaths, injuries and scars, but by the psychological effects of war- by the hatred felt by men formerly soldiers for their families who had demanded that they serve for the sake of respectability, by the shreiks of men wakening to dreams of nightmare and perhaps more insidious by those who could not remember or became mad. In France many in that case later died when in 1940-4 the asylums were understaffed and undersupplied with food and neccessaries.

Le Naour understands this and as very little can be said about Mangin himself- he ceased to speak much in the 1920s or recognise people, fiddling with the buttons of people who came to see him but registering very little of the outside world. Getting inside the mind of a man who has lost the ability or wish to signify it to the outside world is beyond the capacity of most who meet him- let alone those who meet him through the fragments of the source record- records which only arose when the case reached particular noteriety, some of which even then have been lost in the administrative confusion of World War Two.

So Le Naour portrays not Mangin- but the way that society reacted to Mangin and particularly the way that those who beleived that he was their relative beleived sometimes to the exclusion of any rational thought that this was their father, brother, husband or son. Le Naour's portrait is designed to show us the desperation of the generation that fought in the first world war- his drawing is acute- Mangin once identified faded away but whilst he was anonymous he became a kind of monument to every man. Just as French men and women gathered at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier saying this could be your son, this could be your husband- so families gathered around the unknown lunatic exclaiming the same thing.

Le Naour points both to the pathos and the self righteousness of a grief which seeks an object to greive over, pointing to a particular situation and particular time he illuminates the tragedy of war- the tragedy of lives ripped apart not by the obvious wounds made by gunshot, sword or bomb, but the hidden wounds made psychologically on the frame of both the soldiers and those linked to them- in short upon us all.

War whether now or a thousand years ago echoes through the minds of those effected for years and years- as Le Naour comments even now one family continues to plead that Mangin was misidentified and wants his corpse exhumed for genetic testing- despite the fact that the evidence from administrative records indicate that the Anthelme clearly wasn't who they think he is.