Books I Read This Month: November 2024

Patrick Cockburn • Richard Flanagan • Han Kang

Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerilla Journalism (Patrick Cockburn)

Claud Cockburn, the pioneering guerrilla journalist who used a mimeograph machine like a Maxim gun in the 1930s, would have been well-suited to our time of independent online platforms and podcasts, having made his mark as a self-publishing rogue reporter after breaking away from legacy media. Before going solo, the Englishman was a successful scribe for the Times of London, working the U.S. beat from Manhattan, dispatched to New York City just weeks before the 1929 stock market crash. The budding young communist hoped to use the assignment to discern if America was the capitalist wonderland it seemed from afar. With that question quickly and emphatically answered, he spent his days filing stories about the hard life during the Great Depression from this side of the pond. His edgier pieces about the human suffering he witnessed often didn’t see print in the stodgy publication, perplexing him. He couldn’t, for instance, use the word “panic” when writing about the market, even though everyone was panicked. Cockburn was well-compensated at a time when others were scrounging for scraps, but he was at an early-career crossroads, knowing that toeing the line would make him want to chop off his foot. Something had to give.

What happened next was pretty much everything. The wild events of Cockburn’s life on the front lines of journalism—and often on actual front lines—are recalled in Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied, a 2024 biography by his son and fellow journalist Patrick. Once he resigned from his comfortable mainstream perch, baffling his bosses who viewed him as a golden boy, Cockburn founded, in 1933, The Week, an “extreme left-wing news sheet” that punched well above its weight. A blend of reportage and social criticism crudely published via rented mimeograph, the publication revealed secret truths about Brownshirts, Blackshirts, and those in white-collared shirts working in the British government and media. Cockburn’s success during that decade of iron and blood wasn’t immediate. In 1933, the year Roosevelt and Hitler came to power, the circulation of The Week was “awfully steady at thirty-six.” Money was tight and the intrepid reporter poured most of what he had into steins and shot glasses. His antiestablishment newsletter, however, eventually reached thousands, including many in key political posts throughout Europe, irking German Nazis and British Astors alike, two clans that had a surprising amount in common.

His most notable success came in the run-up to WWII when he wrote of the alleged drawing-room machinations of an upper-class British group of politically influential public figures, a coterie he dubbed the “Cliveden Set,” who were planning to play nice with the Nazis, working to ensure Hitler would be appeased rather than challenged. The circle formed around Lady Astor, the first female member of Parliament, whose desire to accommodate Nazis was likely driven as much by her virulent anti-Semitism as by any pragmatic concerns. The story “went off like a rocket.” That Lady Astor and her husband, Waldorf Astor, owned the Times and were previously Cockburn’s employers, probably made his pillorying them all the more delectable. (The paper’s owners before the Astors once ran a positive review of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, so Rupert Murdoch, who currently owns the publication, isn’t nearly the biggest ghoul to have run the company.) He was bucking the trend since censoring copy critical of Germany was “systematic according to journalists working in the Times office in London” and at many other English news outlets.

There was the whiff of conspiracy about his polemical reporting on the Cliveden Set, and not all the facts were correct. In the macro, though, Cockburn painted a desperately needed portrait of privileged Brits behaving horribly. The Astors and their peers came to be considered disreputable, and their political influence flagged. Cockburn was subsequently introduced once to Lady Astor at the House of Commons. Upon realizing who he was, she “pursed her lips as if to spit in his face.” No expectoration ensued. She was officially honored by the British government in 2019 as a feminist trailblazer; hopefully, she’s currently roasting in hell.

Cockburn also made his bones with his boots-on-the-ground coverage of the Spanish Civil War, filing reports from the field about the doomed Republican effort to stave off fascism. At one point the journalist was captured by a regiment of anarchists, who didn’t think the communist reporter was necessarily an ally, and placed him against the side of a barn where he was to be shot. He talked his way out of the execution, if barely, though he later suffered two broken ribs “when jumping from a car during the Battle of Brunete.” Whether Cockburn was tramping across Teruel or escaping from Berlin just ahead of Nazi ascendance, death was frequently a looming threat. The swashbuckling only seems romantic in retrospect because his skull somehow wasn’t caved in.

If it was a period of political tumult, it was also an era of sexual revolution. Cockburn experienced all manner of fresh permutations with “New Women” who were fellow adventurers, caring little for societal strictures. When he decided to leave NYC, he and Hope Hale, a writer and Soviet spy, ended their relationship. Before he decamped, she proposed they conceive a baby—she would raise the child solo so he would be under no obligation. They referred to the offspring as “Project Revolutionary Baby.” A comrade in diapers. Once ensconced again in Europe, Cockburn began a five-year romance with actress Jean Ross, a meh cabaret singer and dancer, a daring war correspondent, and a film critic for the Daily Worker. She remains best known for the fictional character she inspired: the decadent Weimar chanteuse Sally Bowles. Far from the apolitical, oblivious persona based on her, Ross was an engaged antifascist. She regretted permitting Christopher Isherwood to depict her in Berlin Stories, even if the book is one of the few examples of well-written fiction that birthed excellent adaptations in theater and film.

There’s more than a whiff of RFK Jr.’s sad descent into conspiracy-mongering in the family.

Reflexively believing authority is evil knows its limits, and Cockburn was sometimes guilty of this immature posture. He was unable to acknowledge the positive shift when Britain’s upper crust and key politicians ultimately took a stand against Hitler. “Claud’s suspicion of those in authority ran too deep for him to readjust to a British government carrying out policies of which he approved,” Patrick writes of his father. The biographer almost immediately tries to minimize the presence of this trait in his dad, but it was a significant part of his DNA. The same goes for the author’s late brother, Alexander, a leftist firebrand who was a longtime staff writer for the Village Voice, who distrusted the professional class so much that he lashed out at the official scientific position on global warming, becoming an outspoken climate-change denier. There was more than a whiff of RFK Jr.’s sad descent into conspiracy-mongering in this family of professional skeptics. Our author himself shares this flaw.

Paul Cockburn’s overstimulated distrust of power is on display toward the end of the book, when his focus extends beyond a lively account of his father’s acts of fourth-estate derring-do, becoming a meditation on the current condition of the media. “In theory, there should be lots of publications like The Week,” he says mournfully, believing the new platforms haven’t birthed journalism that challenges the status quo. In a confounding explanation, the author asserts the reason for this deficit is that information is still too centralized, the legacy publications having maintained control even as we’ve moved ass-deep into the Internet Age. “The balance of media power has not swung as far as optimists expected,” he writes. “Traditional news outlets and news providers have colonized the online space, drowning out critics and other providers of information.” This contention is bonkers, certainly in America and many other countries. The author believes that there’s some centralized power damming a flood of righteous facts, but the evidence points to something more complicated and depressing.

There certainly are online newsletters and podcasts that are doing good investigative work. But most of them are connecting, in our moment of diffuse communications, with a niche readership, merely a pimple on the long-tail media economy. Meanwhile, legacy media has been disrupted by devious forces. Conspiracists spread dangerous misinformation about vaccines. Billionaire technologists care more about establishing Martian settlements than the public good. Manosphere podcasters dislike “illegal aliens” but love ancient aliens. The red-pilled, increasingly white supremacist Marc Andreessen floats a faux-independent outlet published by the ignorant grifter Bari Weiss. Elon Musk spends $44 billion to buy a social media site, turning it into a global Dearborn Independent. The status quo is being challenged, and the result is a grotesque spectacle.

The mechanical tools Claud Cockburn utilized to execute his vision have become networked, the self-publishing infrastructure exponentially expanding and improving beyond his wildest dreams. Anybody can be a “journalist” now. The culture that encouraged him to develop critical thinking skills and become a high-minded skeptic, however, has been burned to the ground.•

Question 7 (Richard Flanagan)

If a butterfly’s wings can affect the course of world events in surprisingly profound ways, what can a pair of atom bombs do? As he makes clear in Question 7, his unusual and unusually brilliant 2024 memoir, Australian writer Richard Flanagan owes his very existence to the awful moments during the dying days of World War II when nukes nicknamed “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” were dropped respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people. It was mass murder on a scale previously beyond human capability. Flanagan’s father, Archie, a young Allied soldier from Tasmania imprisoned in the brutal Ohama Camp, sick and exhausted from endless grunt work in a coal mine and regular beatings, was ready to succumb. He was an unlikely beneficiary of the atom-splitting cataclysm, the war ending abruptly. Outrageous fortune pulled him back from the brink, freeing him suddenly and unexpectedly. He eventually recovered his health, living to 98 and raising six children. The fifth was our author.

A writer drawing a line from earth-rattling nuclear carnage that razed cities directly to his small patch in the world might come across as a raving egomaniac, but that isn’t the case with Question 7, a book of dazzling writing, expert research, and generous spirit which is kin to the work of Sebold and Labatut. Along the way, in this smorgasbord of ideas, Flanagan writes of the Tasmanian genocide, the Hungarian “Martian” scientists of the twentieth century, H.G. Wells’s romance with Rebecca West, the author’s childhood in Tasmania, his unpleasant education at Oxford, the death of both of his parents and his own near-death experience when employed as a kayak guide. He ends several dramatic, puzzling chapters with the phrase, “That’s life,” because that’s what it is. The book is a peripatetic volume in the best sense.

The title comes from “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician,” an 1882 Anton Chekhov short story that offers nine brief absurdist word problems. The seventh question is this: “Wednesday, July 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?” The enigmatic nature of the unanswerable query is apt because the author regularly wonders about his ability to make sense of information, memories, and life itself. “We return to the stories we call our memories, perplexed, strangers to the ongoing invention that is our life,” he says. He’s acknowledging that he’s an unreliable narrator of his own story and that it couldn’t be any other way. The question is also apt because love, a terrain that always feels a little foreign and disorienting no matter how often you visit, is central in the memoir.

Nuclear fission depends on a chain reaction, and so too does life. Flanagan locates the first link in Earth-rattling events and his biography in the person of H.G. Wells, who, in the early twentieth-century novel The World Set Free predicted atomic warfare decades before scientists believed it possible. (The book explains how Wells’s romance with West influenced his writing of that middling-yet-influential fiction.) George Orwell opined that “up to 1914 Wells was in the main a true prophet. His vision of the new world has been fulfilled to a surprising extent…the physical world would be perceptibly different if [he] had never existed.” Even post-1914, he wasn’t too shabby. In 1937 articles and lectures, he advocated for creating a “World Brain,” a repository of scientific knowledge accessible to everyone. It was a lot like the Internet if it hadn’t been commandeered by opportunists, bigots, and kooks.

The following link is Leo Szilard, the genius Hungarian scientist initially turned on to atomic possibilities by The World Set Free, who cracked the nuclear code when looking at traffic lights in London, noticing how they would change one after another, almost like one was setting off the next. Szilard knew instantly that atomic power could work as a series of reactions if conditions were correct. He mostly buried his discovery, worrying Hitler would be the first to develop these ungodly weapons. After fleeing the Nazis and emigrating to America in 1938, the physicist implored his old friend Albert Einstein to be the lead signatory on a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to develop the A-bomb before the Nazis did. That’s how the Manhattan Project began and Flanagan’s father was freed, while hundreds of thousands of others died. “Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima,” he writes. It may seem an overstatement, but it’s unlikely the bomb would have been a reality before the end of WWII without Szilard’s role.

The author alternates his takes on these seismic global issues and the intricacies of his childhood in Rosebery, a remote mining town in Tasmania. He was born virtually deaf, and it appeared he would go through life that way. His family didn’t realize the doctor in their rural town was an error-prone alcoholic who misdiagnosed the problem. The boy remained without hearing until he was six years old when he finally received a proper diagnosis and had several minor surgeries that allowed him to hear. He still wonders how much deafness, a purgatorial world of “isolation and pain” in his early formative years, molded his thinking. His mother hoped he would be a good plumber, and he did plumb, though not in the way she believed he would. Flanagan won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where he encountered a genteel form of British bigotry, and stumbled forward without a map into a literary life.

One passage that links the personal to the political recalls Flanagan’s trek years ago to the wartime labor camp in Ohama where his father was interned. Nothing was left of the prison camp, no markers commemorating it. A kindly woman considered a “fount of knowledge” of local history assured him that there was never any such camp. He must be mistaken. “It was as if it had never happened, as if no one had ever been beaten or killed or made to stand naked in the snow until they died,” Flanagan writes. Without the aid of artifacts, he had to reconstruct the daily struggle of the prisoners and their interactions with the guards. It wasn’t easy, and some of what he relates is supposition. “Maybe that’s what the past is,” he offers. “Making it up so we can keep moving along.” He also delivers this paradoxical gem: “The past is always most clearly seen by those who never saw it.”

The trip’s climax is his meeting in Tokyo with a geriatric man who was an Ohama Camp prison guard so infamously cruel that even the author’s sensitive father grew immediately infuriated just thinking about him. “The Lizard,” as the prisoners called him, can’t recall having committed vicious acts, appearing to have genuinely forgotten his misdeeds. He does admit that prisoners were punished by being repeatedly slapped across the face. For reasons even he can’t understand, Flanagan offers his cheek and exhorts the reluctant Lizard to demonstrate this discipline. The first two smacks do little. The third time the Lizard strikes him, however, something happens. The room begins to spin, and Flanagan struggles to maintain footing. Could this ancient man, likely a nonagenarian or close to it, have knocked him silly? No, a 7.3 Richter scale earthquake rocked the city at that moment. A look of terror comes across the Lizard’s face as he scrambles for a safe space that doesn’t exist. It seems too wild to be true. Could Flanagan’s memory be playing tricks? Could he be taking some degree of poetic license? We’ll never know. That’s life.•

The Vegetarian (Han Kang)

Seoul businessman Mr. Cheong has a keen sense of himself and, he thinks, his wife. “It was only natural that I would marry the most run-of-the-mill woman in the world,” he declares at the outset of The Vegetarian, Han Kang’s disturbing 2007 novel. It’s not a compliment to either of them. He further describes his spouse’s looks and demeanor as “completely unremarkable in every way.” For Mr. Cheong, this lack of quality is a feature, not a bug. He is the most risk-averse, dispassionate person, like an actuarial table with a faint pulse. All he desires is to fit in, striving to connect with his employers so that he and his spouse, Yeong-hye, can afford to start a family. The mediocre man learns too late that his wife isn’t a wallflower but a forest fire.

The capstone thus far of Kang’s literary career, the novel that put her over the top for the Nobel Prize, The Vegetarian, has its place on the continuum of the literature of nihilism, with a bothersome central character who practices an extreme level of self-abnegation, in line with Kafka’s Hunger Artist and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. It’s trickier than that, though. Yeong-hye prefers not to à la Bartleby and skips more meals than the Hunger Artist, but her character isn’t drawn wholly from fable-like qualities like theirs. She’s also rooted in realism, a contemporary person who will ultimately be diagnosed with all manner of neuropsychiatric illnesses: schizophrenia, anorexia, catatonia, etc. This duality adds a disquieting heft to the story, though no medical diagnosis can fully explain her curious actions. “She’s different from the other catatonic patients,” one doctor says of her.

It all begins with a dream. Yeong-hye has a REM vision of blood-soaked meat hanging from a ceiling, animal slaughter, and violent predation. The nightmare isn’t fleshed out—not for the reader and seemingly not for the character—but it’s awful and transformative. Yeong-hye immediately decides to become a vegetarian, emptying the refrigerator of containers of beef, pork, chicken, and saltwater eel. Her husband is perplexed by her sudden transformation. After weeks of picking at only vegetables, infected by something like Sartre’s nausea, Yeong-hye is lethargic, and her complexion is pallid. She camouflages her sallow face as best she can with make-up when she impassively escorts her husband to an important business dinner with his superiors. Mr. Cheong hopes to make an impression but fears his wife will make a scene.

Early in the meal, Yeong-hye rejects several plates of carnivore delights and receives an oddly hostile lecture from the boss’s wife. “Meat eating is a fundamental human instinct, which means vegetarianism goes against human nature, right?” she asks. “It just isn’t natural.” Is it possible Yeong-hye, in her enfeebled state, is exaggerating this scolding in her mind? Mr. Cheong is the narrator of the first section of this three-part novel—the subsequent two are written in the third person—so it would seem the animosity is real. When Yeong-hye tries to discuss the dream that scared her into quitting meat, her husband interrupts with a lie, explaining away her dietary practices as necessary to counteract gastrointestinal issues. The unspoken issue at the table is that Yeong-hye isn’t wearing a bra, her nipples obvious to everyone assembled, which they consider a serious breach of decorum. Mr. Cheong is perplexed, believing his wife is becoming feral, but the truth is the opposite: She’s not only eating plants but becoming a plant—a flower, to be precise.

As she reduces even her produce intake, thinning her flesh, becoming the star and director of her self-produced body horror epic, Yeong-hye is treated brutally by the men in her life, who want her to behave “normally.” When her lack of nutrients leaves the woman without a libido, and she becomes turned off by her husband’s odor—“Your body smells of meat,” she tells him—he begins regularly raping her. During a family intervention, her stern father, who used corporal punishment on her throughout her childhood, restrains Yeong-hye and thrust pieces of meat into her mouth, forcing her to swallow. The force-feeding will be repeated in an institutional setting later when Yeong-hye ultimately refuses all food while a patient in a psychiatric hospital. All these men want to coerce her to accede to society’s demands, to quit being a dissident to her species, and to stop rejecting them.

After Mr. Cheong leaves her, Yeong-hye winds up in a strange relationship with the husband of her older sister, In-hye. Ji-woo is a video artist of small repute who works on his creations while his wife runs a thriving pharmacy, pays the bills, and cares for their son. She offhandedly mentions to Ji-woo that her younger sibling has a pale blue birthmark on the middle of her butt that has never faded. It sends him into a creative and erotic frenzy, awakening in him something he didn’t know existed. “In his mind, the fact that his sister-in-law still had a Mongolian mark on her buttocks became inexplicably bound up with the image of men and women having sex, their naked bodies completely covered in painted flowers.” Unbeknownst to his wife, he convinces Yeong-hye to let him paint floral patterns on her naked body while a camcorder documents the session. When she hears this suggestion, the woman believes she is a plant and no longer a person. An odd affair begins, and when In-hye learns of the liaison, the family is permanently torn asunder.

Despite the damage done to her life, In-hye, alone among her relatives, refuses to abandon Yeong-hye. She can’t specifically understand her sibling’s descent, but the “model” daughter has privately thought of carrying a noose into the woods. While visiting a psychiatric facility to see her torpid sister, who is dying like the Hunger Artist in his cage, she’s told this by Yeong-hye: “I’m not an animal anymore…All I need is sunlight.” She’s unwell, but so is the society she spurned.•