The D-Day spies and their echoes in Lisbon

A lot of the double agents who play leading roles in Ben Macintyre's Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (2012) are controlled from Lisbon (on the Nazi side), and reading that book you'd be forgiven for thinking that perhaps every single person in 1940s Lisbon was a spy, probably a double or even triple agent. Take the following account of a dinner party thrown by von Karsthoff, the German control of Dusko Popov, a double agent who was secretly working for the British. The names aren't important; just attend to the cat's cradle of secret connections:

[Von Karsthoff] threw a dinner party in Popov's honor and invited Jebsen, Aloys Schreiber (the new head of counterintelligence), and their secretaries. It was a bizarre occasion. Two of the guests were German intelligence officers, and two others were secretly working for British intelligence; Jebsen was sleeping with Schreiber's secretary, who was spying on her boss; the married von Karsthoff was having an affair with his secretary, Elizabeth Sahrbach, while ripping off the Abwehr. Popov was conducting at least six love affairs. Everyone was involved in the lying and cheating game.

I don't know nearly enough about Portuguese history to be sure of this, but the incidental sense I get of neutral Portugal from MacIntyre's book is of an utterly louche, feckless netherworld, a sort of fascist Monte Carlo of the soul, blithely untroubled by the fears, dangers, shortages, and existential threats faced by the rest of Europe at the time:

An Abwehr office who arrived in Libson shortly before Jebsen was shocked by the behavior of his new colleagues, who "were leading a rather loose and immoral life in Lisbon," with little concern for their duties." Some were sleeping with their secretaries. Others were cocaine abusers. "All had enormous amounts of money, most had their own cars, made frequent pleasure trips throughout Portugal and spent their evenings gambling in the casinos."

It's been at least fifteen years since I read Cees Nooteboom's wonderfully compact little meditation on death, The Following Story (1991, English translation 1994), but its vision of a haunted, hushed, exhausted Lisbon has stayed in my mind--the hangover of neutrality and fascism?

Evening in my memory, evening in Lisbon. The lamps in the city had been lit, my eyes were like a bird flying above the streets. It had grown cool, up there; the voices of the children had gone from the gardens; I saw the dark shadows of lovers, statues locked in embrace, lazily moving double-people.

Nooteboom presents the town as labyrinth, of frustrated plans and forgotten intentions, leading to the only exit: death.

The most striking aspect of the Lisbon component of the XX, or Double Cross, group, however, is the network of fake spies set up by Portuguese double agent Juan Pujol, known by the British as "Garbo." Pujol, who "possessed what his case officer, Tomas Harris, called a 'remarkable talent for duplicity'," not only convinced his Nazi handlers that he was supplying them good information even as he was doing the bidding of his English paymasters, but also had them believing in an entire network that he'd made up out of whole cloth. MacIntyre explains:

By the end of 1942, the Garbo network included an airline employee, the courier who supposedly smuggled Garbo's letters to Lisbon, a wealthy Venezuelan student named Carlos living in Glasgow, his brother in Aberdeen, a Gibraltarian waiter in Chislehurst whose anti-British feelings were said to be exacerbated because "he found the climate in Kent very disagreeable," a senior official in the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information, an anti-Soviet South African, and a Welsh ex-seaman living in Swansea described by Pujol as a "thoroughly undesirable character." The personality, activities, and messages of each spy were carefully imagined, refined, and entered in a logbook. Some of these subagents were supposedly conscious collaborators, while others were unwitting sources of secret information; some were given names, while others remained anonymous. . . . Pujols's subagents were able to correspond with the Germans independently after he was authorized to supply them with secret ink; those agents then began recruiting their own sub-agents. The network began to self-replicate and metastasize, until the work of Pujol and Harris came ot resemble a limitless, multicharacter, ever-expanding novel.

Who else could possibly come to mind than Lisbon native Fernando Pessoa, who, in the words of translator Richard Zenith,

wrote under dozens of names, a practice--or compulsion--that began in his childhood. He called his most important personas "heteronyms," endowing them with their own biographies, physiques, personalities, political views, religious attitudes and literary pursuits. . . . The many . . . alter egos included translators, short-story writers, an English literary critic, an astrologer, a philosopher and an unhappy nobleman who committed suicide. There was even a female persona: the hunchbacked and helplessly lovesick Maria Jose. At the turn of the century, sixty-five years after Pessoa's death, his vast written world had still not been completely charted by researchers, and a significant part of his writings was still waiting to be published.

Or, as Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquiet,

And all this, in my walk to the seashore, was a secret told me by the night and the abyss. How many we are! How many of us fool ourselves! What seas crash in us, in the night when we exist, along the beaches that we feel ourselves to be, inundated by emotion! All that was lost, all that should have been sought, all that was obtained and fulfilled by mistake, all that we loved and lost and then, after losing it and loving it for having lost it, realized that we never loved; all that we believed we were thinking when we were feeling; all the memories we took for emotions; and the entire ocean, noisy and cool, rolling in from the depths of the vast night to ripple over the beach, on my nocturnal walk to the seashore . . .

Ah, though the pleasures of multiplicity might tempt, the intrigues of spies are not for Pessoa:

I've always felt an almost physical loathing for secret things--intrigues, diplomacy, secret societies, occult sciences.

No, for Pessoa, multiplicity was too hermetic to be part of an external scheme. "Every gesture, however simple, violates an inner secret." He could be no spy.

Two epigrams for a weekend of proofreading

In honor of the 300-plus pages of seasonal catalog proofreading that are keeping me from blogging (and piano playing, and bread baking, and and and), two thoughts from Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet:

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

How tragic not to believe in human perfectibility!
And how tragic to believe in it!

Note for those stocking zombie-proof shelters against the inevitable brain-eating apocalypse: A shelf consisting solely of The Anatomy of Melancholy and The Book of Disquiet would suffice for a good long time.

"no one's going to love you, don't be alarmed"

{Photo by rocketlass.}

It seems fitting that this day of fireworks and celebrations opened, for me, with a post from the mysterious and self-lacerating Spurious, who earlier this week alerted us to the existence of a museum in Lisbon devoted to Fernando Pessoa--and off-handedly noted that the museum was a tremendous disappointment. {Let's be honest, though: doesn't that seem right? Would you want to come out of a Pessoa museum invigorated, transformed, calling your friends to tell them of your love? No, no, instead you want to leave by an unmarked door, pull your hat lower, hunch your shoulders into your coat, and wander off, barely looking at the street signs; your silent room will find you.}

Today Spurious is gnawing at some overwrought, yet admirable, lines from Alberto Giacometti in which the sculptor finds himself "sobb[ing] with rage" at his inability to express himself in words. Why, wonders Spurious, is the very thought of sobbing over recalcitrant prose these days more likely to make us smile with amusement than shake with sympathetic frustration? The investigation leads Spurious {him? her? I don't know that anyone knows, aside from Spurious's occasional interlocutor, W.} right back to Pessoa, then through Beckett and Blanchot, until finally Spurious surrenders, offering a closing paragraph that opens with a ring of rapturous abandon--

Stab yourself in the neck, drink until you fall over. Copy out Giacometti's lines on the walls of your padded cell. Laughter, endless laughter: literature has a fever and is burning up.

--and gets better from there.

All of which led me, too, to Pessoa, in the moments just after dawn, when, having woken with the birds, I was alone in the quiet house; as always, a few minutes spent paging through The Book of Disquiet were rewarded. Here, from "A Factless Autobiography," Pessoa {or his heteronym Bernardo Soares} quietly urges us to rapture by laying out its opposite:

The world belongs to those who don't feel. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of sensibility. The chief requisite for the practical expression of life is will, since this leads to action. Two things can thwart action--sensibility and analytic thought, the latter of which is just thought with sensibility. . . . Every man of action is basically cheerful and optimistic, because those who don't feel are happy. You can spot a man of action by the fact he's never out of sorts.

Can those who are never out of sorts really ever be in sorts, though? Can a state exist without its opposite? Or do they simply exist, unchanging and unchanged, neither gaining nor losing--simply, uncomplicatedly, unreflectively being? Is it better to rage like Giacometti?

In principle, yes, for we all can see what Giacometti made of his rage. But I will admit that I tend to keep an even keel, that right now I am unequivocally enjoying sitting on the back stairs in the summer breeze with my laptop, coffee, and ziggurat of books. Uncomplicatedly.

As Beckett had the first word of this post, in the headline, it seems right to let him also have the last one, stepping forward, stepping back, stepping forward. If he can't convince us, no one can.

From "Texts for Nothing" (1950-52)

Leave, I was going to say leave all that. What matter who's speaking, someone said what matter who's speaking. There's going to be a departure, I'll be there, I won't miss it, it won't be me, I'll be here, I'll say I'm far from here, it won't be me, I won't say anything, there's going to be a story, someone's going to try and tell a story. Yes, no more denials, all is false, there is no one, it's understood, there is nothing, no more phrases, let us be dupes, dupes of every time and tense, until it's done, all past and done, and the voices cease, it's only voices, only lies.

Now hie thee out into the holiday and rapturously set some things on fire.

Done, seen, read in New York

From The Zurau Aphorisms, by Franz Kafka (translated by Michael Hofmann, published in English in 2006)

It isn't necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy.

Ah, but only by disregarding Kafka's Thomas-a-Kempis-ean advice can you even think about going New York for a week on business.

And if you go to New York, you just might, on the first morning you're there, walk past a man on the street who looks, at a glance, like John Crowley--or at least like John Crowley looked twenty years ago when the photo was taken that decorates his novel Love and Sleep, which is tucked under your arm so you can read it at breakfast. Knowing that John Crowley is going to be in town a few days later for a reading, you might even think of saying to the man's receding back, quizzically, "John Crowley?" How often, after all, is he recognized on the street?

But the moment, most likely, would pass too quickly, the question remain unasked. Off to breakfast you'd go.

That, it turns out, is for the best, because at the reading you might realize that the man you saw was not John Crowley. He was too tall, and too young; his hair and beard were dark rather than gray. In fact, you might realize, he resembled not so much Crowley as the protagonist of Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy, Pierce Moffett, whom all these years you've associated, rightly or wrongly, with his creator. As a character, Pierce does give off a bit of the sense of idealization, of both his virtues and his faults, that often accompanies authorial stand-ins; but Crowley probably deserves more credit for his invention than that, and as you imagine the two together in this bar, the distance between them--and thus the value of Crowley's creation--seems to grow.

Which, in its way, only seems to make it more likely that the man you saw was the imaginary Pierce, wandering in search of the long-gone streets of late-70s New York, of old lovers and old buildings and old impressions long ago effaced by moneyed progress. He wouldn't have turned had you hailed him by the wrong name, but perhaps it would nonetheless have registered as a quiet ripple, a flash of inexplicable familiarity--even a shivery moment of deja vu.

From The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Richard Zenith, published in English in 2002)

Another life, of the city at nightfall. Another soul, of one who watches the night. I walk uncertainly and allegorically, unreally sentient. I'm like a story that someone told, and so well was it told that I took on just a hint of flesh at the beginning of one of the chapters of this novel that's the world: "At that moment a man could be seen walking slowly down So-and-so Street."

What do I have to do with life?

That's how your trip might have gone, had you been willing to ignore Kafka and Thomas a Kempis and set out in the first place. Some journeys are like that, after all: for example, having written earlier in the week about surprises left in library books, you unexpectedly get a chance to convince John Crowley to sign your Chicago Public Library copy of Love and Sleep. Now the title page will address the next patron to open it:

To all readers of Chicago Public--John Crowley.

Then one night you spend talking with a pair of friends who are thinking about going to Portugal in part because of Jose Saramago's book The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. The novel tells the story of Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa's many obsessively maintained authorial identities, somehow surviving his creator's death and returning, confused, to 1936 Lisbon--which is all a bit odd because Pessoa happens to be the only author you chose to carry in your suitcase on this trip to leaven the 1,500 pages of John Crowley you're reading. Maybe that was Pierce Moffett you saw on the street after all.

Later, meeting another friend in a bookstore during a thunderstorm, not only do you discover that a new volume of Pessoa's poetry has just been published, but you talk her into leaving the shop with a copy of The Book of Disquiet under her arm--and at the counter you discover The Zurau Aphorisms, which you happen to open to this:

All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, an ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object.

Which, to be honest, sounds like as close to a method as you've got for your blog. Thus coincidence and doubling, despite your not being on the lookout for them, pervade the trip--probably because you're secretly, perpetually on the lookout for them. After all, WWBD? What would Borges do?

I'm sure there are blogs out there that would benefit from a methodical approach, but this one, I think, will continue to attempt to make a virtue of ostensible pinnings down, of falling into error.

It really was a splendid trip.