Rogue Male

My sister sent me a book she picked up at the Blue Hill Library book sale, remarking that A) it had my name on it, and B) a woman she knew had written the introduction.  It’s a recent paperback edition of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, a much celebrated and compelling yarn: think The Most Dangerous Game with Nazis thrown in. 

The first and best movie version is Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt, released in 1941 - Household’s novel came out in 1939 - once you get past Walter Pidgeon in the lead.  (I’ve never bought him in anything, which includes How Green Was My Valley.)  This stumbling block aside, Man Hunt has the hugely endearing Joan Bennett – considerably less sympathetically cast in Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, two later pictures with Lang – and the impeccable George Sanders at very possibly his slimiest, outdoing even the blackmailing bottom-feeder Favell in Rebecca. 

Here’s the hook.  Pidgeon, a renowned big-game hunter, stalks Hitler in Berchtesgaden, and has him in his sights, but he’s caught before he pulls the trigger.  He’s tortured by the Gestapo to get the truth out of him.  Sanders, the most sophisticated and sadistic of the secret police detail, is convinced Pidgeon could only have been acting on instructions from British intelligence.  Pidgeon escapes, through dramatic contrivance, and gets back to England, but Sanders and his goons follow him home.  Enough spoilers.

The most significant difference between the book and the movie is that Household drops you in media res.  There’s no preamble, and no back story.  In fact, the hero, the country, and the target go unnamed – you can certainly infer that it’s Hitler, but he’s never specified.  The book opens with the guy already on the run, and the details get filled in as you go along.  All you know is that he’s being pursued by malevolent adversaries.

This is very much John Buchan territory, The Thirty-Nine Steps.  The paranoia, the noose tightening.  Which is also familiar to Fritz Lang.  Household uses a journey narrative on both the surface level and belowdecks, though.  There’s an atavistic bass note.  In the wild, paranoia is your ally, a sense of the immediate, fight or flight, whether the environment presents as hostile or tame.  Landscape can be psychic, or magicked, just as well as physical. 

This isn’t a new storyline, by any means.  Household is reinventing, or reimagining, a descent.  Beowulf goes into the cave, to face Grendel’s mom.  Orpheus challenges the god of the underworld.  When the guy in Rogue Male goes to earth, literally, like a badger or a bear, hiding in a hole in the ground, he becomes earthen, old, primal. 

Nor is this simply habit, or trope.  This is a theme, for Household.  Victoria Nelson, a Goddard scholar and the author of Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets, says in her introduction to this newer edition of the novel, that he’s walking back the clock.  That in order to survive against the primitive, primitive instinct has to resurface.  Old wine in new bottles, we might say.

For all that, it’s one hell of a good story. 

Metropolis

David Edgerley Gates


Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis was released in 1927. Paranoid and hallucinatory, it's the first feature-length dystopian SF picture, but of course its spooky Teutonic future is at right angles to the spooky present of a doomed Weimar.

Philip Kerr's last Bernie Gunther novel, Metropolis, came out this year. It's set in 1928, and sure enough, Fritz Lang's chilly breath hovers over the story. (His wife, the screenwriter Thea von Harbou, steps into the book to pick Bernie's brain for cop shop detail - she's turning over some ideas in her head for a serial killer story.) Bernie remarks early on that for all its grime and despair, his home ground of Berlin mirrors both the human condition and the German national character, and you can say the same about a book or a movie, so is it true of this book or that movie?

Lang had a problematic relationship with the Nazis. He'd been raised Catholic, but his mother was originally Jewish. It was an obvious pressure point. And while we're on the subject, Thea, the wife, was a Nazi sympathizer from early days. Hitler and Goebbels were huge fans of Metropolis, as it happens. But after Lang made The Testament of Dr. Mabuse in late 1932, and Hitler came to power in January, 1933, the Nazis banned Mabuse, which was pretty clearly aimed at Hitler. Goebbels, on the other hand, offered Lang a job as head of UFA, the biggest German movie studio. It was bait-and-switch. Lang was being invited inside the tent, but the price of admission was spelled out: he was selling his soul. Lang said he'd think about it, and beat feet for France. Thea stayed behind and divorced him. UFA went to Leni Riefenstahl.

The question is often raised in the Bernie books - in fact, it's the central spine of the stories - What would you do as the world disintegrated around you, as it lost all moral force, what choices would or could you make? Metropolis goes back to the beginning, chronologically. It takes place before March Violets, the first of the novels. But it looks forward. The foreshadowing is all there, On the other hand, Bernie doesn't comment on what he sees and does from a future perspective. This dramatic irony, which is used in a number of the books, isn't present here. Bernie is blessed with ignorance of the future, even though the choices keep lining up. The answer to the questions is, You compromise just a little every day, and it gets easier.

How can we know, how could we possibly predict whether we'd rise to the occasion, show grace under pressure, or simply cave? It seems, generally speaking, as if even the major life-changing decisions we make are essentially taking the path of least resistance. If you've followed Bernie's history, as I have, over the thirteen books leading up to Metropolis, you respect him not just for his survival skills, but for his generosity, and his self-respect, even if he sometimes loses confidence. Seeing him here, right as his life is about to take a walk off a cliff, is enormously affecting, because you know what's coming, and he doesn't. The future of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, as frightening as it is, can't begin to conjure up the waiting chaos, and the terror.

Metropolis, the novel, is a swan song. Phil Kerr died last year. This is one terrific run of books.