C8| Saturday/Sunday, February 22 - 23, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Reviving
The Spirit
Of ’74
BYERNESTHILBERT
O
N THE EVE of
World War II, when
Archibald Mac-
Leish, the Librar-
ian of Congress,
announced that his fellow librari-
ans “must become active and not
passive agents of the democratic
process,” he may not have antici-
pated just how deeply involved
they would become in the fight
against fascism.
In “Information Hunters,” Kathy
Peiss, a professor of history at the
University of Pennsylvania, invites
us into the surprising world of
wartime librarians, describing
their “mass collecting missions
and how they mattered in a cata-
clysmic war.” The Office of Stra-
tegic Services, the forerunner
of today’s CIA, eagerly recruited
scholars and archivists, both men
and women, for war work, favor-
ing men otherwise ineligible for
the draft, preferably a “mild 4-F.”
It was a peculiar moment in his-
tory, when “librarians’ and col-
lectors’ skills, expertise, and aspi-
rations aligned with American
military and political objectives”
and when the everyday activities
of librarians “became fraught with
mystery, uncertainty, and even
danger.”
The drama falls into three acts,
tracking U.S. involvement in the
war. Before the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor, which prompted
Hitler to declare war on the previ-
ously neutral United States, Amer-
ican agents had dashed across
war-torn Europe inviting curiosity
and suspicion from officials of all
the belligerent powers. One such
agent, moving perilously between
the Third Reich and Russia, was
questioned in four languages over
two days before reaching his des-
tination. Among the most daring
was Maria Josepha Meyer, who
made audacious sorties through
Europe, collecting both fascist
and anti-fascist literature, much
of it moments before the Gestapo
seized it from bookstores. The
“petite forty-five-year-old Ameri-
can quietly outmaneuvered Ger-
man authorities,” Ms. Peiss writes.
From occupied France, Meyer
reported that the Nazis “consis-
tently foment confusion, spread
false news....Theoutlook is very
dark indeed.”
After the Battle of Dunkirk,
which ended in June 1940, there
followed a period of open-source
acquisition “as a way to know the
enemy.” Agents moved into spy-
rich neutral cities such as Lisbon
and Stockholm, haunting book-
stores and news agents to obtain
publications from Germany, Italy
and occupied Europe. (Nazi agents
gift for swift encapsulation and metic-
ulous splicing allows him to drop
in great quantities of detail without
losing the thread. Scenes tend to be
sharply visualized: When he does ven-
ture into the interior, the prose can
become pulpishly florid, as in a long
passage purporting to describe Robert
Evans’s reaction to hearing Jerry
Goldsmith’s score for the first time
(“not fantasy but palpable evidence of
a dream becoming true, the rare and
shivery threshold of immeasurable
pleasure, the promise imagination
grants the mundane”).
Such cadenzas are fortunately inci-
dental to Mr. Wasson’s book. He rarely
gets distracted from the connecting of
dots by which he constructs the dia-
gram of his Los Angeles. As fragments
of lives come intoview, gossip serves
as a form of description. Within a few
pages, for instance, we learn that Julie
Payne, the girlfriend and later wife
of Robert Towne, was the daughter of
movie stars John Payne and Anne
Shirley, and was the stepdaughter of
screenwriter Charles Lederer, who
was the nephew of William Randolph
Hearst’s inamorata, Marion Davies.
Payne entertained herself during a
lonely childhood by reading about
notorious Los Angeles murders. The
ContinuedfrompageC7
details somehow echo or impinge on
the main narrative—or maybe in
Hollywood every story is naturally
connected to every other one. Past
associations overlap in thickly braided
and sometimes toxic fashion.
As it is in “Chinatown,” Los Angeles
is central to Mr. Wasson’s book, his
characters preoccupied with a mistily
idealized past and an increasingly om-
inous present. Mr. Towne, raised in
the nearby port of San Pedro, figures
as pure product of the Southern Cali-
fornia he would seek to memorialize.
Mr. Wasson makes much of how Mr.
Towne incorporated into “Chinatown”
shards of his own experience. A flaw
in Julie Payne’s iris (later diagnosed
as a benign tumor) becomes a mes-
merizing trait of Faye Dunaway. When
the dancer Barrie Chase tells Mr.
Towne about discovering her father,
the screenwriter Borden Chase, in bed
with his stepdaughter, it becomes a
source for the incest motif in “China-
town.” The possible crookedness of
Mr. Towne’s developer father informs
the film’s account of the deep-laid
scheme to steal Los Angeles’s water
supply.
“Chinatown” developed from Mr.
Towne’s desire to write a classic pri-
vate eye role for his old friend Jack
Nicholson, and also—as a writer re-
vered in Hollywood for his uncredited
script doctoring—to realize himself
fully in a film he originally intended
to direct as well as write (he was over-
ruled by Robert Evans). The screen-
play had a slow gestation, generating
finally a staggeringly convoluted and
still not quite completed draft. By then
it was an attempt to recapture LosThe Making
Of a Classic
Film Noir
mal, extra-legal governments sprang up around
them. These committees and conventions
assumed many of the powers of government.
Those loyal to the royal governments argued in
the press that these extra-legal bodies were
dangerous, treasonous and tyrannical, and the
patriots responded by justifying their tar-and-
feathering and other oppressive actions as
expressions of the people’s will. In her detailed
descriptions of these debates, Ms. Norton
always gives a fair hearing to the views of
the loyalists.
The Continental Congress meeting in
Philadelphia could not have reversed the
massive transfer of authority taking place in the
localities, even if it had wanted to. The Congress
simply recognized the new local authorities
and gave them its blessing. It established the
Continental Association that oversaw the non-
importation, nonexportation and nonconsump-
tion of British goods,
and it gave local
committees of obser-
vation and inspection
in the counties, cities
and towns the author-
ity to enforce the
boycotts and to
condemn publicly
all violators as “the
enemies of American
liberty.” Without
intending to, the
Congress in effect
legitimated mob rule in the local communities.
In January 1775 the colonists learned of the
king’s response to their appeal for a redress of
their grievances. In his speech to the opening
of Parliament, George III put an end to the
hopes of many colonists for reconciliation.
He spoke of the “most daring spirit of resistance,
and disobedience to the law” in Massachusetts
and the way in which “fresh violences” there
had been “countenanced and encouraged” by
the other colonies. He told the Parliament of
the determination of his government to uphold
its authority.
His ministry sent military reinforcements to
Boston and ordered Gen. Gage to use force
against the Massachusetts rebels if necessary.
The British government thought it was dealing
with “a rude rabble” that had no substantial
backing in the colony and could be put down
with ease. Given this kind of misperception of
reality, it was inevitable that a military clash
would occur, as it did on April 19 in Lexington
and Concord.
“By April 19, 1775,” concludes Ms. Norton,
“Americans had not yet formally adopted a
Declaration of Independence, but their leaders
had long since practiced independence in
thought and deed.” The colonists didn’t need
Tom Paine in his “Common Sense” of January
1776 to tell them that the time was ripe for
breaking away from Great Britain. In 1774
Americans had already in fact become indepen-
dent, as Ms. Norton’s book makes only too clear.
And never once in her detailed account of that
long year does she declare that the protection
of slavery had anything to do with bringing
about that independence.Mr. Wood is the author of “Friends Divided:
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson” as well
as many other books.ContinuedfrompageC7In September
1774, the beset
Massachusetts
governor warned
Britain that ‘civil
government is
near its end.’shadowed the Americans while
gathering Allied publications for
themselves.) Even “society pages
might reveal the location of a regi-
ment,” Ms. Peiss tells us. Gossip
columns offered “clues to scandals
which a secret agent could ex-
ploit.” But the sheer bulk of accu-
mulated paper made conveyance
to the U.S. infeasible. As Ms. Peiss
puts it, “the bounty had become a
curse.” Secret microphotography
studios were established to shrink
a truckload of information down
to the size of a diplomatic pouch.
Adele Kibre, one of the best
microphotographers—according
to some, “a real Mata-Hari type,”
fluent in seven languages—made
her way from the Vatican through
France and Spain to Lisbon, later
slipping into Stockholm from
Scotland under heavy weather
to conceal her plane’s approach.
She remained elusive, even to
her direct superiors. Among many
valuable prizes, she captured a
copy of “Industrie-Compass 1943,”
an important German industrial
directory. She was known to steal
away from her station to perform
secret missions of her own devis-
ing, all the while, Ms. Peiss says,
expressing a “disdain for Wash-
ington’s efforts to manage her.”
Frederick Kilgour, head of the
IDC (Interdepartmental Commit-
tee for the Acquisition of Foreign
Publications), who managed this
far-flung librarian-spy network,
soon realized that the goal of
his agency must be to glean vital
information, not simply acquire
publications. He fashioned an
elaborate system of catalogers,
readers and librarians back in the
U.S. to sort the otherwise over-whelming mass of detail that was
pouring out of Europe. He thus
transformed the IDC “from an
acquisition group to an active
producer of intelligence,” Ms.
Peiss writes.
Following the D-Day landings
in June 1944, librarians formed
into units known as T-Forces,
“rapid-strike documents teams.”
They moved with front-line units
to procure intelligence that might
be used not only for active opera-
tions but also for later war-crimes
trials, as well to get hold of
patents and technical manuals
that might be of use to the U.S.
military after the war. The librari-
ans were now fully part of the
military operation. The mission
had become, as one of them said,
“interesting and even a little
glamorous.” As they pushed into
Germany, they discovered a
greater chaos than they could
have imagined, including the
destruction of German libraries
by the Allied bombing campaigns.
To their dismay, American sol-
diers kept warm by “burning doc-
uments in the fireplaces.” Most
of the books that the librarians
acquired were paid for, Ms. Peiss
says, in “the most reliable form
of currency”—cigarettes. At one
point, the contents of the Prus-
sian State Library was discovered
in a salt-potash mine, “two mil-
lion volumes in disarray, piled
up in tunnels, and no card cata-
logue in sight.”
After the fall of Berlin in May
1945, the documents teams were
caught up in a mad race against
the clock. Many scientific volumes
had to be spirited away overnight,
agents “skim[ming] the cream”Information Hunters
By Kathy Peiss
Oxford, 277 pages, $34.95
while “leaving the watery bulk” to
the Soviet armies that were
quickly advancing. The mission
then pivoted to the wearisome
task of removing—and, controver-
sially, sometimes destroying—
fascist books from German insti-
tutions and even private homes in
aid of the denazification process.
No less important was the work
of identifying Jewish libraries
stolen by the Nazis and hoarded
in caves and castles around the
former Reich. Within a year of
the war’s end, no fewer than two
million books and periodicals
retrieved from wartime Europe
had made their way back to the
Library of Congress, alongside
160,000 Jewish books stolen by
the Nazis, which entered Jewish
institutions in the United States.
“Information Hunters” pres-
ents a fascinating, and until now
little-known, story. Writing in an
engaging style, Ms. Peiss synthe-
sizes an array of historical details,
intriguing personalities and byz-
antine bureaucratic divisions into
a coherent narrative. She explains
how heroic librarians not only
aided the war effort—delivering
intelligence about fascist technol-
ogy, propaganda and infrastruc-
ture—but also altered the practice
of librarianship, ushering in an
era of mass foreign acquisitions
and widespread microfilm use,
as well as giving urgent focus to
the rapid extraction of vital infor-
mation rather than the simple
storage of data. The history of
librarianship isn’t as quiet as
some of us might believe.Mr. Hilbert is a poet and an
antiquarian book dealer.Librarians at War
MANUSCRIPT MANChaplain Samuel Blinder in 1945 examining a sacred scroll in the cellar of the
Race Institute in Frankfurt, where books stolen from every occupied country in Europe were stored.CORBIS/GETTY IMAGESBOOKS
‘The country of the mind must also attack.’—ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS, 1942
Angeles before World War II—before
the sprawl and the smog and the free-
ways—as a lost paradise, a symbolic
re-creation of his earliest sense of
place.
The recollected scent of eucalyptus
and orange blossoms drifts through
Mr. Wasson’s pages, but Eden dis-
solves, as Mr. Towne deepens his re-
search, into the city of camouflaged
corruption so eloquently described by
Raymond Chandler and by the histo-
rian Carey McWilliams, whose
“Southern California: An Island on
the Land” (1946) would provide
the germ for the theme of stolen
water. The film was born in a con-
tradictory spirit: On one hand
nostalgia for vanished beauties
of nature and architecture and
stylistic elegance (whether of
tailoring or of Chandler’s prose),
on the other the excavation of
brutal buried crimes still poison-
ing the air.
Brutal crimes pervaded the at-
mosphere in which Mr. Towne
was working. The Manson killings
of late summer 1969 sent movie
people who had formerly left
their doors unlocked shopping for
guard dogs and firearms. Before Man-
son was identified, Roman Polanski
himself, given the Satanic ambience of
“Rosemary’s Baby” and his rumored
libertine lifestyle, was the object of
ominous rumors. The prelude of “The
Big Goodbye” establishes Polanski’s
story in rapid bursts—the wartime
childhood he barely survived, his
mother’s death in Auschwitz, his
emergence in Poland as a technical
master with Hollywood ambitions, hisscreenplays, but the story Mr. Wasson
tells is more complicated. Mr. Towne
had a close collaborator, Edward Tay-
lor, who sought no credit but whose
intensive involvement seems to have
been crucial.
After Polanski got involved, he pro-
ceeded—at first working with Mr.
Towne and then on his own—to pare
the epic narrative drastically and steer
it toward an ending more despairing
than what Mr. Towne had intended.
Without Polanski, Mr. Wasson
suggests, “Chinatown” might
have ended up “slack, overcom-
plicated, confusing.” By consen-
sus it is none of those things,
but, on the contrary, taut,
streamlined and irresistibly ab-
sorbing. The first time around,
the film seemed to have all the
satisfactions of a Hollywood clas-
sicism almost extinct, while
packing into its nihilist climax
the negation of everything that
classicism once promised. Seeing
it again recently after many
years, I was struck by how deeply
its colors and settings had im-
printed themselves, and by how
expertly its simulacrum of 1937
Los Angeles embodies a 1974 melan-
cholia still displaying the bright hues
of a party just ended. By now it is not
so much the grand themes of “China-
town” as its small beauties, and the
rigor with which they are realized,
that bear the mark of another time.Mr. O’Brien’s collections of film
criticism include “The Phantom
Empire” and“Stolen Glimpses,
Captive Shadows.”idyllic (or perhaps, in view of his
chronic infidelity, not quite so idyllic)
marriage to Sharon Tate. Polanski’s
efforts to solve Tate’s murder through
obsessive sleuthing—searching for the
owner of a pair of glasses found at
the scene (Bruce Lee came under his
suspicion briefly), furtively testing
his friends’ cars for bloodstains with
chemicals and Q-tips—mirror the per-
fectionism of his filmmaking as Mr.
Wasson goes on to describe it.At its center “The Big Goodbye” be-
comes something of a treatise on the
craft of screenwriting, as Mr. Towne
invents and discards and recombines
the elements of a “tangle of stories”
embodied in some 500 pages of notes
and drafts. It then becomes the story
of a director wresting away control of
that script and asserting his own deci-
sive vision. The final result earned Mr.
Towne an Oscar and the reputation of
having written one of the greatest ofLMPC/GETTY IMAGES