‘The Hellfire Club’ and the sinister consolations of secret societies

There is a scene in Jake Tapper’s new novel of Washington intrigue, “The Hellfire Club,” which seems tailor-made for our time of Twitter mobs and pearl-clutching, intentional outrage.

The novel follows a conversation in Statuary Hall on the second floor of the U.S. Capitol between newly-installed Representative Charlie Marder and his colleague, Congressman Isaiah Street. It is early 1954, and both men are surrounded by statues of great Americans of the past. Marder is white. Street is black. “Folks at home…voters would be amazed if they ever found out how many decisions are actually made by these secret societies and clubs,” Street says.

He doesn’t mean Skull & Bones – but the Ku Klux Klan. He voices the arguments of this century, wondering why there are monuments to great figures of the Confederacy here in the capital city of the nation they betrayed.

Both men are veterans of World War II, both serving their nation at a moment of great power. But both are men, in a nation at that moment largely led by men. And for one of these men, there are large portions of the nation where he couldn’t get a seat at a table in a restaurant, or even hold elected office, because of his race.

When Marder argues that the legacy of these men is complicated, Street replies that “right is right.” It is not enough to say that the people of the past, like us, contain multitudes. But then again, we are reading a novel about people of the past, in what we think of as an uncomplicated part of it, aren’t we?

This novel, the first by the CNN anchor, is fun. Tapper has constructed an entertaining, teeming, tense and charming thriller with bits of humor and even grandeur. It is obvious that Tapper cares about, and relishes, American history, particularly its more forgotten aspects. He shows the kind of devotion for old Washington haunts that you might want in your favorite tour guide, but he doesn’t let the minutiae overpower the narrative. More importantly, he expertly lifts the veil to show how similar the arguments of the recent past are to our own age. At the same time he's comfortable not answering the questions raised in the process. When a senator claims that 100 communists are crossing into the U.S. through the Mexican border every day, he doesn’t employ a flashing sign for the reader to draw any conclusions.

Like the Statuary Hall scene above, Tapper reminds us that the people of the past have the same complications we do. They sometimes know the right way but can easily lose sight of it in the press of the daily concern. And there is, in any situation, the exertion of the moment to conform to whatever masquerades as wisdom. Charlie’s wife Margaret at one point muses, “The human soul isn’t sold once but rather slowly and methodically and piece by piece.”

Among the sources for “The Hellfire Club,” Tapper acknowledges a debt to David Halberstam’s “The Fifties,” a fantastic account of the times written more than twenty years ago. Halberstam begins with the idea that the Fifties appear to us to be an orderly era, but that image masks vast contradictions. We see these years of American omnipotence in the same shade as the photographs that depict the time - black and white. There was a seeming order to everything, and Americans were grateful for order.

“In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society,” Halberstam wrote. “After all, it was reflected back at them...they were optimistic about the future…Americans trusted their leaders to tell them the truth, to makes sound decisions, and to keep them out of war.” At the same time, vast cultural, political, social and intellectual forces were moving beneath the surface that would eventually burst forth in the chaos of the Sixties.

Some of those forces are evident in the pages of “The Hellfire Club.” Charlie Marder comes from privilege. It was on his 21^st birthday, Dec. 7, 1941, that America was rudely ushered onto the stage of world conflict, and ultimately, power. And it is through his father’s influence that he is appointed to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. House of Representatives during the endgame of the career of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Charlie comes from academia and has faith in the essential goodness of people.

Through the novel’s intrigues, we are introduced to the idea of a secret society that operates at the highest levels of government, as old as America itself, keeping a lid on the tectonic forces driving the nation. But McCarthy’s advent – alleging a shadowy Communist conspiracy at the highest levels – threatens to upset the delicate concentrations of power within the Hellfire Club. Charlie Marder blunders into the middle of this upon taking his seat in Congress, requiring the action of the club’s old hands to escort him out of peril.

Through his odyssey, we meet familiar and forgotten figures of the era – the Kennedy brothers, Estes Kefauver, Lyndon Johnson, Ike – and we are treated again to the pageant of deep Cold War politics. As I read the novel, I kept wondering what the Russians would have thought of the idea of cabals within cabals. It probably would have looked familiar to them, as anyone who has seen “The Death of Stalin” would understand.

But I was also reminded of the lure of secret societies, an idea probably as old as government itself. The concept of a group of highly placed individuals who secretly pull the strings has an almost equal share of mystique and menace. If you are someone who prizes order, there is consolation in knowing that things may spin out of balance, but never quite out of control. There will always be someone to step in and preserve the institutions that help us sleep at night.

But if you feel yourself outside the order of society, then you are constantly wondering at what point that secret power will collapse, and what it will take to finally bring it down. Even so, there are consolations here.

Generations of anti-Semites have stoked themselves into a frenzy at the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world through politics, finance and culture. That idea has laid waste to millions. Those believing the lie even today have also taken cheer from it, because its believers see themselves as liberators, and their lives have an awful meaning and purpose. The political assassinations of the Sixties have led to spiderwebs of conspiracy among amateur detectives, with each new blurry photograph promising the long-wished-for solution. Those same people take pride in the fact that they know, better than anyone.

And there is sometimes truth to the ideas behind our fears. Hillary Clinton supporters speak of a "vast right wing conspiracy." Followers of Donald Trump talk about a "deep state" that frustrates his plans and sews suspicion through leaks. Read Abraham Lincoln's "House Divided" speech, and it too posits a conspiracy among America's institutions to preserve slavery. Judge for yourself whether he was right.

 When people on the left or right hear the other side’s conspiracy theories, they probably think, “If only we were as powerful and united as they suppose…” But both sides draw strength from the idea that, beneath the surface, are nameless vindictive zealots who may frustrate them today, but not tomorrow.

Somehow, Tapper makes all of this entertaining against a tapestry of time that we’ve mostly managed to forget. I was thrilled to see his story shoehorn in episodes like Congress’ hearings on the comic book industry. That too was a conspiracy theory – that lurid tales of murder and horror were responsible for rising juvenile delinquency. The way he works this into the conclusion was particularly sweet.

There is, of course, at this moment in American politics, the idea that we lost something when we lost the order of the Fifties. We lost surety, peace, optimism and benevolence. A movement to “make America great again” necessarily taps into that nostalgia. It was obvious who our enemy was then, we think. “The Hellfire Club,” within the mechanism of a suspense novel, pokes needed holes in that belief by reminding us of how complicated the uncomplicated past was. 

Novels like this – LeCarre comes to mind –usually cement in the reader’s mind the idea of a moral universe where everything is contested and there are no reliable levers to pull in order to bring everything into balance. Governments and movements are peopled by morally corrupted and endlessly compromised people. But Tapper leaves the reader of “The Hellfire Club” with a hopeful optimism, putting these words into the mouth of the era’s most recognizable, and sadly, overshadowed figure, President Eisenhower:

“I am confident in the idea of the United States of America…I believe that the combination of checks and balances and a free press and our democratically elected representatives ultimately expose charlatans. I believe in the good sense of the American people, and I know in my soul that truth will win out.”

There is a tendency in every era of American history to think that the stakes have never been higher, that the threat to the Republic has never been greater, that sinister forces were never closer to an ultimate victory. That may be true of any era, but as the years pass we quickly move past those conflicts to find others, consoling ourselves with darker, more mendacious conspiracies, casting ourselves in greater clothing to be quickly discarded. As Marilynne Robinson wrote in “Gilead,” “…how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome and meaningless in the next.”

I find myself wanting to revisit the history of “The Hellfire Club” (which I suppose is Tapper’s intention), seeing how it might have handled the Civil Rights struggle, Vietnam, or Watergate. Or perhaps a look back at the toll of the Civil War. We can hopefully wait to see about our own age, after our outrage cools. 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
Here's a review of the novel by Robbie Pink.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.  

Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 

Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here.

'King Rat' and the consequences of hard choices

Before he was the author of 1,000-page blockbuster novels about Asia, James Clavell was a screenwriter with a lot of time on his hands because of a strike.

That's how he became a novelist, when he turned his experiences in a World War II Japanese prison camp into his first novel, "King Rat." After nearly 15 years of saying nothing of his experiences - he found himself a prisoner again. His wife locked him in a room, he later recounted, promising to let him out only after he'd completed five pages of a novel. Clavell later admitted that much of this work was autobiographical, the character of Peter Marlowe serving as the author's stand-in. The 1963 novel was later made into a movie starring James Fox.

There's a reason Clavell, who also wrote the original film, "The Fly," and co-wrote "The Great Escape," sold millions of books - he was a very good writer. Even in this first work, he shows the polish and panache that distinguished him throughout his career, while still dealing with material that must have been personally harrowing to revisit. "If you live at the edge of death, you appreciate life," he said later. "It's the only way you can really appreciate life."

Clavell joined the Royal Artillery as a teenager, and was captured on Java. He was later sent to Changi Prison in Singapore, where he was subjected to some of the horrors depicted here.

Outside of slavery, it's hard to think of a more degrading experience than that recounted in "King Rat." The world within the novel is absolutely masculine. For the prisoner inside Changi, the war is over, and the tedium between action of the soldier is eaten up in the prisoner's tedium of inaction, or brutal labor. Men are deprived of healthcare, living on a barely subsistence diet. Cigarettes serve as currency, and black market bartering is cut-throat and emasculating. Each prisoner strips himself of clothing and dignity, floating in sweat and misery, convinced the future only holds more humiliation, and death. Each man is tormented by the knowledge that the world continues outside the camp, but what of friends and family, or any approaching relief?

At the center of the novel is "The King," an American corporal who is the master of illicit trades, commanding a small army of stooges who do his bidding. The King wears a clean uniform with  creased pants and clean socks, as he wanders through men with ill-fitting sarongs. He has his own store of food and demands tribute, keeping his own counsel. He does not survive by collaborating with the Japanese, but imposes his own order within the walls of the prison. With Marlowe's help, he hatches an elaborate scheme to supply the officers with rat meat through breeding vermin, and barters with guards and villagers with the guts of a burglar.

"The whole of Changi hated the King. They hated him for his muscular body, the clear glow in his blue eyes. In this twilight world of the half alive there were no fat or well-built or round or smooth or fair-built or thick-built men. There were only faces dominated by eyes and set on bodies that were skin over sinews over bones. No difference between them but age and face and height. And in all this world, only the King ate like a man, smoked like a man, slept like a man, dreamed like a man and looked like a man."

Marlowe is English, but Clavell only hints at the usual class distinctions among the British troops. Instead, each man is a human struggling to stay human. Marlowe is useful to the King, but he is also oblivious at first to what knowing him means. The King is never given an actual name, throughout the whole novel. And while there is something sinister about him, there is also something grand. The King survives on his wits and guile, not his intelligence. We aren't told what he did before the war, where he is from, or what his aims are. The ultimate goal of every other prisoner is to stay alive until the war is over. But the King wants more than survival - and he understands that here, in Changi, the rules are different. As Clavell writes, the world has been recreated here. It is a place of "beginning again."

Clavell gets a lot of mileage out of the image of the rat. They are scavengers, eating their own kind, living off filth and desperate for self-preservation. Changi has turned all the men into something a little better than rats, clinging to hope even when they think the Japanese will kill them all rather than surrender. Marlowe nearly dies in the camp, and it is only through the King's guile that he is given the medicine he needs to survive. "King Rat" is a different depiction than other prisoner of war stories, such as the portion of "Slaughterhouse Five" that deals with a German POW camp. The men of Changi are either cowed by the King's audacity, or they revile him, like Grey, the provost marshal of the camp. Grey later says the world would be a sorry place if everyone hid behind the excuse of the King - adapting to the circumstances of the camp. In other words, morality must hold true everywhere, or humanity perishes. If the camp changes who you are too radically, you will not be able to survive beyond it.

This is true for Sean, a prisoner who is recruited to play the female parts in plays staged inside the camp. Sean, we are told, was given the job because no one else would take it. But he soon began to adopt the mannerisms and trappings of a woman until he believed himself to be a woman. He feeds off the lust given by the prisoners at the sight of him, as they are altogether deprived of the
feminine form. When the war finally comes to an end, the men who previously had desired him are disgusted by the sight of "Betty," and he walks into the ocean to his doom. Marlowe is later left to ponder, "Is it wrong to adapt?"

In a curious way, Clavell contrasts these individual decisions with the drive to develop the atomic bombs which end the war. They have unleashed catastrophic destruction, killing hundreds of thousands of people and ushering in a new and awful kind of warfare. But to the men of Changi, there was no other choice. "But he knew, of a sudden, a great truth, and he blessed the brains that had invented the bombs. Only the bombs had saved Changi from oblivion. Oh yes, he told himself, whatever happens because of the bombs, I will bless the first two and the men who made them. Only they have given me back my life when there was truly no hope of life. And though the first two have consumed a multitude, by their very vastness they have saved the lives of countless hundred thousand others. Ours. And theirs. By the Lord God, this is the truth."

The coming of Allied troops and the end of the war is especially brutal to the King. Immediately, one of his henchman will no longer fetch his coffee. None of them want to see him. The rest of them say he is "dead." His presence seems to remind those who previously sought him out that something within them was perhaps fatally compromised in order to survive. When Marlowe attempts to console the King - indeed, to thank him for all he has done to keep them, and him, alive - the King will not be comforted. He is just a corporal again, stuck with stacks of worthless Japanese money. His exit from the camp is sudden and anticlimactic. He is reborn, as are those who bowed to him, and were bullied by him.

Clavell later said the lessons of Changi were repugnant to him until he transferred them to the pages of "King Rat." Writing it allowed him to see, from a distance, the distance he had bridged in remaining alive, in order to return to life.

War stories regularly refer to their settings as "hell on earth." To the Christian reader, the phrase is weak tea. Hell is hell, and the worst parts of existence all eventually come to an end. We crave the freedom of resurrection, sometimes not knowing that it takes a great deal of pain to shake off what we were before. Stuck here on a planet of beings little better than rats, we cling to hope and morality to preserve ourselves, abandoning either when the mood suits us, hoping others will embrace them if it means our lives.

There is little logic among corruption, save surviving. We forge ourselves with each decision, hoping we do not harden into something corrupted, or corrupting. Pardons extended from Heaven, however well-disguised or obvious, uplift as they humble, while at the same time we go on resenting the same hand that feeds us. We cry out for a King until he makes demands on us, but kings often distinguish themselves only through acts of mercy.

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
Here's a review of the novel by Robbie Pink.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.  

Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 

Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here.