The Star-Rover
April 15, 1974 | Monday
Michael
Sophie's conference call about the connections between the Bohemian Club, the Hearst affair, and Jack London has her on her old hobbyhorse of the decadent Bohemian artists who used to hang out at Coppa's in the Montgomery Block (now the site of the Transamerica Pyramid).
A reminder that this was all post-Mission 1 research Sophie did; it was a long time ago:
The Montgomery Block research: Sophie has been kind of diving into this in the couple of days immediately following the end of the mission. She started pulling resources on this during the mission but she's only able to give it her full attention now. What she finds is that a group of prominent artists and Bohemians—the famous author Jack London, and the less-well-known in this era poets George Sterling and Nora May French—all took their own lives after living and carousing and working in the Montgomery Block. The center of their "scene" was twofold: a bistro/café named Coppa's in the basement of the Block, and the newspaper and literary revue the San Francisco Argonaut. The Argonaut was home to Ambrose Beirce and other famous literary figures of the Gilded Age/pre-WWI years.
Nora May French killed herself a year and a half after the '06 earthquake, by cyanide, at the home of George Sterling and his wife. Ten years later, Jack London of course wrote his adventure novels (along with a fair bit of what we'd likely call left-wing speculative fiction about futuristic totalitarian regimes) but suffered from a number of chronic illnesses, both mental and physical, that led to his abuse of morphine that likely led to his death. Sterling would also kill himself using cyanide, ten years after London and twenty years after French, at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. For years he carried the vial around, saying of it, "A prison becomes a home if you have the key." After Nora May's death, Sterling habitually drank and used opium, and was often heard saying that there was another world than that we know. One of his associates said, "He repeated this to me so frequently that it became a trifle tiresome."
Upon presenting this mini-report to both URIEL and to the higher-ups at SANDMAN, the Librarian says, "This entire fin-de-siècle Bohemian scene in San Francisco had to be lousy with Irruptor influence. And that building had to be the gateway. All the psychic energy around their avant-garde art and drug use likely kept the gate open well after they'd all stopped hanging around there."
Sophie orders a copy of The Star-Rover using Interlibrary Loan to be rushed to Tarzana from UCLA for Archie, Jo, and Andy to check out (or refresh his memory with, in Andy's case). She also says she's going to do some more intense Jack London and George Sterling research the rest of today and put together a dossier on what the connections might be to the events in San Francisco today.
(Rob and Leonard, feel free to check out The Star-Rover if you want, I can also do a summary because it's quite long but I think given it's at the center of Redford and Roeg's interest—and the fact that a lot of it has relevance to the campaign, oddly enough, if you look at the protagonist Darrell Standing's story and past lives—it might not be a bad idea to breeze through it so you can react in character.)
Oh yeah, Archie can give me a Politics-19 roll and Jo can give me a Law (U.S.)-14 roll.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 5
Rob
>> SUCCESS by 3
Michael
(Kinda cute that Archie would have a bit of a harder time divining this from reading The Star Rover but since you both succeeded, this works either way.)
So as Jo and Archie review the novel quickly, it is clear that it is Jack London's attempt to do two things: 1) work in other historical modes such as the Western (Archie notes London's evil, selfish, insular Frontier-era Mormons in the "Jesse" past-life vignette with some interest), the Biblical epic, the medieval romance, etc. etc. and 2) a vitriolic political statement against cruel, unusual, and capital punishment. The bosses, doctors, and screws in London's novel are unrelentingly cruel; they use the titular "jacket" with glee and mock the protagonist Darrell Standing's jacket-induced visions. The shadow of the gallows hangs over the entire novel.
As Jo considers the angle that Redford and Roeg might take on this novel from the 1910s from the brief notice in Variety, she accepts that the "reformatory" impulse in "correcting" the inmates in the novel does line up well with the kinds of stuff Jolly West and the CIA have been doing both here in the US and abroad the past decade: physical, psychological torture, less to get intelligence and more to "correct" antisocial behaviors. Surely Redford and Roeg could hit that angle, and the pro-dissident angle as noted with respect to Daniel Ellsberg and the release of the Pentagon Papers and his prosecution that only ended with the coming of Watergate.
But there's also the death penalty! Another central conceit of London's novel is how snuffing out a life also snuffs out that person's experience of all their manifold past lives as well. London knew well that California was long known as a state with one of the easier hands on the hangman's drop (or, later, the gas chamber's lever). But in 1972, that all changed. California's Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty a couple in People v. Anderson right before the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the death penalty was cruel and unusual in Furman v. Georgia. Which didn't, of course, stop Reagan and the fine voters of California from functionally reinstating it mere months later by plebiscite with Proposition 17.
Redford seems like the anti-capital punishment type, and Jo bets that's an even bigger part of Roeg and Redford's pre-screenplay pitch using London's novel than anything else. And in thinking how this script could expose people to the eternity of the human soul, that big concept, that meme that URIEL is now trying to push to prevent the souls of the dead from falling into the hands of the Kings to fuel their existence... Jo's mind, at the end of reading London's novel, is kind of blown. There's a real message here about the preciousness of human life, one that easily could be adapted to the purposes of either well-meaning liberal Hollywood types... or Operation URIEL.
Leonard
"Wow, chief," Jocasta says after paging through The Star Rover with her usual thoroughness. "I'm not sure about it as, you know, a work of art — it kind of reads like a bunch of short stories that someone threw a frame around years after the fact — but as a vector for delivering the kinds of messages we want out there...I'm not an entertainment expert, obviously. Maybe this has 'dud' written all over it. But if we aren't already in on the making of this thing...maybe we should be."
Rob
"Well, I mean, 'art'..." Archie makes an imaginary picture frame with his thumbs and forefingers, laughs it off like: let's not even get into the question of what is 'art.'
"But there's definitely something likely about the book, isn't there? It could be a good vector for us... or for them. Have you ever seen any of this Roeg's pictures? Could he be another Xanten type? Another Keiner? I hope we're not sending Andy into the lion's den." Archie picks up the library copy of The Star-Rover, flips through it again. "And we're back around to where we started: those Montgomery Block Bohemians. Hard to say which side Jack London would be on. (I loved White Fang as a kid.)"
He finds a passage towards the end and reads it aloud:
"I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. ... I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest ... (it does go on a bit, doesn't it?) ... welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them."
He nods like the passage has made up his mind. "Yes, let's get Andy in on the making of this."
Michael
Should we get Jo on a plane to Alameda, then?
