Flashback, June 1863: Tubman Spy Work Aids Union Army

Secessionists who discounted the intelligence of their slaves learned firsthand the folly of their contempt during a Union Army raid on rice plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina. It wasn’t only that Federal army brass lent 150 African-American slaves to the operation, but that they employed the services of an unusually savvy woman—“Underground Railroad” “conductor” Harriet Tubman—to coordinate tips about Confederate defenses. The most crucial of the latter—the location of floating mines in the river—enabled the Union to free 750 slaves in one stroke, a daring attack at the heart of the plantocracy that had helped bring on the war.

The fact that Tubman was even down there, so deep in the heart of the Confederacy, testified, of course, to her daring, but also to a toughness bordering on ruthlessness. She had to be: her very survival, as well as those of family members, depended on not giving in to any physical or mental frailty, hers or others.

No more than five feet tall and slightly built, the teenage female slave, known then as Araminta Ros,s took a blow her body could ill afford to sustain. Blocking the way of her master as he tried to whip a fellow slave, she was hit by a two-pound weight thrown at the other slave. She would continue to be troubled, even while "conducting" the railroad, by what have been interpreted since then as epileptic fits. Her first attempt to escape to freedom from Maryland had ended when her brothers had gotten cold feet and, in sympathy, she had come back with them.

She would not make the same mistake twice, however. Thereafter, if someone she was helping escape had a change of heart, Tubman pulled out a gun to make sure that mind got changed again.

It’s not known how many escapees followed this tenacious woman, but at very least it consisted of relatives, likely around 70, with some estimates running even higher, to a few hundred. What is not in dispute, however, is that she not only returned repeatedly below the Mason-Dixon Line, but that sometimes she went considerably farther than her native Maryland. The perils were enormous, as were the extremes she ran to elude capture: leading groups by dirt roads or lightly trod paths at night, hiding “passengers” in forests or swamps.

When war broke out, Tubman offered her services to the Union Army, in areas under its control near the South Carolina coast. A year later, an escaped slave named Robert Smalls (later a congressman) managed to make a daring escape to freedom by commandeering a rebel boat, CSS Planter, running it past Confederate gun batteries in Charleston Harbor, and surrendering it to Union forces—at a stroke, offering a powerful counterweight to any notion that blacks could not match whites in intelligence and daring.

As astonishing as that deed was, the one in which Tubman was now involved, in the midst of the third year of the war—a period of dismal news for the North so far—was even more breathtaking. She was involved not only in a liberation raid, but also, as noted by Paul Donnelly in a post on the New York Times blog “Opinionator,” “for the first and only time in the Civil War, or for that matter any American conflict before this century, a woman (and a civilian at that) …[would play] a decisive role in planning and carrying out a military operation.”

The raid, carried out on June 1, 1863, required greater coordination skills than Tubman had had to show until this time. A major obstacle was that she did not know Gullah, the language of slaves along the coast. In fact, she knew little more about this group than the best-informed white officers. She had to rely, then, on 10 slaves she had recruited for the operation.

Tubman accompanied the Second South Carolina Regiment, led by Col. James Montgomery. The commander had been suggested to General David Hunter by none other than Tubman herself, who knew Montgomery when he had been associated with John Brown—and, therefore, appreciated his abolitionist zeal (a quality that many Union officers did not possess then). As the Union ships journeyed up the river, many slaves fled at sight of the strange vessels. But before long, Tubman’s network of 10 recruited spies had passed the word that "Lincoln's gun-boats come to set them free," and the slaves began to flock to the shore.

Despite the fact that the raid led to the recruitment of 100 slaves into the Union armed forces, Tubman did not receive any reward from the federal government while the war was raging. Nor, despite her intelligence work, did she receive a pension for her efforts in this direction, partly because the nature of the work lent itself to sparse documentation. In fact, the pension she eventually obtained only came through her second husband, a war veteran himself.

After the war, Tubman lived out the rest of her days in Auburn, N.Y., home to one of her strongest supporters in the federal government, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward. Fifty years after the breathtaking raid she had helped plan, frail and in dire financial straits, she was admitted to a rest home named in her honor, where she died.

 (A woodcut image of Harriet Tubman by an unknown artist, from Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman by Sarah H. Bradford.)

Flashback, May 1593: The (Christopher) Marlowe Mystery

Following an accusation of heresy, likely extracted under torture, by friend Thomas Kyd, playwright Christopher Marlowe was arrested on May 18, 1593. Almost as quickly, he was released. 

But Marlowe’s life, marked by mystery and controversy at every turn, was bound to end the same way. Within two weeks after his arrest, the masterful Elizabethan playwright-poet—not to mention spy, counterfeiter, infidel, and gay—was stabbed to death, under circumstances almost certainly covered up by the government.

A prior post of mine discussed the death—and, in necessarily brief form, the life—of Marlowe (1564-1593). But the environment surrounding his demise remains so complex that only one post hardly does justice to it.

Just as important, a new book—deeply accomplished in style, if not conclusions—has brought renewed attention to the case. I don’t buy a major underlying premise of Ros Barber’s The Marlowe Papers—i.e., that the playwright did not die, but was whisked away by British intelligence, carving out a new identity for himself as William Shakespeare. 

But Barber does a sterling job of evoking a truly dark time, and her book, like Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate, is one of the few examples I can think of where the narrative power of a novel is combined with evocative verse.

The glorification of Queen Elizabeth I by courtiers in her own time and historians bent on an Anglocentric view of the past masks a grave reality that the Marlowe case highlights: her subjects lived in a police state. 

Fears of a takeover of the nation by the Catholic monarch of Spain, Philip II, created an atmosphere of paranoia, as well as the rise of a massive intelligence network monitored by Sir Francis Walsingham. Control of the theater community, perhaps the major entertainment venue of the time, was a priority.

Go through the plays not only of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Kyd but also of John Ford, John Webster and Thomas Middleton, and the same pattern emerges: not one of these dramas of deceit and violence was set in Elizabethan England.

More often than not, to be absolutely safe, the plots occurred on the Continent, in places such as Venice, Spain or Greece—areas where most Elizabethans had never seen, and could know only by reputation. 

When a play was set on English soil, it was best to set it way off in the past—or use a metaphor that, in the context of a play, could be shrugged off as expressing no more than it appeared to do on the surface. Thus, “a rose by another name would smell as sweet,” except if the colors referred to the rival houses of Lancaster and York in the War of the Roses.

Clare Asquith’s Shadowplay is instructive in this regard. I don’t accept all the ramifications of her contention that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic, but she operates from an indisputable premise: anyone writing plays had to communicate via coded language. 

At very least, playwrights might be interrogated by government agents, then induced to change some aspect of a play, as when Shakespeare altered the name Sir John Oldcastle to Sir John Falstaff to avoid offending a descendant of the knight.

Thomas Kyd’s treatment was worse than Shakespeare’s. Being the author of The Spanish Tragedy, one of the most performed plays of the Elizabethan Age, as well as in the employ of a prominent English earl, did him no good with Walsingham’s men.

Somehow, his name became associated with an offensive, anti-immigrant sign posted on the door of an English church. The authorities raided Kyd’s room, where they discovered a number of blasphemous papers. 

After a week of interrogation, a prolonged period in which torture was likely employed, Kyd claimed that the materials were not his but Marlowe’s. 

Marlowe, released on bail following his arrest, was still required by the Privy Council to report daily to the Palace of Westminster. He was due to appear before the Star Chamber Court, where a fate similar to Kyd’s (at best, shunning by his patron; at worst, judicial murder) might await him.

Within a few years after his death, rumors (conveniently allowed by the government) circulated that Marlowe had died in a barroom brawl. It wasn’t until the 20^th century that a scholar, performing like a literary Philip Marlowe, uncovered some salient facts about the death that contradicted this version.

First, the death had not occurred in the bar but in a room. Second, the room was in the house of Eleanor Bull, a bailiff’s widow with court connections. Third, Mrs. Bull’s house was no ordinary lodging establishment, but one with connections to Walsingham’s spy network. Fourth, the four men in the room that night all knew each other; Marlowe; the man who stabbed him in an alleged quarrel over the “reckoning” for the food and drink that day, Ingram Frizer; and two others who served as eyewitnesses at the subsequent inquest.

In 20^th-century private-eye parlance, Christopher Marlowe made for an ideal fall guy. He had already been involved in a street brawl in which his friend, Thomas Watson, had come to his aid. Watson had ended up killing the man with whom Marlowe was fighting, an innkeeper’s son named William Bradley.

Whatever services Marlowe had performed for Her Majesty, the last thing the spy network could afford was someone indiscreet. It would be better for Marlowe to be removed from the scene, and even better yet if it could be made to seem a result of his own doing. Thus, the word went out that Marlowe had died in an argument over the “reckoning,” or bill, at the Widow Bull’s. In fact, all the circumstances now known make it quite possible that he was "terminated" in a government safe house by agents known to him and to Her Majesty's spymaster.

Frizer’s subsequent argument—that he had acted in self-defense—was readily accepted, all the more so as it came from a personal employee of Walsingham’s who actually lived on his estate. Frizer was pardoned within a month—extraordinarily fast for such a case.

The life of Shakespeare has struck many as being extraordinarily quiet and bourgeois. The example of his principal stage rival, Marlowe—dead before the age of 30—would have served as sufficient warning about the dangers of a reckless life. 

In the typical coded language of the Time, The Bard alluded to his fallen contemporary in As You Like It: “When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”

Quote of the Day (John le Carre, on Film Adaptations)

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bullion cubes."—Attributed to novelist John le Carre

Given that the theme week at the Chautauqua Institution, where I’m vacationing right now, is the American intelligence system, the temptation was irresistible to use this quote by one of the premiere—perhaps the premiere—practitioner of the espionage novel.

(Incidentally, at a class I took this morning, two retired CIA case officers said that two novelists generally favored by those in the bureau were le Carre and Graham Greene, both of whom worked in the British intelligence service before they wrote their spy thrillers. (Tom Clancy, on the other hand, got a thumbs’ down from the couple.)

I came across this delicious quote in, of all things, a Roman Catholic weekly church bulletin. Perhaps it’s not so bizarre a find, on second glance. After all, it requires a real act of faith for an author to trust that his material will be treated sensitively in a different medium often more guided by the dollar than by aesthetics.

The closest source I could find for this quote traces it to the author’s feelings after watching how his The Tailor of Panama was translated to the big screen. I’m not sure if le Carre’s feelings about that adaptation were as ambivalent as this quote suggests (the film wasn’t that bad, after all). Actually, the novelist has been far better served than most writers by the entertainment industry. (See especially The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.)

When I went to le Carre’s official Web site, I discovered news that sure seems to validate his faith. It seems that a new film adaptation is going to be made of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. For the life of me, I can’t imagine how Hollywood could improve on the 1970s version of the first third of his Quest for Karla trilogy. For one thing, the first pass at his book was turned into a mini-series, allowing for greater opportunity to dwell on character and plot points. Additionally—perhaps even more crucially—it had Sir Alec Guinness in a tremendous career-capping role, as quietly dogged (yet troubled) spycatcher George Smiley.

But le Carre appears very, very high on this remake, this time produced for the big screen. That’s what having Gary Oldman (taking over the Smiley role) can do in boosting an author’s faith in the men who make the movies.

This Day in Literary History (Graham Greene, Voice of Faith and Betrayal, Dies)

April 3, 1991—British novelist Graham Greene, whose serious fiction and so-called “entertainments” alike probed the human heart hopelessly ensnared between love and other forms of commitment, died at age 86 of a blood disease in a hospital near his home in Vevey, Switzerland. 

An intelligence operative in WWII, he had, in his last days, become so alarmed by a rumor about a friend he’d sacrificed much for, the notorious Cold War traitor Kim Philby, that he was frantically rifling through papers to ferret out something he long knew was elusive and ambiguous: the truth of a life.

In neither his religious faith nor his politics was Greene a diehard loyalist; in fact, he spoke glowingly of “the virtue of disloyalty.” 

A convert to Catholicism in his twenties, his faith was decidedly heterodox, such that, by the end of his life, he termed himself a “Catholic agnostic.” He shed the Communism he embraced for a few weeks in his youth and denounced Soviet aggression in Czechoslovakia, but still spoke warmly of Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh.

If ever a person seemed to embody the rather hyperbolic 1938 comment of E.M. Forster—“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”—it was Greene.

He had upset many in Britain with a sympathetic (and preposterously argued) introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir, My Silent War, that compared the secret Communism of his onetime M.I. 6 boss with the covert Catholicism of Elizabethan England. 

Philby had acted as a mole in the West at the behest of the murderous Stalin, Greene suggested, in the same way that "many a kindly Catholic must have endured the long bad days of the Inquisition with this hope . . . that one day there would be a John XXIII." 

It had long been rumored that a single Scandinavian voter had blocked a Nobel Prize for Greene because of his Catholicism, but the Philby defense probably dampened any enthusiasm at home not only for that prize but for a knighthood.

The story of the sudden dismay that gripped Greene in his final days has been told in two articles by the masterful literary journalist Ron Rosenbaum (Explaining Hitler). 

In the first, a 1994 New York Times Magazine piece, “Kim Philby and the Age of Paranoia,” Rosenbaum discussed the frantic efforts made by Greene, as he struggled with his fatal blood disease, to discover the truth behind a rumor passed along by biographer Norman Sherry from intelligence author Anthony Cave Brown: Perhaps Philby had not been a true-believing mole after all, Brown thought, but instead a double double-agent (i.e., a triple agent), given the most brilliant cover of all—the most damaging West-to-East defector on the Cold War—to undermine the Soviet Union from within.

Rosenbaum concluded that Philby was not, in fact, a triple agent, but nevertheless bent on a different form of deception: concealing a savage disillusionment with both his personal situation in the U.S.S.R. following his escape from British intelligence in 1963 (Philby was so distrusted that he was under virtual house arrest for several years after defecting) and with the grinding, endlessly dreary Soviet Communism of Leonid Brezhnev.

Philby (inevitably dubbed in the West “The Third Man,” referring to two Cambridge classmates that had fled to the U.S.S.R. earlier, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess) was dead three years when Greene was informed of Brown’s speculation. 

The ailing author never responded, but, as he reviewed notes about their meetings—including a 1985 visit to the U.S.S.R. in which the novelist met Philby again—Greene might have felt that real life was suddenly conforming to Greeneland.

I refer to one of his best later novels, The Human Factor, written in Greene’s sixties but not published until 1977. The protagonist, stationed in Africa, decides to punish the West for the racism shown toward his wife and family by defecting to the East. 

His reward: a drab Soviet apartment, where he wanly dissembles to Western visitors about his degraded state.

The fact that Greene had rejected Philby’s urging to tone down this grim conclusion suggests that the novelist intuited the actual state of the defector’s endgame. 

The mole mastermind whose colossal, multi-decade deception haunted the memories and fiction of ex-spooks Greene, John le Carre (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and William F. Buckley Jr. (Last Call for Blackford Oakes), according to recent disclosures by his widow Rufina, reaped a penalty that few in the West could have foreseen (especially after being buried with the honors of a KGB general): drinking himself into oblivion night after night, angry that the society in which he now found himself was nothing like the nirvana he once envisioned.

“Why do old people live so badly here?” the old spy asked. “After all, they won the war.”

It was an ending and a hellish punishment that his old friend, the literary master of paradox, well understood.