The Rose from Pennsylvania
An Interview with Margot Metroland

Robert N. Taylor, Moon Mistress

3,299 words

I love reading Margot Metroland’s essays and I love when she helps me to remember the various writers and forgotten figures of the American underground of the past. Margot has undoubtedly led a very interesting life and has known many personalities, artists, and interesting people. Judging by her writing, I’d say she’s both smart and sociable, which is a very interesting combination, and at the same time she has an interest in strange things. Margot is creative not only in her art, but also in her writing.

I have been preparing this interview for a long time because I was dealing with personal problems myself, in addition to which Margot’s husband passed away, so she didn’t have time for this interview for some time while she was dealing with other things. Now we bring it to you in full. We talked about her writing, her life’s journey, the Fortean Society, the literary underground, A. Wyatt Mann, Adam Parfrey, music, her favorite films, and her advice for aspiring writers.

Could you introduce yourself to the readers? 

I’m a former financial writer, sometime illustrator, cartoonist, general-interest journalist (freelance and staff), and web developer. Born in Pennsylvania. Lived in San Diego, Seattle, London, New York. Next-of-kin lives in Independence, Missouri. I was never red-pilled.

Why didn’t you ever take the red pill? How did your journey to Counter-Currents take place? 

2014. I was looking for an old friend named Bill Hopkins in London, and couldn’t find him. So I looked for the guy who introduced us many years before, Tony Hancock in Brighton. I discovered through search engines that Tony Hancock was dead. This brought me to someone named Jonathan Bowden, who apparently had been a long-time friend of Bill Hopkins, though never crossed paths with me. But now it turned out that Bowden, too, was dead. However, he’d had a few things published at this site called Counter-Currents. And through that I discovered that Bill Hopkins, the Founder of the Feast, had likewise passed away. So I got in touch with the CC editor and he answered right back. Miraculously, he was living nearby at the time, so we had lunch together at Columbus Circle in New York, and a few days later I joined a couple of his friends to see a really good new director’s cut of The Conformist (which I had seen 30 times already, but not in this cut, of course).

The Red Pill is for babies and naifs. It’s a trope used by people who feel they need permission to describe what they intuitively, or empirically, know to be true.

It had another, specialized meaning 10-15 years ago, pertaining to sex roles and pick-up artists and knowing “game” (i.e., power plays for guys trying to get laid). That meaning has faded out, along with characters such as Roosh and Chateau Heartiste.

Why do you use the pseudonym Margot Metroland? Does it have anything to do with Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall? Do you have any relation to that novel?

That was all it was. Margot Metroland actually appears in a number of Waugh novels, though Decline and Fall is my favorite. My thought was that people would Google the name and get the fictional character. Alas, they now usually get me. I believe I started writing for C-C and American Renaissance around the same time. Jared Taylor rejected MM as a pseud (he does not like frivolity or obscurantism) so I chose another name, an alias I’ve used all my adult life.

I have two or three other pseuds. One I use when writing for C-C and talk about people who’ve known me in real life and would identify me if I signed the article MM. Others are variants of my maiden and married names. These I use when writing “above ground” for normies.

Do you have a personal reason for writing?

No, it’s an innate compulsion. I started doing it when I was about five years old. Some people need to write, some people need to draw, some people need to fish. I need to do all three. I don’t get much opportunity to fish.

I know you’re busy, and you’re dealing with a lot of stuff. Do you have time for any special hobbies besides fishing and drawing? 

Well, I was a competitive runner (distance, middle-distance track, cross-country) till a few years ago and I hope to be again. I was a nationally-ranked Masters athlete for some middle-distance events in the women’s 40s and 50s categories. This is even less impressive than it sounds; there isn’t that much competition. But when I was training and racing full-throttle, it completely consumed me, and made the rest of my life like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. I have never had another pursuit that took over my life like that.

I tried triathlons briefly, but they’re not really my thing. I can’t swim fast and I never had a really good road bike.

What else do I do? I write comical fiction and memoirs. One of these days I’ll pull a stack of them together and publish a book. I hope not to self-publish, however. Nothing’s sadder than someone who says she’s published six books and it turns out they’re all tawdry self-published paperbacks with lots of typos and no illustrations.

Have you been in the underground for long time? How did you get into the underground?

I haven’t really considered myself to be in any underground, though a true “underground” involvement in something sounds attractive to me. I affiliated loosely with some Right-wing or conservative groups when I was still in my teens (Young Americans for Freedom, the Birchers, Rightist clubs in college). Back in the 1980s I knew the Institute for Historical Review’s (IHR) people and affiliates — this includes David McCalden, Keith Stimely, Ted O’Keefe, H. Keith Thompson, and Mr. and Mrs. Willis Carto. I did freelance and part-time work at the IHR in the late 1980s, early ‘90s (in California) and occasionally wrote for and compiled the index for The Spotlight (from Washington, DC).

One of your first articles was about the Fortean Society. Have you met any former members of it, and are you interested in the subject? Is there anything similar today?

No, I’ve just known people who delved into Fortean history, much as I did. When I wrote the two-part article on Tiffany Thayer and the Forteans back in 2015, the whole thing was an eye-opener: the actual history of the society, Thayer’s contrarian politics, the variety of notable people he knew. Here was someone who’d been a successful novelist and screenwriter, and occasional film actor, and ran the Fortean Society while holding down a steady advertising job at J. Walter Thompson. He left his archives to the New York Public Library, and like those of Tom Wolfe, they are voluminous.

Do you have any personal memories of A. Wyatt Mann, Boyd Rice, or Adam Parfrey?

Adam Parfrey I knew for 30 years, and knew him quite well for much of that time. We worked together at the San Diego Reader, a very prosperous weekly newspaper, back in the 1990s. We wrote articles, edited sections, did headline-writing duty on alternate weeks. He was otherwise working and living in Los Angeles, in a somewhat seedy area not far from Paramount Studios that he called Baja Melrose. His friend Crispin Glover, the actor, would come over sometimes when I was there. After a few years we both moved away from Southern California, and were in touch only sporadically after that. He had an automobile accident in the mid-1990s, and later some other mishaps, that he said resulted in some brain damage. The damage wasn’t apparent to me, but he said he had trouble remembering things, such as names of people we had known.

You can buy Charles Krafft’s An Artist of the Right here.

In his last year he started phoning me up or messaging me on Facebook, asking me to fill in the blanks for these incomplete memories. What was that girl’s name? Did so-and-so actually do such-and-such? After he died, the artist Charlie Krafft told me that Parfrey liked to concoct and spread outrageous, scurrilous stories about him and me and other people. I mean, in most cases the truth about us all was interesting enough, but Adam seemingly had a need to dumb down his descriptions so that they’d have a wider, more sensationalistic appeal.

Charlie himself died not long after this. In retrospect I considered that Adam’s memory problems probably had a lot to do with his lifelong habit of telling lies about people and perpetrating hoaxes. When he was 60 years old and contacting me, circa 2017-2018, he was asking for help because he couldn’t remember which of his stories were true and which were just Parfrey concoctions from years ago. His pretext in asking me questions was that he was writing a memoir, but the memoir never got written.

A friend named Sam Corwin was deeded the honor of “finishing” or rather writing the Adam biography, which Sam was now doing as an oral biography.

A. Wyatt Mann was the pseudonym of a professional filmmaker and videographer named Nick Bougas. I met him at his apartment in Burbank in 1991 or ‘92. Adam Parfrey took me. Nick’s work was mainly known through Tom Metzger’s W.A.R. (White Aryan Resistance) newspaper. It was little more than a hobby, but Nick produced a lot of stuff over the years. Around 1987 or so he did a comic book with Michael A. Hoffman, called, I think, Tales of the Holohoax, which you can probably find in its entirely on the Internet these days. I did some comic work in a similar vein and people often supposed that I was responsible for the Holohoax book, but no. In fact I seriously disliked Nick’s style in those days and was offended when I got confused with him. (I should say I have a much higher opinion of his work these days; what offended me was that he always drew “out of his head” and didn’t go in for accurate references or depictions. If he drew a TV, it was a cartoon television set from about 1960.)

Part of Nick’s hobby was communicating with famous prisoners: John Wayne Gacy, John Hinckley, etc. He’d draw cartoons of them, or for them, and they’d keep up a correspondence that way. Hinckley I remember wanted sexy, salacious nude cartoons of Jodie Foster, and Nick showed us some of them. Hinckley truly did have a thing for Jodie Foster, that wasn’t a joke.

Nick kept his real identity under wraps for many years. Those of us who knew him did not go around saying he was A. Wyatt Mann, since that would have been incomprehensible to most people to begin with. Nowadays if you search for his name online you’ll find him mainly credited with the extreme Jew caricature called “le happy merchant.” The person who spilled the beans there was almost certainly Adam Parfrey. As years passed and he had less and less to do with me or Nick or Charlie Krafft (etc. etc. etc.), Adam became exploitative and dishonest about people he’d known. The really interesting stuff about Nick isn’t the Jew caricature, it’s stories such as that comic correspondence with John Hinckley. That’s a real narrative. Once Adam put the A. Wyatt Mann story out there, he and Nick had nothing to do with each other. Sam Corwin contacted Nick for the oral biography, but Nick brushed him off. I don’t blame him.

Boyd Rice I never knew, but we had friends in common and certainly knew of each other from the late 1980s onward.

What kind of music do you listen to? Something tells me you’re a pretty serious listener.

No, a mix of classical, nothing unusual or special, and Broadway showtunes. Gilbert and Sullivan. Pop and jazz standards from the twentieth-century songbook. A lot of Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer stuff. Very little pop-rock. I liked Taylor Swift in her 1989 Tour period, but not now. I followed pop-rock much more closely in the early days of MTV. If I had an era of expertise, it would be the Top 40 hits from 1964 to 1970.

What made you want to write for Counter-Currents?

Around the time I met Greg Johnson, I gave him a piece I’d written for my own entertainment (about To Kill a Mockingbird) and he invited me to write frequently after that. Once a week, if I wanted to. I would if I could. Twice a month seems more like my maximum. I think slowly and I write slowly. I always have a dozen drafts and outlines lying around, but then I don’t finish them because I have a deadline for something. I could never do the Jim Goad/David Cole thing and just crank out rants as needed. Also of course I get paid little or nothing for my C-C work. Besides writing little essays, I do some research work for Greg. I do it mostly for sheer love of it, but I need to make a living and I write for other outlets under different bylines. I haven’t had a good-paying steady job that went on for more than a few weeks in something like ten years.

What do you enjoy most about Counter-Currents? Do you follow other English-language sites? 

I follow other sites that I write for, or where my work has appeared. I regularly go through the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. Sometimes The Spectator or The Oldie, which I used to write for, but not recently.

Counter-Currents offers much more latitude in topics and attitude than other Rightist online magazines. When writing for some of them, I feel constrained to echo the obsessions and party line of the editor. There’s a lot less of that with C-C, as Greg is a film reviewer and has an appreciation of popular culture and doesn’t want C-C to be filled with leaden, didactic essays on political philosophy.

Is there a place for women and women’s issues at Counter-Currents? Why should women write for Counter-Currents and read this site? Do you have any tips on how to get female readers and writers?

Greg has gotten a few female writers over the years. There is less of an appeal for women, by and large, because of the subject matter. It’s partly social, but undoubtedly involves a genetically-linked bias.

Generally speaking, areas of interest with an obvious and immediate practical value have an appeal to women, obscure and theoretical matters less so. More male brains than female are skewed to pursue things that have no immediate practical value: like preparing to run a sub-3hr marathon, or building radio-controlled model Yamato battleships, or collecting the complete set of Henry James first editions, or taking a deep dive into some technical or philosophical writing.

Of course there are lots of males, probably a majority, who also eschew specialized, obscurantist, non-practical interests (call them Type A people), and there are many women, surely a minority, who are self-driven to pursue specialized interests (call this the Type B personality). End of the day, Type B men greatly outnumber Type B women, and it’s B types to whom Counter-Currents tends to appeal.

That’s more of an abstract and theoretical answer than I intended. I hope it makes sense. But one can’t get overly concerned with equality of sex representation, because it’s a very superficial metric.

What kinds of films do you like? Can you briefly describe five of your favorite movies?

You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Part Four of the Trilogy here.

Just now I’ve been first-time watching The Philadelphia Story, with Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart, and it is absolutely dreadful. How did this get such a reputation? I think the Philip Barry stage play must have seemed entertaining and witty, so it was picked up as a convenient vehicle. But some plays don’t work well when they’re “opened up” for film. Others work better as films. Some years ago I went to see a new production of John Osborne’s The Entertainer at the Old Vic in London. I knew the film with Laurence Olivier, and was expecting something like that. No way. The play is dreadful. Only recently, when reading literary histories of the Angry Young Men era, did I see an analysis of the problem. Osborne slapped it together as a revue, full of some of the unlikely types he’d known as an actor doing rep. There’s no plot arc. The allegory about Suez-era England in decline is too forced and obvious. And on stage, all the wonderful visuals of a seedy English seaside town just aren’t there.

Films I like are often ones that work better on screen than in their original (usually novel) version. One is The Godfather, which I’ve seen dozens of times, and only fully appreciate now. Sometimes I look at the many outtakes that have been saved, and I wonder why they were cut. Well, they were cut because they’d slow down the action. We don’t really need a lot of backstory to explain Michael’s character development, or what’s going on with Sonny and Lucy Mancini.

Visually similar is The Conformist, made almost at the same time, and an influence upon Coppola in its look and feel. Like The Godfather, The Conformist as a film is a better story than the original novel because twiddly details and authorial didacticism are left out. Oddly, though, The Conformist tells a very different story from what Alberto Moravia was trying to say in the novel, which was making a tendentious connection between conformity and support for Fascism. The anti-hero in the film, Marcello, isn’t a conformist, he’s simply a passive sensualist.

The Day of the Jackal is a favorite, superior in almost every way to its novel. Almost all the actors are unknowns, and the suspense is unrelenting. And it’s beautiful to look at.

Double Indemnity is always worth watching, a near-perfect gem. Better than the James M. Cain novella. You’ve got the setting, you’ve got the actors, you’ve got the dialogue.

Chinatown is supposed to take place in Los Angeles at about the same time as Double Indemnity (1937), but seems to take place in another world entirely. Robert Towne was trying to give us a confused and Chandleresque plot that never quite fully explains itself, that much is clear. But it lacks the tightness of something such as Double Indemnity and is weighted down by the built-in anachronisms. The Mulholland aqueduct story happened 30 years earlier, and this concern about bringing water to the desert just wasn’t on the radar in the 1930s.

I love reading your articles. What do you use to choose topics to cover?

I have odd obsessions and discoveries and sometimes write about those. Sometimes I’m asked to write on a particular subject. Recently Greg asked me to do a review of Colin Wilson’s The Angry Years, so I did that for Colin’s birthday. I also knew two similarly-named books on the same subject, more or less, so this was a pleasure. Greg sends around a kind of liturgical calendar of people whose birthdays we usually celebrate, and I often pick something from that list.

What would you recommend to aspiring writers?

You have to write frequently if you wish to write easily. I write frequently, but I still don’t think I write that easily. Adam Parfrey cranked out a lot, but he always thought he wrote badly. It’s important not to be too self-conscious about that sort of thing.  It’s okay to write about personal matters, in a blog or whatever, to get practice. And writing reviews of books and movies always draws on personal experience and opinion. No matter how objective or abstract your subject matter is, you’ll always bring your own bias and perspective to the description.