Tag: Margot Metroland

Brown’s yearbook photo, circa 1920?

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It is intriguing, and often maddening, to research an author or historical figure and discover that there’s very little material to be found. With today’s newspaper and genealogical databases, such lack of information is itself suspicious. Perhaps the person just didn’t want to be found, or spent his life trying to keep his name out of the newspapers. And there’s always the possibility that for practical or professional reasons our subject wrote mostly under pseudonyms, such as “Lewis Carroll” or “Ulick Varange.” (more…)

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Frederick Charles Ferdinand Weiss is one of the more elusive figures of the mid-twentieth-century American Right. The smudgy late-1940s snapshot I’ve scanned here — Fred on a Yorkville doorstep — and then duotoned in an attempt to make it presentable seems to be the only portrait available. That may be symbolic.

60 or more years ago, Fred sometimes popped up in Drew Pearson’s political-gossip columns, usually named alongside H. Keith Thompson and “Ulick Varange” (alias Francis Yockey or Frank Healy), in a purported triumvirate of intellectuals and activists affiliated with the new Socialist Reich Party (SRP) in West Germany in the early 1950s. (more…)

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Back in 1986, my friend Fritz Berg[1] was suddenly inspired to drive 100 miles north into Upstate New York — Fritz lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the George Washington Bridge — and drop in on William Gayley Simpson. (more…)

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The following is a commemoration for Willis A. Carto, who was born 97 years ago today.

For me, one of the great takeaways from the Willis Allison Carto Online Presidential Library is watching the conservative mainstream drift off into the distance while Mr. Carto basically stayed in the same place. Beginning in the mid-1950s and rolling through later correspondence is like standing in the middle of “Pangea” — the theoretical original single continent that all of Earth’s present continents were once part of — and watching plate tectonics gradually pull the various pieces away from the center. (more…)

Orwell’s passport photo from his time in Burma.

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When did Eric A. Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, lose his virginity? Most biographers haven’t wrestled much with this particular issue. But then came along John Sutherland, a retired academic who published an entertaining book called Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography back in 2016. (I briefly described this cute volume in a 2019 end-of-year Favorite Books wrap-up.)

John Sutherland, bless his soul, spends about half his book reconstructing the carnal history of E. A. Blair. (more…)

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The following is being published in commemoration of George Orwell’s 120th birthday on June 25.

George Orwell is one of those authors well worth stealing, as Orwell famously wrote of Charles Dickens. I am not the first person to start an essay like this. While rummaging through my memory files I recalled a cover piece in the January 1983 Harper’s, and 40 years later I am astounded to discover it begins almost exactly the same way. (more…)

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English original here

Le 25 décembre, jour de Noël, marque également l’anniversaire de l’un des penseurs les plus intransigeants et non-conformistes à avoir jamais traversé la scène politique américaine : Lawrence Dennis. De prime abord il y a déjà trois caractéristiques factuelles que tout le monde peut retenir au sujet de M. Dennis.

Premièrement : il était l’un des principaux théoriciens économiques et politiques de droite des années 1930 et 1940 — un fasciste américain si vous voulez. (more…)

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Huckleberry Finn’s father is such a towering, terrifying figure of American literature, it’s a wonder no one’s ever built a drama around him. Maybe we should put together a one-man show: Pap Finn Tonight!

Like that Mark Twain Tonight! entertainment that Hal Holbrook wrote when he was at Denison University in the 1940s — and then kept revising and reviving to moderately amused audiences . . .  for the next 70 years. (more…)

Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (Céline), 1915. From the collection of executor François Gibault.

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The following is part of Counter-Currents’ commemoration of Céline’s 129th birthday on May 27.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Ed. by Pascal Fouché
Foreword by François Gibault
Guerre
Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2022

I must have been lying there for much of the next night. The whole ear on the left was glued to the ground with blood, the mouth too. Between the two there was an immense noise. I fell asleep in this noise and then it rained a heavy rain. (more…)

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On April 10, 1955 — Easter Sunday — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin collapsed and died of a heart attack in a friend’s Manhattan apartment. He was 74 and had done nothing more strenuous that day than take a stroll through Central Park. (more…)

Robert Brasillach

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Editor’s Note: Today marks the 114th birthday of Robert Brasillach, the French journalist, novelist,  film historian, and man of the Right who was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad for “intellectual crimes” he was alleged to have committed as a German collaborator during the Second World War.  The following translation is offered as a commemoration, and links to other resources regarding Brasillach’s life and work are at the end. (more…)

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Michael Malice
The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil
Independently Published, 2022

What a joy to open this book and find that whatever the author’s White Pill is supposed to be, it somehow involves Ayn Rand (AR). It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971, by Jerome Tuccille) was the name of an actual book that came out when I was in my teens and going through my own brief Objectivist period. The book is a funny saga about the author’s time as a militant libertarian. (more…)