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Volume CXXXI, Number 23 |
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Flipping out and fearing the whole world
LUDWIG RANG
COLUMNIST
On my visit to FDR's home at Hyde Park, made to impress the "good
guys" at the CIA, I thought I was being "shadowed" by a
man I took to be a psychiatrist, charged with "assessing" his
assigned subject as to its sanity.
That's how far I was gone. It never occurred to me that
in order for this to be so, they would have had to know in advance that
I was going to make this trip, and to have read my mind as to its purpose.
That is how someone's mind works who due to paranoid symptoms aggravated
by megalomaniac delusions has moments when he thinks he's at the center
of a "spy case" with political ramifications.
In such moments I really thought the time had come for me
to "come out of the cold" and give the "good guys"
some signal that I was about to do so.
It was the same sick frame of mind that made me suspect that nice Ursula,
my personal assistant at A.K. Peters Company, was "in the pay"
of the FBI (and to make a play for her in order to convince them that
I didn't suspect this).
Such delusions at times took on an amusing character.
When going to lunch one day, I noticed a Mercedes limousine
parked outside the entrance of the Pan-Am building, with a uniformed chauffeur
waiting by the open door, presumably for the executive of some company
with offices in the building, in an obsequious attitude.
I was so far gone as to imagine in a moment of vainglorious
delusion that in reality he was waiting for me, and that if I dared step
into the waiting car I would be driven straight to CIA headquarters at
Langley, Virginia.
Thank God I didn't, for I'd probably have been taken straight to the "loony
bin" at Bellevue Hospital instead.
However, a few weeks later I did something almost equally
as stupid. Having convinced myself that the time for coming in out of
the cold wasn't ripe yet, I threw up my job to head for the wintry hills
of Vermont where my Bowdoin Big Brother Bill Beckett was living. Married
with one son, Bill was teaching philosophy at the University of Vermont
in Burlington. Though willing to put his Little Brother up for a few days,
he suggested I get a job, if intending to stay, and to try and find living
quarters locally.
Bill even arranged for an interview with the head of the
German department, but the fellow must have been puzzled by my slightly
strange behaviour, probably due to my feeling that he too perhaps wasn't
entirely to be trusted. In any case, though subsequently to do so on several
occasions, I have always intensely disliked teaching my native language.
Finally a temporary job was found for me answering telephones
in the University Hospital's ambulance department, with a battery of them
ringing all at once most of the time, a job that would have driven me
crazy, if I hadn't been (just a little) already.
In this hellish job I lasted exactly two weeks, before throwing
it up too. In the evenings I would hang out in the student union, "observing"
people and making notes, or writing letters, among others to Bill Whiteside,
my former history professor at Bowdoin, trying to enlist his help.
Weekends I would spend with Bill and Nancy, increasingly
worried by my strange behaviour, yet unable to offer any help beyond gentle
suggestions as to perhaps consulting a doctor. This I actually consented
to do, but must have worried him too when attributing noises in the radiators
in my rented room, causing me sleeplessness, to "machinations"
by the FBI. Fortunately the time wasn't far off when my paternal friend
the British Colonel was due to meet me in Boston, on his way back to England
from a stay for his health's sake in Arizona. Everything now, I was convinced,
depended on "Uncle Jack."
So I bid Bill and Nancy goodbye, telling them I had booked
on the same flight to London witH the Colonel and his wife. Little did
I know I would not be returning to my quasi-adopted country for more than
thirty years; until last September, in fact, for a two-week trip through
New England culminating with a memorable visit to Bowdoin.
The Colonel's son, studying at Fletcher school of Diplomacy
(and currently UK Ambassador in Jakarta), arranged for me to have a long
chat with his Dad in the comfort and security of Boston's University Club,
while he took his Mom to see A Man for All Seasons, a film about Thomas
More, with Paul Schofield.
When I'd finished my long and involved tale of "surveillance"
by the FBI, and my cat-and-mouse game in order to make them think I was
really an important "case," and thus possibly a "factor"
in the past presidential campaign, Jack turned to me and said, with an
air of admiration tinged with disbelief, "Well, Ludy, I suppose you're
a public figure now."
But the minute he said that I knew it wasn't true.
Next day at Logan Airport I boarded the same plane as he
and his wife, only that Jack and Barbara sat in First Class, I in Tourist.
During the long flight back to London he would now and then come back
to talk to me.
On arrival at Heathrow, however, I was shocked to see my paternal friend,
tall and slim still, being taken off the plane in a wheelchair. It was
the last time I saw Jack, who was to die of a heart attack suffered in
his sleep four weeks later.