Episoder
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On April 8th, 1943 Otto and Elise Hampel, a working class couple from Berlin, are guillotined for leaving hundreds of postcards containing anti-Nazi messages in public places throughout the city. They, and their small everyday acts of futile resistance, are in many ways the opposite of Hans Fallada who continues to do just enough to appease the Nazi’s in order to survive under their regime. If anything he sees the Hampel’s deaths as proof that his capitulations to Nazi demands were the right course. But after the Third Reich falls and Fallada is forced to try to survive in bombed-out Berlin without money or food and with a new wife (who is also hopelessly addicted to morphine) it's the Hampels’ story that he turns to to write the first novel about domestic resistance to the Nazi’s. He writes the 550 page novel in 24 days. It’s an absolute masterpiece, and it kills him…
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Fallada hunkers down on his farm where he plans to wait out the war writing and tending to his vegetable garden in sobriety. But the bomber jets buzzing overhead and the Nazi censors who only allow him to publish idyllic “memoirs” of his country life prove too much for him. He retreats to the bottle and descends into an alcoholic madness in which he brandishes a gun at his now ex-wife Suze. The incident lands him in a Nazi psychiatric hospital which he chronicles in a novel entitled The Drinker. He also writes a memoir about his life in the Third Reich with the belief that both the war and the nightmare he’s been living in since the Nazi’s took power will soon be over. He’s right about the first part, but not the second…
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Manglende episoder?
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In 1932 Hans Fallada releases his big hit, Little Man, What Now? a somewhat autobiographical novel about a young middle-class family trying to survive in an age of mass unemployment and hyperinflation. As The novel can be read as an indictment of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi’s spare it when they take power and begin mass book burnings in April 1933. But to stay in print Fallada agrees to change the novel’s highly unsympathetic Nazi character into a “footballer.” In his next novel, Once a Jailbird, he bends to pressure to write a forward saying that the inhumane justice system described in the novel is now, thankfully, a thing of the past - thanks to the Nazi’s. Doubly ironic because at the time he writes this forward, he’s already been a Nazi prisoner and will most definitely be one again…
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After spending less than two years in a posh sanatorium as punishment for the death of his friend, Fallada is released. Though he has few skills apart from writing and a murder charge on his record, the beginning of WWI means that there’s plenty of work for those who stay home. Fallada gets a job in an agricultural estate where he becomes an expert at working with tubers. He also works hard to become an expert cognac drinker, solicitor of sex and morphine user. These things cost money and in order to finance his budding addictions he steals from the estate and ends up in jail. Then he gets out, steals again and goes back. The discipline and routine of prison is good for Hans and he spends his years of incarceration honing his writing skills…
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Early morning October 17, 1911. Two teenagers climb a hill outside of Leipzig, Germany with the intention of killing each other in a duel. Rudolph Ditzen fires his gun and hits his mark but his friend Hans misses. Ditzen turns the gun on himself but survives and stumbles down the hill covered in blood. Years later Rudolph Ditzen will publish his first novel under the pseudonym Hans Fallada. By then he’d already killed a man, attempted to kill himself a number of times and been institutionalized nearly as many. His new name will go on to acquire just as much ignominy as the old one: multiple jail stints for theft and embezzlement, another attempted murder charge, and constant visits to sanatoriums for alcohol and morphine addiction. But Hans Fallada will also be responsible for publishing some of the greatest novels about life in Germany before, during and after the Second World War.
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In 2019 the Leicester City Council granted preliminary approval to place a statue of Joe Orton in the city’s cultural quarter. With the help of celebrities such as Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry and Alec Baldwin, the Joe Orton Statue Appeal raised over ₤100,000 in a short time. But in 2020 statues of problematic historical figures were toppled throughout England and Leicester found itself embroiled in a controversy over whether or not to remove a statue of accused racist, and sexual predator Mahatma Gandhi. The Gandhi statue was spared, but when word got out that Joe Orton was a sex tourist who made several trips to Morocco to sleep with pubescent boys, a debate erupted in the Leicester City Council. In this final episode of Season 2 we report what’s going on in Leicester and contemplate the question: Must one have been ethically pure to be publicly commemorated in metal or stone?
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The story doesn’t end with Joe and Kenneth’s deaths. In fact, the most shocking part comes here: Joe Orton was a pederast. Despite the fact that Orton’s story has been told numerous times in a biography, documentaries and a biopic, and that the diaries are chockfull of what today would be called the sexual exploitation or assault of pubescent boys, this aspect of his life has always been obscured. Until now…Listener discretion is advised.
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Kenneth Halliwell’s mental health is deteriorating. After he and Joe return from Tangier in July of 67, a producer friend of Joe’s calls Kenneth a “middle-aged nonentity” to his face. This stings particularly because after failing as an actor, a writer and finally as a collage artist, Kenneth can’t really deny it. His value, he believes, is in his contributions to Joe’s career, but he’s felt for some time now that he’s losing Joe. And that’s not something he’ll be able to stand. On August 9th, 1967, in a desperate effort to ensure that Joe never leaves him, Kenneth uses a hammer to bludgeon Joe to death before swallowing a fistful of pills…
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In December 1966, Joe Orton begins keeping a diary that he maintains for the final eight months of his life. Along with plenty of cottaging in public lavatories the diaries chronicle the death of his mother, the success of Loot, and the writing of both a film for the Beatles and his final masterpiece, What the Butler Saw. They also cover his sex tourism trips to North Africa and the breakdown of his relationship with Kenneth Halliwell. At one point in while Tangier, feeling great about his fame, his pocketbook and his sex life, Orton worries that he and Kenneth will soon be struck down by some disaster because they are, perhaps, too happy…
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Beginning in 1964, conservative England is shocked and outraged by Joe Orton’s work. In his radio play The Ruffian on the Stair and then in his stage plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot, Orton attacks church, state and family and taunts his enemies by putting sexual ambiguous characters on stage. For some of the first times ever, gays in the theater can’’t be stereotyped as effeminate queens or tragic cases. And while this brings Joe more hatred and censorship from the right, another group of people, namely those who’re putting the swing into swinging London and leading England through a cultural revolution, absolutely adore him. Orton sells the screen rights to Loot for a near record-breaking £100,000 and 1967 begins with Joe Orton on top of the world…
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At his local library branch Joe Orton is enraged to find out that they don’t have a copy of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In retaliation for this grave injustice he and Kenneth Halliwell begin a multi-year campaign of stealing books from the library, artfully doctoring them, then smuggling them back to their rightful places on the shelves. Eventually the police and the local law clerk deploy undercover agents and a sting operation in order to entrap them and Joe and Ken are sentenced to 6-month in jail. Ostensibly, its for their crimes against the library but really, as Joe puts it, “it was because we were queers.” While inside, Orton is finally separated from Halliwell and from any remaining desire to fit in. The result is liberating, particularly to his writing...
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By 1953 Orton and Halliwell are both realizing they don’t have what it takes to make it as actors, but no matter, Halliwell is going to be a famous novelist and Joe, the less-educated and cultivated of the two, well, he’s going to be Kenneth’s secretary. In time though, Joe recognizes his own passion and talent for writing and the two men start writing collaboratively, determined to make it big. Shunning society and material comfort they spend the better part of a decade locked in their bedsit writing and living off rice, sardines and golden syrup. By decade’s end they’ve written a handful of novels and plays all of which have been promptly turned down by publishers. The men not only feel rejected, they feel angry. And they’re going to do something about it…
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One morning in 1949 Kenneth Halliwell comes downstairs for breakfast and finds his father’s dead body awkwardly protruding from the stove. He turns off the gas, then steps over the body to boil water for tea. When he finishes his tea, he shaves and calls the neighbors to report his father’s suicide. Nearly two decades later, when Joe Orton’s mother dies, his response is to pick up an Irish laborer and screw him in a derelict house. Joe and Kenneth have different ways of coping with their parents' deaths, but as young men growing up in dreary industrial England, they both have the same dream: before either considers writing, they’re both convinced that they belong on the stage. In 1951 they buy one-way tickets to London and begin a journey that will fail to bring them any success as actors but that will lead them to each other. Episode 1 chronicles the bleak childhoods that shape the pair inspiring one of them to become the most iconoclastic English dramatist of the 1960s, and the other to become a murderer…
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A Village voice exposé denounces Kosinski for using ghostwriters and casts aspersions on his entire literary career. Nine years later Jerzy Kosinski is a broken man. His writing career is over; he’s managed to write only one novel which was unanimously panned. One night after going to the movies, he drowns himself in his bathtub. Across town, Mailer’s easing into the role of one of the aging titans of American letters. One of Mailer’s many mistresses publishes a tell-all memoir that includes the claim made by a number of people who knew him well: that the most manly, heterosexual man in America was actually bi-sexual. But he manages to live into old age and die peacefully before the book’s release, avoiding the issue and also avoiding any reckoning for stabbing his wife and for all the other horrible shit he said and did.
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On July 9th, 1981 Jack Henry Abbott, Norman Mailer and Jerzy Kosinki get together at an expensive Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village to celebrate the imminent release of Abbot’s book. A week later Richard Adan is dead and Kosinksi and Mailer have a choice to make: Stand by Abbott or throw him under the bus? Mailer endures the negative publicity and supports his friend while Kosinski turns on both Abbott and the political Left. In doing so, he makes powerful enemies who will begin looking into the whispers that he’s used ghostwriters, plagiarized some of his novels and lied about his childhood. Their findings will destroy his career, and eventually, his life...
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If you’ve made it to Episode 8 and part of you still likes Mailer and/or Kosinski, that’ll change with this episode. Jerzy Kosinski admits to having committed rape when he was a young man in Poland, and his adult behavior is just as horrific. As for Norman Mailer, he takes it upon himself to try to save the patriarchy from Second-wave feminism by attacking Kate Millet in The Prisoner of Sex and then at the so-called “Town Bloody Hall” by championing misogyny and homophobia. Needless to say, he makes a complete fool of himself and is absolutely owned by Germaine Greer, Susan Sontag, and Cynthia Ozick among others.
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Mailer’s violent ways continue both off and on the page. He fictionalizes the stabbing of his wife in an absurd, grotesque little novel aptly titled An American Dream. Not to be outdone, Jerzy Kosinki and his finest ghostwriter get to work on an even more grotesque little novel called Steps which will win him the National Book Award for fiction in 1969. That year's non-fiction winner is our guy Norman Mailer with his book The Armies of the Night about the Anti-war movement and his experience getting arrested at the March on the Pentagon. When he’s not getting arrested, Mailer’s now making movies. One devolves into a porno, another ends in Mailer getting nailed in the head with a hammer by Rip Torn.
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After spending the 1950s trying to follow up The Naked and the Dead with another hit, Mailer writes two poorly-received novels and mostly spends the decade getting stoned, drunk, angry and delusional. By 1960 he’s so far gone that he decides to run for Mayor of New York City. To celebrate his decision he throws a party that begins with him announcing his candidacy and ends with him stabbing his wife Adele in the chest with a rusty penknife, puncturing her pericardial sac and missing her heart by a matter of millimeters. Aside from a couple-week stay in the Bellevue Psych ward, the great white American writer receives no punishment for nearly murdering his wife and his career continues with hardly any blemish.
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In fall of 1965 a book called The Painted Bird is published and begins to make waves across the literary world. It’s the story of a boy separated from his parents for six years during WW2. It follows him while he wanders the Polish countryside witnessing and enduring unimaginably sadistic torture and abuse. And as if the plot weren’t shocking enough, it’s made all the more sensational by the fact that it’s true! Yes, the author, a man named Jerzy Kosinski, managed to live to tell the tale. He’s compared to Anne Frank, his book is held up as one of the most important works of holocaust literature, and his life story is one of the most remarkable ever told! But...well, it’s all bullshit. Kosinski was never separated from his parents. Almost none of the events in the novel actually happened, and on top of that, he didn’t even write the book by himself.
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After defecting from Poland Jerzy Kosinski gets to work trying to make a name for himself in the States. He starts telling some incredibly tall tales about his childhood during the war and somehow manages to publish a few non-fiction books in English despite the fact that his grasp on the language is tentative, at best. In order to write his great book, Mailer sails across the Pacific to fight in World War 2. Well, he does a bit of fighting; mostly he makes pork and beans. But eventually he gathers enough material to sit down and write what he believes will be the war’s great novel, The Naked and the Dead. Whether or not he succeeds is up for debate, but he is definitely successful in teaching the world the word “fug.”
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