JIMMY. BERLIN. SUMMER 1930
Another trip to Europe, another pause from the whirlwind of his marriage. Jimmy and Kay had long ago given up trying to maintain any pretense of happiness, balance, or normalcy. Even hope seemed a stretch at this point. At best, the tenuous status quo might last another year, or ten, until it snapped. Although he missed his daughters—and yes, his wife—Jimmy now depended on travel for reflection, reading, and refuge.
Wilhelm Kissel, the de facto chairman of Daimler-Benz, and Wilhelm Haspel, the head of the company’s business department, had invited Jimmy to a cabaret in Berlin. Haspels Frau ist Jüdin, the letter from Stuttgart had explained. “Haspel’s wife is Jewish.” As if to say, we’re all family, with a friendly Weimar wink.
A dank, crowded theater in the sweaty basement of a brick building in the red-light district. Panels of maroon-and-black cloth draped the walls and stage. Well-heeled businessmen, prostitutes, and a few Hitler-Jugend with their swastika armbands crowded the tiny tables, whistling and catcalling as heavily made-up, half-naked whores, homosexual hustlers, transvestites, and sadomasochists gyrated and pivoted, singing paeans to political dysfunction and social decay and acting out skits that glorified lust, dominance, and homicide. They mocked Paul von Hindenburg, the president of the republic, as a doddering stuffed shirt. They ignited and threw into the air fistfuls of paper money. In Jimmy’s estimation the musicianship, singing, and dancing were semiprofessional at best. It all seemed a depraved parody of recent New York culture—risqué innuendo, kickline dancing, jazz.
“Some call it moral laxity,” Haspel half apologized. “Others call it emancipation.”
“And the authorities?” asked Jimmy. “What do they call it?”
“That gentleman over there,” Kissel pointed at an obese man who puffed on a cigar and blew clouds of smoke into the air while fondling the adolescent girl on his lap—or was it a boy in lipstick?—“that is the chief of police. Of course we have laws against lewdness,” he added as the waiter refilled their brandy snifters. “But who is going to enforce them? In the current social climate, such a person would be considered a Spielverderber”—a party-pooper—“and would rapidly be voted out of office. Germany is a democracy. We prize self-expression.”
When they tottered down to the avenue to hail a taxi at two in the morning, the city was still buzzing. Jimmy observed posters slapped on stone walls that advocated for National Socialism, Communism, and other apocalyptic remedies. He saw adolescent boys and girls in garish makeup selling pleasure on street corners. A group of thugs kicked a man to a quivering pulp while others passed, apparently unconcerned. “Shouldn’t we get this man to a hospital?” asked Jimmy, horrified.
“Don’t even try. You would be killed,” Haspel warned him. “I shall put a call in to the hospital when I arrive home. Of course,” he added nonchalantly, “he will be dead by then.”
“Perhaps now you understand Herr Hitler’s message,” Kissel slurred as a cab pulled to the curb and they climbed in. “His fight is against degeneracy. He names the perpetrators. His purpose is to exhume the German will.”
Jimmy thought his logic confused, considering that they had just partied away their evening in a cavern of sexual exhibitionism.
Another night, Jimmy traveled to central Berlin to hear Hitler address a rally. The ceremonies began with a parade, which wound to a stop in the Alexanderplatz. As a brass band blew patriotic hymns, Hitler’s uniformed soldiers lined up in rows under the flickering light of tall torches. All beautifully choreographed and lit: an answer to chaos and darkness.
Hitler began speaking. At first he sounded reasonable. Little by little emotion inflected his voice, carrying his vast audience up with him as if on a Messerschmitt fighter cruising toward a golden sunrise. The individual words did not matter so much as the overall message of purpose, resolve, and hope. But as Hitler’s delivery grew impassioned, his tone rising all the way into high-yelp territory, Jimmy found himself dangling from a Made-in-USA parachute, floating back to earth.
Jimmy deplored the Austrian’s demagogic style but, as he wrote to his father during the return cruise, still thought it prudent to accord Herr Hitler the benefit of the doubt. He agreed with Hitler on many points, after all, particularly in his skepticism about religion and his embrace of science. Recent findings of physical anthropologists, applying the objective measurements of craniometry and phrenology, proved that multiple races did indeed exist and displayed distinct characteristics. Hitler’s rhetorical emphasis on the “hierarchical analysis of race” might well prove to be an electoral ploy rather than a rigid doctrine.
Nor was Hitler’s professed hatred of capitalism an innovation. European priests and ministers had railed against usury and its practitioners—bankers—for centuries. Hitler’s desire to eliminate Jews had taken root in this long-fertilized soil. Fancying himself a skilled surgeon of modern statecraft, he sought to excise the parasite race for the good of Germany and the world.
If Adolph Hitler was anything like other politicians, Jimmy reasoned, he would eventually reveal himself to be susceptible to negotiation. All politicians balanced on the shaky stilts of cheap ideology and public naïveté. Their Achilles’ heel was and always would remain their need for a financial footing.
During the return crossing, Jimmy made the acquaintance of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. They met at a backgammon table during a storm. The two men played to win and shared a passion for books. Relaxing over cigars and cognac, they discussed Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, international finance, the upcoming presidential election, and of course Hitler. Knopf had seen Fine and Dandy and thought it fresh and delightful.
Within days, their rapport resulted in an informal agreement. Paul James would pen a book of poetry for Knopf. In a letter to Kay he described the meeting and his plans for the collection. The tone would be less solemn than his previous published efforts. That old seriousness had reflected the self-importance of youth. But these new poems would not be shallow, either. They would blend intimacy with irony. He spent so much of his time traveling these days, and pouring his heart into letters like this one, which he sealed with wax. Thus, he decided, he would call the volume Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax, in a nod to the shape and substance of his life.
Kay sat at her desk, and picked up her Dunhill pen. “Dearest Jimmy,” she wrote,
You saw Herr Hitler! What a spectacle you describe.
And now, on the return cruise, you’re playing backgammon with Alfred Knopf, who wants to publish your poems. Not the poems you once wrote, bursting with romance and bluster, but verse that’s more playful, less high-toned. I suppose we’ve both learned a thing or two from our Georges, Kaufman and Gershwin. You’re well on the way to realizing your dreams, Jimmy.
Do you remember when our marriage was a dream? I do. You were in Washington and I in New York, and the thought that we would soon be sharing our lives seemed too wonderful to be entirely true.
Which I suppose it was.
I’m so happy for you.
Love,
Kay