January 1935: An office of the U.S. Division of Investigation, Chicago.
During the scene we sometimes hear the commotion of a nearby elevator.
HOOVER behind the desk, dressed in a business suit.
He makes faces and clenches his fists and wrings his hands, screams and laughs and weeps—all silently.
HOOVER [into intercom]:…Blanche.
BLANCHE’S VOICE: Yes, sir.
HOOVER: Is he still in the anteroom?
BLANCHE’S VOICE: Yes. Mr. Purvis is standing in the anteroom.
HOOVER: What is he doing now?
BLANCHE’S VOICE: He’s—standing in the anteroom.
HOOVER: Have you got him by the window? Left side?
BLANCHE’S VOICE: No, sir.
HOOVER: No, sir?
BLANCHE’S VOICE: I told him to stand by the window, but he moved.
HOOVER: All right. [On phone] Hello.
I wish to place a person-to-person call—
Excuse me. Later. I’ll—goodbye…[Into intercom] Now, Blanche,
Who is ascending? I hear someone ascending.
That whirring again. That whir and thunk. I hear it.
BLANCHE’S VOICE: They went to another floor.
HOOVER: Quite right. All right.
Goodbye. [On phone] Hello. Hello. Person-to-person, please,
To the Hoover residence in Washington, D.C.
Temple six eight seven seven eight.
O—Mr. Hoover for Mrs. Hoover. Sorry.
…Mother, how are you?…Mother, put your mouth
Nearer the mouthpiece; that’s why they call it that.
Mother, I miss you…It’s cold, the rivers are frozen.
This wind will whirl you around and slap your face.
…O, I love you too…O, I miss you sorely.
How are you doing?…How are you doing, Mother?
How are the cats?…How are the cats? The—
How does Snooky Snooker snuggle without me?
O, that’s sweet!…He’s precious. So are you.
…Mother, I want your prayers today, especially
Today. Go on your knees, dear Mother, and pray
That I find the strength to go about my work.
…I know you do, I know you do, but now
As much as ever, Mother…Thank you.
…There isn’t any danger, Mother. I’m just—
…O, O, no no no. The telephone—
The telephone can’t hurt you…No no no,
Chicago telephones are harmless, too.
…All right, but never fear. And pray for me.
All right, all right—hello? Hello?—Goodbye.
[Leaps to his feet.]
…What’s this, my man—a hooligan’s switchblade knife?
But I am a servant of the law. And yet
I hold this blade, how sharp, and to what purpose?
Huuuuh! Hrrrrrrh! Haah! Hhm-hhm! Hrrraaggghhh!
They said you had a lot of guts! Quite so!
Let me introduce you to your bowels.
Here’s the large, and here the small intestine.
My! What have you been eating?—Eat it again!
Hah-HAH hrrr-hrrr HLLL HLLL haaghr AAH.
How do you look in this year’s very latest
Fashionable scarf, the tripe-of-traitor
From deep in the interiors of you?
There! Now I’m the man who collared Purvis!
You’re trembling, trembling, let me snug your cravat.
How you blush! Too much? O no, I mustn’t
Strangle you, no. No, you’re going to spend
Seven long days begging to be strangled!
HAAARGH HUUUH huh huh huh huh huh…
[Resumes his seat.]
…Send him in…Hhhhrrrr. Hrrrrhh. Hrrrh. Hrrrh. Hrrrh.
[MELVIN PURVIS enters.]
Here’s our man, “the man of the hour”! Sit.
PURVIS: Welcome to Chicago, sir.
HOOVER: Director.
PURVIS: Welcome to Chicago, Director.
HOOVER: Hoover.
Director Hoover.
PURVIS: Welcome to Chicago—
HOOVER: Title and name, Special Agent Purvis.
PURVIS: Welcome to Chi—
HOOVER: Thought I’d better see
Firsthand how things are done in the Windy City.
PURVIS: Well, you’re most—
HOOVER: The city of the big shoulders,
Hacker and stacker and mover of meats, O bold
Encaser of meats, Special Agent Purvis.
Special Agent Purvis: title—
PURVIS: and name,
Yes, sir—or, yes, Director Hoo—
HOOVER: Quite so.
Marvin, are you hungry? You look hungry.
PURVIS: I believe we’re going to lunch? Or am I wrong.
HOOVER: Hark! Our luncheon rises in its cage.
[To intercom] Is that for us, Blanche?—Lunch is on the way.
[Two box lunches arrive. Meanwhile:]
…Well. Quite a year. Quite a half-year—
Five months, more like, what hey? Three villains down.
Dillinger, Baby Face, and Pretty Boy.
PURVIS: I wouldn’t flatter them with monickers.
Or even names. Nor shrines. Nor histories.
Not even so much as markers on their graves.
HOOVER: What, then?
PURVIS: Urinals.
HOOVER: —Good, Midwestern milk:
Here’s to “the man who collared Dillinger”!
…But we aren’t cowboys, are we, sir? Or clowns?
We can’t be turning handsprings, courting headlines.
PURVIS: An officer charges foremost into the fray.
He can’t lead from behind.
HOOVER: What luscious ham!
—May I call you Marvin?
PURVIS: My name’s Melvin.
HOOVER: I see. Melvin. Melvin. Melvin’s rather…
Swiss cheese, mustard—milk all right?
PURVIS: Yes, Director Hoover.
HOOVER: Call me…
PURVIS: Edgar?…John?
HOOVER: Director Hoover will do.
[They address their meals. Neither actually succeeds in eating anything. Meanwhile:]
…What do you make of this Adolf Hitler fellow?
PURVIS: He seems a volatile ingredient.
HOOVER: Still and all, don’t you think he trains
His mind with clarity on all the truly
Modern problems? On the subjugation
Of growing populations, one might say
On swollen populations—one might say
Tumescent throbbing citizenries?
They must be kept in hand, but ever so gently.
We can’t accomplish this by deadly force
Of arms. A zealous subtlety is wanted,
Vigilance, subtlety, creativity.
PURVIS: He strikes me as a dangerous maniac.
HOOVER:…Marvin—Melvin? Marvin? Marvin—Melvin,
Help me, please.
PURVIS: Of course, Director Hoover.
HOOVER: I’m composing a letter of termination.
PURVIS: Termination? Do you refer to a death?
HOOVER: I don’t. I mean the ending of employment.
…We moderns author a language suited to
Our work: the work of faceless entities.
The modern age boils slowly forward on
The inauspicious labors of a multitude,
Comings and goings, routes and dates and times,
Bits and pieces, instruments and engines,
A monstrous undergrowth of pipes and wires,
And, Marvin, what do you suppose prevents
The behemoth from strangling on itself?
Order: tables, lists, charts, graphs,
Indices, appendices,
Inventories, catalogues.
And who shall keep these treasures holy?
The men of the bureaus; we, the Bureaucrats!
We who stalk our shadows in the halls,
We who strum the blades of pages with
The ridges of our fingerprints. In battle
We unsheath the alphabet and drive deep
The Dewey decimal. Quite right—small stuff.
Yet we accomplish in the aggregate
What Hercules and Theseus would’ve—
Theseus married, as I think you know,
The queen of the Amazons. I shall never marry.
I am wife and husband to this work.
Bureaucrat. The word makes music.
I am having our branch redesignated:
No more “Division of Investigation.”
Is this a division?—Are we, then, dividers?
No! Bureau is the French for “desk”:
Our steed, our tank, our Howitzer.
Our battleship! Dreadnought! Gunboat! Bastard schooner!
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Yes. A bureau. We’ll be Bureaucrats!
PURVIS: Like Jason and the Argonauts.
HOOVER: Somewhat.
PURVIS: Hoover and the Bureaucrats.
HOOVER: Just so.
[He gathers both their meals together, and lunch is over.]
…I am holding in my mind the text
Of a lacerating letter to demand
The resignation of a renegade.
Demand, did I say? No. I shall command.
I’ll reduce our Mr.—“P”—to pabulum.
But, sir, whereas I taste the very words
Like blood on my tongue, I can’t quite redden the page.
O, would you help?
I want somehow to remonstrate and also
Devastate, you see. He must be wounded.
He’s grown to quite the prideful peacock,
Fanning and strutting and shimmying, grinding
Under his spurs the faces of his betters.
He’s slimy with adulation. It’s ungrateful.
—There’s the crux, he’s just ungrateful, there
You have its full and quivering extent.
PURVIS: You ask me to help you phrase
The letter of my so-called termination?
HOOVER: I’ll settle for a writ of resignation.
PURVIS: You won’t get one. Fire me. Put it on paper
Above your name for all the world to see.
HOOVER:…Perhaps I spoke too vigorously just now.
The hurt of having been outshone, you see,
The piercing of a beneficiary’s
Ingratitude, you see—that corkscrew works
Deeper and deeper—you see.
PURVIS: How can I not?
HOOVER: Vigor of tongue is for the politician.
We are the new, soft, strong, gray men, in whom
A kind of soapy equanimity
Is not entirely uncalled for.
The proper bureaucrat must keep
Alert but noncommittal.
PURVIS: Like a dog.
HOOVER:…Have you visited the pyramids of Egypt?
—But you’ve seen photos. We could raise a hundred
In twenty months. A pyramid was called
“The place where men are turned to gods.”
…How do you find Chicago, Agent Purvis?
Isn’t winter like a thousand razors?
PURVIS: It’s still autumn.
HOOVER: And down near zero!
A million miles from sunny Carolina.
[Sings] I’d walk a million miles
For one of your smiles—
PURVIS: And just last month we had a solid week
Of days that broke a hundred.
HOOVER: Brutal stuff!—
Brutal.
PURVIS: I can’t tell you what it is,
But think of all the killers bred from here:
The Daltons; Frank and Jesse James;
HOOVER: The Youngers;
PURVIS: Johnny Ringo,
HOOVER: Ringo, really—
Wyatt Earp grew up in Pella, Iowa,
As I remember reading—
PURVIS: Yes, quite right,
And Katie Elder came from Davenport.
HOOVER: The vagaries of climate—
PURVIS: Or the diet,
All this dust, the hopeless distances,
HOOVER: The vertigo of horizontal vastness—
PURVIS: The sweet, mild Carolinas don’t conduce
This bloody tommy-gun-style criminal
Deportment. The hypnotic wheat
Of Kansas, Illinois, that’s where these boys
Rise out of, and they’re mean. They come for blood
With the innocence of sucklings. Charles A. Floyd
Hardly blinked, so say the witnesses,
When he and his accomplices gunned down
Four noble cops, including one of ours,
That day at the Kansas City station.
Killing suited him.
HOOVER: Well, killing’s what you gave him.
PURVIS: Charles A. Floyd was struck down in the throes
Of violent resistance to arrest.
The same for Gillis—alias Baby Face—
The same for Dillinger.
HOOVER: Alias Jimmy Lawrence.
PURVIS: That is not an alias known to me.
HOOVER: I was a guest at City Hall last week.
Had my photo snapped with Mayor Kelly;
And he—that is, the mayor—raised the name
Of Michael Green, the officer on hand
With you when Dillinger was shot. Mike Green? Chicago cop?
PURVIS: I think it rings a bell.
HOOVER: O, you hear a bell ring, do you, Purvis?
Officer Green, in turn, has raised the name
Of Jimmy Lawrence—ding dong!—Jimmy Lawrence?
PURVIS: I repeat: The name is not familiar.
HOOVER:…All day long I gaze at the faces of liars,
And to my practiced eye the difference
Between your face and that of a liar is vast,
So vast I might be staring into the face
Of Boris Karloff playing Frankenstein,
That’s how monstrously rare a face you have.
It’s not the face of a liar. I believe the name
Of Jimmy Lawrence is not familiar to you.
PURVIS: Will you tell me who he is?
HOOVER: You’re not a liar, unless, perhaps,
You work a self-deception practically
Hallucinatory in its intensity.
PURVIS: I see you launched on your bureaucratic
Argosy and I no longer view
Your world as one in which I’m possible.
HOOVER: Hero, what do you accuse me of?
Cowardice, no—effeminacy?—what?
PURVIS: I don’t. I’ve cast no implication here.
HOOVER: The room is ripe with it. A cloying, rotten
Honey. I can’t breathe. Where’s a breath?
PURVIS:…Never let it be known
Outside this room I spoke this way;
But you are false, sir. What you do is a falsehood.
You are a lie. I want you to understand
I’ve lived. You never will. I’ll die.
You’ll neither live nor die. You’ll simply
Fade as the truth comes out.
…I can’t say what I’ve fought to save,
The right things, the good things, the people who hope for them,
But I know what I’ve fought against,
I’ve seen it animate
The heart of a gangster with seventeen bullets in him,
And I didn’t come here
To knuckle under to its latest guise.
You are the Dark, the Death.
HOOVER: You want to call me
Devil—but sophistication robs you
Of a name for me and leaves you stammering.
You’re so mundane, you’re so unworthy, so
Ignoble in your vision, so one-eyed.
Don’t you see that we shall minister for gods
That we create? We’ll don the heads of beasts
And speak with new tongues, dancing in the smoke
Of sacrificial fires!—while outside
The glowing pyramid the multitude
Feels the pull and trembles and bows down.
I curse you, sir. I raise you high above
The flames and break your body!
Silhouetted in a purple light,
To the rhythms of a sexual, melting jazz
Composed in an exotic scale,
HOOVER enacts a private rite, making
Supplication to the numina
Who animate his trembling desires.
PURVIS looks on, utterly motionless.
And while the light transforms itself around him,
He, despite the onslaught of these powers,
Undergoes, himself, no transformation.
BLACKOUT