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Philip Sparrow Tells All
Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist
By Jeremy Mulderig The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30471-7
CHAPTER 1
The Victim's Viewpoint
On Sublimated Sadism; or, the Dentist as Iago
January 1944
Steward's debut as Philip Sparrow in the Illinois Dental Journal was prefaced by a note from the journal's editor, Dr. William P. Schoen, explaining that this essay was "the first in a series of articles executed by a nonprofessional writer" that would present readers of the journal with a "'worm's-eye view' of the dentist, the dental office, dental methods, etc." The constraints of this rhetorical situation rigidly predetermined Sparrow's identity (dental patient), subject (dentistry), and audience (dentists), but in this first essay Steward partially escaped these limitations by ignoring the journal's actual readership and writing about dentists rather than for them, thereby casting his dentist readers in the role of eavesdroppers as he hyperbolically condemns the "diabolic gleam in their eyes," their "ghoulish glee" and "foul deliberation," and, perhaps most startling during World War II, their "Gestapo technic of delayed execution."
The constraint that Steward could not escape in the first of his Illinois Dental Journal essays was his defined role as a dental patient, which left little room for developing Philip Sparrow's persona as the writer. Here Steward attempts to compensate for this restriction with an outrageous premise, witty language, and clever allusions, but the effect is a somewhat contrived, bookish feel, and Sparrow remains a shadowy entity, referring to himself only abstractly — and rather awkwardly — in the plural ("We have opened our mouth widely. ... We have worked ourself into a cold dribble."). Once Steward and Schoen had agreed to abandon the pretense of the dental patient, however, Steward would be free to create his distinctive version of the twentieth-century familiar essay by marrying his characteristic wit and allusiveness to a persona whose experiences and subjectivity become the focus of each piece.
Dentists are extraordinary, indeed.
There are some people of unjaundiced and unprejudiced eye who can admire in the digital dexterity of the dentist the same finger facility that marked a Rachmaninoff or a Paderewski; or who can perceive an aesthetic analogy between the delicate and torturing way a dentist plays on one's nerves and the smooth drawing of the bow across the strings that a Kreisler or a Heifetz is capable of; or profess to hear in the head-shuddering noise of a burr against an eyetooth the deep organ diapason of a Bach or a Pietro Yon. But we have never been able sufficiently to overcome our mundane emotions to appreciate such comparisons.
No, our associations are almost wholly literary and psychoanalytical, and after some thought on the matter we have come to a conclusion which we think is correct. And that is that every dentist has in him something of Iago.
All of us remember Shakespeare's archvillain, and the heinous way in which he tormented his master, Othello, and eventually brought destruction to all concerned. Why he did has long puzzled some of the best critical minds, who have described his conduct as being one of "motiveless malignity," and have said that he himself seemed not to know why he acted as he did. But lately a clever scholar discovered the reason, in Iago's soliloquy at the end of Act I. There, Iago says:
Let me see now:
To get his place and to plume up my will
In double knavery — How, how? — Let's see —
To plume up his will! Let us scan that for a moment. "To plume" in Elizabethan times meant to "heighten." And why should he have wanted to heighten his will? Because he was a man of superior intellect, and his position as mere ancient or servant-companion to Othello offended him; therefore, if he could do something devilish — involving a perilous intrigue — that would harm his master, his own sense of superiority would be heightened.
Why does a husband bully the wife and child he loves? Why are little short people so aggressive on street cars, squeezing between the standing rows of people with such belligerency as to knock one from one's feet? Why do policemen shout so loud and act such unreasonable stinkers when they give a ticket, or catch you on a sly U-turn? Why do nasty little boys pull wings off flies, or impale them on pins, or tie tin cans to dogs' tails? The answer to all these questions is very simple: such acts heighten their sense of superiority over their victims, and the sufferer's pain increases their own feeling of importance.
Freud and others say there is a bit of the sadist in each of us; and that such is all right provided it is sublimated. This seems in point, but the question is: do dentists sublimate their sadism?
We have opened our mouth widely for many of these torturers, from Maine to Montana, and we are ready to swear that on more than one occasion — as we have been approached, lying there helpless and trembling — we have seen a diabolic gleam in their eyes as they reached for their tools. There is one certain prober, doubtless invented by Beelzebub, which they use when they begin their preliminary surveying. It is shaped vaguely like a sophisticated corkscrew, and is evidently intended to search out the secret places of one's heart; we personally have felt it go even lower, and are sure it once left a scar on our right kidney. With what ghoulish glee they brandish this! Of course, all such minor manipulations pale when they begin to adjust the burr and prepare really to get down to work. There is a certain foul deliberation in the way in which they insert the thing, and lock it with a click. Then they hang the whole apparatus up, so that you may be given an exquisitely painful, sweating moment to see if the burr is small and round, or terrifyingly long with spikes on it. They watch you with a cold eye and a false smile on their faces, noting your every reaction, while pretending to say something innocuous about the weather. But you know what is in their warped minds: they are employing the Gestapo technic of delayed execution, and you are well aware they are playing with you as a cat worries a mouse. Then they begin — but let us draw a curtain over this painful scene; even in thinking of it we have worked ourself into a cold dribble.
Freud adds that the most successful surgeons — nay, even the most skillful carvers of turkey at a table — owe their repute to the fact that they have turned their love of slicing into useful channels.
But as for dentists — we know better! We know that they've never heard of sublimation and that they like their torture straight, and our gums bloody and raw. We feel this way because our appointment is on the books for next Thursday.
CHAPTER 2
On Cryptography
October 1944
When the United States entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Steward was already thirty-two and too old to be among the first draftees, but he nonetheless began to consider how he could contribute to the war effort. Having had a long-standing interest in cryptography, he decided to enroll in a correspondence course in cryptanalysis through the Army Cryptographic Center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, imagining that such training could be the foundation of a wartime role in army intelligence. "During several months," he wrote later, "I faithfully did all the lessons they sent me, and enjoyed working with all the wonderful devices that arrived by registered mail — enciphering machines and such like." In the spring semester of 1943, officials at Loyola University Chicago, where he had been teaching since 1936, agreed to let him offer a course in cryptanalysis, for which six students registered. One measure of Steward's classroom success may be the fact that all six enlisted in the military for cryptographic training when the course ended in June. "I was left — on the night of final exam — with a set of questions and an empty classroom." It was time for Steward himself to take another step.
By this time, though, he had changed his mind about pursuing a career in the army, drawn instead to the navy by its long-standing homosocial mythology — as well as by the appealing dark blue of the sailor's uniform. Steward enlisted on June 10, 1943, and was sent to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station north of Chicago, but his incapacitating food allergies — described in the Illinois Dental Journal essay "On Fifteen Years of Lent" — earned him a discharge within a week, and he returned to teaching at Loyola.
Like other early essays that Steward wrote for the Illinois Dental Journal as he began to develop his persona as Philip Sparrow, this one is witty but impersonal and draws on material that he had ready at hand. But with its roots in the cryptography course that he taught at Loyola, it also offers a window into his classroom manner. Steward's easy command of the subject, clarity of presentation, and playfully engaging tone all suggest the qualities that made him a popular teacher throughout his academic career.
When Lysander of Sparta, who lived in 405 BC, wanted to send to one of his generals a message not intended for prying eyes, he used one of two methods: if there were no great hurry, he shaved the head of a slave, wrote the communication on the fellow's pate, let the hair grow in, and started him on his way. Or if the message was urgent, he used a small round baton called a scytale, on which he wound in spiral fashion a soft leather belt, and then wrote his message along the length of the stick; when the belt was unwound it showed only a meaningless jumble of letters and fragments. But his generals had similar-sized batons, and it was simple for them by rewinding the belt to discover Lysander's orders. Suetonius, the Walter Winchell of ancient Rome, says that Julius Caesar used a secret cipher which consisted merely of shifting the alphabet by four spaces: thus, if Caesar wanted an a, he used an e, if a b an f, and so on. Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, is said to have written a running story of his life into several of Shakespeare's plays by means of a cipher; and the whole wild argument over the authorship of the plays began with that crackpot idea.
Ciphers and codes — which are classed under the general term of cryptography, or secret writing intended for the purpose of conveying information to but a few chosen people — seem to be the particular joy and necessity of kings, diplomats, tramps, lovers, thieves, generals, and schoolboys. Especially in wartime is it imperative that communications be secret, because it would play hob with one side's plans if the enemy immediately knew what movements were contemplated, and acted to stop them. Ciphers in the last war had a tremendous role, and actually accounted in large measure for the defeat of Germany; in the present struggle, only one small story has leaked out about them; but that story told us that it was through the efforts of the cryptanalytic department in Washington that Axis messages sent to Germany from Argentina were broken down, resulting in Secretary Hull's stern denunciation of Argentina. It will be many years before the story is completely revealed, and perhaps it will never be.
In wartime, then, it is only natural that there be a renewed interest in this fascinating and complicated science. This enthusiasm is rather curiously handled; by a tacit and coy agreement, libraries in the Chicagoland area have withdrawn all books on cryptography from their shelves for the duration; yet for one dollar one may buy, over the counter in any bookstore, a reprint of one of the best books on codes and ciphers — Fletcher Pratt'sSecret and Urgent. One sometimes wonders just how a librarian's mind functions.
In the layman's opinion, there is no distinction between the terms code and cipher, yet for the cryptographer they are miles apart. A code entails the use of a codebook, of which there must be many carefully guarded copies, on the field of battle, at the headquarters in the rear, and at the office of the general staff. Should a copy be lost, stolen, or photographed by the enemy, a whole new book must be composed, printed, and distributed. The codebooks that the battleships of our navy carry are bound in lead, and are the first things to be thrown overboard in case of disaster. In a codebook, groups of five letters are arranged alphabetically, although the meanings of the groups are not close together. Thus, a message such as AWKLM AWKLN might when deciphered mean: "Am arriving at [AWKLM] five a.m." [AWKLN]. The advantages of a codebook are several: economy, because one five-letter group may stand for a whole phrase; security, unless the book is stolen; and exactness in transmission.
Ciphers, on the other hand, are quite different. Here, each letter of the message to be sent is represented by another letter or character — or sometimes two or more letters represent only one letter of the plain-text message. They are of three kinds, the first of which is known as substitution. In a substitution cipher, some letter or character other than the one to be sent stands for the intended letter. The Julius Caesar cipher is one of these. For example, using a basic equivalent of A plain = D cipher, the word "Caesar" would be enciphered FDHVDU. There are hundreds of elaborations and complications that have been developed from this idea, the number of them limited only by the imagination and ingenuity of the inventors — and yet they are all easily solved. In every modern language, certain letters appear more often than others; in English, the order of descending frequency is E T A O N I S H R D L U. The cryptanalyst takes a frequency count, juggles a bit, and if he finds that in the secret message which he has intercepted the letter P occurs more times than any other, the chances are that it is the equivalent of the letter E.
A second type is transposition. In this, no substitution of the original letters is made: they themselves are used, but are scrambled in accordance with a plan previously agreed upon. The simplest form is something like this:
I L N I D N A J U N L
L I O S E T L O R A
— which the sender would transmit by horizontal lines: ILNID NAJUN LLIOS ETLOR A; it is called a "rail-fence" cipher. The varieties possible here are perhaps more endless than those of the substitution method; squares, rhomboids, trapezoids, geometrical patterns may be used; differing routes may be taken through the patterns; preestablished keywords may change from day to day, and so on. It may be said here, in passing, that there is no cipher which cannot be broken, if the cryptanalyst is given sufficient time and enough intercepted material to work upon. The only purpose of ciphers in wartime is to delay the enemy in his translation of the cipher until the information it contains is no longer of any value to him.
A third method is concealment; the Baconian cipher already mentioned may be regarded as this, because with it one can send a simple communication, a seemingly innocent discussion about friends or the weather, and have it carry a hidden meaning. Here, too, we get into the dark and mysterious world of Mata Hari, the world of the seductive and slinking spy and the espionage novel — with secret inks and formulae to write invisible messages on cigarette paper, or between the lines of open letters, or hidden — as in Marlene Dietrich's movie Dishonored — in the notes of a piano concerto. Although this is an extremely exciting branch of cryptography, it is never practiced on the battlefield, but only in back-of-the-line espionage; and the chemical division of G-2 is adequately equipped to handle such things.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Philip Sparrow Tells All by Jeremy Mulderig. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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