Clancy Sigal’s fourth novel centers on expatriate Gus Black, a freethinker who moves to England in search of a new life. He absorbs the native culture by plunging into its dark corners. Amid the upheavals, he lands a job at Vogue, consorting with models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, and commences a passionate affair with Rose O’Malley, a brilliant writer loosely based on Sigal’s real-life lover Doris Lessing.
Set in the swinging London of the fifties and sixties, The Secret Defector is a portrait of an American on the loose striving to define himself against an alien yet oddly familiar culture. Sigal’s frequent themes of the working class, the counterculture, and Marxism are in evidence, as is his self-deprecating wit. This quasi-autobiographical novel takes Clancy’s trademark energy to confront the decline of the left and the rise of feminism.
Clancy Sigal’s fourth novel centers on expatriate Gus Black, a freethinker who moves to England in search of a new life. He absorbs the native culture by plunging into its dark corners. Amid the upheavals, he lands a job at Vogue, consorting with models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, and commences a passionate affair with Rose O’Malley, a brilliant writer loosely based on Sigal’s real-life lover Doris Lessing.
Set in the swinging London of the fifties and sixties, The Secret Defector is a portrait of an American on the loose striving to define himself against an alien yet oddly familiar culture. Sigal’s frequent themes of the working class, the counterculture, and Marxism are in evidence, as is his self-deprecating wit. This quasi-autobiographical novel takes Clancy’s trademark energy to confront the decline of the left and the rise of feminism.
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Overview
Clancy Sigal’s fourth novel centers on expatriate Gus Black, a freethinker who moves to England in search of a new life. He absorbs the native culture by plunging into its dark corners. Amid the upheavals, he lands a job at Vogue, consorting with models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, and commences a passionate affair with Rose O’Malley, a brilliant writer loosely based on Sigal’s real-life lover Doris Lessing.
Set in the swinging London of the fifties and sixties, The Secret Defector is a portrait of an American on the loose striving to define himself against an alien yet oddly familiar culture. Sigal’s frequent themes of the working class, the counterculture, and Marxism are in evidence, as is his self-deprecating wit. This quasi-autobiographical novel takes Clancy’s trademark energy to confront the decline of the left and the rise of feminism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480437067 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 274 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Sigal moved to London in the 1950s and stayed in the UK for thirty years, writing and broadcasting regularly from the same BBC studios that George Orwell had used. During the Vietnam War, he was the “stationmaster” of a London safe house for American GI deserters and draft dodgers. For several years, he collaborated with the radical “anti-psychiatrists” R. D. Laing and David Cooper, with whom he founded Kingsley Hall in London’s East End, a halfway house for so-called incurable cases.
Sigal’s most recent book was the memoir Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal, and Raging Egos (Soft Skull Press, 2016).
Read an Excerpt
The Secret Defector
A Novel
By Clancy Sigal
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1992 Clancy SigalAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3706-7
CHAPTER 1
Going Away
Scene: The London Maisonette of Rose O'Malley, an African-born white writer. Shabby two floors in Hammersmith not far from where the Thames snakes upriver. Time: Summer '58. My "two weeks in another town" has lasted more than a year and I haven't even seen the Tower of London yet. I'm dog-tired. My dad must have come in off the road like this: rumpled, unshaven, rain-drenched. I've been up in Yorkshire, not to visit the Brontës' house in Haworth but in a strike-bound coalfield. Now I'm back home, with Rose.
"H'lo, Maggie," I called, letting myself in. Though it was before dawn, I knew Rose would be standing at the top of the hall stairs, an invisible rolling pin tucked in her angrily folded arms.
"Top o' th' mornin' to ye. And wot's fer br-r-r-eakfast?" I asked in a stage-Irish accent I'd picked up from Eire-born building workers on a strike at the South Bank McAlpine site.
A mistake. Knew it immediately.
"I'm Rose. Your mistress, remember?" she said through nicotine-stained teeth. She had on a pale blue shantung silk blouse and Cyd Charisse-style wool skirt I'd bought for her. I'd also supervised a new, closely shaped hairdo that dramatized her high cheekbones and slightly unfocused eyes, emphasizing even more her resemblance to the film heroine of Laura, Gene Tierney. Rose had protested when I gathered up her dowdy old rags—tomboy jeans and checked lumberjack shirt—and chucked them in the fireplace, but she cheered up when I blew the last of my money taking her to Harrods for a whole new refit. Even persuaded her to turn in that cheap Woolworth's lipstick for different eye shadow. But though I pumiced them myself, the small, even teeth remained stubbornly unglamorously yellow. She'd give up anything for me, Rose swore, except cigarettes and writing.
Weakly, I explained the Irish joke. Maggie 'n' Jiggs was an old-fashioned cartoon strip I grew up on. Maggie was always waiting up for Jiggs with blood in her eye.
Rose wasn't laughing. "And who was he screwing to provoke her?" she demanded.
Here we go again.
"Actually, nobody, you stupid woman," I replied. "He was out playing poker with the boys."
"So that's your story, is it?"
She wouldn't have believed it anyway.
Climbing the stairs, I tried to push past her to the small room I rented from her. A bargain at two pounds (ten dollars) a week, considering the extras.
"You and your lies." Rose blocked my way.
She was small, almost tiny. More Veronica Lake's size than Gene Tierney's, though I couldn't see Rose as a peekaboo blonde. I could lift her with my little finger. Something told me not to try it just now.
"You're just like my mother," I yawned. "She never bought it from Dad either."
"Ha! Convicted out of your own mouth," Rose said with satisfaction. Oh no: I'd done it again.
She put both small hands on my shoulders. "Please, darling," she pleaded. "For both our sakes. See a doctor."
That same old song. I was too tired to argue. "I'm incurable, baby. Either rustle up some food, fuck me—or shut up."
She hated being called "baby."
Rose was no quitter. "I love you," she said.
"Blondie loves Dagwood," I said.
She was distressed for me. "You can't keep behaving like someone in a cartoon strip—"
Also, I reminded her, a Columbia B-movie with Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake. Sometimes Rose liked my cinema pedantry.
Rose laughed. "You're quite mad, you know."
Ah, the fight was over. I looked down at her faintly Asiatic, lively round face, noting that as usual her blouse—which I'd got for her in Burlington Arcade—was only half buttoned. I leaned down and kissed her breast, brushing my stubbled face back and forth until I felt her unbrassiered nipples erect through the fabric.
"Oh," she said.
I sucked her nipple. "Mmm," both of us said.
"Oh God that's nice—you bastard," she said.
She arched her pelvis into mine, rubbing until I was stiff. I unlatched my silver cowboy belt with one hand while keeping the other clamped to her tight, writhing buttock.
"Have mercy on a poor sinner, Rose."
She did, unzipping my jeans with a practiced hand and taking my cock. We fell backwards onto the stairs, but she didn't let go. Before I knew it her legs were on my shoulders. I was inside her. For reasons mysterious to me, Rose and I never had sex problems outside bed.
A minute ago I could hardly walk. Now I was home.
Just on the verge of coming, I looked up—to God?—and saw a small boy in red flannel pajamas peering at us between the railings on the top floor. Calmly he studied us as we scratched, bit, and wrestled together until we shudderingly collapsed, gasping hard.
"There's blood on Gus's shoulder. Should I dial 999?" the boy asked. 999 was Emergency.
Rose and I looked at each other in mortification. Staring straight into my eyes, she yelled, "Go back to sleep, Alastair O'Malley!"
Aly merely settled himself in his front-row seat by the bannister.
Rose straightened her clothes, slipping out of me in the process, and sat up with a semblance of dignity. Her South Africa-accented voice again commanded Aly to go back to bed.
"How do you vote, Yank?" Aly called down. "Sleep is so boring when you two are at it."
I rolled over on my back, pulled up my jeans, and buckled them. Then I hauled myself up the stairs and stooped over Aly, who gave me his best innocent look. I reached down a hand, and the chubby ten-year-old scampered up it like a monkey until he was on my back: a familiar routine between us since I'd barged into his life. He began whipping me, shouting, "Giddap. Giddap, stupid horsie!"
I made hoofbeat clucks with my tongue while galloping up and down the top landing next to my room. Aly was almost beside himself with ecstatic rage. He began hitting me really hard.
"Ouch," I said.
"Horses don't talk," Aly reminded me sharply.
I told him jockeys aren't cruel to their mounts if they want to be taken to Lords today for the Test Match. The kid and I loved bribes. "Hooray for Len Hutton!" he shouted.
Aly astride me, I turned to look down at Rose, now fully self-possessed. She gazed inquiringly at us.
"Keep this out of your novel, Rose," I warned.
From somewhere she produced a cigarette and lit it from a matchbox in the pocket of her trimly flared skirt. She leaned against the downstairs wall, coolly examining us both.
I shrugged, then looked over my shoulder at Aly.
"Smile, kiddo," I said. "She's taking our picture."
Rose was a refugee too. The politics of apartheid had driven her from her native South Africa, where she'd grown up in the bush country and married a coffee planter. "I was the perfect memsahib, the baas's woman—until my local doctor sent me to a specialist in Johannesburg. I'd been having all these hot flashes and moodiness, see. None of the hysteria pills worked, and my husband, poor damned soul, suggested a few days shopping in the big city would cure me. I dropped in at the specialist's office as an afterthought. The bloody wonderful man, a Jew of course, converted me to Communism and nonpassive sex in the same afternoon. We had this terrific secret affair until the authorities arrested him for sedition. Meaning, he hated the color line. They also found this dynamite in his back garden he was safeguarding for some black radicals who were using him, don't you see. The idiot was lucky they didn't hang him. He's still on Robbins Island, I can't even get letters to him. Well, when I kept going down to Jo'burg for his trial and got my picture in the paper with all those nasty white liberals cheering him on, my husband did the right thing: threw me bag and baggage out of our house. In front of the kaffirs too!"
I loved lying in Rose's large, rumpled bed listening to her past. We never had enough time to tell each other about our lives. I had been born into the international movement she had freely joined. In Rose's case, she had chosen to be an anti-apartheid South African, an outcast white, and now a British Communist ... well, ex-. Like many of her intellectual friends, she had angrily quit the Party over the bloody Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. But nothing much had changed about her politics, it seemed, except for turning in her Party card. The big thing was, we spoke the same language—of love and politics if not sex.
Why didn't Rose understand about sex? She was always talking about love instead. "You're such a child." She'd shake her head, and the debate was on. She didn't get it. Sex without love was good, and love was a killer of good fucking.
"But why does it have to be bad if you love someone?" she pleaded, reaching out for my hand as if to console me.
"Don't know, just is," I mumbled.
"That's no answer," she protested. "You have to be conscious, be aware, to be a complete man."
How did she know what it took to be a man?
"Because a man is a person, and I know about people, don't you see?" Then she fell back, exhausted. "It's all that Hemingway you American writers are so keen on."
When she called me a writer my heart warmed to Rose again, and I stood up and grabbed her, and she came like a drunken woman on the heaving deck of a ship lost at sea, saying as always, "Oh ..."
God, I thought, I sure don't want to fall in love with this woman. That would ruin everything.
I was an ex- too. Most Communists are. It was like getting stung by the same bee nine thousand miles apart. The delicious venom of Marxism still circulated in our bloodstream, heightening sensation, adding tang to dull duties. Rose and I, like most trained Reds, simply took for granted that only a special sort of person became a "leading edge" Communist, a cadre of the vanguard. It appealed both to Rose's inbred social snobbery and to my macho military fantasy. As a World War II GI, I'd volunteered for several high-risk elites like Airborne and OSS but was always turned down for "security reasons." It probably saved my life, but it left me with an unsatisfied longing to be in the front line, anyone's front line.
The odds were against my living this long. Look what happened to my corner gang, ROCKETS ATHLETIC CLUB OF GREATER WEST SIDE CHICAGO (LAWNDALE) stitched in red thread on our blue fake-satin team jackets. Four of the seven of us didn't make it. Otto, a B-17 waist gunner, went down over Schweinfurt, Jackie was blown up on an ammo ship, in Leyte Gulf, Marv was crushed by a tank in a training accident at Fort Campbell, and Vic, a born hero, got his posthumous Silver Star for storming a Siegfried Line pillbox. The percentages were all wrong. Nobody drafted so late in the war got hit that bad. Except us. Four out of seven. We never had a baseball season so good. Of us three survivors, Bobby has sunk without trace, and even worse, Joe was chairman of the Skokie Campaign to Elect George Bush.
So I, the last of the Rockets, am left with the honor—or crushing burden—of representing them in the world. But how do you carry the flag for six other guys who never asked you to?
Rose never grasped how seriously I took the Rockets. To her, they were simply my pre-Communist party; to me, the Party was my post-Rockets gang. You can't build an ideology on a streetcorner experience, she told me, that's what the Nazis did. But we were all Jewish, I said. That's no excuse for thinking with what's between your legs, she argued. I laughed: Oh yes it is. She'd shake her head yet again: My darling, you're proud of all the wrong things. You know your trouble, baby? I'd say. You became a Communist without ever being a socialist. Ha! She'd rare back, teeth bared. You have a nerve lecturing me from your morally lofty position ...
In matters of love if not ideology, my Rose was a hard-liner. Sometimes the only thing we agreed on was that our histories were also our future.
Take mine: The Great Depression wasn't bad for a kid who hated change, because there was no money to repair the neighborhood or for couples like Polly and Jake to divorce. Poverty = stability. Then Joe Louis began to speed things up by losing in his first bout with Max Schmeling, a hint that my universe was changing. Pearl Harbor made things better, if you saw it that way. Mom got her first regular job in a long time sewing army uniforms in a Loop sweatshop. We moved out of other people's houses, where we always rented a room together, to a tiny apartment of our own on Fifteenth Street. Jake took off for good now we could support ourselves. And I got drafted. Even then it held. I can't specify where, exactly, it all began to shift and roll under my feet. I came back from German occupation duty ... became an organizer like Dad ... planned a career, my life, in the labor movement. Conventional stuff.
Then, wham, it hit. Truthfully, I loved the Red hunt called McCarthyism, actually Trumanism, but why quibble? Bang! goes my union job along with every other Red's in labor; zok! goes any other work I try to find in factories or even as counter help in a department store; whump! my college career shortcircuits when UCLA's dean of students tells me to get lost, I'll have to attend the University of Cuzco if I want a degree because he'll hunt me down anywhere else.
Get the picture? The whole enchilada: Smith Act trials, McCarran-Walter, the Hubert Humphrey Senate amendment to "detain" Reds in Arizona camps in a national emergency, loyalty oaths, purges, blacklists. Even that buffoon the LA. county sheriff got into the act on local radio by urging patriots to report anyone who got their mail in plain brown wrappers, God forbid it might be the Nation or the Daily Worker. One phone call from your neighbor to any of fifteen police agencies and it was like winning the Devil's lottery, with FBI, sheriff's deputies, LAPD Red squad, and very likely the Sea Scouts camping on the front steps. Hey, guys, I'd shout through the screen door, form a line.
An enemy in my own country, an ex-Communist "friendly drop," I kept ahead of my FBI tails via thumb or U-Rent-It car, hitting almost every one of the forty-eight states like a crazy pinball. Mutt and Jeff, the Federal agents assigned to my case, brilliantly deduced that only a Soviet agent could be devious enough to stay one jump ahead of them. (This was before computers.) I had to be a spy, an agent, a mole: the harder I was to find, the worse my subversion grew in their Mormon eyes. The truth was, my worn-out tires were chewing up state lines as a substitute for sex and the talent I didn't have yet but was pursuing the way Mutt and Jeff chased me. Fellas, I'd say when they'd catch up with me, I'm only trying to be a writer. Today, my FBI file (courtesy Freedom of Information Act) reads, "Subject explains persistent abscondings by stating he is writing a novel about the Bureau and needs more raw material."
The truth was, I was a traveling salesman of resistance, Willy Loman with leaflets in my battered suitcase instead of nylon stockings. Crisscrossing the U.S.A. in other people's Studebakers and Kaiser-Frazers, I was peddling the notion of a Committee of Correspondence, dreamed up either by Leo Huberman of the Marxist Monthly Review or I. F. Stone, can't recall which, whereby independent leftists kept in touch as we imagined Paul Revere and Sam Adams did in 1776. A scribbled address, a vague contact, or merely a hunch and I'd parachute into the least likely places: Walla Walla, North Platte, Mobile, Knoxville, Conneaut, Troy—anywhere readers of I. F. Stone's Weekly, Dissent, or Monthly Review were prepared to give me a cot for the night. Avoiding the big cities for places like Toonerville, South Dakota, or anywhere I liked the sound of, I was unconsciously reliving a childhood when Polly and Jake used to stash me in strange small towns while they were either in jail or on organizing drives or both. At least, that's how Rose saw it.
But always, at trip's end, Mutt and Jeff waited for me on the porch of my little garage apartment within sight of Sunset Boulevard. "Now, Gus?" barked Mutt, the taller one, hitching back his seersucker suit to expose a .38 service automatic. "No, fellas," I'd say, as if they were vacuum cleaner salesmen, "try me next week." "Come on," half-pint Jeff would rasp, "don't be a pain. Help us clear up your file." "Yeah," agreed Mutt, who didn't know my dad used to carry a piece seven calibers bigger than his. "Just confirm a few names for us. You don't have to say a word. Just nod your head." I'll bet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Secret Defector by Clancy Sigal. Copyright © 1992 Clancy Sigal. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
BOOK 1 Going Away,BOOK 2 The View from Hanover Square,
BOOK 3 The Masked Avenger Strikes Again,
BOOK 4 Soft Money,
BOOK 5 The Lonely Bombardier of Primrose Hill,
BOOK 6 Speak of England,
About the Author,