One of
my earliest memories is of sitting with my mom watching the Watergate hearings
on television. Her sudden and frequent outbursts, expressions of anger and
disgust, framed what little I understood about the images before us. I
understood only that something shocking was taking place, something that had my
parents arguing long into the night, something that signaled a departure but
from what I did not know. The secrets
hidden, and stolen, by President Nixon and his comrades, and revealed by
Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post, are not the whole story. They are not even the whole secret. It is, rather, the protocols of secrecy – the
underlying desire to know – that compels narrative forward and why we return
again and again to such formative histories.
What if Watergate were a novel?
***
In
1836, James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald
paper picked up a story of a young prostitute’s murder, adapting the
conventions of fiction as well as secret histories, and creating a mystery out
of material already well known. The panic fostered by Bennett’s treatment of
Helen Jewetts’s murder by a nineteen-year old clerk, named Richard P. Robinson,
was published serially and included various images of Jewett’s partially naked
corpse lying on the bed, which Robinson had set fire to after the attack, and “transcripts”
of Robinson’s trial.
The Jewett–Robinson murder case proved exceptionally sensational and
Bennett took every opportunity to insinuate secrecy, scandal, and mystery in
the pages of the Herald. Stories focused on the most grotesque,
scandalous, and macabre details of the crime and its aftermath. They began by entering the crime scene before
Jewett’s body was removed, depicting her as a “beautiful female corpse” as that
which ‘surpassed the finest statue in antiquity’.[1] He later published a false report that her “beautiful
body” had been dug up from the grave in order to perform a more accurate
autopsy. As David Anthony points out in
his treatment of Helen Jewett’s case, “even the grave is suspected of secrets”.[2] The media sensation was not limited to the
New York Herald, in the months
following the murder the case was covered zealously. Newspapers printed daily transcripts of
Robinson’s trial and in the wake of Jewett’s discovery, at least six pamphlets
about the crime were published, all of which took up the question of why she
would turn to prostitution rather than marriage.[3]
Just as readers responded to Hannah Foster’s The Coquette (1797) as the secret history of Elizabeth Whitman, so too did
readers seem to understand the tale of Helen Jewett’s prostitution and murder as
accountable as a secret history of a fallen woman. Both tales inspired identification with and
sympathy for the female victims: Whitman’s faithful protection of her lover
until her death was seen as fidelity. As Bryan Waterman notes, “her grave
became a site of pilgrimage where courting couples might pledge their love…her
gravestone turned into relics, chipped away by romantic pilgrims”.[4] Similarly, one paper published that several
women were seen collecting the burnt remains of Jewett’s bed from outside the
brothel, souvenirs of her tragic fall, and evidence of her secret history.[5] In
this way, Bennett’s paper offered a “key” for decoding the mystery of Jewett
and Robinson’s fall – a mystery not of the murder, but of how these characters
came to their tragic ends from otherwise privileged backgrounds.
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the Panic of 1837, narratives
driven by the protection of– and thus window into – the private lives of
mysterious figures, are joined by narratives meant to expose the secret
corruption of a state, one that so failed to protect its citizens from economic
disaster. No writer generated more
controversy, sold more fiction, and exposed the so-called elite of his
Philadelphian society more than George Lippard.
Averaging over a million words annually, Lippard raged against the
establishment and reached an unprecedented number of readers between 1842 and
1852. His career began as a copyeditor
and city news reporter for the Spirit of
the Times, a paper well suited to Lippard’s political philosophy, before
moving on to write for and edit the Citizen
Solider.[6]
In 1842, Lippard got his start writing the “City
Police” daily column for the Spirit of
the Times, which required him to spend time at the Mayor’s Police Court. Here, he honed what would become his
aesthetic, interweaving narratives of true crime, with “vivid Dickensian
caricatures” and his own
conviction about the unequal application of justice in
Philadelphia.[7] Writing under the pseudonym “Toney Blink”, and
then later “Billy Brier”, Lippard sought to make public the invisible, secret,
world of respectable members of society: the clergy, bankers, police, lawyers,
and the literary elite from which he felt especially excluded. In a series of ten instalments called “Our
Talisman”, Lippard claims to have been given a ring that would allow him full
access into the private chambers of the privileged. Here, he exposes the “injunction of secrecy”
that allows society’s leaders to profit from the unwitting, even as he
undermines the “literati” who, according to Lippard, work tirelessly to
discredit the Penny Press and sensational fiction more broadly.
As Christopher Looby demonstrates, in the overlap of literary and
journalistic spheres, we can see Lippard “chafing against the boundaries of
fact and the limitations of journalistic form” –conditions out of which his
sensational, serialized fiction emerges.[8] The most popular and well known of Lippard’s
fiction is The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, A Romance of Philadelphia
Life, Mystery, and Crime (1845), which sold over 60,000 copies in its first
year in print. The Quaker City was serially published in ten installments and, like
The Coquette and the pages of the New
York Herald, was based on real events
both sensational and mysterious. Based
on a famous murder case of 1843, when a man named Singleton Mercer was
acquitted for the murder of Mahlon Heberton.
Heberton had allegedly killed Mercer’s sister after seducing her into
what was either a brothel or a cheap room- for- rent establishment, with his
promises of marriage.
As was the case of Jewett’s murder, and Elizabeth Whitman’s
disappearance, the Mercer murder trial and acquittal was widely known. Splashed
all over the pages of Philadelphia newspapers, the sensational event became a
flashpoint for readers of The Quaker City. But Lippard also included several subplots,
violent, satiric, and with strains of the gothic, all of which fanned the
flames of its rapidly growing appeal.
Readers were especially keen to learn which of Philadelphia’s local
elite were targets of Lippard’s revelations, of hidden secrets, corruption, and
criminal deviance. The desire to unmask those in seemingly irreproachable
social positions compromises discrete categories of privacy and publicity;
narratives of the period thrive upon exposure, which reinforces a sense of
history worthy of public display.
Most fascinatingly, when the first two-thirds of Lippard’s novel were
bound in 1845, and dedicated to Charles Brockden Brown, it was accompanied by Key to the Quaker City: or, The Monks of
Monk-Hall. The title page reads, “Published
by the Author, and for Sale by all Booksellers”, and it contains separately
numbered pages at the back, with a short list of “ERRATA OF THE QUAKER CITY”.[9] The Key
is supposed to clarify any aspects of The
Quaker City that remain mysterious or occluded; it claims to come from the lawyer,
“Old K------“ who is mentioned in the original Preface to its first bound
publication, “The Origin and Object of this Book”. Given to Lippard from his deathbed, we hear
from the ‘good old lawyer’ that his papers:
“[c]ontain a full and terrible development of the Secret Life of
Philadelphia. In that pacquet, you will
find, records of crimes, that never came to trial, murders that have never been
divulged; there you will discover the results of secret examinations, held by
official personages, in relation to atrocities too horrible for
belief----------’”.[10]
Here
we find the features of secret histories, including a “key”, the omitted name
of “Old K-----“, and the cagey tension between concealment and disclosure,
publicity and privacy, that the construction of “secret examinations”
implies. As Looby identifies the
relative rarity of such keys in nineteenth-century U.S. fiction (Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1853) is another), in the longue durée of transatlantic literary history,
paratextual keys for unlocking the secrets embedded in texts are unremarkable. Lippard draws upon the formal structures –
and conceptual affinities – of secret histories by including the publication of
a Key when the novel is packaged as
such. In this way, he retains the
mystery and deferral associated with serialized publications (readers are
caught in an anticipatory state whereby certain secrets remain concealed until subsequent
installments), in its new, totalizing, and novelistic form. The publication of the Key to Quaker City does not, in fact, reveal all of the narrative
secrets of its foundational fiction but rather serves to preserve and even intensify
what Looby calls the “antinomy of secrecy and publicity”. In this way, then, serialization, popular
fiction, and Lippard’s drive to expose all of the corruption and scandal
underlying the respectable surface of state apparatus, creates a secret history
for early nineteenth-century U.S. readers.
****
In “The
Storyteller”, Walter Benjamin identifies “the earliest symptom of a process whose
end is the decline of storytelling [as] the rise of the novel” and further,
that “this new form of communication is information” (364-365). Information, for Benjamin, flattens
narrative: it leaves nothing to the imagination, nothing “marvelous” for the
reader to interpret. While information
may compromise oral histories, tales – “storytelling” – its place in and of the
novel is highly suggestive. And this may be where secrecy intervenes – not only
in the novel, but across all narrative forms – as concealment and revelation
propels stories, and where “information” if it does indeed exist is always
suspect, or at least opens up onto other questions, other unanswered (or unanswerable) mysteries. Since Robinson
Crusoe, novels have always played with readers’ conception of truth,
history, and fantasy – in effect, novels have always flirted with secrecy. Secrecy might be thought of as the circuit
between the book/author and the reader; between public and private. In this
formulation, the power and significance
of secrecy lies in an implicit contract, one integral to the strength of our
belief in communal bonds between private citizens and the public. As sociologist
and philosopher Georg Simmel claims, “human collective life requires a certain
measure of secrecy” (The Sociology of
Georg Simmel 335). Our ability to
measure and understand relations between a collective life and secrecy seems
ever more urgent now.
[1] New
York Herald, April 11, 1836.
[2] See David Antony, ‘The Helen Jewett
Panic: Tabloids, Men, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum New York’
American Literature 69:3 (September 1997),
489.
[3] See pamphlets such as The Thomas Street Tragedy: The Murder of
Ellen Jewett and Trial of Robinson (New York, 1836); An Authentic Biography of the Late Helen Jewett, A Girl of the Town by
a Gentleman Fully Acquainted with Her History (New York, 1836);. Her name was often misidentified as ‘Ellen’.
[4] See Hannah Foster’s The Coquette and The Boarding School,
Edited by Jennifer Harris and Bryan Waterman, Norton Critical Edition, New York
(2013), xv-xvi.
[5] See The Illuminator, 5 May 1836, quoted in Anthony, ‘The Helen Jewett
Panic’, 489.
[6] The mantra for The Spirit of the Times was ‘Democratic and Fearless; Devoted to No
Clique, and Bound to No Master’.
[7] See Christopher Looby, ‘Lippard in
Part(s): Seriality and Secrecy in The Quaker City’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 79:1 (June 2015), 4. My discussion of Lippard is indebted to
Looby’s essay and to David’s Reynolds ‘Introduction’, The Quaker City: Or, The Monks of Monk Hall, A Romance of Philadelphia
Life, Mystery, and Crime (Amherst,
MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), vii-xli.
[8] Looby, ‘Lippard in Part(s):
Seriality and Secrecy in The Quaker City’,
9.
[9] Looby, 30.
[10] Lippard, The Quaker City: Or, The Monks of Monk Hall, A Romance of Philadelphia
Life, Mystery, and Crime, ed. David S. Reynolds (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts, 1995), 3.
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