July 1, 2012 · 12:34 pm

ANDREW LLOYD WEBER AND THE PRE RAPHAELITES

Talking of Earls or Lords of anything, how awful it was to see Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber on the Pre-Raphaelites. Much as we have a sneaking love of any musical, and putting on a show here and now, but usually written by Sondheim, Rogers and Hammerstein or Bernstein, Sir Andrew’s attempt to step into the spotlight of serious art historian was just a gawping embarrassment. Trying to adopt the tonal stride of Jeremy Paxman, with a bit of grave World War I throw away history chucked in, to twang the thrumming heart-strings, he led us into a wonderland of sentiment and mawkishness, only worthy of some of the worst blogs at Phoenix Ark Press, in the wounds of love or art! Look, was the subtext, at the lovely Pre-Raphaelite works on my sitting room wall, I now own for my private Nation, as I cool it up playing Rock n Roll on my antique piana, and I will share with you how jolly succesful and rich I am, one of you, though not quite, and what an amazingly sensitive person too.

If there is any lone justification for abolishing the House of Lords, or reforming it radically, it is and was the donning by Lord Webber of the blessed Ermine, the Lord Archer of the minim and octave, and now in danger of becoming the Liberace of his own success. So comes another Simon Cowell style TV stitch up, with Superstar. Jesus Christ! As the money triumph of the ever running musical, in our age of countrywide coach tours to the Mama Mia show, did so much harm to the life blood of real theatre. Ah, perhaps it was just TV and the Global ‘culture’ franchise. For those who absolutely loathe the pompous self aggrandisement of Victorian architecture, Webber can defy anyone to hate Keble college, but we hope it falls on his head.

To be a little kinder, he may have many real talents, may have edged saying something interesting about the Arts and Craft movement, but so much of the Pre Raphaelites were not only a side-show, but the mythification of days of yore, in a Tennyson style love of the antique, but turning so much real art to Victorian kitsch and the island of fey. Yes it has beauty, yes at times it carries the visionary, but the programme was not about that, it was about Sir Andrew Lloyds-Bank’s lovely things, and his desire to be taken to the heart of a Nation, as cultural hero, in preparation for more of his TV stuff. Hence his suddenly ‘noticing’ the Superstar crucifixion on the front of the Lady of Shallot’s barge. The mirror cracked, from side to side! The stage show way he was tutored to speak with gravitas to camera was only as obvious as that naughty schoolboy way he tried to hold the eye, and failed, in a very slight attack on Damien Hurst and his sell-out jewelled skull. Well, if you are going to attack, do so, for the love of God, and do it well, but don’t be naughty about it, Sir Andrew. We forgive you, compassionately, but abolish the House of Lords immediately, its full of Pre-Raphaelite ‘style’, and bring back Brian Sewell!

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July 1, 2012 · 12:23 am

DEREK JACOBI, RICHARD II AND THE EARL OF OXFORD ‘THEORY’

“Whatever they say I am, that’s what I’m not.” Alan Silitoe.

Always good to see Derek Jacobi, whose I Claudius made everything forgivable, and his programme about Richard II last night, despite that desire to roll the wooorld around the plum of his English tongue. But why, like great actor Mark Rylance, does he go on about the fatuous Edward Devere, Earl of Oxford authorship theory for Shakespeare’s work? Perhaps because both were in Anonymous,or because of strange chips on acting shoulders? He said, with that cheeky grin of supposed assumed knowledge, it would ruffle feathers, or something, but it only ruffles feathers because it is rubbish. We all know nowadays you have to sell a thing by supposedly being controversial, or coming up with the great conspiracy. Though the most moving elements in the programme were actors talking, through the insights of Richard II, of how we are all nothing, specks in eternity, simply a part of the mysterious pattern.

There is a great deal of evidence for the Stratford Shakespeare though, despite the difficulty of reading contemporary records and the obvious desire of a poet and playwright, unlike self trumpeting Ben Johnson, to remain forever mercurial, behind the dangerous, ever watching London scenes. That was about preserving the well-spring of his art itself, dark and light, and not being pinned by anyone. Also the delicate nature of his temperament. There is little or no evidence for the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward Devere, who published under his own name during his lifetime, as a minor and rather bad poet. There is that little bit of interesting self flattery about Devere being called the ‘spearshaker’ at court, but this was an age of impresses and also the fluid change in the fixity of Sirnames themselves. Did Shakespeare think he was Shakespere, Shakesbye, Shackspere, or was he a mind and spirit on a great journey, capable of inhabiting everyone, who then sured up his own name, as spelling codified, and he found the right to survive and buy New Place in Stratford? To make good where his father had gone wrong.

It is continued social snobbery though that supports the Edward Devere authorship theory, that emerged in the nascent proto-fascist climate of the 1920’s, and incidentally an insult to today’s fluttering Free School movement too. It underestimates how advanced was the Edwardian and later Elizabethan Grammar school education, well beyond learning by rote from the school Horn Book, how grand were some of Stratford’s historical links to London and how a young Shakespeare could well have moved among very educated circles, as a young man, either as player or tutor, or in prominent Catholic families. Besides, if Tony Blair could go on about “education, education, education,” he might go on about what’s being taught, how the teachers around you, in school, life or home are inspiring or destructive forces, or, in the realms of freeing imaginations, sing snatches of “teacher, leave them kids alone.”

The conspiracy thesis of Anonymous, and those who must somehow vindicate lineage alone, perhaps a symptom of any actor’s search for identity too, is that Elizabethan society was highly stratified and players the scum of the earth. All the evidence suggests the opposite, at a time of huge mobility in London and the building of permanent playhouses under James Burbage and others, despite the rich City of London’s attempts to drive them out. The actor Edward Alleyn became a superstar of his day, as did James’ son and Shakespeare’s brother-in-arms, Richard Burbage. Indeed, in terms of the ‘celebrity’ values of their day, perhaps little changes, and it was Burbage’s not Shakespeare’s death that was so mourned in his time. But at least those celebrities set very high cultural standards and the whole of London thrilled to poets and writers, good and bad, as well as brothels, gambling dens, cockpits and bear pits.

As for any claim that writing plays was NQOCD, so not to be linked to an Earl, the Earl of Essex paid for the funeral of Edmund Spencer and writers processed proudly to the grave to throw in their quills. The idea that what was said in those plays could be dangerous, even fatal, so supporting secret authorship, might be more convincing, except for all the other evidence and arguments, and the fact that not only can Shakespeare be as conservative as radical, on the side of Kingship, as against its excess or madness, but he very carefully wrote and rewrote his plays in tune with the changing political weather vane of the time. No time-server, but aware, and also a writer trying to succeed, appealing to popular kinds of opinion, imagination and humour, and going beyond it all. Just as a very aware court protected the players, in part because of its need for the popular pulse and battles with The City of London.

As one commentator briefly said though, on Derek Jacobi’s programme of course, perhaps the most important thing is how all Shakespeare’s plays so breathe and resound with the working life and metaphors of theatre, of the fact of acting, seeming, playing, that you do not pick up as some clever or mediocre nob in the wings. They were written and semi-literally wrought in the revolutionary and thrilling climate of London playhouses, a largely nasty, brutish, dangerous and very smelly place. The Globe Theatre itself, built in 1599 out of the wood of the dismantled Theatre, across the river in Shoreditch, was partly Shakespeare’s owned triumph, and house of vital independence too, sounded out so loudly in plays like Henry V. His independence too from the likes of playhouse owner, bear baiter, Master of the Game, brothel owner, local grandee and all time creep Philip Henslowe. To be fair, Henslowe protected writers sometimes with loans, but fell foul of what he thought it was only about, money. You could go on about the metaphors of Arden forests though in As You Like It, the constant repetition of imagery of gloves or clothes, out of professional working people like his father John, very far from the bottom of any social heap. The journey too of the plays, from experimental bums on seats pot boilers like Titus Andronicus, worthy of blood-soaked Anonymous, through to such an astonishing flowering, speak of one man, one consciousness, rooted in the countryside, on a momentous journey, physical and metaphorical, who lived through his times, and out of Stratford. You do not get to the metaphysical astonishments of Hamlet, under magestical rooves fretted with golden fire, inside the physical echo chamber of his imagination, a working theatre, unless you have walked the boards and written for them too.

Why is it important? Because, apart from truth, given the right soil, and in revolutionary times, genius can grow from and come from anywhere, and die anywhere too, which is not to say Shakespeare did not take on aspirations of the Court, and move increasingly freely in those circles, as patrons fought political battles of patronage around the City of London, that were also about influencing public opinion. The power of imagination is also linked to real life power. As he got his coat of arms and his ceremonial sword that he wore at the accession of James I, and his mind went high to low, probably found more beauty in the high, though far from always, and as much energy in the low. Although Shakespeare died not a hugely rich man, but a moderately wealthy one. Jacobi is an actor who inhabits other’s words, but Shakespeare was actor, poet and playwright too, formative in his understandings and visions, increasingly distancing himself from players, or players that don’t know the purpose of the whole play, or ‘stand beside their part’, and there perhaps is the key. The writer distinguishing himself from the acting he also knew so well. A mind that so imbibed what Shakespeare is all about, living language, where the basic secret lies, of course, at a time of vital metaphorical richness and linguistic fluidity, living and flowering in and through it, completely in tune, perhaps at a time when such imagination was possible, in a way it no longer is. Science has compartmentalized and ‘rationalised’ language itself, so it is hard to even use it in the holist, organic way Shakespeare lived it. That organic connection of language is also about the sonnets and his being a poet.

But that personal relationship to language, a gift for everyone, is not the exclusive preserve of Earls of anything, and great poets and writers come from many soils. Shakespeare also very quickly consumed the sources of his day, in the revolutionary age of the printing presses, from Holinshed to Plutarch, to all the renaissance stories and legends that abounded. He ‘stole’ plots like an ‘upstart crow’, then made them his own, constantly translating through the glass of his soaring, refracting imagination. That attack on an ‘upstart’ came from one of the Oxbridge wits of the time, Robert Greene, who first proved you could make good money from scandalous diaries, as you can’t anymore, and it has marked the divide ever since, that leads straight into the weary Devere theory. So splitting editions between the Arden and Oxford Shakespeares, summoning attacks from the establishment ‘educated’ that ‘he weren’t half as good as them’ and marking a fault line in English consciousness and social values.

There is another element to the ‘proof’ and that is increasing evidence of Stratford links with that vital centre of London life and theatre, Southwark and Bankside. That is one of the themes of coming blogs and original work on Edmund Shakepeare, William’s youngest brother, who is virtually unknown, but was also a player in London, died at only 27, four months after his bastard baby son, in the greatest freeze London and the river had seen in decades, and is buried in beautiful Southwark Cathedral. He lived in a property near the Globe just before his death, called The Vine, that belonged to a Hunt family, and though the link has to be yet made, there were also prominent Hunts in Stratford, one of whom talked of William Shakespeare as the ‘Rocius’ of his time. The Berkeley Shakespeare academic Alan Nelson has highlighted the significance of that.

As Peter Ackroyd argues though, Shakespeare the London playwright was not only known in his day, but a phenomenon, as actor, playwright but also Globe theatre sharer. The secret of ‘no Shakespeare the playwright’ on Stratford documents is about how all signed themselves in legal documents as associated to the Guild trades that legally marked social status and London citizenship. In the country it was about land and property ownership. But many of those people, at a time when Henry VIII’s reformation was also systematizing parish records themselves, making the perceived structures of recorded history, for administrative and tax purposes, for reasons of power, often had very good cause to avoid being put on the record. Shakespeare avoided local London taxes and may possibly have been protected by the Bishop of Winchester, in the Liberties in Southwark. But if Joe Orton advised in Loot, ‘never get caught’, that vanishing act is also about the freedom of the artist, poet and writer. The knowledge of how powerful but also dangerous it can be at the creative centre of the circle.

The work on Edmund though brings to light fascinating unknown material too on players in Southwark, as far back as the reign of Henry VI, a cycle of History plays that have been completely underestimated in their importance in Shakespeare’s ingathering of a time, an age and very specific place too, radical and divided Southwark, an almost physical fault line of the Reformation in London. Henry VI very possibly began the whole history cycle, but it is Henry VI’s reign, really defining the ‘Wars of the Roses’, and what is said about London, power, faith and miracles in those plays, that also links the poet to Southwark, the Bishops of Winchester and the all important religious battles of his day. That makes them just as important as Richard II, if not as good artistically. As Catholicism and Rome were pushed out, or into the shadows, and Kit Marlowe played dangerous games with ‘God’ and the ‘Devil’, and English spying too, Shakespeare turned to the humanist playwright’s art, grounded in very secular themes, the stuff of life, but understanding it all as metaphor to summon the creative energy and visions inside himself, the magic of his art and characters, culminating in Prospero. It was also a journey to other ‘countries’ of reality and imagination, as ‘The Globe’ and England opened in the discovery of the Americas, the breach with Rome, the explosion of City trading expeditions, and Shakespeare felt the tectonic conflicts of his time in his blood.

It is another frustration of Phoenix Ark though that DCD, unagented, and damaged by the story in America, or perhaps it’s just today’s terrified or cynical publishing climate, could not get backing after months of work at the Metropolitan Archive. Perhaps a grand ambition is to make Phoenix Ark Press a ‘Globe Theatre’ for writers then(!), but we’re pleased to give it to readers for free instead. All the world’s a page!

New addition to Phoenix Ark in pages above: Shakespeare’s Brother, the story of Edmund Shakespeare, the missing player, and the biography of an unrecorded life.

Phoenix Ark Press

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June 30, 2012 · 3:15 pm

LONDON OLYMPICS, WIMBLEDON, FOOTBALL AND A FREE THRILLER

The Godhead Game will now be available for free wireless download on sunday July 1st and wednesday 4th of July. Click here

Also available on Utube at http://youtu.be/Z62x9mzO5NA

Available from Amazon.com

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June 30, 2012 · 3:03 pm

A GAME OF SECRETS, A HUNT FOR SKULLS, A BATTLE OF SPIES

In responding to searches on Phoenix Ark’s website, we have noted interest in the article on Drue Heinz and the CIA. The story of Allen Dulles features prominently in the new thriller The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies, A Game of Secrets, A Hunt for Skulls, A Battle of Spies, available as an eBook via Amazon.com, but here is some of the factual research that helped to inform the story. Drue Heinz was one of Manhattan’s grandest dames for many years and a massive supporter of the arts, but sadly not Phoenix Ark Press. On the other hand, we have never asked!

FROM THE PHOENIX ARK FILES:

It turned up in a World War II visitor’s book, from an aristocratic home, on a hill in Switzerland, with sweeping views to Mont Blanc. There a glamorous American heiress, and a Swiss Baron, banker, and notable art collector, lived out the war in grand style, and with a considerable taste for adventure. Among their more permanent guests was the painter Balthus. They were also intimately connected with a celebrated spy – Allen Dulles – first Civilian Director of the CIA. The hostess of the house would help Dulles retrieve the Ciano diaries from Mussolini’s favourite daughter, Edda. As part of an American East Coast elite, she was at least an informal agent for the OSS, forerunner to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. As for Dulles, still said to be a romantic hero at the Agency, and a committed lady’s man, the be-spectacled, swashbuckling, but famously discrete lawyer had crossed into Switzerland, via Lisbon and Spain, as the borders slammed shut on the eve of Operation Torch, the allied invasion of North Africa. He was armed with a banker’s draft for a million dollars, and a virtually free hand, as Berne OSS station chief. That he cherished, and fully exploited, culminating in his work over Operation Sunrise, for German surrender in Northern Italy. His all important Swiss escapade is touched on, fictionalised, but largely avoided, in the film The Good Shepherd, starring Matt Damon. Dulles certainly believed in something that seems to have gone into decline, operatives fully enagaged on the ground, and culturally educated and well informed, rather than doing much second hand, perhaps nowadays down the net. He once famously said that all you really need in life is ‘a little bit of courage’.

Dulles had worked for the State Department, became a lawyer with Cromwell and Sullivan, and was a member of Yale’s infamous Skull and Bones Society, initiate to Presidents and security gurus, alike. In Switzerland he set about building a spy network that saw his intelligence gathering reach Roosevelt’s own desk. Since he had turned Lenin from the American Legation door in Switzerland, in 1918, he would never make the same mistake again, and worked with many. He also contacted every American living there, to ask for help, in what he described to Washington as a ‘somewhat distorted world’. It was the kind of world where agents still wore red carnations, or proffered a pack of Camel cigarettes, rather than Gauloise, to establish their allegiance to Free France, or Vichy. One that saw the British and Americans in touch with Admiral Canaris, employer and lover of Mata Hari, as head of the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence. Until Canaris fell, after the attempt to assassinate Hitler, and the Abwehr were abolished. Canaris was effectively replaced by Walter Schellenberg, who mounted two machine guns on his desk in Berlin, and later settled in Switzerland to write The Labyrinth. One of Allen Dulles’s greatest coups though was securing the help of the heroic Fritz Kolbe, who the British had turned away from ‘the shop’, and whose reports were validated in London by none other than Kim Philby, already working for the Soviets. Actually Dulles was too acute to sign his name in a visitor’s book, although his daughter Joan, and troubled wife Clover Todd, both appear in 1944. As does a patient of the psychologist Carl Jung, who, though he never came to the house, Dulles also consulted in Germany, and had his own OSS code number. There too came Dulles’s station replacement in Berne, Robert P. Joyce, and General Barnwell Legge, American Legation secretary. Legge was heavily criticized in a recent military controversy on the internet, for his involvement in preventing downed American airmen escape, under threat of Court Martial, probably because Dulles did not want their Swiss operation compromised. Also for failing to correct conditions at the scandalous camp at Wilmeroose, although one subordinate called him a caring man.

In a very ‘Special Relationship’, British Intelligence were at the house too, many times. In the person of George Younghusband, military number two at the British Legation, and the Colditz escapee Pat Reid, famous for his escape-themed board game, and for so successfully telling The Colditz Story, after the war. Reid never wrote about his time in Switzerland though. More specifically, on the British front, there is Henry Cartright, head of MI9 in Switzerland. MI9 dealt with escape routes out of Switzerland, although the role of MI6 has been little written about, in terms of the use and significance of information that debriefed escapees must have provided to intelligence networks, for attacks on Germany. Cartwright was a world War I escapee himself, whose best seller on the subject was avid Nazi reading in WWII, for obvious reasons. That house was watched closely by the Swiss Police too, reported for high antics, and for harbouring ‘a nest of spies’. Its owners were friends with the head of the Berne police though, and so probably protected, in the semi neutral atmosphere of smoke and mirrors diplomacy. One affected in Switzerland by the changing winds of war.

Soon after the war though, they received a grateful card from the British Legation, commending the couple not only for hospitality, but for their invaluable help to British and American escapees. It makes a family visitor’s book a very important historical document, as are unseen papers on Hitler and Edda Mussolini. Perhaps significantly, they received no such commendations from US Services, since spying rarely stops. The question still remains though as to how much their Brit guests were aware of the depth of their American connections, because the house’s true significance is testified to by a meeting in 1945, still a mystery, that involved a visit by colonels at the heart of SHAEF, The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and ETOUSA, American Theatre of Operations, during Operation Overlord. They had helped covertly in a war that would see Nazi scientists smuggled to America too, in the battle for the A-Bomb, under Dulles’s Operation Paperclip, and herald the triumph of American world hegemony, in more ways than simple military victory. If information is power, cash rich America certainly won the covert war, because America soon had vast reserves of European files transferred to Washington. Incidentally, some 6000 secret papers relating to Switzerland, and designated Safehaven, remain closed.

There is one rather surprising name in the visitor’s book too though, on an evening in 1943 – Drue Mackenzie Robertson. She is actually Drue Heinz, future wife of the Baked Bean and Ketchup Multi-Millionaire, Henry J Heinz. She was a doyenne of New York Society for many years – writing letters to the New Yorker in 1944, so she may have been back in the States by then – but also became a celebrated patron of the literary arts. One the flapping Phoenix Ark could certainly do with a little help from – for our love of stories, real and fictional! She is publisher of The Paris Review, established the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and her foundation endows the Drue Heinz lecture series in Pittsburg. At the Carnegie Museum of Art, her foundation also funds exhibitions at the Heinz Architectural Centre, and supports The Lincoln Centre Review. Having endowed a chair of American Literature at St John’s College, Oxford, and involved with Hertford College too, Drue Heinz has long been at the very epicentre of American Arts and Culture, but also influential in the UK. In 2002 she was made an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Born Doreen Mary English, Mrs Heinz clearly had a taste for theatrics earlier on, and as an actress, earned a small part in the movie Uneasy Terms, in 1948. It is all a long time ago, and many lives have passed in-between, so distance affords both mystery, and admiration, for a now grand old literary lady. But what of such tantalising ‘skull and bones’ in her cupboard, and was Drue Heinz really part of the OSS too, America’s Office of Strategic Services, or only linked by association? The term spy became a very moveable feast during the war, but it is an open secret that some of the most fertile areas of unwritten intelligence history are neutral territories, and Switzerland is no exception. Drue Heinz was there that night in Switzerland, 67 years ago, in 1943, and her signature is on the visitor’s page too, below her second husband, Dale Wilford Maher. As a graduate of the US Cavalry School and military attaché, Maher is a dead ringer for a spy, and signs himself ‘Master of the Five by Five”. That entry rather bemused this excited researcher, until, last year, one of the obvious links sprang fully armed from the pages of history, to validate a remarkable story, worthy of a movie, or a very stylish spy novel. ‘Five by Five’ was official Nato parlance for the best quality wireless transmissions, namely ‘reading you loud and clear’.

These people based at the American Legation then, and guests at a private home, were sending back radio reports, as Dulles himself began nightly transmissions from Switzerland, which in a coming technological age changed the cloak and dagger style of British dominated spying. It was the dawn of a new era, and they specialised in American style code words, like ‘Fatboy’ for Herman Goering. Stationed in Berne, in his beautiful flat in the Herengasse, Dulles’s own rather charming code name was Mr Burns, so you might take another glance at the satirical cartoon The Simpsons. To underline the personal touch, that Dulles would stamp all over the CIA, he called the technique for an operative communicating with a plane overhead by radio, ‘J-E Operations’. It came from the initials of Dulles’s daughter Joan, and his sister Eleanor. Despite British fears, Dulles’s work never compromised the greatest British coup though, in his supposedly ‘gung ho’ and open door approach. A coup embodied in the Enigma project, and Ultra transmissions, concealing the fact Britain had cracked and could read all German messages at the start of the war. British archives, although still closed, reveal a wireless transmitor was installed in their own Swiss legation in 1943.

Dulles, whose obsession would soon become the Soviet threat, and who encouraged later assassination programmes, out of the no-holes-barred tactics learnt in defeating the Nazis, notably had shares in the American Fruit Company, and has a rather more suspect role after his heroic war effort. Allied propaganda was one of his specialities in Switzerland, and as a master of dis-information, he was to be involved in a Mind Control programme, and Operation Mockingbird – perhaps he liked Harper Lee – the CIA’s attempt to directly influence the American media. Another visitor to that house would be Captain Tracy Barnes, a so-called ‘Jedburgh Agent’, and code named ‘Trick’, who would later turn up in the Cuban ‘Bay of Pigs’ debacle. It was of course Cuban bedeviled Kennedy who said of the CIA that he would like to scatter the organisation ‘to the four winds’. But what of Drue Heinz, whose Wikepedia profile is rather thin? Tantalizingly, that evening Drue Heinz signed herself in appealingly Mata Hari vein, for such a sparkling Manhattan hostess-to-be – “Queenie – the Striptease Queen!” The intense passions and fortunes of war, and such heady Swiss excitement, may have been too much for some. Dale Maher died in 1948, and his forwarding address on the internet is simply listed as ‘The State Department’. Drue Mackenzie Robertson married Henry J. Heinz II in 1953, becoming his third wife, and so perhaps beginning her powerful and passionate role in fiction and the arts. A passion fully shared by Phoenix Ark Press, although admittedly with a sometimes sceptical eye on other literary powers that be.

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June 30, 2012 · 3:00 pm

WELCOME TO THE MAYAN END OF EVERYTHING!

Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to share an article by David Clement-Davies on the Mayan Calendar in The Weissman Report Click Here

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June 30, 2012 · 2:57 pm

THE PRIDE OF PHOENIX ARK!

In moments of shame or despair, Phoenix Ark has been very troubled at times! But in re-reading Cultural Essays from other writers and artists, many of the blogs here and, above all, turning to readers who have supported, even criticised, we looked with huge pride today at all the work done and the reviews beginning to gather around our publications of Fire Bringer, The Sight, Fell, the Coedition and others. They are climbing again, and seem to inspire hearts, so never surrender and you can beat the B’s! Principles of truth and spirit were fought out here and the Phoenix is what remains inside, the flame.

The work and the stories are all that matter, but that is why, in any wrongs or heartbreaks, indeed any whining, DCD’s editor Susan Van Metre, now Abrams Vice President, should have supported the most fundamental principles. Not just the books she bought, but the absolutely vital working conditions too, that can actually become emotionally dangerous to any author. Books are indeed like children, to go out into the world and grow. She knew David’s track record and his absolute commitment to getting stories right. If the professional was so soured by the personal David was most certainly not to blame alone. Indeed, the chain of arrogance and betrayal began elsewhere entirely and it is part of the absurd political fear we ourselves generate in the world, that was so generated in New York City, but with respect to everyone’s jobs or talents, it is the authors who try to stand up and be counted and also need protection.

But when the Terror Time Spies comes out, it is time to turn again to epic animal fantasy in the edit of Scream of the White Bear. Readers who have followed the story may now understand a little more why it was cancelled, why it has taken so long and why now it deserves full energy and direction again. We do not think we will make August, as we said, but David owes it to himself and to readers who have waited too long to get it right. It will be this year.

PHOENIX ARK PRESS

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June 30, 2012 · 2:55 pm

PHOENIX REDESIGN AND CULTURAL ESSAYS

In the coming freshening up of Phoenix the Cultural Essays page, with some wonderful articles by very talented writers, has been simplified and linked, while now our ‘blog page’ will be used far more sparingly, to alert readers to longer articles and stories inside.

Phoenix Ark Press

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June 30, 2012 · 2:53 pm

PHOENIX ARK AND THE IPG

Phoenix Ark are pleased to announce we may have missed the 50th party at the Fishmongers Hall, a helpful plug for coming stories on Edmund Shakespeare, Bill’s youngest brother, also a player, and steamy Southwark, but we have now joined The Independent Publisher’s Guild.

“Art thou a fishmonger?” Hamlet

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June 30, 2012 · 2:51 pm

BARCLAYS, BANKING AND THE GODHEAD GAME

Another huge scandal at the heart of the City of London, and Barclays traders rigging rates. Scandal lurches towards scandal, who really regulates, since Labour’s ‘Big Bang’, beloved of Tories, and how does it corrupt everyone, or make them feel there is no justice or fair playing field?

So when do we wake up to the fact of what money is now, in the complexity of financial packaging, in the game of futures, in the sweeping dissociation of numbers and real lives? A large element of the new thriller The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies is both the internet and financial systems, and how you might actually beat world markets, but with a better purpose in mind. To buy a copy, exclusive to eBook, Click here

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June 30, 2012 · 2:48 pm

TARA BREAK, DAVID ROSEN AND THE BATTLE AGAINST ABRAMS

One of the things that became so extraordinary about Tara Break standing behind the cloak of an entire publishing firm, and standing over the destruction of an ex’s career too, one just taking off in America, was her own obsessive privacy and secrecy. It has an intimate cause, we believe, but was matched by an ability to seek permission for her actions among others, underlined by her warning of how ‘political’ work can be, but not face the music on things that really matter. Is that Abrams, New York, Tara Break or modern life? So she asked David once what she should do about an Abram’s colleague on the slide there, David Rosen, she said was drinking too much, as she would later say, like Sarah Van More, of the man who hired her and also loved her, Harold Rove . Tara Break had once been so seemingly sensitive to people, but over David Rosen, David C-D did a mime into a swimming pool once about being stabbed in the back, with teasing laughter at the time, but the point was perhaps being able to be a little tougher, yet to take responsibility for that yourself, and not ask everyone else. It became an issue about really standing beside the people you are with too and say you care about. Little did he suspect…

The crisis at Abrams though was always both personal and professional, but the so-called ‘protection’ of an employee at the expense of a contracted author, meant that vital aspect of the situation was blocked and denied and it totally distorted ensuing arguments about books too, and the right working relationship and conditions back. Instead a kind of ‘mobbing’ happened, that for a time was later supported by a CEO, as he started to see where the chips were falling. So a literally unanswerable ‘stalking’ charge was held in place, partly on grounds of privacy, and used to bully, in breach of fundamental principles of justice and ultimately the US Constitution. It was underlined by the arrogant words and actions of Sarah Van More, in so many ways, especially in accusing of betrayal and puting Satelite Tours into a catalogue that completely undermined a contracted author’s ability to promote and function in the US, as he had done so well, and support his future and past work properly and forcefully. Both valuable to a firm and essential to him, not to mention the deep emotions involved anyway. Also supporting Tara Break’s claim he alone was in the wrong.

The open threats to a contracted author, who had asked for help, apologised – though never put yourself even slightly in the wrong in New York business – and was seeking some power back in his work, including a novel that would have been held there four incredible years, were harmful and outrageous, David needed a way back to a far lighter storytelling and positivity too, like the wasted proposal he offered, but the fundamental issue was a senior editor refusing to allow any professional peace. Just go on hiding instead and stick your easy labels on others. Yet now the issue became a fight with his own editor too, that she saw wrongly as some attack on her “power over her list” and because he got so close to the heart of a firm over two years, David was talked to in a way they would never have dared get away with compared to any American author. Then there was the effective conspiracy that developed between people in a small department, to keep a secret from a CEO, that would have pushed a book into print that his own editor did not think good enough. Before that, they knew about it as it happened, and people David had worked with for years did nothing. That was surreal itself, as it was his own editor admitting she “saw what he meant” when he argued they were holding his entire life and work to ransom, but what later happened would make Kafka blush.

Tara Break ‘stabbed David in the back’ in several ways though. First over a ‘private’ medical issue, then over a relationship itself she spoke about to colleagues without asking him first. Then in her bizarre responses and failed priorities, when he was coming on tour to New York, and she was a major firm representative too, that made it so difficult to function. With words from her like ‘porn is evil’, from a woman who edits books on Rock n Roll, some real writing was on the emotional wall. That’s what makes the claim to privacies such a joke though, and it included Sarah Van More’s breach of private trust to an outside publisher at Penguin US. In Sarah Van More telling David once “loyalty is a tricky thing”, you might wonder where Sarah Van More’s loyalties lay, in terms not only of people, but basic editorial duties, now Tara Break was supporting her over her own personal crisis, but she could come out with a line like “we will protect our girl”, months before David’s issue reached a head, work dialogue already drying up, and she was hand in glove with Tara Break’s new man too. At the point where Susan Van Metre developed pneumonia, perhaps it was the atmoshpere inside New York firms that was very much to blame.

Tara Break knew something of previous publishing fights and difficulties though, why Abrams support had been so important and special to him, not to mention America, but seemingly nothing at all about the psychology of authors, the process of writing, the wider value of it, or someone she had been with two years, who had specific issues with the high handedness of some editors. One was the fact Macmillan had swapped editors on a third novel the same day he told them his father had died. But as ever intimate shared trusts were abused and then used in ‘evidence’ against the ‘bad guy’, behind the scenes. Try working in front of that. It seems Abrams editors are allowed absolute protection of their ‘private’ lives, but not expected to show one iota of professional care, intelligence or respect for working author’s private or professional lives. When they first met she came out with the line “don’t make me the last to know”, then did just that to David in every way imagineable. Just as they had shared ‘trusts’ about being hurt in other relationships, but she took a pick axe to real trusts, personal and professional, in her own ‘growing up’. If a relationship with a publisher itelf is like a kind of working marriage, especially in the language used in America, she should take a leaf out of the calendar book she did with the artist Donny Miller!

Then not only saying things that might have given anyone hope personally, yet going behind his back to friends in London, reversing even a friendship she asked for, admitting she had a fear of any kind of ’emotional confrontation’, and in the complete breach of professional trust too in allying with someone in London David specifically warned her about to do a ‘book’. That spat on a ten year fight to produce work of value and meaning, and to him a very ‘special relationship’ with an American firm. Her indigant claim “now you’re not respecting me” may have become true, but was laughable in terms of everything she had so disrespected in a life, friendships and work too. But then in the slam door absolutes there, she refused to even read Fell, or other obviously worthless work, compared to the ‘Hew, Screws and Glues’ she was producing at Abrams. She might by now have read “War and Peace”!

So the crisis happened, which was actually an argument both about love and friendship too, but also about work, surreal in the way it was pinned into one bad moment in time, or ‘truth’, voiding any honesty that ‘side’ about why it had happened or how, while David found it almost impossible to write. It was bloody obvious he went too far, but in comparison to Tara Breaks’s astonishing failure to ever take one single positive action, beyond the months of silent passive aggression of sitting at the heart of a firm, that David had also once so loved, and was doing so well at, culminating in a meeting where she told him “I give myself permission to change my mind”, before she took the whole thing to another guy in the background, he had to make all the gestures, when the real harm was all on the other side.

Espcially when it became “US” against “YOU”, so quickly, courtesy of Susan Van Metre, synthesising delicate personal issues and judgements and so-called working ‘rights’, as David was forced to work under contract, into a situation that was almost killing. His agent told him categorically “they will sue you” if he tried to walk away, days before she walked away on him, as he was about to take her professional advice, though he thought the principle of threatening a contracted author and blocking proper working conditions and dialogue wrong. That happened after whatever was said to her on the phone by his own editor Sarah Van More. Then a CEO’s right response was they had been in effective working repudition of a contract and potential defamation with regard to all previous working standards on his front. David has noticed how they talk merrily about ‘kicking ass’ at Abrams now, but you are not actually supposed to do that to your own authors, under contract and in the middle of three commissions, with two novels already at a firm.

He had apologised, and too generously, into a wall of complete silence from his publisher and editor too, in the next door office to Tara Break, but even then nothing could come back from the person who had declared “life is unfair”, to help just a work situation. But then the issues went on and at any moment Tara Break could have stood up at work and put them away, or even privately before a so-called ‘enquiry’, but again used the group, with ensuing damage everywhere. The cruelty of it became astonishing. Oh yes, but of course a contracted and supposedly valued and supported author at ‘Family Abrams’ was to blame for everything, trying to bring out his own truths or meanings in complex books, losing a persion, under conditions they could see were doing harm, or find some balance in his working life and respect again, as Sarah Van More replaced Harold Rove! In one way, in knowing the point of going wrong, he was to ‘blame’, he lost his better self, though he no longer thinks his better half, but in everything else that happened, welcome to Abrams, or Amulet, and the story of the scapegoat, although it seems Harold Rove became one too.

It was never just about Tara Break though. Why could Sarah Van More not even show the respect to an author, in looking at his rewrite of a second novel, or Abrams stick to its own forced agreements, in announcing to readers, in breach of that difficult agreement, a book was still cancelled? If it was all so obvious about ‘new people sending out emails by mistake’, or already failed trusts, how could they maintain such an appalling, military style insistence on contracts they themselves had already breached? Because basic publishing contracts are hardly worth the paper they are written on, as Ginger Clarke warned “you will destroy trust” if you even mention them. For reasons of deeply breached trusts on that side of the fence, it was already gone. There are two very simple questions though, if ‘they’ were right why is Harold Rove no longer Vice President, and why has David not been compensated for such unnecessary harm, to life and work, over so long, despite repeated attempts to make peace, and get on with work under the right conditions? The authors do not matter, unless right at the top, the publishers do.

DCD

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