Thursday
I’ve written a lot about people’s hopes in Robert Mueller, which helps explain the palpable disappointment in his performance yesterday before two Congressional committees. From one perspective, there’s no reason to feel let down. After all, his report exposed one of the great scandals in American history: our president welcomed and encouraged Russian election aid and then actively attempted to obstruct investigations into it.
Although Mueller made clear that the Russians are still interfering and that Trump is still obstructing, however, many however, wanted a messenger as dramatic as the message he was delivering.
Hopes were high because, into the remarkable secrecy that Mueller maintained as Special Counsel, people projected their desire for a powerful engine of truth that would save the republic. I wrote several times about these hopes, comparing Mueller at one time to Sherlock tracking down Moriarty and at another to Detective Porfiry investigating Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. I said he was like both the eye of Sauron and the Ents that save the day in Lord of the Rings. In my favorite post on Mueller, I said he came across as the owl in Mary Oliver’s poem “In the Pine Woods, Crows and Owl,” who as “the bone-crushing prince of the dark days” eats the crows one by one:
They know it. They hate you. Still
when one of them spies you out,
all stream
straight toward violence and
confrontation.
As though it helped to see the
living proof.
The bone-crushing prince of the
dark days, gloomy
at the interruption of his
rest. Hissing
and snapping, grabbing about
him, dreadful
as death’s drum; mournful,
unalterable fact.
We dreamed that, if Mueller revealed the unalterable facts of Trump’s Russia connection, everyone would agree he had to go.
After seeing Mueller’s halting delivery yesterday, however, I found myself thinking of Octave’s conversation with Christine in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece Rules of the Game. She believes that Jurieux, who is the first man to fly across the English Channel at night and who does so expressly for her, is the hero who will take her away. Once he offers to do so, however, she learns that he is a conventional bourgeois. Her old friend Octave explains that some people are heroes only in the air and have feet of clay when they come to earth. Mueller may know how to run an impeccable investigation, but he has bumbled when conveying his findings to the general public.
Or maybe he’s like Siegfried von Turpitz in David Lodge’s campus novel Small World. Turpitz, a scholar who goes through life wearing a black glove, is a fearsome figure. He may be modeled on reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss, a former Nazi youth member, but in any event he frightens the living daylights out of people. For instance:
Siegfried von Turpitz now has black gloves on both of his hands. They grip the steering wheel of his black BMW 635CSi coupé, with 3453 cc Bosch L-jetronic fuel-injection engine and five speed Getrag all-synchromesh gearbox. He holds the car to a steady one hundred and eight kilometers per hour in the fast lane of the autobahn between Berlin and Hanover, compelling slower vehicles to move over not by flashing his headlights (which is forbidden by law) but by moving up behind them swiftly, silently and very close; so that when a driver glances into a rear-view mirror which only moments was empty save for a small black dot on the horizon, he finds it, to his astonishment and terror, entirely filled by the dark mass of the BMW’s bonnet and tinted windscreen, behind which, under a skullcap of flat, colorless hair, floats the pale impassive visage of Siegfried von Turpitz—and, as fast as the shock to his nerves permits, such a driver swerves aside to let the BMW pass.
And then there’s this account of his married life:
Far away in Germany, Siegfried von Turpitz…is asleep in the bedroom of his house on the edge of the Black Forest. Tired from his long drive, he lies to attention, on his back, his black hand outside the sheets. His wife, Bertha, asleep in the other twin bed, has never seen her husband without the glove. When he is taking a bath, his right hand dangles over the side of the tub to keep dry; when he takes a shower it projects horizontally from between the curtains like a traffic policeman’s signal. When he comes to her bed she is not always sure, in the dark, whether it is a penis or a leather-sheathed finger that probes the folds and orifices of her body. On their wedding night she begged him to remove the glove, but he refused. “But if the lights are out, Siegfried?” she pleaded. “My first wife asked me to do that once,” said Siegfried von Turpitz cryptically, “but I forgot to put the glove back on before I fell asleep.” Von Turpitz’s first wife was known to have died of a heart attack, found one morning by her husband lying dead in the bed beside him. Bertha never asked Siegfried again to remove his glove.
Or as Trump put it after learning that Mueller had been appointed, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”
At the end of the novel, however, von Turpitz, like Mueller, turns out to be just a guy. The scene occurs in Lodge’s over-the-top romance ending when identities are revealed, families are reunited, and long enmities are dropped:
Only Siegried von Turpitz looks cross and sulky. Persse grabs his hand and pumps it up and down. “No hard feelings,” he says, “Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein are going to publish my book after all.” The German pulls his hand away irritably, but Persse has not finished shaking it, and the black glove comes off, revealing a perfectly normal, healthy-looking hand underneath. Von Turpitz goes pale, hisses, and seems to shrivel in stature, plunges his hand in his jacket pocket, and slinks from the room, never to be seen at an international conference again.
We may, in fact, never see Mueller again as he doesn’t like the limelight and, having done his duty as special counsel (not to mention as a decorated soldier and respected head of the FBI), wants to be left in peace. Unlike Turpitz, however, the special powers that people imagined him possessing were never his idea.
