Nicht nur wegen Robert Mitchum …

Alf Mayer verabschiedet sich von Gaylord Dold, der uns noch einen Text schenkt.

Eigentlich ist die „Spanische Grippe“ hundert Jahre her. Weltweit fast hundert Millionen Menschen sind ihr damals zum Opfer gefallen, immer aber noch kann man an Grippe sterben. Am 29. Januar 2018 hat es damit ganz banal den US-Schriftsteller Gaylord Dold hinweggerafft, 70 Jahre alt und körperlich eigentlich sehr fit. Er lebte auf der Prärie des südlichen Kansas und war der Autor ausnahmeguter Kriminalromane, wir verabschieden uns von ihm hier mit seinem letzten Text, den er schrieb. (Bibliographie ganz unten.)

Gaylord Dold, nahe Fort Scott, Kansas

Die historische Epidemie von damals wird gerade aufregend im Sachbuch „1918. Die Welt im Fieber“ von Laura Spinney (Hanser) dargestellt. Wer heute etwas über Gaylord Dold wissen will, muss ein wenig schürfen. In meinem Regal stehen seine Bücher neben Jerome Charyn, das nicht nur, weil sie alphabetisch beieinander liegen. Dolds letztes Hardcover ist 14 Jahre her. Er hat danach noch eine Handvoll eBooks veröffentlicht, übersetzt wurde er meines Wissens in Deutschland nie.

Dold besaß vier Universitätsabschlüsse: Deutsch, Philosophie, Jura und internationales Recht, er arbeitete als Jura-Professor und als Anwalt – in Wichita, Kansas, of all places, dort blieb er hängen, schrieb mehr als 35 Jahre lang Buchkritiken für den „Wichita Eagle“, gründete den Kleinverlag Watermark Press, die größte Entdeckung dort John O’Brien und dessen „Leaving Las Vegas“ (oscar-trächtig verfilmt mit Nicholas Cage).

Als Rechtsanwalt verteidigte er Bankräuber, Fälscher, Kleindealer, eines Tages ging bei ihm eine Lampe an: Warum nicht darüber schreiben? Seine ersten drei Bücher waren „aufgeblasene Übungen in lächerlicher Dummheit“, sagte er später. Dann fand er Philip Spitzer als Agenten, der auch James Lee Burke und Michael Connelly vertrat, lernte die Tugenden der Revisionen schätzen. „Was ich lernte, war, niemals von der eigenen Arbeit allzu beeindruckt zu sein.“

Seinen toughen Privatdetektiv Mitch Robert benannte er nach Robert Mitchum, schrieb mit ihm zehn Romane, die ersten sechs waren Paperbacks. Es war eine der besten Privatdetektivserien der späten 1980er, mir gefiel immer auch, wie weltoffen und philosophisch die Bücher waren. Sie führten etwa nach Jamaika – Dolds Kollege Stephen Greenleaf war von „Rude Boys“ tief beeindruckt -, nach Haiti oder London,  hatten Flair. Kein Wunder: Dold schrieb auch Reisebücher, “The Rough Guide to the Bahamas” oder “Moon Handbooks: Dominican Republic”. Sein Anwaltsthriller “Devil to Pay” kam 1998 unter die besten zehn Kriminalromane. „Schedule Two“ mit der asiatischstämmigen Undercover-Polizistin Grace Wu sah Daniel Woodrell in der Liga von Robert Stones „Dog Soldiers“ und nannte ihnen einen „Top-Shelf Thriller“. 

„The World Beat“ spielt zum Teil in den Diamentenminen im Kongo. Dort heißt es, 1993 schon, vernichtend über ein gieriges und nationalistisches Amerika: „Ideas“, he repeated in a whisper. „America has no ideas any longer. I’m afraid all we have is hypocrisy and an overbearing nationalism. This is the same thing as greed masquerading behind emptiness.“

Gaylord Dolds letzter Text stammt von Ende November 2017. Der Amoklauf in der Baptisten-Kirche der kleinen texanischen Gemeinde Sutherland Springs, bei dem 26 Menschen starben und weitere 20 verletzt wurden, war ihm Anlass, in zwei seiner früheren Buchrezensionen zu schauen und Grundsätzliches über Empathie, über den bequem und oberflächlich gewordenen Umgang mit „dem Bösen“ und auch über deutsche Geschichte zu schreiben. Gaylord Dolds letztes als haptisches Buch erschienener Roman, „The Last Man in Berlin“ von 2004, spielt im Berlin des Jahres 1933 und behandelt die Gewissens- und Gesellschaftskonflikte am Rande des Faschismus.

Das Rad der Perversion hat sich in den letzten Wochen in den USA noch weiter gedreht: Inzwischen lernen dort Lehrer in Lehrgängen auf Schüler zu schießen; in den ersten 23 Tagen des neuen Jahres 2018 gab es bereits elf „School Shootings“. Um im richtigen Moment, den „richtigen“ Biss zu haben und ihre Hemmungen abzubauen, sollen sie sich beim Schießen ihren Lieblingsschüler vorstellen, auf den sie anlegen. (Siehe „The Nation“ vom 1. Februar 2018.) – Alf Mayer

Evil – and what is our share in it

by Gaylord Dold.
After the mass shooting (according to some estimates the 555th mass shooting of America’s year 2017) at a Baptist Church in Texas, Governor Abbott, when asked what should his citizens be doing now, answered, “Look to the Lord.” The Texas Attorney General had more specific thoughts. Texas gun laws were ambiguous about open and concealed carry in churches. He thought that people should take their guns to church and that Texas law should unambiguously allow them to do so. Asked about what causes such mass gun casualties (remember, this was just four weeks after a gunman killed 59 and wounded about 500 in Las Vegas), the head of Texas Carry thought that riots and disrespect for police was the answer.

All that is stupid nonsense of course. But the problem of evil in the world is not nonsense. Now that we inhabit a full-bore gun culture (no pun intended), we Americans are sunk in perpetual foreign wars, subjected to news of deaths that most cultures would be shocked by, and numbed by constant hate to the point that our President (Trump) says only that “now is not the time” to talk about it. The President does, however, sometimes call mass shooters “degenerate” or “evil”, succumbing to non-reflexive instinct in a search for either natural (“degenerate”) or transcendent (“evil”) explanations. One thing the President cannot do is to look inside himself; nor, it seems, can many of us. But, what is it about the culture surrounding these horrible events that gives rise to mass shootings and gun violence in general?

The two books under consideration here do look inside “us” to examine the culture of evil and cruelty. Andrew Delblanco’s superb book “The Death of Satan” is a highly readable survey, by Columbia University’s Professor of Humanities, of the literary, social and cultural landscape surrounding America’s engagement with the Devil and how American thinkers and writers have come to grips with the ever-present history of war, torture, murder, and other forms of human cruelty. Delblanco’s basic premise is that: “A gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it.” Citing a “crisis of incompetence before evil”, Delblanco traverses the centuries from Puritanism to Science, and finds that the Devil has disappeared and that Americans, “having discarded the old words and symbols” have arrived “at an unprecedented condition of inarticulate dread.”

Those of us interested in the present debate about the Gun Culture (not about guns, but about an entire culture addicted to guns and other violence) can hardly ignore the fact that neither religion nor science can adequately explain what is happening in our churches, schools, nightclubs, workplaces, streets and homes. Delblanco discusses a wide array of writers and thinkers—Emerson, Melville, Cotton Mather, Hemingway, Lincoln, Kierkegaard, Primo Levi, Dewey and Lippman, to name just a few. “Getting a handle” on evil, as Delblanco argues, has been a major theme in American literature and art. These days, Delblanco would say that we as a culture have lost our mutual ability (as a society) to agree on any terms of transcendence for our shared values. Gun advocates argue that we need more guns to combat the guns in the hands of “evil doers”. Some argue that we need regulation. Some might raise their hands in surrender. But make no mistake, Delblanco’s wonderful book is a reminder about how much we’ve lost to violence and evil when a disappeared Devil can compose such a score and have us all dancing to his tune from somewhere off the stage.

While Delblanco’s “Death of Satan” is an invaluable book for those interested in America’s historical thinking about evil (and a book that could stimulate much useful debate), Simon Baron-Cohen’s “The Science of Evil” rejects transcendental or metaphysical speculation in favor of a strictly scientific explanation of evil, or what Baron-Cohen (a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge) calls “empathy erosion”. “Empathy is not the only component that contributes to cruelty” Baron-Cohen writes, “but…it is the final common pathway.” Empathy erosion is, in scientific terms, the only thing about “evil” that is measurable or observable, and thus the only thing that can be reasonably discussed as a causal factor in any kind of cruel act.

Baron-Cohen describes the considerable research done into the ways and means behind how some people become capable of cruelty and “whether the loss of affective (emotional) empathy “inevitably has this consequence.” Cohen’s book describes the abundant research results from neurobiology and gene dynamics to take a close look at the medical conditions leading to a loss of empathy. At issue is the behavior of psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists, who demonstrate a “Zero-Negative” empathy level, meaning that each of these categories of persons suffer from medical illnesses that disallow them from recognizing the emotions of other people. Along the way, Cohen discusses people diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and Autism, “Zero-Positives” who have a affective connections to other’s emotions, but who cannot cognitively process “other minds”.

Cohen’s book leaves a barren impression, though its science is undoubtedly correct. But as an explanation for “evil in the World”, science falls short, at least emotionally, given that “cruelty” is only one limited kind of evil. Zeroing in on individuals who lack affective empathy (even if this can be observationally and scientifically proven) leaves out of the equation, for example, all those “good Germans” who watched the Jews disappear from their towns and villages, quietly observed them being marched to the trains, and gazed on as their ashes rose up as smoke out of tall chimneys all over Germany and Eastern Europe. Those were the Germans who loved their children, went to church, fed the dog, and listened to Mozart.

These good Germans have a lot in common with we good Americans who all stand up during the national anthem. We’d best start asking each other and ourselves the right questions.

Books Discussed:

The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, by Andrew Delblanco (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1995)

The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, by Simon Baron-Cohen (Basic Books Perseus Group, New York 2012)

Bibliografie Gaylord Dold
Die Mitch Roberts-Romane:

Hot Summer, Cold Murder, 1987
Snake Eyes, 1987
Cold Cash, 1987
Bone Pile, 1988
Muscle and Blood, 1989
Dishelved City, 1990
A Penny for the Old Guy, 1991
Rude Boys, 1992
The World Beat, 1993
Samedi’s Knapsack, 2001.

Thriller:
Schedule Two, 1996
Bay of Sorrows, 1995
Devil to Pay, 1999
Six White Horses, 2002
The Last Man in Berlin, 2004, als eBook: Storm 33.

eBooks:
The Nickel Jolt, 2013
Same Old Sun, Same Old Moon, 2013
The Swarming Stage, 2013 (science fiction)
The Moon When the Water Freezes, 2014 (YA, Western)
Jack’s Boy. An Alcoholic Childhood, 2015 (Memoiren)