The Death Instinct

Author's Note

The wall street bombing of September 16,1920, would remain the most destructive act of terrorism in the United States until the Oklahoma bombing of 1995. Unlike the latter, however, and unlike the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Wall Street bombing was never solved. Its perpetrators were never caught. No one was ever prosecuted. In 1944 the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that the explosion 'would appear' to have been 'the work of Italian anarchists or Italian terrorists,' but this was conjecture, and the identity of those responsible remains unknown to this day.

Let me emphasize that my 'solution' to this mystery is imaginary. There is absolutely no historical evidence for the notion that the true masterminds behind the bombing were Senator Albert Bacon Fall, Thomas W. Lamont of the J. P. Morgan Co., or former Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo. These men are real historical figures; the latter two are properly credited with significant public service and important accomplishments. The background facts that I recount about them are true. My story, however, about their responsibility for the Wall Street bombing is just that – a story.

What then is real and what imaginary in The Death Instinct? The principle I tried to follow was simple. The action of the book – the perils of its protagonists, the evildoing they uncover – is fiction. The world in which that action takes place is fact.

Thus the backdrop of events and circumstances against which The Death Instinct unfolds is true. At the very moment of the explosion on Wall Street, and directly opposite, almost a billion dollars in United States gold was indeed in transit from the old Sub-Treasury to the adjacent Assay Office via a wooden overhead bridge. A few miles away, a hundred working women would have been painting luminous watch dials, using their lips to point their poisonous brushes. In Washington, DC, Senator Fall was in fact machinating, nearly successfully, to bring about a war with Mexico that would have enriched himself and his powerful friends in the oil industry. Meanwhile, in war-devastated Europe, Sigmund Freud had just arrived at a new understanding of the human soul, according to which every individual is born with two fundamental instincts – one aiming at life and love, the other at death.

On the other hand, the theft of the Treasury's gold described in The Death Instinct is invented. The United States has always denied that any gold was lost. The accepted account is that the simultaneity of the bombing and the gold transfer was mere coincidence and that the workmen moving the precious metal happened to take their lunch break, closing up the heavy doors on either side of the bridge, moments before the explosion.

From the great occurrences like the bombing, to the petite Curie radiological truck driven by Colette, the world described in The Death Instinct is as real as I could make it, every detail based on actual historical sources. Readers who learn in these pages that thousands of soldiers were needlessly killed on November 11, 1918 – after their commanding officers already knew of the armistice – can be confident that this fact is documented in numerous reliable accounts. If I quote a newspaper, the quotation is verbatim or, if edited, only very slightly for style, without alteration of content. If I offer particular images from the September sixteenth explosion, every one of them is drawn from contemporaneous accounts: a taxi was in fact blown into the air; a woman's head was severed from her body; the pockmarked walls of the Morgan Bank can still be seen today. Even the outrageous forgeries I describe, purporting to show that the Mexican government had paid bribes to three anti-interventionist United States senators, are historically based, although these forgeries would not be circulated until a few years later, in another failed effort to spur an American invasion of Mexico.

To be sure, I can't vouch for the truth of the historical materials on which I rely. When I quote Toynbee describing German atrocities in France in 1914, readers can be sure the quotation is exact, but they can't know – and I don't know – whether Toynbee's account is itself correct. The ultimate validity of historical sources must be left to historians.

Nevertheless, some of the most incredible events described in The Death Instinct are not open to serious question. The remarkable tale of Edwin Fischer, for example, is established fact. His advance warnings, repeated to many different people, of a bombing on Wall Street after the close of business on September fifteenth or on the sixteenth are still unexplained. (All the peculiar details I mention about him – his four tennis championships, his multiple suits, his statement that he learned of the bombing 'out of the air,' his subsequent detention in an asylum, and so on – are completely factual.) If Fischer had advance knowledge of the bombing, which historians do not accept, it would suggest that there were men behind the attack belonging to a circle quite different from that of the penurious Italian anarchists usually said to be responsible.

Although it is not well known, Fischer was, as mentioned in my book, indeed in contact with federal government agents several years before the bombing. But my account of his further dealings with the Bureau of Investigation, along with the story told at the end of The Death Instinct, in which Littlemore figures out that the voices Fischer heard 'out of the air' came to him outside the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, is entirely fictitious. It is a fact, however, that whispers can be heard across that concourse at the spot I describe.

The Marie Curie Radium Fund, led by the indomitable Mrs William B. Meloney, eventually succeeded in purchasing a gram of radium for

Madame Curie, who traveled to the United States in 1921 to receive the gift from President Harding. In addition to being the Sorbonne's first woman professor and the first winner of two Nobel Prizes – one in Physics in 1903, the other in Chemistry in 1911 Madame Curie remains today the only woman to have accomplished the double-Nobel feat and the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields. Radiation exposure very probably caused her cataracts in 1920 and almost certainly caused her death from aplastic anemia (or perhaps leukemia) in 1934.

While my protagonists -Younger, Littlemore, Colette, and Luc – are fictional, many of those with whom they interact are not, such as Police Commissioner Enright, Treasury Secretary Houston, New York City Mayor Hylan, 'Big Bill' Flynn, and Dr Walter Prince (of the American Society for Psychical Research). There was also a real Mrs Grace Cross who apparently had an affair with Warren Harding, but the character bearing her name is not otherwise based on the actual person.

Arnold Brighton is a fictitious character. Edward Doheny was the real oilman who backed Fall's efforts to make war on Mexico and paid him at least $100,000 in bribes, for which Fall would later become the first Cabinet member ever to be imprisoned for a crime committed while in office. The real head of the US Radium Corporation in 1920, at whose New Jersey factory Quinta Maggia McDonald and her sisters worked, was Arthur Roeder. There is absolutely no reason to believe that either Doheny or Roeder had anything to do with the Wall Street bombing.

By contrast, the tragic poisoning of the radium dial painters is well established. In several respects the true facts are worse than my description. Up to one hundred twelve dial painters may have died as a result of 'pointing' their brushes with their lips – a practice not abolished until 1925. Many more suffered painful, debilitating illnesses.

The Maggia sisters – Quinta, Amelia, and Albina – were among the victims. (Although I use these three women's names in my book, my characters do not correspond to the real-life women, and the story I tell about their escape from the radium factory, their being hunted, and their efforts to communicate with Colette, is complete invention.) Amelia died in 1922, the first of the dial painters known to have perished from radium poisoning. When her body was exhumed in 1927, it was still radioactive. A handful of women, including Quinta and Albina, sued US Radium in the mid-twenties, but the law did not treat them well. In 1928, terminally ill, Quinta received a modest cash payment and an extravagant $600 annuity 'for life'; she died less than two years later. Albina lived until 1946.

The corporation apparently suppressed or even falsified a report demonstrating that its officers knew of radium's danger to the dial painters. At one point a medical specialist from Columbia University volunteered to conduct independent examinations of the complaining women and concluded that they were either in excellent health or that their symptoms were due to syphilis or other illnesses unrelated to their employment. That specialist, Frederick Flinn, neglected to mention that he was not actually a doctor – and that he was being paid by US Radium. My character Frederick Lyme engages in similar misdeeds, but his further nefarious conduct is imaginary.

Sigmund Freud first articulated his theory of the death instinct in a short book called Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920. Understood as a drive of pure aggression, a kind of lust for killing and destruction, the notion of a death instinct might raise questions about the goodness of human nature, but would otherwise be simple enough to comprehend. Freud insisted, however, that the instinct is fundamentally and originally directed at the self's own destruction. As a result, his death drive is regarded as a much more difficult and controversial proposition – although self-destructiveness is surely a phenomenon almost as familiar as aggression.

By and large, the psychoanalytic world since Freud has been happy to forget about the death instinct or at any rate to deemphasize it. Melanie Klein was an important exception; so was Jacques Lacan, who considered the death instinct central to psychoanalysis, although he sought to prize the instinct free from the biological foundations Freud had given it. Another exception is Andre Green, also a French psychoanalyst, whose excellent recent book on the death instinct – Pounquel les pulsions de destruction ou de mort? (Editions du Panama, 2007) by contrast explicitly connects Freud's theory to apoptosis, the biological process of programmed' cell death or cell suicide.' I have Freud draw the same connection in a conversation with Colette, perhaps,a little anachronistically. Although apoptosis was known to scientists by the late nineteenth century (called at that time 'chromatolysis'), its connection to cancer was not established until the late twentieth.

Readers familiar with Freud's work will recognize the famous fort-da game that figures so prominently in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The unnamed boy who plays the game in Freud's essay has been identified as Freud's grandson Ernst; his mother was the Sophie whose death Freud so deeply mourned in 1920. There is another place in my book where Luc assumes the role of one of Freud's grandsons. The anecdote I tell about Freud, Luc, and the beggar feigning epilepsy was told to me by Clement Freud – brother of the painter Lucian Freud – and appears in the late Sir Clement's autobiography, Freud Ego.

The astonishing story Freud recounts to Colette and Younger demonstrating the accuracy of one of his dream interpretations – in which Freud correctly deduces that a patient witnessed an affair between the patient's nurse and a family groomsman when the patient was about four years old – is entirely true, or at any rate is attested to by the patient herself, Princess Marie Bonaparte. Princess Marie, however, did not begin her consultation with Freud until 1925, so the story is not in correct time sequence in my book. As in The Interpretation of Murder, many of Freud's statements in The Death Instinct are drawn from his actual writings. Although it is common today to refer to Freud's death drive by the name of Thanatos' (after a Greek god of death), Freud never did so in his writings, and accordingly that term does not appear in my pages. He does refer to the death goddess Atropos in 'The Theme of the Three Caskets,' a 1913 essay that contains the key to the symbolism of The Death Instinct. Freud lived in Vienna until 1938, when he narrowly escaped Nazi persecution. He died in England in 1939.