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Aug. 15th, 2020 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFor most of the past week I've been out of the city of Boston for the first time since the quarantimes began, and I spent a significant chunk of that time reading out loud from Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide to genarti and my parents whenever any of them would sit still long enough to listen.
Between Silk and Cyanide is a memoir by Leo Marks, who in 1941 was deemed too much of an unreliable misfit to go work at Bletchley Park and as a result was instead sent to SOE to handle the cryptography of their various sabotage operations in Europe.
Some relevant facts about Leo Marks:
- he was Jewish and absolutely petrified by the prospect of facing combat
- his parents owned a moderately famous used bookstore
- after the war he went on to become a playwright and screenwriter, which means that the book is extremely entertainingly written but also one has to cast a slightly skeptical eye at some incidents of dialogue that seem perhaps slightly too cinematic for reality
- in 1941 he was 21 years old, which means that one spends a significant percentage of narrative clutching one's face and screaming "CHILD!" as, for example, in his initial interview for the position:
He began the interview by asking what my hobbies were.
"Incunabula and intercourse, sir."
It slipped out and wasn't even accurate; I'd had little experience of one and couldn't afford the other.
AN INFANT.
(Later on, he gets assigned to visit Cairo on Top Secret Codes Business and is petrified by the prospect of telling his adoring parents, who are convinced he's not capable of going across the city on his own, let alone leaving the country. "They need to have their heads examined, sending a baby to that awful place," wails Leo's Mum, of a youth currently responsible for overseeing all cryptographic traffic sent between London and SOE agents parachuted behind enemy lines.)
Anyway, immediately upon arriving at SOE headquarters, the Infant Leo becomes appalled by the lack of security and danger to the agents of the poem-based codes in use at the time, and embarks upon a one-man crusade to a.) develop better cryptographic methods and b.) convince his superiors that resources ought to be devoted to them. His methodology is often very funny and extremely twenty-one-years-old of him -- at one point, for example, he comes up with a cunning plan to force someone to read his report by marking it 'TOP SECRET,' leaving it in an unlocked drawer, and promptly reporting himself for breach of security protocols -- and you often understand all too well why Marks' superiors and coworkers are frequently furious at the obnoxious wunderkind who keeps barging into their offices and yelling that everything they're doing is wrong and bad.
With all this said, Leo's first most endearing quality as a writer is that he is not only witty and self-aware, but also more than happy to make himself the butt of the joke and admit his own shortcomings, failures, and hubris, as well as occasional highly relatable moments of slapstick. The second and far more significant one is that all his efforts are clearly driven by a profound conviction and sense of personal responsibility about the fact that bad cryptographic protocols are killing agents, and as funny as the book is much of the time, it's also very clear that Marks was and remains deeply haunted by SOE's losses. Several significant SOE figures show up over the course of the book, but some of the most space is reserved for Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo, and Leo's friend F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, all of whom were captured by the Gestapo in France. (On a lighter note, he also spends a lot of time tearing his hair out over Einar Skinnerland, whose cryptographic traffic is as sloppily coded as his clandestine achievements are heroic.)
Aside from the Ongoing Quest for Better Cryptography, the other main thread of the book is Marks' conviction that all SOE agents in Amsterdam have been captured by the Germans, based on the use of their secret security checks followed by the subsequent implausible perfection of their cryptographic traffic, and his deep frustration and panic about the fact that his superiors will neither do anything about it nor allow him to tell anybody else. The parts of the book where he talks about having to keep a professional face when providing briefings to officers that he's convinced are being dropped straight to their deaths are incredibly affecting. By the time the war ends, a now twenty-five-year-old Marks is significantly less of an infant, and deeply and understandably exhausted by both cryptography and the vicious politics of war.
(It's worth noting for the sake of independent verification that none of Marks' reports about this issue survive in the war archives, so the only source for Marks' ability to detect the deception in Amsterdam before the rest of SOE is Marks himself. Relatedly, Marks claims that the only report of his that does survive to the present day was a youthful attempt to understand cryptography through a Freudian perspective titled "Ciphers, Signals, and Sex." Given that a full chapter of the book is dedicated to one of Marks' colleagues attempting to explain the 'awkward time of the month' to him as it relates to his mostly-female codebreaking team while he makes the confused math face, one doesn't put a lot of stock in his conclusions but one does expect it to be hilarious. Alas, attempts to recover this important document have apparently failed.)
Anyway. Highly, highly recommended for anyone who's at all interested in this particular period of history -- thank you tosovay for reminding me that I've been meaning to get around to it.
genarti and my parents whenever any of them would sit still long enough to listen.Between Silk and Cyanide is a memoir by Leo Marks, who in 1941 was deemed too much of an unreliable misfit to go work at Bletchley Park and as a result was instead sent to SOE to handle the cryptography of their various sabotage operations in Europe.
Some relevant facts about Leo Marks:
- he was Jewish and absolutely petrified by the prospect of facing combat
- his parents owned a moderately famous used bookstore
- after the war he went on to become a playwright and screenwriter, which means that the book is extremely entertainingly written but also one has to cast a slightly skeptical eye at some incidents of dialogue that seem perhaps slightly too cinematic for reality
- in 1941 he was 21 years old, which means that one spends a significant percentage of narrative clutching one's face and screaming "CHILD!" as, for example, in his initial interview for the position:
He began the interview by asking what my hobbies were.
"Incunabula and intercourse, sir."
It slipped out and wasn't even accurate; I'd had little experience of one and couldn't afford the other.
AN INFANT.
(Later on, he gets assigned to visit Cairo on Top Secret Codes Business and is petrified by the prospect of telling his adoring parents, who are convinced he's not capable of going across the city on his own, let alone leaving the country. "They need to have their heads examined, sending a baby to that awful place," wails Leo's Mum, of a youth currently responsible for overseeing all cryptographic traffic sent between London and SOE agents parachuted behind enemy lines.)
Anyway, immediately upon arriving at SOE headquarters, the Infant Leo becomes appalled by the lack of security and danger to the agents of the poem-based codes in use at the time, and embarks upon a one-man crusade to a.) develop better cryptographic methods and b.) convince his superiors that resources ought to be devoted to them. His methodology is often very funny and extremely twenty-one-years-old of him -- at one point, for example, he comes up with a cunning plan to force someone to read his report by marking it 'TOP SECRET,' leaving it in an unlocked drawer, and promptly reporting himself for breach of security protocols -- and you often understand all too well why Marks' superiors and coworkers are frequently furious at the obnoxious wunderkind who keeps barging into their offices and yelling that everything they're doing is wrong and bad.
With all this said, Leo's first most endearing quality as a writer is that he is not only witty and self-aware, but also more than happy to make himself the butt of the joke and admit his own shortcomings, failures, and hubris, as well as occasional highly relatable moments of slapstick. The second and far more significant one is that all his efforts are clearly driven by a profound conviction and sense of personal responsibility about the fact that bad cryptographic protocols are killing agents, and as funny as the book is much of the time, it's also very clear that Marks was and remains deeply haunted by SOE's losses. Several significant SOE figures show up over the course of the book, but some of the most space is reserved for Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo, and Leo's friend F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, all of whom were captured by the Gestapo in France. (On a lighter note, he also spends a lot of time tearing his hair out over Einar Skinnerland, whose cryptographic traffic is as sloppily coded as his clandestine achievements are heroic.)
Aside from the Ongoing Quest for Better Cryptography, the other main thread of the book is Marks' conviction that all SOE agents in Amsterdam have been captured by the Germans, based on the use of their secret security checks followed by the subsequent implausible perfection of their cryptographic traffic, and his deep frustration and panic about the fact that his superiors will neither do anything about it nor allow him to tell anybody else. The parts of the book where he talks about having to keep a professional face when providing briefings to officers that he's convinced are being dropped straight to their deaths are incredibly affecting. By the time the war ends, a now twenty-five-year-old Marks is significantly less of an infant, and deeply and understandably exhausted by both cryptography and the vicious politics of war.
(It's worth noting for the sake of independent verification that none of Marks' reports about this issue survive in the war archives, so the only source for Marks' ability to detect the deception in Amsterdam before the rest of SOE is Marks himself. Relatedly, Marks claims that the only report of his that does survive to the present day was a youthful attempt to understand cryptography through a Freudian perspective titled "Ciphers, Signals, and Sex." Given that a full chapter of the book is dedicated to one of Marks' colleagues attempting to explain the 'awkward time of the month' to him as it relates to his mostly-female codebreaking team while he makes the confused math face, one doesn't put a lot of stock in his conclusions but one does expect it to be hilarious. Alas, attempts to recover this important document have apparently failed.)
Anyway. Highly, highly recommended for anyone who's at all interested in this particular period of history -- thank you to
sovay for reminding me that I've been meaning to get around to it.
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Date: 2020-08-16 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2020-08-16 04:55 am (UTC)seriously, I've seen the title but never picked it up, so this is most useful (not to say entertaining), thank you!
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Date: 2020-08-16 05:10 am (UTC)This fact continues to become funnier every time I learn something else about Bletchley Park or SOE.
With all this said, Leo's first most endearing quality as a writer is that he is not only witty and self-aware, but also more than happy to make himself the butt of the joke and admit his own shortcomings, failures, and hubris, as well as occasional highly relatable moments of slapstick.
He apparently sounded exactly like that in person, too.
The second and far more significant one is that all his efforts are clearly driven by a profound conviction and sense of personal responsibility about the fact that bad cryptographic protocols are killing agents, and as funny as the book is much of the time, it's also very clear that Marks was and remains deeply haunted by SOE's losses.
I encountered him first as a screenwriter, i.e., I saw Peeping Tom (1960) about a year before finding and reading Between Silk and Cyanide (and have still never written about it properly), but I saw Cloudburst (1951) afterward, and in that light it is a hell of a thing to throw onscreen where anyone could see it. I don't know that he ever worked all of the haunting out.
(A film version actually exists of The Girl Who Couldn't Quite and I have wanted to see it for years, no matter how deprecating Marks is about the success of the play. I'm just really curious.)
Highly, highly recommended for anyone who's at all interested in this particular period of history -- thank you to sovay for reminding me that I've been meaning to get around to it.
You're welcome! I am very fond of this book and its author. The ghost of the codemaker in "The Boatman's Cure" came from a dream I had in the same month as the original inspiration for the story, but he is really obviously belatedly Leo Marks' fault.
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Date: 2020-08-16 05:41 am (UTC)I am still very glad about that!
I forgot until I was looking for something else Silk and Cyanide-related in my journal archives just now that I also turned Elizabeth E. Wein on to it—which is not as monumental as it sounds since she was either already working on or had just finished Code Name Verity, but I still get to feel a little like Patient Zero.
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Date: 2020-08-16 10:24 am (UTC)When you out it like that...
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Date: 2020-08-16 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-16 11:55 am (UTC)Have you read Slacks and Calluses by Constance Bowman Reid? It's a significantly less high-stakes "what I did in WWII" memoir - Bowman Reid and her best friend were schoolteachers who spent a summer working at an airplane factory in California - but your description of Leo's writing as witty and self-aware and humorously self-deprecating reminded me of Bowman Reid's.
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Date: 2020-08-16 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2020-08-16 03:22 pm (UTC)Anyway this book sounds delightful and someday I must read it.
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Date: 2020-08-17 12:37 pm (UTC)"I twiddled the knobs on my briefcase (II still didn't know how to open it) and finally produced SOE's version of a [fancy coding thing]. But in my eagerness to show him what our technicians could produce, I allowed my briefcase to spill out the remainder of its Top Secret contents. They consisted of six bananas, a selection of Mother's sandwiches, and a contraceptive in a plastic container. Although a bunch off bananas was one of England's rarer sights, the commander's expression as he gazed at the contraceptive was rarer still, and I hastily explained that it had arrived on my desk earlier that morning with a note from the head of special devices suggesting that 'a contraceptive made of local rubber would be excellent camouflage for a microfilmed code.'"
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Date: 2020-08-17 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2020-08-17 12:49 pm (UTC)Having read your review of Cloudburst ... yeah, I don't know that he ever got all the haunting out either.
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Date: 2020-08-17 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-17 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-17 12:54 pm (UTC)(NOBODY COULD MAKE ANY SENSE OF IT. Bletchley officers keep turning up through the book and squinting at him like "why are you HERE and not THERE?"
Later of course this comes to be a difficulty for him as he's attempting to recruit staff who might be good at codebreaking for his own department before they can all go to Bletchley; he finally sends a memo to central staffing reading, "Do not reject any girl on grounds of insanity without first offering her to SOE.")
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Date: 2020-08-17 04:55 pm (UTC)I LOVE THIS oh my God.
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Date: 2020-08-17 09:50 pm (UTC)I would adore The Collected Scripts of Leo Marks. I've only seen the two mentioned above, but Sebastian (1968) is about cryptography and stars Dirk Bogarde, so it should become relevant any day now. The shooting script for Peeping Tom can be found with mild transcription errors online and it is indeed in a recognizable style: "He looks as if he has just been voted the best cameraman of the year (unanimously) – and the two films he directed have both won Oscars (though Don Jarvis understood them)." There's an out-of-print published script from Faber & Faber, but I've never seen it for sale in person and now I'm back to missing used book stores. It remains one of my favorite films.
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Date: 2020-08-17 11:13 pm (UTC)I still think that is pretty monumental!! Ooh and this has just reminded me that I think she has a new book out...
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Date: 2020-08-18 01:21 am (UTC)And it's called The Enigma Game! I . . . dammit, I want a copy.
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Date: 2020-08-18 06:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-25 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-30 07:18 pm (UTC)Noor Inayat Khan: how British spy's love for blue betrayed her https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/18/executed
(Wince at that webpage title, but the article is interesting and the book sounds like it should be as well)
Spy becomes first woman of south Asian descent to get blue plaque in London
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/28/spy-becomes-first-woman-of-south-asian-descent-to-get-blue-plaque-in-london
(This is the one I meant to link. It's sort of appalling she didn't have one already, and is the first South Asian woman to get one. For the non-Brits, the Blue Plaque scheme puts a plaque (blue) on buildings associated with famous people - there's one on some cheap flats in a row of old townhouses a couple of hundred yards from my place because Charles Dickens grew up in the place)