Leo Marks: Of heroes and voyeurs

This is an account of the son of a well-known bookseller who became a pioneer writer and manager of wartime codes and then switched to conceiving and scriptwriting a fictional account of sado-vouyerism. His book, Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941–1945  (1998) tells the first story (its publication was delayed by censorship issues). Peeping Tom (1960, and directed by the famous Michael Powell), at first reviled and now a cult classic, tells its own story. The real Leo Marks (1920-2001) lurks tantalisingly somewhere in these works, but he is nowhere explicit about all that..

In 1942, a small Jewish only child, aged 22, begins his army service as the star code-maker for Britain’s undercover operations in Nazi-occupied territories on the Continent. From a standing start, he becomes head of a large, crucial, fraught department which depends almost completely on his imaginative puzzle-solving and networking skills. He is smutty, scatalogical, self-conscious, shy, spoilt. He admires all the agents whose lives he is trying to prolong, and befriends some of them. He also admires the senior and older soldierly spy-masters of the Special Operations Executive who are sending young people on missions which are more likely to shorten the agents’ lives than definitely to shorten the war. These desk-wallah senior officers might easily be satirised as Colonel Blimps, but Leo quickly detects their real quality. He got on well with many senior people in the separate, different and often competing Bletchley Park operation, bearing in mind that they were decryptors working in comparative safety, whereas he was an encryptor battling against Nazi decryptors who were also committed torturers who could break both agents and codes.

Leo Marks was a born coder. We don’t find out whether he has any insight as to whether he thinks his skills are mathematical or linguistic (and there may be no very deep distinction between those, since both pivot on logic). His must be a mind both labyrinthine and acrobatic.  Footnote: ¹I am working on reviews of a trio of Jews,who were all masters of arcane brainwork: Leo’s code, Beddington Behrens’ financial dealings; Peter Millett’s legal maze. All make the obscure as clear as is possible. What’s more all three convey the poetry in the complexity. Marks does walk us though some details of his complexities, but I could follow very little of it. Millett does walk us through many legal conundrums, and I could sometimes briefly feel I was master of their subtleties. Beddington Behrens briskly whistles through the details of some financial transactions, and mostly made me realise I was none the wiser.

Marks seems to be exploring and expanding what is simply a sort of knack. He does say it all began when he wanted to understand the coded pricing system his father deployed in his famous antiquarian bookshop, Leo’s childhood hangout. He is a good popular – a memorable – poet: professionally and personally, he writes powerful love poems. Footnote: [mfn]For a fine on-point account of the film’s tricky merits, try “Peeping Tom: He Has His Father’s Eyes” , by Megan Abbott, Criterion [movie channel], May 14, 2024.[/mfn]) He idealises the women he comes across, and there are lots of them: flocks of FANYs – by the hundred, not mere handfuls or dozens – are the stuff of his decoding and recoding operations. He is tough with them when he thinks they may be failing to maintain their great but unstated diligence, and even tougher in self-excoriation when he senses he has failed the muses of code, and put agents in dangers he could have forestalled. His failures energise and inform his extraordinary innovations.

By the age of 25 the war which he helped win is drawing to a close and a glittering career could lie ahead of him as hostilities seem likely to become more complicated if less torturously violent. But he wants to leave the code-world behind him. Perhaps he is sickened by the prospect of endless involvement in systematic violence; he may feel tainted by his role in the war; perhaps he feels burnt-out (though there is every sign that his talents are only growing).

In his brilliant, funny, peculiar book, Between Silk and Cyanide (written by the mid-1980s but not published until the mid-1990s), Leo tells us that he wanted eventually to leave SOE at war’s-end and to turn to playwriting and film-scripting. Certainly, his account of SOE is told with running threads and teasing episodes: it is the work of someone who understands story-telling. Somehow it combines a pained conscience with a thriller’s, but also a music hall or even Carry On…, theatricality. He speaks briefly of his equally famous production: the script of the film Peeping Tom, released in 1960 (long before the book was written, or published).

The connections between SOE and Soho, between secrecy and stripping, do not at first sight seem close. And yet….

The film, directed by the famous Michael Powell, was plainly pornographic, meaning that it was not merely sensual, or erotic, or ordinarily sexual: it was all of those, but it was also sexually goading and pandering. Footnote: ²For a fine on-point account of the film’s tricky merits, try “Peeping Tom: He Has His Father’s Eyes” , by Megan Abbott, Criterion [movie channel], May 14, 2024.) Besides, its whole purpose was to make the audience aware of the dubiety of their pleasure in the film they were watching, and that – presumably – is merely a subset of the author’s own anxious attraction to the violence lurking in sex. I mean that Leo had skin in this game. Between Silk and Cyanide had passages which showed him to be fascinated by both Freud and by prostitutes. He tells of his hands-on experience of a Parisian whore, organised for the young Leo by a kindly uncle. He doesn’t say he ever lay on a psychiatrist’s couch. His sex-life, like anyone’s, has a gothic mystery about it.

Peeping Tom is a study of a man – played by a German actor of germanic blondness – who made what we now call snuff movies. The peeping Tom’s amateur productions feature sexy girls being murdered. He constructs devices by which his camera could become a weapon which was able first to fatally wound his victims and then to record close-up their horror in dying. Such a device – both mechanical and theatrical – was not new to entertainment. The supposedly joyous Oklahoma! stage show (which opened in London in 1947) and Hollywood film (1955) features Ali Hakim, a Persian peddlar who sells a modified photo viewer by which a photographer can knife an unwary subject. It is a theme which Leo ramps up to the Nth degree of intensity and reflexsiveness. It is also a theme that lies at the heart of, say, Christianity. For a thousand years Christians have sought redemption by praying before a God who was tortured to death, and the image of that bloodied victim was glorified in the highest art, whilst in many a public area the same audiences jostled in awe, delight and horror at hangings, burnings, and quarterings.   

Leo agonised over the pain inflicted upon his friends and colleagues in the war, several of them women he worshipped. Perhaps he was drawn to uncomfortable pleasure in the idea of pain, or simply agonised over the spectre of it. After all, the Marquis de Sade was never far from the 20^th Century mind.

Peeping Tom may have been intended as a morality tale. It may have been intended to expunge Marks’ inner demons: it may have been some sort of refraction of his inner being. He had lived a life of secrets and hoodwinking, and now wanted – not necessarily to out himself – but to confront what he thought were important truths about all of us.

The film was released in a small way to howls of critical outrage. It seriously dented Michael Powell’s career. It went on to develop cult status. Even then it was largely and conveniently parked as an iconic, brilliant “slasher” horror thriller, passed-over in haste as a cult version of a genre pushed a little too far. It was Hitchcock with the gloves off. As the cult developed, Martin Scorsese, ever a glamorisier of the gore in human life, said  Peeping Tom was a superb analysis of the effect not merely of extreme but also seemingly innocent cinematography. The camera is always a voyeur and activist. Audiences sponsor what they see on the screen and, says Scorsese, that is sharply so when we watch violence. So Peeping Tom has merit in forcing an audience to face up to what they lazily and usually ignore: one can’t recoil from, or renounce as unintentional voyuerism a piece of filmed enactment which one has enjoyed. At the box office we are buying into voyeurism of one sort or another, and some of it is depraved.

Who is to know whether my pleasure in Carve Her Name With Pride (1958) as a twelve year-old was entirely innocent? The film told the story of SOE’s agent, Violette Szabo, the Anglo-French woman sent to France with Mark’s famous love poem “The Life That I have” as part of her coding set-up; she was caught, tortured and executed by the Nazis. Millions of people must have seen the film: but with what emotions, acknowledged and unacknowledged? ((The poem was written originally in memory of Leo’s girlfriend Ruth, who had died in an air crash. He allowed its anonymous use in the film.))

If we can’t or shouldn’t psycho-analyse Leo, we can nonetheless take him as living at the heart of a world of complex people. Indeed, I like him best as a funny exemplar of the view that if we begin with the unknowability of anyone’s personhood, we at least start our speculatons with the right expectation of never getting to the bottom of things.

Leo Marks was the son of a famous antiquarian bookseller, who would already rate as one of the great Anglo-Jews, and that’s a crowded field. Antiquarian booksellers are not merely odd, they cannot for long remain innocent. Perhaps that’s because antiquarians have historically been interested in alchemy, devilry and (really quite often) the pornographic, sadistic and pederastic. These themes have often produced books which are not only arcane and mysterious, but sold in small quantities in select places. This esotericism leads to high-end under-the-counter trading. That’s a cocktail of qualities which require tact and discretion in those who trade in them, but also provide the opportunity to deal in high prices. I don’t know if Marks & Co were into elicit books, but they were not innocent or even legal traders: they engaged in a rare-book pricing ring which only narrowly escaped public and legal exposure (not least because bibliophiles privily warned the owners that the game was up).

Let’s come to Leo’s personal experience of this corner of bookselling. He revered the chair in which Freud sat in Marks & Co’s famous shop, later made famous, under slightly different management, in 84 Charing Cross Road . The Austrian psychologist was seeking material for his Moses and Monotheism (1936), which suggested that the prophet was not a Hebrew. I like this Jewish disloyalty. Later, Leo would recount with something like glee that his mother was a dedicated wartime blackmarketeer, whose illegal cakes and sweetmeats were currency in his dealings with his superiors and inferiors alike in SoE. And he remarks, similarly, that in his experience, Jews made great draft-dodgers.     

Leo doesn’t ever say he believed in psycho-analysis, but there are plenty of hints that he took Freud seriously, even if as an influence on others. And certainly Leo was convinced of the power of the sub-conscious and its subversion of orderly good behaviour. Also, I think, the youngster imbibed an inquisitive open-mindedness, in which loyalty to friends or colleagues was often better than abstract principle. Certainly, Leo’s father stuck by his friends, perhaps especially his eccentric customers.

In the 1920s Benjamin Marks sold large quantities of books to Clarence Hatry, the enormously famous and extravagant financier (from a Jewish family) who turned out to be, in equal measure, and when push came anywhere near shove, a fraudster. Hatry embodied a certain post-war insouciance and scepticism. Facing Old Bailey trial in 1929, Hatry sought to resell his book collection to Marks, who promptly and (saving his friend embarrassment) discreetly ignored what was a slumped market and paid him a bit over the original prices and over three times their slump-period value. Later, says Leo, his father also engineered (via his Freemasonry) a library role for Hatry during his hard-labour spell in Brixton prison. The fraudster went on to buy Hatchards, and his 17 year tenure seems to have rescued the country’s oldest and grandest bookshop.

Another fan and friend of Benjamin Marks was Gerald Templer (mis-spelled as Templar by the great coder in his book). The garlanded Sir Gerald went on to mastermind the British counter-insurgency in Malaysia in the early 1950’s and is credited with paving the way for the country’s independence, eventually becoming CIGS. His path and Leo’s intersected in their SOE work.

In 1945 Templer was running the German section, whose operations were becoming crucial as the ground war arrived on Hitler’s doorstep. The soldier had bought his military books from Marks & Co, and knew that his friend Hatry did as well. (Leo had been able to send a coded war-related message to another Marks & Co customer, Field Marshall Alan Brooke, then CIGS, in a business letter dictated to his father for on-passing, but that’s another story.) Templer and Leo Marks had code business to do together in 1945, and bit by bit (in Leo’s telling of events) they revealed to each other more and more of their shared Marksian background. Along the way, Leo was fascinated by a beautiful fountain pen Templer used for coding work. Simultaneously, Templer, like most visitors to Leo’s office, allowed himself to be seduced by the coffee and confectionary and cakes, supplied by Leo’s industrious mother. As their ways parted with the end of hostilities, Templer gave Leo the pen, and the youngster wrote the first draft of Peeping Tom with it. It is entirely in keeping that Templer also presented Leo with a posy of flowers, for on-passing to Mrs Marks. (By the way, most of the very senior officers of WW2 – many of them deeply-shaken survivors from WW1 – had an emotional richness not commonly associated with high command then or now.)

Tentatively I suggest that Leo Marks was a rebellious Jew, a bit like Mel Brooks (who bought the film rights for 84 Charing Cross Road as a birthday present for his wife Ann Bancroft, one of the resulting movie’s stars). The Producers is a fabulous outrage, as shocking in its way as Peeping Tom. Both films were initially reviIed, only to accumulate wary cult status after a few years. The Jewish factor often includes, I think, a sort of dissidence, seldom explicit, against the mores that Jewish parents and authorities rather similarly impose on their offspring.

I surmise that Leo was a man who shared the guilty sexual tastes – I mean the pre-Playboy, pre-Penthouse aesthetics – which many of us post-war young, ten years his junior, explored through the work of the erotic photographer, Harrison Marks (I haven’t looked for a cousinly connection there), one of whose favourite models was his wife Pamela Green, who transcended her silent posing as a pin-up in Peeping Tom. No naif, she had an art school training and experience as an entrepreneur as well as a performer.

I quite like the idea that brave, difficult, darkly clever, and darkly humorous Leo Marks, schooled in layers of secrecy, and very tired of them, simply wanted to break cover. He had been systematically robbed of innocence at an early age. He might not be ready or willing to tell the deepest inner truths of what he thought and felt at SoE, and the torture which was ever present, nor even about the no-man’s land of his (and everyone’s) experience of vouyeuristic pornographic violence. But he wanted to get it all out there, and to rub our noses in it. His two great works, Between Silk and Cyanide and Peeping Tom, are essentially about secrets and silences. The first is a socially acceptable account of a fascinating set of events, but its very quirkiness is revealing of something or other not quite disclosed. The second is way out there, and was condemned as outrageous, but Leo himself is more obviously obscured behind its fictions. Leo Marks had a great deal to say, and it can’t be decoded entirely. The worlds of SoE and Soho both gave him a powerful desire, a need even, to express himself, and the means of doing so within the bounds of discretion.

ends

Footnotes

• 1
  I am working on reviews of a trio of Jews,who were all masters of arcane brainwork: Leo’s code, Beddington Behrens’ financial dealings; Peter Millett’s legal maze. All make the obscure as clear as is possible. What’s more all three convey the poetry in the complexity. Marks does walk us though some details of his complexities, but I could follow very little of it. Millett does walk us through many legal conundrums, and I could sometimes briefly feel I was master of their subtleties. Beddington Behrens briskly whistles through the details of some financial transactions, and mostly made me realise I was none the wiser.
• 2
  For a fine on-point account of the film’s tricky merits, try “Peeping Tom: He Has His Father’s Eyes” , by Megan Abbott, Criterion [movie channel], May 14, 2024.