I once knew an eight-year-old named Martha who wrote stories, unexceptional in every way except one: the heroine of each was a nightclub singer, Sandra, whose life was complicated by the constant threat of blackmail. In some stories Sandra was blackmailed by a shadowy Syndicate, in others by her estranged husband (“Mark,” a déclassé Fed); in still others, dating from Martha’s costume period, the pressure was applied by the boys at the Land Office, who alone knew that Sandra, a long time before and in another country (Dodge City), had committed an indiscretion so unspeakable that Martha could only hint at it. All Martha’s plots turned on blackmail; each of her dénouements was a study in blackmail foiled.
When I asked how Martha had hit upon this particular story line, her mother, a young woman of relentlessly laissez-faire principle, pointed out that blackmail was in fact the prevailing motif in all Martha’s favorite bedtime stories, from “Cain’s Hundred” to “Have Gun, Will Travel.”
“Every time the telephone rings,” she added, “Martha expects it to be anonymous.” Although we both smiled, more or less at Martha’s expense, there is a sense in which Martha is right: a sense in which blackmail, that fairly uncommon fact, emerges as a commonplace of life. What Martha watched, after all, were our generation’s miracle plays, the ritual dramas in which our deepest tensions work themselves out in symbolic terms. From Euripides to MCA-Revue, Shakespeare to Desilu, no storyteller has ever told us a tale we did not already know. We could scarcely understand the Medea did we not understand that a woman holds the tacit power of blackmail over the man who takes her, as Jason took Medea, from home. (I betrayed my father for you: almost no one says it, almost everyone has used it.) To read Joseph Conrad is to read about blackmail, part of the heart of all the darkness; Henry James would seem inexplicably tedious had we no feeling for the play of power, the startlingly literal blackmail, which operates among all of his characters, pervades every drawing room, shadows each well-rolled lawn.
We have all, in brief, known blackmail. Forget the symbolic trappings, the anonymous telephone calls, the clumsily printed scare notes; forget what the boys at the Land Office know or do not know. What is blackmail, after all, but what lawyers sometimes call it: “the demanding of money or other advantage on the threat of exposure of information, true or false, about the victim.”
