The Misanthrope's Corner - comments on the film 'Riding in Cars with Boys,' and on Jack the Ripper - Review

National Review, Nov 19, 2001 by Florence King

We have an emergency. I compiled a sheaf of notes and file-named them Terror3.NR, but faced with the prospect of turning them into a column, I suddenly found that I couldn't go on. Writing three columns in a row about Sept. 11 is like listening to the Three Tenors. It's two tenors too many, or as George Eliot put it: "much of a muchness."

So, you're going to have to take potluck because I invented a new approach to the essay: I decided to open the newspaper at random and write about the first thing I saw that wasn't about terrorism.

I admit I cheated a little, immediately discarding the Business and Sports sections, but when I picked up Style I squeezed my eyes shut, stuck my finger indiscriminately into the pages, and yanked them apart. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw were two movie reviews.

Riding in Cars with Boys stars Drew Barrymore, the acting profession's collateral damage, and is based on Beverly Donofrio's coming-of-age memoir of the same name. It just so happens that I reviewed the book, but if you think that's going to get this show on the road, guess again. I've reviewed countless other books just like it, and I never could tell one from the other. Comprising the Funky Feminism school of growth-through-humping, their standard theme is How the '60s Liberated My Personhood, and their titles all sound alike (e.g., Rosemary Daniell's Sleeping with Soldiers). I pretty much panned the whole genre, which is why editors kept assigning them to me. I would get a phone call and the editor would say, "Here's one you can have some fun with," which is lit-crit code for "I know you're going to hate it."

The movie reviewer said that Riding in Cars with Boys lacks "the honesty and grit" of the book, but I don't remember any honesty and grit. In fact, I don't remember anything about it at all except that I panned it. I read the movie review with great care but nothing in it rang a bell; my mind is a total blank, so chalk up one shaggy-dog story for my new approach to the essay.

The other movie review was From Hell, about Jack the Ripper. Now we're cooking. . . . I could fill a whole issue with commentary on this subject.

It's doubtful if the crimes would have become so legendary without the catchy moniker. Nicknaming is an Anglo-Saxon art form born of our need to erect jaunty barriers against emotion, a case in point being the number of WASP men who call their wives "Dutch." The Ripper's nickname invariably gets lost in translation. When the French dramatized the story they called him "Jacques L' Eventreur," which simply doesn't do it. It sounds very fey and very French, a murderer out of a puppet show. I don't know what the Germans call him, but I can imagine. They probably throw together one of their verb-trailing compounds that translates as "Jack who the throats of women who their bodies to men sell cuts." If, as is generally thought, the murderer invented the name himself in his taunting letters to the police, we can clear the two Polish suspects because whoever coined "Jack the Ripper" had an English ear.

The best Ripper book, in my opinion, is Tom Cullen's When London Walked in Terror. The worst is Frank Spering's Prince Jack, which kicked off the fad of attributing the crimes to Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria and the heir presumptive to the throne until his death from typhoid in 1892.

Prince "Eddy," as he was called (his father was Edward, Prince of Wales, later Edward VII), has to be the sorriest candidate for alpha- male mayhem in criminal history. A study in limpid-eyed lethargy, he was, said Victoria's cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, "never ready, never there." Whatever else we may say of Jack the Ripper, he was smart, but Eddy's mind, said his tutor, was "at all times in an abnormally dormant condition."

To claim a retarded drunkard and drug addict who had inherited his mother's congenital deafness could have pulled off the Ripper's split- second timing and daring escapes is silly enough, but the Prince Jack contingent also insists that the Ripper's surgical skills, good enough to be attributed to a doctor or a Jewish ritual slaughterer, could easily have been acquired by Eddy at royal shooting parties.

It's true that he was always shooting something. In fact, the royal calendar for the August murder dates puts him in Scotland for the sacred annual pursuit of the grouse. He and the other bluebloods shot thousands of birds and animals on any given day, but they did not dress their own kill. That task was beneath even the "ghillies," or gamekeepers; it was done by lowly rustics at a far remove from the royal picnic tables. Eddy would never even have seen it, much less taken a hand in it.

The words "a good English murder" are synonymous with escapism, but we haven't escaped the Ripper. His trademark is the coin of our cultural realm. In the words of Tom Cullen:

The head had been so nearly severed from the body that the killer had knotted a handkerchief around the neck as though to hold the head to the torso. The left arm had been placed across the left breast, and the legs were drawn up, with the feet resting on the ground and the knees turned outward. The face was bruised and the tongue was swollen and protruded between the front teeth. The body had been disemboweled and, with some show of surgical deftness, the uterus and its appendages had been removed. As a further bizarre note, two brass rings, evidently wrenched from the middle finger of her left hand, and a few pennies and farthings, were laid out neatly at the victim's feet.