THE READING RHEUM: PRESIDENT FU MANCHU (1936)

                                                     

PRESIDENT FU MANCHU, the eighth work in the Fu Manchu series, shows author Sax Rohmer continuing his project to make the doctor’s schemes more global in nature—and you don’t get much more global than the villain trying to become the de facto President of the United States. Naturally, this goal can only be accomplished through a political pawn. Still, throughout the novel Fu’s subordinates call him “president,” and since they did not use that title in earlier novels, the clear implication that Fu Manchu’s candidate will reshape the world according to the doctor’s will, by harnessing the resources of the most powerful country on the planet.

As BRIDE takes place entirely in France, all of PRESIDENT’s action takes place in the U.S., though it takes Rohmer about thirty pages to establish that the specific locale is New York. Smith is the only native of Great Britain involved, as he’s given some special dispensation to command various American agents. Most of the novel is told through the POV of young agent Mark Hepburn, though some scenes are told from the viewpoints of Fu’s agents. These include Moya Adair, a young Irish widow (and the novel’s obligatory romantic interest for the leading man), and a mysterious genius known as “the Memory Man.” Neither character has been subjected to the irreversible brainwashing chemicals seen in BRIDE, though Fu does make use of more limited mind-wiping techniques. Fu and his subordinates acknowledge that their resources are limited, in part because of Nayland Smith’s dogged pursuit. At some point, however, Fu must have managed to set up a gold-making operation like the one destroyed in TRAIL, for he’s got enough money to fund a populist organization, “the League of Good Americans,” to the end of creating a political puppet to assume the Presidency.

The apparent candidate of the League is an uncouth but charismatic speaker named Harvey “Bluebeard” Bragg. The name by itself bears slight resemblance to real-life populist demagogue Huey Long, and it’s not impossible that Rohmer may have read another fictional treatment of Long in Sinclair Lewis’s IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE, published the year before PRESIDENT. Rohmer, however, does not devote much time to Bragg’s character, for Fu’s long con involves using the quasi-fascist demagogue to promote a different candidate, one Salvaletti. This means that PRESIDENT beat out the main plot of Richard Condon’s MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE by over twenty years. And in addition to sorting out Fu’s primary plot, Nayland Snith must also figure out why the doctor seeks to silence a priest, the Abbott Donegal, who poses some obscure threat to the League of Good Americans.

But though PRESIDENT fully reporesents Rohmer’s commitment to more extensive ploys, in one sense it feels more like the first three novels, with their trope of “there’s a yellow or brown boogieman under every English bed.” Rohmer’s novels of the 1930s ease off this trope somewhat, and even allowed a couple of (very minor) characters of color who didn’t turn out to be minions of the Si-Fan. But early in the novel Smith meets one of Donegal’s functionaries, James Richet, and later makes the following extraordinary (even for 1936) pronouncement:

There’s color somewhere. I can’t place its exact shade.

And, as it happens, Smith’s instincts are correct, for Rohmer tells the reader that one of Richet’s ancestors was a “Kanaka” (i.e., Hawaiian-derived), as well as mentioning that Richet’s racial heritage barred him from success in white society, leading him to work for both criminal societies and eventually for the Si-Fan. Rohmer wastes little time on this minor pawn, whom the devil-doctor exterminates in the course of things. However, it wouldn’t be hard to read the novel as a racist diatribe. The first three novels often excoriated Asians by calling them “yellow,” but rarely used epithets (with the exception ot the word “dago” in RETURN). I counted six uses of the word “chink” in PRESIDENT, though I note that all of these epithets are spoken by white Americans. This may signify that Rohmer simply believed that Americans were more openly impolite than his own people.

There are, to be sure, some moments in which Rohmer seeks to stress that Fu Manchu and his people do not represent all Asians, as when one monologue asserts that “the Chinaman is a law-abiding citizen.” And then there’s PRESIDENT’s “shady lady” Lola Dumas, who’s attached to the retinues of both Bragg and Salvaletti. Lola is apparently a major player in New York society, together with her father Emmanuel, who “claimed… to be descended from the brilliant quadroon who created the Three Musketeers” (i..e., Alexandre Dumas). Unacceptable though the word “quadroon” may be today, Rohmer seems to mean it only as a descriptive term, not least because he’s extolling the writer’s genius. Later, Fu Manchu himself seemingly confirms the legacy of these latter-day Dumas descendants, when he meditates on Lola’s fitness to serve him:

She is amorous and she is compassionate—it is the Negroid strain…

Again, these will sound like left-handed compliments to a modern ear, as does Moya’s curious opinion that Lola reminds her of “a beautiful, evil priestess of voodoo.” As it happens, it’s not clear whether or not either Lola’s amorousness or compassion renders her unfit for service to Fu Manchu, but he does choose to replace her for a time with Moya Adair. Lola doesn’t play a big role in the story. Her ultimate destiny is that she’s intended to be First Lady to the puppet-President. One wonders if Rohmer may have given American culture too much credit, to assume that voters of the thirties would be okay with a First Lady who acknowledged Negroid heritage.

Fu has a more complicated relationship with Moya Adair. He suborns her by kidnapping her young son Robbie and returning him to his mother on the condition of her continued service. Yet when he visits Moya’s home to give her orders, he’s friendly enough to the boy that the child calls him “Yellow Uncle.” (Fu’s opinion of the name is not recorded.) Yet, despite having every reason to despise the doctor, she tells Hepburn that Fu Manchu “thinks on a plane which we simply can’t understand.”

Because Moya discharges her duties to the doctor without turning on him as do many of his other female pawns, Fu Manchu actually confesses a certain human failing on his part, as well as taking her into his confidence in a minor way:

I do not trust you—no woman is to be trusted in a world of men. Yet because I am a man too, and very lonely in this my last battle to crush what the West calls civilization—I will advance you one step further into my plans.

This scene mirrors an earlier one in which Fu confers with his aged comrade Sam Pak, who serves the doctor implicitly, but declines the master’s invitation to join Fu in the state of agelessness. Without overestimating Fu’s relationship with either Sam Pak or Moya, both scenes depict Fu Manchu with a tragic air, a Tamerlane born in an era that regards him as only a common felon. This may well explain why he does not seek to impose brainwashing upon either his rebellious daughter Fah Lo Suee or his runaway bride Fleurette: he wants willing companions in his quest for a new world order. He knows that Moya is not such a companion; that she only serves him under coercion. Yet, in the novel’s most extraordinary scene, he personally utilizes his great medical skills to save Moya’s young son from a diphtheria infection, even though this deed of noblesse oblige places him in danger of capture. Of course, being Fu Manchu, he escapes the law with ridiculous ease, though in the final chapter he suffers yet another equivocal death, this time being swept over Niagara Falls while under attack by his more rebellious servant, the Memory Man.

As for Fu’s master plan to co-opr the U.S. Presidency, the Abbot Donegal, who disappears for most of the book, re-appears at the end to reveal to the multitudes the true backer of the League of Good Americans. Yet Donegal’s most telling strike may be his sabotage of the celebrity marriage of Lola and Salvaletti, for in his big speech the Abbot reveals that Salvaletti is both a de-frocked priest and a man with a previous wife. Salvaletti then commits suicide, leaving this reader with the impression that he’s the one who should’ve been nicknamed “Bluebeard.”

PRESIDENT FU MANCHU, though not one of Rohmer’s more engrossing thrillers, may well be the closest he ever came to elaborating his beliefs about race and culture. I don’t think it would have occurred to the author to ameliorate readers hostile to his character via tokenism: say, by giving Nayland Smith a brilliant young Chinese aide. Rather, Rohmer’s overall view seems to be that of a later author’s idea of an inevitable “clash of civilizations,” if one may extrapolate from a passage in the next-to-last chapter:

…[the sound] rose weirdly on the night, as though long-dead gods of the red man, returning, lamented the conquest of the white.”