I’ve written before about how I collect - with nothing more than recreation in mind - excerpts from books and journals about pockets and what’s in them. As hobbies go, it’s niche. There’s not much to be gained from it; tracking the progress of the pork kidney Leopold Bloom pockets early on in Ulysses lends a certain granularity to a study of the text, but is that a recommendation? Probably not. And I’d be hard-pressed to make the argument that it enhances anyone’s appreciation of Catcher in the Rye to take into account how Holden Caulfield’s pockets contain, at one time or another, a hunting hat, a train timetable, an imaginary automatic pistol, pieces of a broken record by “Little Shirley Beans,” cigarettes, and a copied-out quote by Wilhelm Stekel. To my own nipples this imparts a rare rigidity, but I wouldn’t hasten to write it up as prescription for anyone else’s happiness. (The Stekel quote, by the way, is: “The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”)
The point is that it was in my capacity as amateur frisker that I found the following posting, signed by Cuthbert Bede, in Notes and Queries, September 6, 1873.
At Derby, on July 15, 1873, Benjamin Hudson was found guilty of having murdered his wife, and was sentenced to be hanged. In the pocket of the murdered woman a purse was found which contained some pins and a piece of paper, on which the deceased had written: —
‘It is not these pins I mean to burn,
But Ben Hudson’s heart I mean to turn;
Let him neither eat, speak, drink, nor comfort find
Till he comes to me and speaks his mind.’
In this case the husband was aged twenty-four and the wife twenty-three. Despite their quarrels and jealousies, it wold seem they had a certain strong affection for each other; and the ‘charm’ was no doubt to regain her husband’s love.
It’s unfortunate that Cuthbert Bede — a pseudonym for Edward Bradley — doesn’t accord the victim the courtesy of a name; she was Elizabeth, but was known as Eliza. Also off-putting (and revelatory) is Bede / Bradley’s breezy assertion that between husband and wife must certainly have lingered a mutual affection that merely had been circumstantially mislaid. When he wrote to Notes and Queries (“Cuthbert Bede” was a regular contributor), the events were still current, the facts still fresh. He would have known, or should have, that this violence was in no way attributable to, say, a minor lapse in constancy. This was not a hiccup. Inscribed on Benjamin Hudson’s long rap sheet were mostly acts of petty thievery, but also of assault, including a grievous attack on Eliza a year prior to her murder. He served six months in jail. A peace bond meant to limit contact after his release proved useless. On April 24, 1873, after working all day at her job as a laundress, Eliza made her way home. Benjamin knew that her route took her first through town, then over a field. Near the latter he hid in some bushes. As Eliza climbed over a stile, he attacked her, and shattered her skull with a hedge-stake. The coroner’s report makes for graphic, terrible reading. Then Ben reported to various friends and relatives what he had done, and waited calmly for the police. He was hanged on August 4.
When the story of Eliza’s murder was told and retold — as it was, often, and for years to come — it wasn’t as a cautionary tale about the horrors of domestic violence, but rather as a curiosity, an example of mystical primitivism in Derbyshire. This was Cuthbert Bede’s main interest, no doubt. For him, and for future chroniclers, Eliza was a vessel for the delivery of a folkloric punchline. She would have been another woman brutally killed and quickly forgotten were it not for the pins and the beckoning spell in her pocket. You can sense sometimes, in the later accounts, a suggestion, sotto voce but not so sotto as all that, and almost whimsical, that Eliza brought her horrible end on herself by not anticipating what might be the end result of the successful practice of witchcraft. She had copied out the incantation with its voodoo cadences, had carried it on her person, had drawn Ben Hudson to her, possibly against his will, and look what that black magic unleashed.
For Benjamin Hudson, executed uxoricide, I can’t summon much pity. That said, such a capacity for cruelty doesn’t come from nothing, and his disastrous, harmful life must have been a long way from enviable. Tracking his criminal past I was interested to note that there was, at exactly this time, another Benjamin Hudson making his way through the courts. He was usually, and rather glamorously, identified as Benjamin Parker Hudson. He was a more sophisticated operative than his namesake, a charming, fast-talking swindler with a speciality in the paper and textile industries. Time and again he’d take possession of merchandise on a credit arrangement, promptly sell the goods, and then repair with the funds to a local pub where he’d be arrested. This happened many times over a period of about 30 years. The repeated pattern of offend, arrest, jail, release must have suited Benjamin Parker Hudson. Evidently, he saw no futility in it, and perhaps no shame. He was true to his nature. He was a con man, and con men con. It’s how they get by.
Reading about Benjamin Parker Hudson reminded me that I’d left unfinished the story of a similar character, Nicholas Wiseman, Mavis Gallant’s (MG) con man uncle. For some reason, I developed a kind of treacliness of mind about Nicholas, his petty crimes, his narcissism, his cheerful insistence in the face of very good evidence to the contrary that he was the son of French nobility. (Oddly, at exactly the same time the bogus Count Paul Anatole Leon Monte was cutting a swath through Lynn, Massachusetts, there was a self-styled psychoanalyst who claimed to be from the house of Bourbon setting up “power of the mind institutes” in the midwest, Texas, and New Orleans. He went by the name of Dr. Paul De Monte Leone, and his qualifications to practice as an analyst were a product of the power of his mind. He kept the police busy for a few years, chasing after him, compelling him to shut down his Leonic Institutes, directing him out of town. For a happy hour, because the similarities are so marked, I believed him to be Nicholas Wiseman exploring a sideline, but, unless there was something to Dr. Paul De Monte Leone’s “power of the mind” theory that it was possible for a human being to be in two places at once — Dr. Paul was often in Alaska at the same time he was in Missouri, for instance — the timing doesn’t work out.) The point is, I’ve let the story lie around too long, and no one has been asking after it, but it still nags at me. I’ll set it down here in brief strokes, and then move on. My thanks again to Linda Granfield, who sent a lot of material my way.
In my last writing I wrapped up, as best I could, the account of the society divorce case (Grover v. Grover) in which Nicholas — by then known as Paul Monte — was named as the co-respondent. Those were his dapper days, when his gifts as a fashion-plate were widely remarked, and he was said to never be seen wearing a thoughtfully curated ensemble that had previously been enjoyed by his public. Here he is in 1925, in a photograph that accompanied a story about the $50,000 suit (not of clothes, but libel) he’d launched against Lyndon Grover whose happy home he was said to have wrecked, having seduced (as it was rumoured) both Lyndon’s wife and step-daughter. Nothing came of this action.
A few weeks later, Nicholas / Paul was in the news again, this time on an unrelated, but no less thrilling, matter.
Subsequent stories wondered if he was dead or merely in Montreal. Then, Lazarus-like, he arose, and settled the question himself.
While on Staten Island, Paul took a break from working on his motor, aka his stabilizer, to step out to the movies with Vera Brandenburg, a young local heiress. Leaving the theatre, he was arrested at the behest of his wife, Esther, aka Estelle, and charged with abandonment and failure to support. Thus began a long haul through the courts, and several terms of imprisonment. Never backing down from his claim that he was born to French nobility, and that he was, despite the insistence of his mother and his spouse to the contrary, not, in fact Nicholas Wiseman, shoe salesman, but Count Paul Anatole Leon Monte (or Viscount, depending on the day and who was asking), he never failed to inspire good copy. (The Stillmans and the Thaws refer to prominent divorce trials.)
The extradition referred to in the clipping above was from New York to Massachusetts, but some authorities hoped to arrange something more definitive and far-flung for the troublesome fake count. This report, from the Lynn Daily Item, contains information about the Wiseman family I haven’t seen elsewhere.
Nicholas / Paul wasn’t bundled up and sent back to Rumania, nor to Canada. He was given a six month jail term for abandonment and non-support. On release, he had the ingenious, also bad, idea to impersonate a federal agent — he used the surname “Robinson” — and in this guise to persuade two gullible gents, the Field brothers, that their wives had become involved with bootleggers and that he, agent Robinson, was in a position to protect their good names, and this he could do for round about $300.00. The thing with the suckers who are born every minute is that they will, in fact, howl when slapped, and when the Robinson rubes did just that, Nicholas / Paul landed back in court and back in the pokey, a two-year term. In 1928, whilst sequestered in the Plymouth jail (he worked in the bakery) Esther, the first of the four wives to whom he was contemporaneously married, and for whom the term “long-suffering” might have been coined, was granted a divorce and sole custody of their daughter, Miriam. He would marry again, a number of times, unions that were all — as near as I can tell — of short duration. Owing to the fluidity of his identity — Nicholas Wiseman, Bruce Whitman, Mortimer Montefiore, Paul Monte, Count Paul Anatole Leon Monte, Paul Wiseman, Paul Stone, Paul La Monte, Paul Pierre-Monte, and who knows how many others — I can’t come up with an accurate or definitive spousal catalogue. A good start would be: Esther Trautenberg, Helene Delagarde, Ruth Connolly, Merle Sapp, Maria A. Trottier, Dorothy Hoffman (uncertain), Stella Monte (uncertain), Jeanne Oesterreich, and Marcelle Lotaire.
After his release from jail, save for a strange interlude that saw Paul, as a practical joke, send a telegram to an inmate still in residence at the Plymouth jail stating that his parole papers were to come through soon, he stayed out of the news (as near as I can tell) until 1933, when it was announced that he was engaged to a show girl named Ruth Avon.
After Walter Winchell picked up the story and used his column to suggest that Paul’s checkered past was incompatible with prospects for a long and happy marriage based on mutual trust and interests, Ruth sensibly withdrew. The “Montreal dispatches”mentioned in clipping posted above suggest, to me at least, a wire service story, but I find no mention in the Montreal English language papers of this misbegotten betrothal; perhaps the dispatchers from the north who lit the cautionary flares warning Miss Avon were in private communication with whoever was the writer for The Daily News.
We know, at least, that by 1933 Nicholas was back in Monreal, and that he’d been there for some time. It seems he returned home after his release from jail in 1929, whether of his own volition or whether at the behest of the court, I can’t say. One wonders, of course, what might have been his relations with his relations. It’s hard to imagine that he might have gone back to his old room and lived with mama Rose whose maternity he’d so often denied to the press and to jurors, claiming that she was the family nurse. Was he in close touch with his sister, Benedictine, and her husband, the failed painter, and her daughter, Mavis? In her short story “Rose,” previously mentioned, the bigamist uncle, Hans-Thomas, is a shadowy figure with a dark past who appeared only once. Was he, in fact, a more familiar presence? And did he go back to being Nicholas Wiseman? Apparently not, although his birth name was well enough known and remembered that when another Wiseman / Weisman made a criminal splash, some wondered if they might be one and the same.
It was nervy of Nicholas — the kind of nerve that fills the void left by a paucity of shame — to resettle in what was the closest thing he had to a hometown, where there must have been many who knew and remembered him, and to go about claiming to be not only a Montefiore — a name that was meant to ally him with a powerful Jewish clan, like the Rothschilds; there was a branch of the English Sebag-Montefiore family living in Montreal — but also deracinated nobility. He seems to have had some money and the leisure to enjoy it. On October 7, 1932, he was listed in the Montreal Gazette, as Paul de Montefiore, as one of the passengers bound for Britain on the S. S. Duchess of York. Four years later, when Nicholas / Paul made his last big splash in the press, there was some suggestion that, on that trip, he married again. If that’s so, I can find no record of the arrangement.
Some researcher more committed and patient and skilled than I will one day explain what happened to Nicholas between August 24 of 1935, when he was, apparently, employed by the Royal Insurance Company (unless it was some other Count de Montefiore, which seems unlikely; it can’t have been William Sebag-Montefiore, a prominent member of the Sephardic community in Montreal, a W.W. 1 veteran who was always identified as “Captain”) and March 15, 1936 when he was incarcerated in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington State: Alcatraz North. He must have been up to his old tricks, and perhaps on a bit of a binge because, in the weeks leading up to his arrest, he keeps popping up in the Jewish press from city to city. Paul Wiseman was the name he then favoured, and readers were warned to be alert for him, to safeguard themselves against his larcenous ways, and not to be taken in by his penchant for masquerading as an old world aristocrat.
What had Paul Wiseman — the name he favoured at this point — done to attract the attention of the police in Los Angeles, which is where he was arrested? He was charged, according to prison records, with breaching the conditions of the parole he’d been granted after serving time for impersonating a federal officer. The details aren’t provided. He didn’t have a terribly long stay in the McNeil lockup, was released in November of that same year, and that was when, once again, he was catapulted into the spotlight. Once again, as had happened a decade prior, there was the threat of extradition. Some papers initially reported that he was being sent back to France. This clipping is representative of the kinds of errors that were disseminated about this already obfuscatory character; pretty much everything in the caption — including the spelling of his name and the length of his sentence — is incorrect.
In fact, the Americans were working hard to rid themselves once and for all of Nicholas / Paul. They wanted the Canadians to step up to the plate and take him back, but the word from Ottawa was that no trace could be found of his residency or citizenship, which seems unlikely. Perhaps they weren’t motivated to look, even though he was, as we learn, wanted by police in Montreal and Toronto on various charges of theft and embezzlement.
This clipping, from the Montreal Gazette, supplies some details — rumours, at least — of his life in the city between 1929 and 1936, including the possibility of another marriage. A grain of salt — make that a rounded tablespoon — is required here, as the report contains much that’s speculative and much that’s plain old wrong. Steinmetz was his mother’s maiden name; she was sometimes misidentified as Stone.
And here, from the Toronto Star, January 11, 1937, an account of the tug-o’-war between the U.S. and Canada over who gets custody. Curiously, an adjacent article (cut off at the right margin, sorry about that) tells the story of a young girl who dresses as a boy and runs a gang of prepubescent thieves, exactly as Benedictine Wiseman had done in Montreal, 20 years earlier.
Nicholas / Paul, never easily fazed, stuck to his guns. What was all this fuss about his bona fides? He was who he was.
Inexplicably, and frustratingly, for the dilemma of the Count and who would be stuck with him was widely reported, the story simply fizzled out. If there was a report of resolution, I can’t find it. There seems to be no trace of any further investigation or charge pertaining to the $3,000 theft in Toronto, nor the $800 in Montreal. What happened? Did Canada refuse the prodigal? Maybe. He seems to have remained stateside. A Paul Monte (married to Stella) turns up briefly in Seattle, and I suspect this is our man. He disappears round about 1940, and it’s shortly after this that Paul Pierre-Monte registers for the draft, listing his residence as the YMCA in Providence, Rhode Island, and his closest relative as Miriam Tick: his daughter with Esther. Uncle Sam’s armed forces must not have required his services because, in 1942, he surfaces, briefly, as the director of education for the Linguaphone record company, which was the Rosetta Stone language learning system of its day. Nicholas / Paul used to boast that he spoke 17 languages, so it would have been perfect for him, traveling around to different centres, like Baltimore in this case, showing off his polyglot agility, persuading customers to sign up, and getting into who knows what trouble on the road.
This was a short association. It was as Paul Pierre-Monte that he married Jeanne Oesterreich in 1942, the same year he took the time to offer a man-on-the-street geopolitical opinion to a reporter for the Daily News.
Mostly, after this, he stays out of the news and, as near as I can tell, out of jail. It’s hard to know, what with his propensity for changing his name and all. Monte isn’t as garden variety a surname as Smith or Jones; nor is it rare, and Paul, of course, is very usual. While it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it was our P.M. who married Sarah Sweeney in 1935 and Vera Anatra in 1951 and Felicia Zito in 1953, it might very well have been someone who shared that identifier. His more cosmopolitan sounding monikers leave little doubt about his involvement, whether as criminal or as groom, or both. In 1957, as Paul Montefiore (or Montefiere) he married Marcelle Lotaire (originally Marie Lohstaetter, 1904 - 1995) a French national living in New York. Perhaps Marcelle — she was an interpreter and designer — proved to be Mrs. Right and it was happily ever after into the sunset, but I’d be surprised if someone as restless as Nicholas would turn domesticable and settle down just because he’d hit 60, as would have been the case in 1957. For Marcelle, as for the other Mrs. Montes — with the exception of Esther — I find no sign of divorce proceedings; but, as we know, he was never one to consider marriage an obstacle to marriage. Perhaps he continued as he began, and married without the formality of annulment. In 1960, Paul Monte married Elizabeth Paulsen, who lived in Queens. Again, it might or might not be our Paul, just as it might or might not be that same Paul Monte, newly wed, who died in Queens on October 9, 1961.
Earlier that same year, on March 29, this sad notice appeared as a column filler in the back pages of The Daily News.
That’s all. There was no followup, and why would there be? Stories like that are a dime a dozen, and not just in New York. The puritan in me — that’s how I’m marbled, sad to say — feels that this would be a fitting, even a logical, end to such a life and career. A plunge from a roof, another failure to fly: this makes dramatic, maybe melodramatic, sense; and it would close a circle in that it would ally Paul with his father, Solomon, who also took his life. It would have been an apt, if tragic, drawing of the veil over the life of one so deeply flawed, who did so much harm; a terrible but also — terrible to say — satisfying death; narratively satisfying, I mean, one that arrives with a moral tucked into its pocket. A death that would give us all something upon which to reflect, and afford the opportunity too say, with finality, The End. But in March, 1961, Paul Monte — or whatever name he was then using — would have been 63, which ain’t 77. An error in age-reporting in this situation — solitary man, no family, who knows what kind of papers on his person — wouldn’t have been unusual, but a discrepancy of fourteen years seems too extreme. It’s not impossible that this was our Nicholas, but the chances are less, I’d say, than 50 / 50. And in my experience, which by now is vaster than I ever wished for, suicides are rarely people like Nicholas / Paul, so replete with bravado and their own smudgy brand of rectitude, so invested in the knotted certainty that, somehow, they are the victims in whatever the situation. If what you’re mostly sure of is that you’re right, always right, why kill yourself?
There are variations in his reported birth year and birthday but May 9, 1897, is the one on which most sources agree. It’s a pity that a life so extravagantly and eccentrically lived hasn’t yet been more closely documented and that his death, whenever it came, as surely it has, wasn’t accorded some attention. Someone smarter and more diligent than I will one day give the specifics for the benefit of the vanishingly small number of people who care. What’s sure is that Uncle Nicholas lived long enough to see his niece, Mavis Gallant, publish a sufficient number of stories in The New Yorker to intuit that she was more, much more, than a flash in the pan. Did he know about her emerging brilliant career? Did he care? Did he read the story in which he was described, “Rose,” published December 17, 1960? Six months passed before her next fiction appeared in the magazine. “Rose” was the last story in those pages before Paul Monte, whoever he was, took his own life, March 29, 1961.
Brother Nicholas, Brother Paul — whatever you became and wherever you landed, may your restless soul have found repose. I won’t trouble you further. I’m done with you, now.
I like the way you circled him ( pocketed him would be more precise) with Joyce, Salinger, and Notes and Queries. A sidelong slyness in your approach.
He is a kind of wonder - Nicholas. The sleight of hand proficiency in multiple marriages, his dandy ‘s wardrobe, the travel, the pokey time. The chutzpah of going back to Montreal! You have beamed him up and I’m glad you did.
The effect on me has been speculation about how Mavis absorbed this family history and the oblique ways it entered her writing.
Thank you, Bill.
A lot of sleuthing involved in your strangely nuanced portrait of an enigmatic man.
What a saga! Thank you for following this misbegotten life.