Descent into masochism then suicide

Apr 07, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

This world holds many global secrets, some big, some small, depending on who is inside the conspiracy. Once humans remain curious creatures, the world will forever be tantalized by the desire to know what’s inside the cupboard.
One of the largest international curiosities was born in 1974 when two Washington Post journalists (Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward) wrote a book titled, All the President’s Men, about the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon
The centrepiece of the journalists’ investigation into Nixon’s role was an authoritative, unidentified source given the pseudonym, “Deep Throat.” Most Americans, researchers around the world and the average citizen who were familiar with that aspect of American history would have liked to know who this resourceful person that went by the call name, Deep Throat, was. The guessing game went on non-stop in American academic and journalistic circles.
For thirty years the secret was locked up until 2005 when Mark Felt (in the seventies, the deputy director of the FBI) stricken by dementia at age 91 told a Vanity Fair writer that he was Deep Throat, which Bernstein and Woodward confirmed.
Not as fascinating as the Deep Throat secret was a lady named Elizabeth Mc Neil. She was the author of a memoir that hit the world stage in 1978 with the title, Nine and a Half weeks. The movie made the book popular because the film was a huge hit. Elizabeth Mc Neil was a pen name.
Most people who read the book and saw the film would have liked to know who this woman was. Her memoir centred on a macabre sexual relationship she had with a man she met at random who worked in the corporate world like her.
For nine and a half weeks, Elizabeth Mc Neil voluntarily submitted to being a sex slave with her partner who enjoyed sadism with her while she reveled in her own masochism.
The secret of Deep Throat lasted thirty years. Thirty-five years after Mc Neil wrote her story, her identity was revealed. It happened in November last year when Mc Neil’s literary agent confessed to a New Yorker magazine journalistic investigator that Mc Neil was Mrs. Ingeborg Day, a woman who wrote her memoirs Ghost Waltz in 1980, two years after she published her sexual adventure.
Ingeborg took her identity to her grave. In late 2011, she committed suicide. I guess she died believing that her real name would never be known as the person who wrote Nine and a Half Weeks. She remains an enigma. Why would she write two memoirs of her life but for the next thirty-five years remain mum on huge gaps in her life? In Ghost Waltz there is hardly any material on her daughter.
It is a pity that Ingeborg’s death was not reported globally. Her two memoirs are brutally frank and her honesty caused her to be shunned by American society. Day was a socialite editor at the prestigious, liberal, feminist magazine ”Ms” when she wrote her two memoirs. But when the magazine celebrated its fortieth anniversary last year, there was no mention of her. Maybe the magazine didn’t like what she was or maybe it had to do with her admission that as the daughter of an Austrian Nazi, she had some anti-Semitism in her.
That was a terrible truth to admit about yourself in the US, where Jewish power can make or break any citizen. I guess we will never know who her lover was in Nine and a Half Weeks. I suppose there will be a movie on her life. Her publisher, Harper Collins, will reissue Nine and a Half Weeks under her real name. Please see the movie or read the book. It gives you a graphic description of how impossible it is to understand the human being known biologically as Homo sapiens.
Here in Guyana, there is a mountain of secrets that will never be revealed because Guyanese do not have in their culture the European tradition, handed down to the Americans, of revealing who they are, and that great desire to make history richer and to open it up to subsequent civilization. We in Guyana are contemptuous of history.
I am eagerly awaiting the memoirs of Yesu Persaud and Robert Corbin. Later this month, one hopes Rupert Roopnaraine will not disappoint with his book.
In the not too distant future, I will reveal the name of one of the men who tried to kill Peter Taylor, the crusading anti-PPP editor in the sixties. There are some fascinating secrets about some enduring Guyanese that may never ever be revealed. Laurie Lewis took many to his grave.

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Descent into masochism then suicide

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