Whodunit? Poe and Dr. Strangelove

The oblique reference to Poe by means of the double POE acronyms, then, can be seen as linking the fundamental prophecy of Dr. Strangelove with the much earlier secular prophecies of an American icon, even as their fulfillment. And there is something of a tradition here, given, for example, the many allusions to Old Testament prophets in the Book of Revelation.

With these considerations, we are now in a better position to deal with the question of who was responsible for the double POE acronyms in the general’s doodle. According to Richard Daniels, at the time of this writing Senior Archivist at the Stanley Kubrick Archive, “I am not aware of any documentation that would identify the author of the page” (pers. comm.), although he did supply me with a tantalizing page from the script….

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Edgar Allan Poe is an American icon, beloved by millions around the world mainly for his poems and tales. There should be no surprise, then, that clever allusions to Poe abound in literature and film, with him saying each time, in effect, “I am here!” One such possible appearance is in Dr. Strangelove (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece on military madness and global annihilation by nuclear war. It is a mystery that should be of interest to Poe and Kubrick enthusiasts alike, including those in the field known as Adaptation Studies. As I. Q. Hunter rightly observes, “Kubrick is . . . central to Adaptation Studies, not least for his unusually transformative approach to texts and because they remind us that, first, adaptation is a creative but pragmatic use of texts as convenient sources of inspiration, and, second, it is a process engaged in collaboratively over time, with cameramen and set decorators as well as screen­writers, . . .” (281). Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, however, provides us with something peculiarly outré about it, in fact material for a case study in relation to Poe that is relevant to the themes of allusion, fidelity, intertextuality, conscious and unconscious contributions, end-of-the-world prophecies, and good old-fashioned whodunit and why, all of which shall be addressed in the present article.

A little after the one-hour mark in the film, we find ourselves in the office of General Jack D. Ripper, the psychotic general who bypassed the president and initiated Plan R, sending regularly airborne B-52 bombers with their nuclear payloads to Russia in a pre-emptive strike (since “war is too important to be left up to politicians”). Holed up with him in his office is visiting British group captain Lionel Mandrake, who has the opportunity to stop the bombers if he can find the general’s three-letter recall code prefix and call it in to the Pentagon. Fortunately, while in the washroom Ripper blows his brains out with a pistol. Frantically searching the general’s desk, Mandrake finds the following doodle written by the general on his notepad:

After thinking out loud various letter combinations, Mandrake eventually gets through to the Pentagon, saying, “It’s a variation of peace on earth or purity of essence. EOP. OPE. It’s one of those.” OPE turns out to be the right combination. But surely it cannot be lost on Poe people that “Peace On Earth” and “Purity Of Essence” doubly spell the acronym POE.

Poe, interestingly, while arguably in a prophetic mood or mode, wrote not one but two dialogues on the fiery apocalyptic end of the world, “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839) and “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841). (“The Power of Words” [1845], although apocalyptic, does not count, as there is nothing fiery about it.) What’s more, the language Poe uses in those dialogues is eerily suggestive, from our modern perspective, of a nuclear holocaust. In “Conversation,” which begins with an epigram from Euripides, “I will bring fire to thee” (Quinn 358), Poe writes, for example, of “A combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate,” of “the consummation of Fate” (albeit the cause is a comet), and of “a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name” (363). Similarly in “Colloquy,” which begins with an epigram from Sophocles, “These things are in the future” (448), he writes of “principles which should have taught our race to submit to the guidance of the natural laws, rather than attempt their control” (450), of “the tree of knowledge, and of its forbidden fruit, death-producing,” of the “purification” by “fire” of the “Art-scarred surface of the Earth” (452−453), and of “the epoch of the fiery overthrow” (453).

One might naturally, of course, employ Occam’s Razor and dismiss our mystery as a matter of coincidence and psychological projection. Indeed, the more one reads case studies in Adaptation Studies, the more one might conclude that many alleged allusions, say in a film to a particular author or piece of literature (let alone to many authors and pieces of literature), are just plain matters of coincidence (the comparison of film with Poe, alone, provides endless examples of this), onto which the alleged allusions are projected, finding meanings where there are none, analogous to seeing “faces in the moon” (Hume 40).

The simplest explanation is not always the best, however, and in the present case there is a piece of evidence that tips the balance in favor of design. Specifically, if one looks closely at above the bottom left corner of General Ripper’s notepad, one will see “T/o Helen.” Whatever “T/o” was meant to mean in the mind of the insane general (“theater of operations,” “turn-on,” etc.), those familiar with Poe’s poems will see a case of doubling yet again, as Poe wrote not one but two poems entitled “To Helen” (1831, 1848). Given this fact, along with the fact that Poe wrote two fiery apocalyptic dialogues, the chance of “T/o Helen” appearing on the same notepad with the double POE acronyms in a film about nuclear annihilation is vanishingly small, so that the likely explanation of those acronyms is design, as a cryptic reference to Poe for one or more purposes, the “T/o Helen” serving perhaps as a kind of signature or pointer.

But does this visual clue also help us with a central question in Adaptation Studies, namely, whether a particular adaptation was consciously conceived? As Perry and Sederholm rightly observe, “legitimate adaptations of Poe do not necessarily need to be conscious” (7). (The “rightly” inevitably follows from the overwhelming evidence of the existence and powers, including genius, of the unconscious mind, such as eureka moments in science and art; see, for example, Robinson, Stamos.) Now, as Mary Snyder observes, “distinguishing between conscious and unconscious adaptations can easily become muddled” (107). This is true, but so is the reverse: If we can have clear and reliable autobiographical details from the adaptor about the adaptation in question, such as working out the adaptation step-by-step while fully awake (conscious), or having it suddenly come to mind like a revelation while sitting on a bus (unconscious), or having it appear in a dream (unconscious), or having it pop into mind suddenly upon waking up from sleep (unconscious), then we can be fairly confident about its Jungian polarity.

In the case of the double POE acronyms in Dr. Strangelove, however, muddled is, unfortunately, our fate. To see this, we must first address a question that naturally arises, followed by another: Who did it, and why? This is certainly a legitimate part of Adaptation Studies, what Perry and Sederholm call “the who, what, where, why, and how of adapted texts” (4).

Perhaps if we can identify the most plausible why, that will help us better identify the who. Among the many functions or (more widely) modes of adaptation are: serious play, involving “the pleasure of the adaptor” (Perry 81); homage, “[w]hen adaptation constitutes an act of homage, the source has presumably made much of its medium” (Boyd 597); allusion, “how a film can incorporate a source without an adaptation proper” (Perry 81); and, more specifically with regard to the latter, indirect allusion, which “less visibly adapts another representation as an oblique reference that may or may not be recognized” (Corrigan 26), and analogue, “unacknowl­edged resemblances between a source text and a film” (Perry 81).

In the case of the double POE acronyms in Dr. Strangelove, this one little example, arguably all of these modes can be found therein.

Starting with serious play, to have the insane general doodle “Peace On Earth” (based, as we shall see, on the doodle in Red Alert) and “Purity Of Essence” over and over again in a crossword fashion, each phrase spelling POE by the capitalization, and then adding “T/o Helen” as a further reference to Poe, is the brilliantly opportunistic sort of play that has got to produce an extraordinary turn-on in the adaptor. Pleasure is also the likely effect in the viewer when the lights go on, so to speak, when one has the aha! moment of recognition. In fact, I almost fell off my couch when I first noticed the POE acronyms in the doodle while watching the Blu-ray of the film on my large plasma TV.

Turning to homage, Poe, of course, as principally a magazinist, “made much of his medium,” given his fairly extensive editorial work, his over a hundred book reviews, his numerous essays, and of course (especially for us today) his many poems and tales, but also given the fact that he helped develop a number of literary genres (such as science fiction) and even invented some (notably detective fiction). Highly relevant here is the fact that “his tales of humor and satire far outnumber his tales of terror” (Poe 25). Indeed, if Dr. Strangelove were to pay homage to anyone, then arguably Poe would be the most natural choice of all, given his tales of terror (often mixed with madness), his tales of humor and satire, his apocalyptic writings, Kubrick’s characterization of Dr. Strangelove (which itself is apocalyptic) as a “nightmare comedy” (Kubrick 349), and Poe’s fame in popular culture (including notably the Corman films of the early 1960s). The last of these factors alone makes it possible that the homage to Poe (assuming such) was mainly for the purpose (possibly unconscious) of what Brian Boyd calls “fertility” (596), in explicit analogy with adaptation in evolutionary biology – where fertility is measured in terms of “potential” reproduction in a field of competition (Medawar and Medawar 98) – meaning in this case the desire to increase the potential audience of Dr. Strangelove. Even so, homage here, given the unusually cryptic nature of the double POE acronyms, is not likely to have been made by someone who was indifferent, let alone hostile, to Poe. Instead, it is likely to have been made by someone who was an admirer of Poe, even by someone who loved Poe. This will prove to be an especially important consideration.

Equally interesting is analogue by indirect allusion. In addition to his two fiery apocalyptic dialogues, Poe wrote a cosmological treatise that was published in 1848, fifteen months before his death, a work entitled Eureka and which he considered to be his magnum opus. In this book, both using and correcting the science of his time, Poe argues that our universe is not really evolving but rather collapsing back into what he calls “the Original Unity,” also “Nothingness” (Quinn 1261, 1355). There is thus to Poe a recurring dimension of prophecy, in its simplest and most basic sense, of predicting the future as a projection of the past and present. Dr. Strangelove, too, is evidently a work of prophecy, given that, as Peter Krämer points out, by the early 1960s “many saw [nuclear war] as unavoidable and, once it happened, as utterly destructive” (7). Kubrick himself largely shared this view about the Cold War (Kubrick 349−350; Krämer 9−10; Broderick 2, 8, 23).

To this we should add the context of prophecy in both Poe and Dr. Strangelove. The Victorian era, in Britain but especially in America, whether we’re talking about art, science, or technology, was characterized by progressionism, the belief that humanity and its products, possibly even along with life itself, is progressing onward and upward (Ruse). Poe, however, swam against that current, which is a recurring theme in his writings. In “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841), for example, Monos says the world “grew infected with system and abstraction” (Quinn 451), that it suffered from “intemperance of knowledge” (452), that “the Earth’s records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization,” and that “one or two of the wise among our forefathers . . . had ventured to doubt the propriety of the term ‘improve­ment,’ as applied to the progress of our civilization” (450). Similarly, in “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), the revivified mummy refutes his Victorian interlocutors on their notions of progress since the time of ancient Egypt, leaving the narrator “sick of this life and of the nineteenth century in general” and “convinced that everything is going wrong” (821). And in Eureka, right at the start, Poe writes of the “Destiny” of the universe, its “Total Annihilation” (1261).

The oblique reference to Poe by means of the double POE acronyms, then, can be seen as linking the fundamental prophecy of Dr. Strangelove with the much earlier secular prophecies of an American icon, even as their fulfillment. And there is something of a tradition here, given, for example, the many allusions to Old Testament prophets in the Book of Revelation.

With these considerations, we are now in a better position to deal with the question of who was responsible for the double POE acronyms in the general’s doodle. According to Richard Daniels, at the time of this writing Senior Archivist at the Stanley Kubrick Archive, “I am not aware of any documentation that would identify the author of the page” (pers. comm.), although he did supply me with a tantalizing page from the script:

The actual doodle in the film, of course, is different in a number of respects from what is written here in the script, notably in terms of capitalization.

In the absence of identifying documentation, what remains is to approach the case in the manner of a murder mystery, looking at suspects in terms of “means, motive, and opportunity” and affixing a probability to each.

There were many people involved in the making of Dr. Strangelove who, of course, could have written the doodle that we see in the film, such as one of the prop people, or possibly one of the actors, specifically Peter Sellers or Sterling Hayden, or possibly even Keenan Wynn, who played the officer who finds Mandrake and the dead Ripper at the end of the scene with the doodle. But we have the script, with the key page reproduced above. We shall therefore confine our­selves, in the present investigation at least, to the credited contributors to the screenplay.

We start with Peter George, an RAF officer and the author (using the pseudonym Peter Bryant) of Red Alert. Kubrick bought the movie rights to the book in 1961, and George helped with the writing of the screenplay. In the book, interestingly, General Quinten (the precursor of General Ripper), in conversation with Major Howard (the precursor of Captain Mandrake), refers to his men defending the base from attack as “dying for peace on earth” (Bryant 96). During this conversation, moreover, the general had been doodling on the notepad on his desk. After Quinten kills himself, Howard examines the notepad with page after page of “scrawls and doodles” (146). He then thinks he’s got the clue to the recall code and phones the president, telling him he thinks the code “will be some combination of the letters O, P, and E” (156). When asked by the president why, he states that during their conversation the general “used the expression peace on earth at least twice” (see 70, 96), and moreover that “after the medics had taken his body away, I glanced through the note-pad he’d been using to scrawl in. . . . I noticed on one page he’d written down the phrase Peace on earth. I looked back through the pages and I found it was written again and again. Not only that, but on one page he’d underlined the initial letters of each word, and written them down below in all their possible six combinations. Right then, something told me that was it. One of them was the group code” (157−158). “OEP,” it turns out, “was the correct group” (158) – which should make sense to the attentive and retentive reader, given that earlier in the story the general had thought to himself, while his base was under attack, “On earth peace, goodwill to all men” (97).

Peter George, however, is not the most likely candidate for the double POE acronyms in the film. For one thing, it is surely a stretch to go from “Peace on earth” to POE, especially given the above. Moreover, there is nothing playful about Red Alert. Instead, it is what Kubrick called “a completely serious suspense story” (349). Kubrick likewise, along with his producer and business partner James B. Harris, originally intended the film to be a thoroughly serious treatment of its subject matter, with The Delicate Balance of Terror and Edge of Doom as possible titles and with Peter George having been brought in to co-write the screenplay, from January to April 1962. From March to June, Kubrick moved from the serious approach to the comic, only to vacillate back to the serious approach in July, and then back again to the comic approach starting in August. By that time, he fully realized that the film would be more effective as, in his own words, “a black comedy or, better, a nightmare comedy” (Gelmis 97), which he called “the perfect tone” because “it most truthfully presents the picture” (Kubrick 349), meaning that it deals with the “paradoxes” of nuclear deterrence in a concrete rather than “abstract” way, what he called “cynicism” with a “constructive purpose” (350). Kubrick also called the film a “satire,” in the sense that “it repeatedly has a very strong statement of what I would call the opposite of truth” (Kubrick 355), meaning presumably “acceptable social criticism” (Broderick 6), but possibly also that global nuclear annihilation isn’t really funny but can nevertheless involve a comedy of errors. By the end of August, Kubrick settled on the eventual title: Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. From then onward there is an enormous lack of clarity on the contribution of Peter George to the eventual screenplay and to the film. My own impression, after examining a considerable variety of sources, is that although George was delighted by the shift to suspense comedy, he lacked the knack for the required writing (he was also increasingly physically ill and depressed) and pretty much receded into the background, remaining during production only as a “paid technical advisor” (Broderick 22).

Given that Harris had already left the project before Kubrick turned it into a comedy (and thought at the time that Kubrick was crazy to do so; Broderick 100), we now turn to Kubrick himself as a suspect in our mystery. Certainly, some have seen the influence of Poe in many of Kubrick’s films. John Tresch, for example, sees “the shrill apocalyptic satire” of Dr. Strangelove as one of many “significant subterranean connections to Poe,” along with Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Shining (127−128).

But we have to be careful here, given the possibility of projection. If General Ripper’s doodle, specifically, contains a connection to Poe, then its creator was probably something of a Poe lover: someone who is very familiar with Poe’s works, greatly enjoys them, and would not want to treat them or their author disparagingly. Kubrick was a voracious reader and thorough researcher, but he apparently had little if any interest in Poe.

Moving in reverse chronological order through Tresch’s list, The Shining (1980) is based on Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1977). And that novel provides, as Maroš Buday has shown using what he calls “the comparative approach” (47), if not (here he is hyperbolic) “endless examples of inspiration” by Poe (48), certainly many, both “subtle and explicit allusions” to Poe (49), to his life but especially to his writings, notably “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), and “The Black Cat” (1843), so much so that King’s novel is “deeply connected” (57) with Poe. But this only amplifies a serious fidelity problem with Kubrick’s film version. In an interview with Kubrick by Vicente Molina Foix, for example, the latter points out that “you have avoided the many references to Poe in the book, especially to his mask of the red death, and in fact, your film escapes completely Poe’s influence” (679). Kubrick replies that the main change was to the ending, and he adds, in apparent reference to both the book and the film, “all his Poe quotes and ‘Red Death’ things are all right but didn’t seem necessary” (680).

Even if fidelity and intertextuality in Adaptation Studies are and even must be at odds, because the network of bare and veiled relations between an adaptation and its source or (given intertextuality) sources is much too complex (or whatever the reasons, such as realism versus postmodernism), it by no means follows that an adaptation (taken in its wide and loose sense to include, for example, inspiration and allusion) cannot have a degree of fidelity to a particular source in a particular respect (or perspective). (The situation is analogous to the common rejection in academic philosophy of the concept of overall similarity. Overlooked in, for example, Nelson Goodman’s critique of similarity as “a pretender, an imposter, a quack,” and a “false friend” [19] is the fact that the rejection of overall similarity between A and B does not logically preclude a meaningful assertion of similarity between A and B in a particular respect.) If fidelity, as David Johnson puts it, “refers to the extent to which a given aesthetic object – traditionally, in adapta­tion studies, a film – reflects a faithful understanding of its source – traditionally, a literary text, especially a novel, play, or short story” (87), then Kubrick’s The Shining is not at all faithful, in letter or spirit, to King’s The Shining with respect to Poe alone, rendering any claim of “significant subterranean connections” between Kubrick and Poe unwarranted in this case.

As for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), any real connections to Poe could easily have come from Kubrick’s collaborator, Arthur C. Clarke. This is because the influence of Poe is clear in some of Clarke’s short stories that predate 2001, such as “Critical Mass” (1957), in which he compliments the imagination of Poe (Clarke 43), and “Maelstrom II” (1962), which was not preceded by “Maelstrom I” or “Maelstrom” and is apparently a science fiction takeoff from Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841). Any supposed connection between Kubrick and Poe, then, would once again seem to be a matter of projection rather than of reality.

This is far from obviously the case, however, with Lolita (1962), Kubrick’s film that immediately preceded Dr. Strangelove. The film is about a middle-aged literature professor, Humbert Humbert, who falls obsessively in love with Lolita, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the widow from whom he is renting a room. And there is no question about the appearance of Poe: at around the forty-minute mark of the film, in a seemingly innocent bedroom scene, Humbert happily reads to Lolita some lines from Poe’s poem “Ulalume” (1847).

That hardly makes Kubrick, however, a Poe lover, or even a Poe person. For a start, his Lolita is based on the eponymous novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955. In that novel, Nabokov makes extensive references to Poe, both direct and indirect, especially to his poem “Annabel Lee” (1849). For example, Humbert compares Lolita, who is twelve in the book, to her “precursor,” a twelve-year-old “girl child” named Annabel Leigh (Boyd 7), who lived in “a princedom by the sea,” and whom he fell in love with “[w]hen I was a child and she was a child” (15). She died a few months later (11) and now Humbert, as an adult and professor, claims that “at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (13). The nod now, apparently, is to Poe’s personal life and his tale “Morella” (1835). But there is more, and it’s negative toward Poe. For example, Humbert states that “Virginia [Poe’s young wife] was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her” (39); when registering himself and Lolita into a hotel he narrates that “In the slow clear hand of crime I wrote: Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter” (111), and later in the novel he narrates that “the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis” (242). Even though in his 1956 afterword Nabokov distances Lolita from “didactic fiction” (296), he also reveals his personal view: “my creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarchist” (296), also “a pervert” (297), and “there are many things, besides nymphets, in which I disagree with him” (296).

Subsequently published in the U.S. by Putnam in 1958, the novel enjoyed enormous success. Three months later, Kubrick bought the movie rights and eventually, in 1960, contracted Nabokov to write the screenplay. The eventual result was only partially used by Kubrick, and it contains more shots against Poe. For example, Humbert exclaims, “What indeed could Edgar Poe see in Mother Clemm, the mother of his pubescent bride? Oh, how horrible full-grown women are to the nymphet-lover!” (Boyd 690); he reads into a tape recorder “let me turn to the romantic lines in which the great American neurotic commemorates his marriage to a thirteen-year-old girl, his beautiful Annabel Lee” (723); and Nabokov instructs “In one SHOT, he [Humbert] is dressed as a gowned professor, in another as a routine Hamlet, in a third, as a dilapidated Poe” (730).

As Anna Pilińska rightly observes, “The almost overpowering presence of Edgar Allan Poe in Nabokov’s novel and screenplay is limited in the film to one poem” (115). This is the “Ulalume” scene. In Nabokov’s screenplay, with dialogue similarly reproduced in the film, Humbert reads some lines of poetry to Lolita from “my favorite poem.” Following one of the lines in the first stanza of “Ulalume,” Humbert comments, “Marvelous emphasis on ‘immemorial.’” He then reads roughly half of the eighth stanza, which has a line that ends with “vista” and another that ends with “sister.” At this point Lolita breaks in, “I think that’s rather corny.” When asked why, she replies, “Vista-sister. That’s like Lolita-sweeter” (Boyd 764) – which a few pages later turns out to be a rhyme from a jukebox tune (768). (Indeed, from Poe’s time through Nabokov’s to the present, there seems not an end in Poe-land to the lower kinds of attack, be that of a Griswold or an Eliot.)

Perhaps, however, in limiting Nabokov’s many references to Poe to this one scene, Kubrick was revealing a respect for Poe. Moreover, in Kubrick’s “Ulalume” scene (but not in Nabokov’s), Poe is introduced by Humbert as “my favorite poet,” “the divine Edgar.” But with these words, along with Lolita’s reply to the poem, which betters the literary scholar at his own specialty, Kubrick only serves to further Nabokov’s depiction of the middle-aged Humbert (and by implication Poe) as the real pre-pubescent (or close to it), not Lolita (who is twelve in the book, and fourteen in the film only for censorship reasons).

Finally, there is Terry Southern, the highly talented counterculture hipster writer of “weirdo lit” that Kubrick brought in to help with the screenplay, “officially” from November 16 to December 28, 1962 (Hill 114). But Southern also claims (and there are plenty of reasons to believe him), “We worked together on the script before and throughout the filming” (Southern and Friedman 7), the latter which lasted from January 28 to May 24, 1963, writing and rewriting “usually the pages to be filmed that day” (75). (Recall the key passage from the page of the script reproduced above, dated, notably, January 1, 1963.) As Vincent LoBrutto puts it, “Kubrick needed a deviously subversive mind, an anarchist who could find satire and humor in the deadliest of subjects – he needed the comic gifts of Terry Southern” (230).

One can certainly see this in Ripper’s notepad. “Peace On Earth” connects ironically with what’s on the billboard outside the general’s military base, “Peace Is Our Profession,” while “Purity Of Essence” connects ironically with his obsession over “the purity of essence of our natural fluids,” especially his paranoid belief in a Communist plot to “sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” by adding fluoride to our water, ice cream, etc.

Now add to this, as Southern’s son Nile puts it, that Poe was “one of Terry’s heroes” (Southern and Friedman 260). He was only “nine years old” when he first read Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837−38), which was “an extraordinary turn-on” (Hill 12). He rewrote the novel, replacing its characters with school friends of his, with an unpopular teacher, Miss Dinsmore, being eaten alive. Southern also rewrote other tales by Poe, and also tales by Hawthorne, because “[t]hey never seemed to me to go quite far enough” (12). Naturally, Southern initially took Pym to be a factual account, a “genuine documentation” (Southern and Friedman 193). As such, he says, it was “Hook City for yours truly,” and this didn’t change when he later realized that Poe had used various “trappings,” including “the sort of totally irrelevant and gratuitous bit of ‘ignorance’ which gives an account verisimilitude” (194).

Southern, then, clearly appears to have had much more of a motive in adding the double POE acronyms in Dr. Strangelove, compared with the other suspects, and he certainly had the means and opportunity. In fact, he is the one most likely to have made the various connections between the apocalyptic prophecy of Dr. Strangelove and the apocalyptic writings of Poe, and accordingly to have seen the incredible coincidence of an opportunity to convert General Quinten’s “Peace on earth” on his notepad to General Ripper’s “Peace On Earth” on his respective notepad, along with adding “Purity Of Essence” to make for an appropriate doubling of POE acronyms. Even more, his mother’s name was Helen (Hill 152 photo).

George, Kubrick, and Southern are deceased. And even if we could ask them, memories of distant events are often far from accurate, especially in cases of collaboration. Perhaps it is even “impossible to know who did what,” as Elaine Dundy claims, who interviewed Kubrick and Southern on the set of Dr. Strangelove, although she thinks she can detect in the film script Southern’s contribution from “his odd use of italics and quirky punctuation” (15).

This suggests that one might solve our mystery simply by hiring a handwriting analyst. (I’m too poe for that.) Richard Daniels (Kubrick Archives) doesn’t think the general’s doodle is in Kubrick’s hand, and that “it would be difficult for anyone’s hand to be discerned from the writing” (pers. comm.). On the other hand, Mick Broderick thinks it is in Kubrick’s hand, with multiple writing styles, and adds that Kubrick’s wife personally “confirmed he was a constant doodler” (pers. comm.). I don’t know if Southern was also a doodler – his son Nile says he was more of a “collager” (pers. comm.), although I’m not sure he was serious – but I’ll bet the Devil my head that he was behind the double POE acronyms in Dr. Strangelove.

References

Boyd, Brian. “Making Adaptation Studies Adaptive.” Leitch. 586−606.

Boyd, Brian, ed. Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955 – 1962. New York: Library of America, 1996.

Broderick, Mick. Reconstructing Strangelove: Inside Stanley Kubrick’s “Nightmare Comedy.” London: Wallflower Press, 2017.

Bryant, Peter. Red Alert. New York: Ace Books, 1958.

Buday, Maroš. “From One Master of Horror to Another: Tracing Poe’s Influence in Stephen King’s The Shining.” Prague Journal of English Studies 4.1 (2015): 47−59.

Castle, Alison., ed. The Stanley Kubrick Archives. Berlin: Taschen, 2016.

Clarke, Arthur C. Tales from the “White Hart.” New York: Ballantine Books, 1957.

Corrigan, Timothy. “Defining Adaptation.” Leitch. 23−35.

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Columbia Pictures, 1964.

Dundy, Elaine. “Stanley Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove” (1963). Phillips. 9−16.

Foster, Lawrence, and J.W. Swanson, eds. Experience & Theory. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1970.

Gelmis, Joseph. “The Film Director as Superstar: Stanley Kubrick” (1970). Phillips. 80−104.

Goodman, Nelson. “Seven Strictures on Similarity.” Foster and Swanson. 19−31.

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Unless otherwise stated, images are screenshots from the film.