Steppenwolf

Novel by Herman Hesse.  Berlin: G. Fisher Verlag 1927.  English translation by Basil Creighton.  London: Martin Secker.  New York: Henry Hold & Co. 1929.  Many other editions.

Film produced by Melvin Fisherman & Richard Herland.
Directed by Fred Haines
Script by Fred Haines based on the novel by Herman Hesse
106 minutes 1974

Max von Sydow plays Harry Haller
Dominique Sanda plays Hermine
Pierre Clémenti plays Pablo

Country of finance:  USA/Switzerland/UK/France/Italy
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Germany
Filming location: Basel, Hamburg.

Synopsis.

Harry Haller, a man devoted to the high culture of Goethe and Mozart but alienated by the shallow bourgeois pretence of admiring that culture, sees himself as having a second animalistic nature, a wolf of the steppes.  However he is in despair and on the verge of suicide when he encounters Hermine in a chance visit to a dance bar.  She offers him friendship and teaches him to value the little things in life, to dance and to take drugs.  From the start he notices that her features have a masculine aspect, and feels that she reminds him of his childhood friend Hermann.  He eventually fully falls in love with her at the costume ball where she is dressed as a man. She and Pablo, a jazz saxophonist, take Harry to a magic theatre where he is able to encounter some other of his myriad personalities.

Who are they?

Herman Hesse (1877 – 1962) was an influential German-Swiss novelist with interests in Buddhism and Jungianism.

Melvin Fishman produced only this film.  He was a student of Jung and Alchemy and wanted Steppenwolf to be the first Jungian Film.  The film was in pre-production for seven years as Fishman built up a relationship with the Hesse family to obtain the film rights.  He did lots of drugs and had a heart attack shortly after the film was finished.  Two years later another heart attack killed him.  He died with 20 Swiss Francs in his pocket, and no other money.

Richard Herland produced one television series and four films between 1964 and 1986.  He raised the money for Steppenwolf.

Peter Sprague, the major financier, was a scion of US industrial wealth who thought of himself as radical.

Fred Haines (1936 – 2008), from Los Angeles, fluent in French and German, did a degree in literature.  He met film director Joseph Strick and together they wrote the script of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1967.  It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.  He was a co-writer of Strick’s Tropic of Cancer, but took his name from the credits after a disagreement.  Steppenwolf in the only film that he directed.

Max von Sydow has been in over 140 films.  He is one of Sweden’s most distinguished actors.  He has played both God and the Devil.

Dominique Sanda is a French actress who was especially known for her roles in Italian films.  She has been in 54 films.

Pierre Clémenti, also French, had just completed a two-year sentence for drug charges.

Curiosities

The post-Zabriskie-Point Michelangelo Antonioni was approached to direct, but he thought that the book was unfilmable.  John Frankenheimer and actor James Coburn were also approached to direct.

Timothy Leary, on the run from prison, was considered for the part of Harry Haller, but he gave two acid tabs to Sprague who then had a bad trip.

Conrad Rooks, a heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, who had made the druggie film Chappaqua, was also courting the Hesse family for Steppenwolf, but ended up with Siddhartha instead.

While the film was made in English, none of the actors are native English speakers.

Peter Sprague, the major financier ended up owning the rights.  He put the film on a shelf for two years.

The colours were wrong when the prints were made.

The special effects were cutting edge for 1974.

Mati Klarwein (1932 – 2002), who did the album covers for Santana’s Abraxas and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, painted the images in the corridors of the Magic Theatre.

The Czech artist, Jaroslav Bradac , did the animated sequence.

Decades earlier than the Terminator films and The Matrix, Steppenwolf includes a sequence where humans are fighting a war against the machines.

The entire film is available on YouTube.

“…it seems to me that of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other, and frequently it is actually the affirmative and enthusiastic readers, rather than those who rejected the book, who have reacted to it oddly…”–Hermann Hesse in the 1961 prologue to Steppenwolf.

I was one of very few people who saw the film on the big screen.

Interpretation

Do we have one personality? Or is it an illusion?  Early in the book, Harry sees himself as having two personalities: the spiritual, high-culture snob; and the wolf from the steppes who loathes the bourgeoisie.

When he enters the Magic Theatre the illusion, his fake personality are fractured and he finds that he has thousands of personalities.  Significantly he does not have any female personalities, or perhaps he merely fails to acknowledge them.

There is a suggestion in the text that somehow Hermine is not real - as such she would be Harry's Anima (Hesse was influenced by Carl Jung at the time he wrote the book).  This idea is supported by the fact that 'Hermine' is the feminine form of the Hesse’s first name.  As Harry is not able to recognize his feminine selves, his anima is projected outwards. and takes the form of an independent person.   The ‘fact’ that he maybe/maybe not kills Hermine at the end would constitute a further refusal to accept his inner woman.

• Janny Fabian.  “Jung hearts run free”.  The Guardian.  21 April 2000.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/apr/21/4.
• “Steppenwolf (1974)”.  366 Weird Movies.  Mar 24, 2009.  http://366weirdmovies.com/15-steppenwolf-1974
• “Steppenwolf (novel)”.  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_%28novel%29
• “Steppenwolf (film)”.  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_%28film%29

Cecil Beaton (1904 - 1980) photographer, set & costume designer.

Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was the son of a prosperous timber merchant. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, where he read history, art and architecture but left without a degree.

The first photograph that he sold was of the Shakespearean scholar, George Rylands, in drag as the Duchess of Malfi. It was published in Vogue. Beaton worked regularly for Vogue from 1927 in addition to having his own studio. He became known for his fashion, society and royalty photographs.

In 1934 Gerald Berniers, under the name Adela Quebec, published his spoof novel, The Girls of Radcliff Hall, which featured himself, Beaton and others as lesbian schoolgirls at an institution named after the famous writer. Beaton attempted to have all the copies destroyed and it became a very rare book until reprinted in 2000.

Five years later Beaton published his own spoof of the memoirs by minor royals that were popular at the time. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton features photographs of Beaton and some of his friends crossdressed as the characters in the book.

During the war Beaton worked for the Ministry of Information. Later he photographed many Hollywood and Broadway stars. He expanded into set and costume design for both stage and film, and won Oscars for the costumes in Gigi, 1958 and My Fair Lady, 1964. He was an influence on photographers Angus McBean and David Bailey. He had affairs with Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo.

He was knighted in 1972, and two years later was paralysed on the right side of his body after a stroke. He died in his sleep at age 76.

• Adela Quebec. The Girls of Radcliff Hall. Privately published 1934. Reprinted as by Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt Berners. London: Montcalm, 2000.
• Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Bülop, Baroness. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton. London: B.T Batsford. 1939. Reprint: London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson xiv, 105 pp1960.
• “Cecil Beaton”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Beaton.
• “The Girls of Radcliff Hall”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girls_of_Radcliff_Hall.

Clara Vaughan, 1864 – a novel

R.D. Blackmore (1825 –1900) was one of the most famous English novelists in the second half of the nineteenth century, but since then his work has been largely forgotten except for Lorna Doone, 1869.

His first novel 'Clara Vaughan' was written in 1853 and published anonymously in 1864. The narrator is female and the Saturday Review, as part of an obsession of the period, was convinced that it had detected a female writer masquerading as a man.

'Another decided feature by which our lady novelists are wont to betray the secret of their authorship is the characteristic mode in which they unconsciously make sport of the simplest principles of physics, and of the most elementary rules or usages of the law.'

Some reviewers believed that the novel had been written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon who was popular at the time.

Blackmore was not only male, but he had practiced law in London for five years at that time.  The novel is now regarded as one of the very first detective stories.

• Elaine Showalter.  A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton University Press. 1977: 91.
• “R.D. Blackmore”.  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Blackmore.
• “Clara Vaughan”.  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Vaughan.

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A male writer using the voice of a woman is an example of Narrative Transvestity or cross-writing.   It is sometimes referred to as Appropriation of Voice.

This example shows that attempts to detect the gender of a writer by style and by knowledge exhibited by the author/protagonist can lead to wrong conclusions.

Anna Madrigal (1920- ) landlady.

Anna Madrigal appears in Armistead Maupin's tales of San Francisco where it is revealed that she was raised in a brothel in Winnemucca, Nevada, and that she has a secret that she shares with her lover Edgar Halcyon when he is being blackmailed, although the reader is not informed of the nature of the secret.

She is also shown to be particularly concerned about one of her tenants, Mona Ramsey.

In the second volume she admits to being Mona's father.  Andrew Ramsey had grown up feeling like a girl.  He ran from home at 16, worked at various manual jobs and finally joined the army.  After the war he met a woman who proposed to him and moved with her to Minneapolis where he got a job in a bookstore.  Two years after the birth of their child, Mona, he left and never came back.

In 1964 Andy went to Denmark and came back as Anna Madrigal, taking her name from an anagram of 'a man and a girl'.  She ran a bookshop in San Francisco and then opened a boarding house.  When she saw that her daughter, Mona, enjoying a transitory moment of fame as an advertising whizz, was in San Francisco, Anna approached her and persuaded her to move in as a tenant.

• Armistead Maupin. Tales of the City. New York, N.Y.: HarperPerennial, 1978.
• Armistead Maupin. More Tales of the City. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
• Alastair Reid (dir). Tales of the City.  Scr: Richard Kramer based on the novel by Armistead Maupin, with Olympia Dukakis as Anna Madrigal, Chloe Webb as Mona Ramsey and Gender as an unnamed trans woman. UK/US Channel 4/KQED/PBS 360 mins 1993.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Of course Anna could not go to Denmark in 1964, because after the Jorgensen affair, Denmark had passed a law limiting gender surgery to Danish citizens.

The revealing of Anna’s gender past does not happen until the second novel, but is brought forward into the first television mini-series.

Le locataire

Novel by Roland Topor, Paris: Buchet-Chastel. 1964. English translation by Francis K. Price. The Tenant. London: W.H. Allen. 1966. New York: Bantam Books: 1966.
Film directed by Roman Polanski
English title: The Tenant.
Script by Gérard Brach & Roman Polanski, based on the novel by Roland Topor
126 mins 1976

Roman Polanski plays Trelkovsky
Isabelle Adjani plays Stella
Shelley Winters plays the concierge

Country of finance: France
Nationality of director: Polish
Location of story: Paris
Filming location: Paris.

Synopsis

In urgent need of an apartment in Paris, Trelkovsky finds one on the rue de Pyrenees that was about to become vacant as the current tenant, Simone Choule, had thrown herself out of the window into the courtyard below. He visits Simone in the hospital ward where she is dying, and becomes acquainted with her friend Stella.

After being criticized by the neighbours for a flat-warming that was too noisy, Trelkovsky became more and more paranoid about the neighbours. Some stand in the toilet across the courtyard and stare at his window, there are knocks on his door but no-one is there. The neighbours organize a petition to evict a woman with an handicapped child; they fight with each other over noise.

The cafe owner across the street insists on always serving the hot chocolate and toast that Simone Choule had always had, and pushes Trelkovsky into smoking her brand of cigarettes. The landlord persuades him to wear slippers in the apartment as she had done. One morning he awakes to find his face made up in a feminine manner. For a while he plays along with the role, going out made up, buying a wig, a dress etc., shaving his legs and enjoying the normal pleasures of transvestity. Then one morning he awakes and finds one of his upper incisor teeth missing - as Simone Choule had.

The next time that he awakes he is dressed and made up, he sees a parade of people in costume in the courtyard suggesting a ritual sacrifice. He barricades himself in, and escapes the next morning in his regular male outfit. He stays with Stella. After being knocked down by a car, he is sedated by a doctor. The driver of the car, to make amends, drives him home: however the driver was one of the neighbours from the rue de Pyrenees.

The next morning, Trelkovsky, in full drag, jumps out of his window. Surviving, he struggles back to his room, only to be stabbed, and thrown out the window again.

He awoke in hospital, to find Stella calling him Simone, and a man who looks like himself looking on.

Curiosities

Most critics point out that it was Roman Polanski’s third film about apartment neighbour paranoia (after Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby). But we could also categorize it with his occult films: Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, The Ninth Gate.

The film is also a time loop. Time loop films, where the end is also the beginning, often have a trans or androgyny theme. A good example is Before the Rain, 1994.

Like Polanski himself, Trelkovsky was a Pole in Paris who did not know how to do things.

Trelkovsky is given no first name in either the novel or the film.

The story fitted so well into Polanski’s oeuvre that the file critic Rebecca Bell-Metereau attributes details found in the novel - such as finding Simone's tooth behind the wardrobe - as Polanski's additions. The film suggests more strongly than the book does that Trelkovsky was imagining it.

Polanski, playing the lead role, is actually uncredited as an actor.

The film has no final credits.

Although the UK cinema version was complete the 1986 video was cut by 6 seconds by the BBFC to remove a brief extract of the banned nunchaku scene from Enter the Dragon (1973) (seen by Trelkovsky and Stella during a cinema visit). The cuts were restored in the 2004 Paramount DVD.

The film is not really in either French or English. No matter which audio language you choose on the DVD, the lips never properly match.

This is the last film made by Polanski while still persona grata in the US. Two years later he fled from a paedophile charge in California and has not been back since.

Awards

Nominated for a Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, 1976.
Nominated for a César Award for production design, 1977.

Transvestity in the films of Roman Polanski

This is hardly a theme in Polanski’s films. In Cul-de-Sac.1966, George (Donald Pleasence) is encouraged by his young wife (Francoise Dorleac) to put on a nightie and makeup. This is pretty minor.





In The Magic Christian, 1969, Polanski was the straight man to Yul Brynner’s drag performance.



The only real Polanski drag movie is this, The Tenant. Polanski cast himself as Trelkovsky, but we cannot assume anything about his gender identity from this. The protagonist being a Pole in Paris, who does not fit in, as was Polanski himself and also Topor, was enough reason for him to identify with the part. The themes other than the cross-dressing, especially the neighbour paranoia, are very Polanski.

However, despite Polanski using transvestity to tell a tale of madness and fear, and having little interest in real transvestites, there are moment that trans women will relate to. The days of not really knowing who you are, and that period when you do not quite pass and are the neighbours talking about you, especially when they stop and stare at you.

• Rebecca Bell-Metereau. Hollywood Androgyny. New York: Columbia University Press. 1985. Second Edition 1993: 171-2.
• Jake Euker. “The Tenant”, PopMatters 14 July 2003. www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/t/tenant.shtml
• Richard Scheib. “The Tenant (Le Locataire)” The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review. 1990. www.moria.co.nz/horror/tenant.htm

King Rat

Novel by James Clavell, London: Martin Joseph. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 1962
Film directed by Bryan Forbes
Script by Bryan Forbes, based on the novel by James Clavell
134 mins, BW 1965

George Segal plays Corporal King
Tom Courtney plays Lieutenant Robin Grey
James Fox plays Flight Lieutenant Peter Marlowe
Denholm Elliot plays Lieutenant G.D. Larkin
John Mills plays Colonel George Smedley-Taylor

Country of finance: US
Nationality of director: British
Location of story: Changi POW camp, Singapore
Filming location: California, US.

Synopsis.

Marlowe, whom Clavell based on himself (Clavell was three years in the Japanese POW camp at Changi), is at first aloof from the US Corporal King, the leading black marketer in the camp, but is eventually drawn into his circle. This brings Marlow to to attention of Lieutenant Grey, the Provost Marshall of the camp who attempts to arrest both of them. The film is set in 1945 leading up to the end of the war.

Sean Jennison(1923 - 1945) Fighter plane pilot and stage entertainer.

There is an extra minor character in the novel.

Sean Jennison was with Marlowe in the same RAF squadron in Java. As a fighter pilot he had shot down three Japanese Zeroes. He was then himself shot down and captured.

The commanding officers within the POW camp selected Sean to play female parts in the camp theatricals because he was one of the youngest men present and because he shaved only infrequently. Sean fought this assignment quite bitterly, but the order was repeated. We “tried to sooth Sean down, but he swore he was going to be the worst actress in the world, that he was going to make sure that he was sacked after the first disastrous performance. We told him that we couldn't care less. His first performance was terrible. But after that he didn't seem to hate it so much. To his surprise, he even seemed to like it. So we really started to work.

It was good having something to do - it took your mind off the stinking food and stinking camp. We taught him how a woman talks and walks and sits and smokes and drinks and dresses and even thinks. Then to keep him in the mood, we began to play make-believe. Whenever we were in the theatre, we'd get up when he came in, help him into a chair, you know, treat him like a real woman. It was exciting at first, trying to keep up the illusion, making sure that Sean was never seen dressing or undressing, making sure his costumes were always concealing but just suggestive enough. We even got special permission for him to have a room of his own. With his own shower.

“Then suddenly, he didn't need coaching any more. He was as complete a woman on the stage as it was possible to be.

“But little by little, the woman began to dominate him off stage too, only we didn't notice it. By this time Sean had grown his hair quite long - the wigs we had were no damn good. Then Sean started to wear a woman's clothes all the time. One night someone tried to rape him.

“After that Sean nearly went out of his mind. He tried to crush the woman in him but couldn't. then he tried to commit suicide. Of course it was hushed up. But that didn't help Sean, it made things worse and he cursed us for saving him.

“A few months later there was another rape attempt. After that Sean buried his male self completely. ‘I'm not fighting it any more,’ he said. ‘You wanted me to be a woman, now they believe I am one. All right. I'll be one. Inside I feel that I am one, so there's no need to pretend any more. I am a woman, and I'm going to be treated like one.”

Sean continued to have identity crises. He was, after all, the only only non-male in a very artificial environment. He could talk to the other actors, but no-one else was in a situation like his. He was so effective on stage that he became the lust object for the camp. Whilst he was the only prisoner to have a room to himself, he could never sleep in it because of the risk of rape.

In 1945, when the war with Japan was over, and allied troops came to free the POWs and send them home, many of the prisoners had difficulty adjusting. Sean had difficulties more than most. The beach was now open for swimming. One day Sean went to the beach, accompanied by homophobic catcalls. He found a quiet spot, put on female clothes for the last time, and walked into the sea.
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King Rat was filmed in 1965. The Sean Jennison episodes were in the script from the beginning, but at a late stage, Columbia Pictures executives finally realized that they were present, and Sean was completely removed from the film.

In Hollywood ‘buddy’ films there is often a possibility of reading of reading the relationship between the two leading males as homoerotic. A common diversion from this reading is to have an obvious queer character, often a trans person of some kind. The classic film of this kind is Freebie and the Bean, 1974, where cops James Caan and Alan Arkin go on at each other like a married couple. The diversion is provided by a trans criminal – without the courtesy of a name – who is beaten up and killed by James Caan in the ladies’ room. The relationship between Marlowe and King could of course be taken as homoerotic. Perhaps in 1965, upper management was simply homophobic, without the understanding of the diversions that would become common a few years later.

Given the surname Jennison, Clavell may have had some psychoanalytical theory in mind, but no such thoughts are presented or developed in the book.
__

• Vito Russo. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York: Harper & Row. 1981: 136,198.

Naked Came the Stranger

A Long Island housewife, Penelope Ashe, was the author of Naked Came the Stranger, a badly written sex romp, which was published in 1969 and sold some millions of copies.


Not only did Penelope turn out to be mainly a man, she was revealed to be 19 men and 5 women. A group of writers and editors on Newsday magazine organized by Mike McGrady wrote the book over a weekend to demonstrate how quickly a trash novel could be produced. McGuire got his sister-in-law to play Penelope Ashe in interviews.

In 1970 McGrady wrote a book telling how they did it. He later wrote the autobiography of Linda Lovelace who was famous for being in the porn film Deep Throat.

The novel was filmed in 1975, still giving Penelope the credit.

• Mike McGrady et al writing as Penelope Ashe. Naked Came The Stranger. New York: L. Stuart, 1969. Fort Lee, N.J.: Barricade Books, 2003.
• Radley Metzger (dir). Naked Came The Stranger. Scr: Jake Barnes, based on the novel by Penelope Ashe, with Darby Lloyd Rains as Gillian Blake. US 83 mins 1975.
• Mike McGrady. Stranger than naked;: Or, How to write dirty books for fun and profit; a manual . P.H. Wyden 1970.
• Linda Lovelace and Mike McGrady. Ordeal. Star Books. 1982.
• Alex Boese. “Naked Came The Stranger”. The Museum of Hoaxes http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Naked_Came_The_Stranger/
• “Naked Came the Stranger”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Stranger.

Who was Wanda Tinasky?

Wanda Tinasky was the pseudonym used by the writer of a series of letters sent to the Mendocino Commentary and the Anderson Valley Advertiser, both in northern California, between 1983 and 1988. Wanda is self-described as a bag lady living under a bridge. Her opinions on many topics were witty, irreverent and sometimes harsh.

Bruce Anderson, the editor of the AVA, was later struck, while reading Vineland, with the stylistic and biographical similarities to Thomas Pynchon (1937 - ), and published a book to that effect. The same thesis was taken up by Fred Gardner and TR Factor (alias Diane Kearney and C.O. Jones), who also published a book on the thesis.

The alternate opinion has been put forward by Don Foster, Shakespeare scholar and literary detective, that Wanda is in fact an obscure beat poet, Tom Hawkins (1927 – 1988) who killed his wife and committed suicide at the time of the last Tinasky letter. More matches of biographical details turned up, and his poetry is recycled in the letters.

*Not Diane Kearney, the HBS advocate.

• Bruce Anderson (ed). The Letters of Wanda Tinasky to the AVA, The: The Complete Casebook San Francisco: Anderson Valley Advertiser 1995.
• TR Factor (ed). The Letters of Wanda Tinasky. Portland, Or: Vers Libre Press 1996.
• Don Foster. “Wanda, the Fort Bragg Bag Lady”. Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous. New York: Henry Holt 2000.
• “Wanda Tinasky”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Tinasky.

Madame Sesostris

The character, Mr Scogan appeared in Aldous Huxley's first novel, Chrome Yellow, a 'roman à clef' published in 1921. Mr Scogan appeared at the village fair as Madame Sesostris, 'the Sorceress of Ecbatana'. In this role he read palms and tried to set up selected female clients for seduction.

It is generally agreed among critics that Mr Scogan is based on the philosopher and womanizer, Bertrand Russell.

The very same year, T.S. Eliot, in his much to be discussed poem The Waste Land, used the character (with a slight spelling change, and perhaps influenced by the fact that Russell had had an affair with his wife Vivienne) to give a tarot reading anticipating the rest of the poem:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor ...

P.Lal, the Indian poet, renders homage in 1960:

All that they knew.  In Sly hieroglyph
Floating on time’s gauze, Psammetichus
Carved more than carvers of the carious cliff …
Ask the wild sea.  It is all on the rock.
But Cheops sleeps: he has not heard of birth.
And Sesostris: he has not heard of death.

In episode 2.8 of the television series, Witchblade, Roger Daltrey of the Who, plays a priest who has a second persona as Madame Sesostris.

'Sesostris' is the name of three twelfth dynasty Egyptian pharaohs, and another pharoah whom Herodotus tells of as invading Europe. Ecbatana is in Iran. To conflate the two is an example of orientalism, the Western custom of projecting fantasies upon the East, a custom that often features cross-dressing.  This is the kind of thing that Marjorie Garber discusses in Vested Interests, 1992, although she did not use this particular example.

• Aldous Huxley.  Crome Yellow.  A Triad Grafton Book.  1977 (original 1921):  chp XXVII.
• T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1901-1950.  Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.  1971: line 43-59.
• Grover Smith.  The Waste Land.  George Allen & Unwin. 1983: 67-8.
• Calvin Bedient.  He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its protagonist.  The University of Chicago Press. 1986: 52,55.