Nourishing Obscurity Part One: Psychoanalysis of Jeremy Hartley

I've decided that there is a very sensible way to move on from all this. I don't want to be as nasty to Jeremy Hartley as he has been to me. Apparently, the strange little man believes inductees of my cult are following him around waiting to beat him up.

What I've decided to do, is psycho-analyse the man so the blogosphere can understand him. In doing so, perhaps we shall receive some enlightenment in to the human condition.

The central belief in Jeremy Hartley's world is that there is a group of people called 'Them'. 'Them' are as real to him as the air we breathe. Hartley didn't invent 'Them', 'Them' are the product of centuries of conspiracy theory lunacy. I'm hoping in this series not just to study Hartley but human paranoia, social inadequecy and angst generally.

In understanding Jeremy Hartley, we need to understand not just who he is, but how he sees himself. Part of the clue is in his pseudonyms. The central protagonist of his long and tedious Dan Brown rip-off novel (which can be purchased on Amazon but not in any bookshop) is called Hugh Jenson. You spot the picture, JH, HJ, JH. It takes a particular kind of egotist to be unable to escape their own initials when creating a pseudonym. Like it's a kind of clever crossword puzzle. A private joke. Generally it's something only Agatha Christie villains do. I can't see MI6 recommending it as a cunning plan.

James is chosen to sound 'English'. Americans are Jim. Or Jimmy. Higham, likewise, sounds kind of twee. A country village in the home counties, perhaps. And of course, Ian Fleming fans will know higham House as the place where Fleming wrote many JAMES Bond novels. So we have the persona he seeks to see himself as. For Queen and Country.

Of course, he's not ENGLISH. British, perhaps. Australians are KIND of Brits. British culture, descended many of them from Brits. But English is a very definite kind of thing. I wouldn't claim to be English. I'm not. I'm British in that I possess a British passport. Not that I think of myself as British. I'm a European. Of Irish/Swedish ethnicity. Who lives in the UK.

What else do we know of him? His parents didn't really get on, they stayed together for the sake of the children. Him. He claims to have a brother but since this brother is apparently called John Higham then I think we can asume Jeremy is an only child. He was close to his Mother, she tended to mollycoddle him, less close to his father who was distant and unyielding.

He went to Public School and PROBABLY boarded. Was this in the UK? Maybe. Maybe his parents sent him back to the UK to go to school. This wasn't uncommon in the fifties and sixties amongst ex-pats. Here he was bullied. Probably quite badly. At some point he was introduced to homosexual experiences and these affected him negatively.

His angsts and his sense of loneliness translated themselves, as so often with these young boys brutalised by such an upbringing, into achievements on the Rugby field. Rugby became a pleasure for him and he has always maintained an admiration for this sort of lame Machismo. A huge desire to prove to himself he wasn't gay by being involved in violent sports.

And so he reached adulthood, still a lost, confused, lonely little boy. Wanting to be loved. Desperate for it. And the only role models he had were his parents who stayed together in a loveless marriage out of duty then packed him off to boarding school to cry himself to sleep in cold dorms after older boys had buggered him senseless.

His adult life is a mystery. The reality is he gained his 'English Professorship' by teaching at an english School. He's not a Professor of English the way you or I would see it. It wasn't a tenure awarded by a University. We're talking about 'Professor' of English as a language. The idea he's ACTUALLY a Professor is lie and if he called himself Professor Hartley, he could be arrested for fraud. In point of fact, I doubt he's THAT well read. Because I see little evidence he's familiar with much literature. I doubt he's read the Faerie Queene, for example.

I doubt he graduated from Oxford University, either. He claims he did but I very much doubt it. I heard a rumour the Uni he went to was Victoria State University.

He was a headmaster for eighteen months in the mid nineties at a small private school called Blackheath Preparatory School. This period of his life marks the height of his acheivement and it didn't last long. What, one wonders did he do with the rest of it?



Well, he was married twice. In spite of all the waffling he does on the topic, we don't ever hear WHY. A lot of crap about duty and WN1 and WN2 (his codes for his wives) but one doesn't hear much about why this guru on marital constancy fucked up twice in something he's such an expert on. Apparently, he claims in private he cheated on the first (which would make him a hypocrite), but actually I THINK she cheated on HIM and he couldn't take it. That seems more feasible to me. Clearly, this obsesses him because his own failings on this front have turned him into a kind of monogamy zealot. Were there children?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But does anyone truly believe we'd not have heard of them and how great a Dad he is had he any? Unless he has no contact with them. Either way, he has no business peaching to anyone about family life because, frankly, he's never been involved in the only bit of it that MEANS anything and if he is he did such a bad job he can't use it as a topic to bore people with.

You might say I can't preach on that front. Actually, I can. Being an adopted uncle may not be the same as being a father. But I've learned more in the last two years about how to nurture a new life than Hartley will ever know. And if there's one thing I've done in life I'm proud of (aside from this blog) it's the relationship I've built up with my little niece.

What one can deduce is that Hartley believes the fact that both his marriages failed was not his fault. Perhaps his misogynist views on feminism can be seen to have their roots here. In a world where women knew their place, his marriages would have worked.

It is likely Hartley is a poor lover, physically. It is not a case of him not being able to make a woman cum, though likely he can't. It is more likely the case he lacks sensuality. He hasn't studied female sexuality and therefore he blames women for having it. Erogenous zones might as well be war zones for all he knows.

As a charmer of the opposite sex, he is crass. Most women who know him in real life think he's sleazy. I would guess this is because he THINKS sex is dirty. Therefore, he can't deliver lines which have sexual intent without entering drooling pervert mode.

And yet here is a man who clearly prefers female company to male company. Inept as he is as a lover, he just hasn't ever really figured out how to be a 'man's man' either. Hence his clinging to machismo. He hasn't ever really mastered how to BOND with other males. Hence his lack of real friends. He sometimes refers on his blog to a 'mate' and one might think this was a mate he'd had his whole life. This is not the case. The 'mate' is also his bloghost and Hartley only met him two years ago. It's not, in fact, a true friendship at all. They are blogfriends who live down the road from eachother and, truth be told, the other guy just happens to be the ONLY person Hartley actually has in his real life.

In truth, Hartley remains- sexually and emotionally- a perpetual adolescent in mindset.

What about his life aside from his (unsuccessful) stint at Blackheath? Well, we know he had some sort of lecturing position in Tatarstan. He claims he had to leave because the Russian government expelled all foreign lecturers. This news story kind of missed me. As with so many things, there's clearly more to it.

Whilst in Russia, he engaged in a relationship with a woman in her twenties, likely he was able to provide her luxuries in exchange for sex. I'm not saying it's wrong, what I am saying is it doesn't fit in with the image he seeks to portray. He's done it online too, of course. Behave in a sexually inappropriate manner with women significantly younger than him in age.

Before 1995, it's hard to say. But I guess we can safely say one thing; he has nothing to show for it.

Most signficiantly, he carries with him hard the sense of having wasted his life many of his generation live with. I see it in my Dad, only less marked.

My Dad often comes up with the sorts of bigoted, left-hating, pro-marriage and the family anti-freedom, right wing Tory Capitalist bollocks. Though he doesn't have any of the loony 'THEM' views. Maybe because my Dad actually has something to show for esposing these views. By the standards of Capitalist society, he succeeded. Born in council house, ran his own business, still married to his first and ONLY wife, two children, one of them earning over a hundred grand a year (not me I'm, afraid), mortgage paid, yeah according to bourgeuois values, a success.

So he can get over the fact he missed the boat and KNOWS he did, deep down. As does Hartley. Only Hartley didn't get on any other ones.

The boat in question was 1966. To about 1973. To be around and to have been young then and not got on that boat must be a real bummer. Sure, many got browbeaten back into society's ways. Became yuppies. They ended up doing the whole Capitalism/Family thing in the end. But at least they gave something different a try. They grew their hair long, they dressed funny, they slept around, they got high, they protested against Vietnam, they tried squatting on a bit of land being at one with nature and all that. They gave Peace and Love a shot. And they kept hope alive that one day things might be better.

If you were there at the time and you didn't even give it a shot, how can you live with yourself? All you can do is get bitter about the people who DID give it a try.

And the ones today who STILL want to.




Hartley is stuck realising that the during the greatest FREEDOM party history has ever seen, he was being a party pooper. And he missed out on a lot of fun as a result. He's stuck realising that for everyone who lived through it, it was the best time of their life. It was the Age of Legend of our time. Our heroes were the rebels of the sixties. We look to people of his generation with awe and say 'And what did YOU do in Hippy times?'

And his answer is 'Nothing. I was too timid to give it a try. The sex and the drugs. And the protesting. But I didn't want to, anyway'.

And he really HAS to fool himself on that one. He REALLY wants us to believe him. But you know what, I don't. I don't actually believe it.

So this is what lies behind him- and his failure. His whole outlook is built on trying to explain his FAILURE of a life and his FAILURE as a human being. And finding someone to blame.

It wasn't him, so it must be THEM.

The next posts in this series will look at WHY there needs to be a 'Them' and what role they play in the lives of those who believe in their existence. We will look at the REAL dynamics people like Hartley NEED a 'Them' to explain.