Invisible Ink 305: Ernest Bornemann

An intensely curious young man; he escaped from Germany in 1933 by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth and wrote an encyclopedia of jazz by the age of 25

Never have two girls; have three. Two are too much.” So said the sexual prodigy Ernest Bornemann. Born in Berlin in 1915 and raised as a communist, he quickly developed wide-ranging interests. At age 10, he saw African musicians in Paris, who fired his fascination with new music forms.

An intensely curious young man, he described himself as “sexually mature at 14, politically mature at 15, and intellectually mature between 14 and 16.” He escaped from Germany in 1933 by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth going to Britain as an exchange student. He was fascinated by jazz theory, and wrote an encyclopedia of jazz at 25.

In 1940, he was deported to Canada as an enemy alien, then worked for the BBC. He become an expert in ethno-musicology, film-making, psychoanalysis, social anthropology and, later, (famously) sexology. He wrote screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock and Carlo Ponti, worked as a scriptwriter for Orson Welles in Morocco, composed a jazz opera and wrote plays.

His script Tremolo was directed by Yul Brynner in 1950 and proved the biggest TV hit of the year. After this lunatic life he settled in a tiny Austrian village.

But let’s rewind to Bornemann arriving in Britain at the age of 17 to claim political asylum. He anglicised his name to Cameron McCabe and had a lunatic meta-novel, The Face On The Cutting Room Floor, published before he was 20.

The book is astonishing, frustrating, insolent and exhausting, not least because when Bornemann arrived he spoke not a word of English. It’s a murder mystery unlike anything previously seen in Britain, described by the literary crime expert, Julian Symons, as “a dazzling, unrepeatable box of tricks – the detective story to end all detective stories”.

While British mystery authors were still rattling teacups and finding bodies in libraries, Ernest’s prose was like free-form jazz: slangy, lightning fast, impressionistic, fractured, or as he described it, “a finger exercise on the keyboard of a new language”.

Some passages are so banal that they feel like noir parodies, others are brilliantly haunting. The story – a starlet murdered in an editing suite – is a melody quick-cut into ever-changing forms. Traditionalists felt cheated because the novel somersaults halfway through, defying all expectations, but critics loved it even though the publisher had to hide the author’s identity until 1974.

It ran through many editions, but it was refused publication in America, possibly because Bornemann was a communist. At 80, he killed himself over a love affair.