Milk and Honey

The word “dystopian” is commonly used to describe a narrative work – a novel, play or film – that is set in some terrible, nightmarish but fictitious place. The word is used as the antithesis of utopian – an ideal place. Some critics have called Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon dystopian.(1) But Koestler wrote a work of fiction about people and places that are recognizable. He wrote about former revolutionaries, the old guard of Bolzheviks, who were still around at a time, after the death of Lenin and the expulsion of Trotsky, when Stalin was consolidating his absolute control on Russia. Stalin saw that, before he could have total control of where Russia was going, he first had to control the narrative of the revolution. Just as surely as Zeus devoured Athena so that she would sprout from his forehead, thereby making her a part of his own body and a product of his own power, Stalin had to rewrite history and erase the facts that came in conflict with his own, official, version of events. This called for what became known as the Great Purge. The old generation of revolutionaries who had witnessed and helped to shape the revolution had to be liquidated. But first they had to be denounced and as many of them as possible had to be persuaded to confess their own guilt, to apostatize their former views and then be led away to the executioner. 

Arthur Koestler, in the dedication that precedes the text of Darkness at Noon, wrote: The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials. Several of them were personally known to the author. This book is dedicated to their memory.”

Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov is one such victim of Stalin’s (identified as No. 1’s) purges. At the beginning of the novel he is arrested and imprisoned. The exact reasons for his arrest are unknown to him. And though he eventually learns the “reasons” he has been denounced, he also comes to the realization that they ultimately do not matter. He is to be destroyed because he knows the truth about the revolution, the direction of which has somehow gone desperately wrong. On one of his daily walks in the prison yard he is accompanied by a dim-witted farmer. He says to Rubashov, “A day like to-day, when one smells the melting of the snow in the air, takes hold of me. We will neither of us last much longer, your honour. They have crushed us because we are reactionaries, and because the old days when we were happy must not come back ...” 

“Were you really so happy in those days?” asked Rubashov; but the peasant only murmured something unintelligible, while his Adam’s apple slid up and down his throat several times.
Rubashov watched him from the side; after a time he said: “Do you remember the part in the Bible where the tribes in the desert begin to cry: Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt”? 

The peasant nodded eagerly and uncomprehendingly ... Then they were conducted back into the building.

Rubashov had referred, cryptically, to the moment in Numbers (14:4) in which the Jews, who had been brought out of captivity in Egypt by Moses, were beginning to doubt that they would ever see the Promised Land of which Moses had told them, a land of “milk and honey.” So they considered returning to Egypt, knowing full well what they were returning to. 

Rubashov is determined, at first, to die in silence, but his confinement and the certainty that he will be killed like all the others weakens his resolve. After days of isolation in his cell, he decides to sign a confession to crimes of which he is not guilty simply to save his neck, wanting only to be left alone, even in confinement. Pacing his cell, waiting for his interrogation, he ponders everything that has placed him in his position, while remaining convinced of the legitimacy of the revolution:

The discussions at the congresses during the Civil War had been on a level never before in history attained by a political body; they resembled reports in scientific periodicals—with the difference that on the outcome of the discussion depended the life and well-being of millions, and the future of the Revolution. Now the old guard was used up; the logic of history ordained that the more stable the régime became, the more rigid it had to become, in order to prevent the enormous dynamic forces which the Revolution had released from turning inwards and blowing the Revolution itself into the air. The time of philosophizing congresses was over; philosophical incendiarism had given place to a period of wholesome sterility. Revolutionary theory had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism, and with No. 1 as the high priest celebrating the Mass. His speeches and articles had, even in their style, the character of an infallible catechism; they were divided into question and answer, with a marvellous consistency in the gross simplification of the actual problems and facts.

The whole thing was a pretty grotesque comedy, Rubashov thought; at bottom all this jugglery with “revolutionary philosophy” was merely a means to consolidate the dictatorship, which, though so depressing a phenomenon, yet seemed to represent a historical necessity. So much the worse for him who took the comedy seriously, who only saw what happened on the stage, and not the machinery behind it.

Finally, an old comrade, Ivanov, interrogates him in his cell:

Rubashov rubbed his pince-nez on his sleeve, and looked at him short-sightedly. “What a mess,” he said, “what a mess we have made of our golden age.” Ivanov smiled. “Maybe,” he said happily. “Look at the Gracchi and Saint Just and the Commune of Paris. Up to now, all revolutions have been made by moralizing dilettantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent. ...” “Yes,” said Rubashov. “So consequent; that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. The people’s standard of life is lower than it was before the Revolution; the labour conditions are harder, the discipline is more inhuman, the piece-work drudgery worse than in colonial countries with native coolies; we have lowered the age limit for capital punishment down to twelve years; our sexual laws are more narrow-minded than those of England, our leader-worship more Byzantine than that of the reactionary dictatorships. Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national Institution, and with the most refined scientific system of physical and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see. For the energies of this generation are exhausted; they were spent in the Revolution; for this generation is bled white and there is nothing left of it but a moaning, numbed, apathetic lump of sacrificial flesh. ... Those are the consequences of our consequentialness. You called it vivisection morality. To me it sometimes seems as though the experimenters had torn the skin off the victim and left it standing with bared tissues, muscles and nerves. ...” “Well, and what of it?” said Ivanov happily. “Don’t you find it wonderful? Has anything more wonderful ever happened in history? We are tearing the old skin off mankind and giving it a new one. That is not an occupation for people with weak nerves; but there was once a time when it filled you with enthusiasm. What has so changed you that you are now as pernickety as an old maid?” Rubashov answered: “To continue with the same metaphor: I see the flayed body of this generation: but I see no trace of the new skin. We all thought one could treat history like one experiments in physics. The difference is that in physics one can repeat the experiment a thousand times, but in history only once. Danton and Saint-Just can be sent to the scaffold only once."

And Rubashov returns in his thinking to the metaphor of God’s chosen people in the desert:

What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? 

Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either. But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one’s goal before one’s eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night.


(1) The German title of the novel is Sonnenfinsternis, “Solar Eclipse”. It was hurriedly translated into English by Daphne Hardy, Koestler’s girlfriend, just before the Germans invaded France in May 1940.

Flesh and the Devil

I have always loved silent films, but I don't think I know why. I have some theories, but maybe it's nothing but the magic artificiality of the medium. People talk in silent movies. Some people think Charlie Chaplin never spoke, but he speaks in all of his films. We just can't hear his voice. Early on in my life as a cinephile I was lucky enough to see and fall in love with several great silent films, like Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Baghdad and Rudolph Valentino’s The Son of the Sheik. Such films communicated in a language that is mostly forgotten today: a completely non-verbal language that you had to apprehend with your eyes alone. Although they used intertitles if there was something important being said by an actor and the films were accompanied by music scores sometimes written especially for them, the overpowering impression that a silent film left one with was that they were representations of an imaginary world. That was probably what attracted me to the silent films I saw in my teens – they were products of the imagination.

Among the silent films I saw in my teens were a few starring Greta Garbo, including A Woman of Affairs and Flesh and the Devil. I found them mesmerizing, so much so that my memories of them have remained vivid even after 45 years. I had a chance to watch Flesh and the Devil, made in 1926, again on Monday when it was screened by Turner Classic Movies, and, almost from the very start, my pleasant memory of it was shattered. What I found so intricately alluring then had now become intricately fake. William H. Daniels, who was Garbo’s favorite cinematographer, shot the film. The visuals are flawless, down to the costumes and the settings (although I found a few of the glass shots a tad obvious). As wonderful as the art direction, costume design and cinematography are, the overall effect is of an emphasis on the accuracy of physical details that completely overwhelm the falsity of the characters and their behavior toward one another.

Based on a novel by Hermann Sudermann, the film tries to stake out the same territory well-known to fans of Erich von Stroheim: turn-of-the-century Teutonic Europe, with its handsome military officers in riding boots and beautiful young ladies all married to wealthy old men who meet at balls and fall passionately in love. There are duels in Flesh and the Devil, the first dispatching the old husband. I was reminded of John Gilbert’s appeal as the hero, Leo von Harden (all the leading characters have a “von” in their names), but I was shocked to find Greta Garbo suddenly so uninteresting as Felicitas von Rhaden, the crux of the movie’s love triangle. The central relationship of the story is, unexpectedly, the love of Leo for his boyhood friend Ulrich von Eltz (the names alone are hilarious). After the usual turgid twists in the dime novel romance, the film closes with poor Garbo falling through the ice of an insufficiently frozen lake while Leo and Ulrich throw down their duelling pistols and embrace. A few air bubbles rising to the surface are all that’s left of Felicitas.

Garbo’s performance as Felicitas was beautiful in the incipient love scenes. She is certainly the aggressor, not the least for being more experienced than Leo. But then the film labors to attach the unfaithful wife tag to her, which became so tiresome for Garbo herself that she quit the business in 1940. She doesn’t handle her later scenes well precisely because they weren’t conceived as anything more than romantic clichés. At least half of Garbo’s allure in her films was manufactured beforehand by publicity. Now that the publicity is long forgotten, only the film itself is left for us to judge her by. I’d like to confess that, all these years later, Flesh and the Devil has perhaps something more going for it than Garbo. But it really isn’t very much.

Kevin Brownlow and David Gill did a splendid job, though, dusting off this old relic. Carl Davis’s music is once again memorable. But seeing it again taught me how a memory, especially from one’s youth, should be left right where it is, lodged in the past, untouched by corrosive experience.

Billy Dud

Having finally found the right moment, this past week, a month away from my 62nd birthday, to read Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1) was not out of prejudice to either the opera composed by Benjamin Britten with a libretto co-authored by E. M. Forster, or the film directed by Peter Ustinov (who also starred as Starry Captain Vere) with a screenplay written by Ustinov, Robert Rossen and DeWitt Bodeen. (The script was based on a play adaptation by Louis O. Coxe and Robert H. Chapman.) Both the opera and the film are on a level of seriousness – of intent, anyway – to warrant one’s attention and both productions earned respectable notices. The film got it’s star, Terence Stamp, appearing in his first film role, a Golden Globe for his performance as the title character. 

The tale was left “finished” in manuscript when Melville died in 1891. But even in its “definitive” form, which was finally published in 1962, it’s hardly a finished Melville novel. It’s more of an excellent rough sketch for a great novel Melville might have, probably would have, written. Stanley Kauffmann, in his review of the Ustinov film, called it “the greatest scenario for a novel that I know.”(2)

Having just finished reading it – the version first published in England in 1924 – it does make one wish for more, rather as Fitzgerald’s tantalizingly unfinished The Last Tycoon does. That “more,” however, is not what either the opera or the film give to Melville’s tale. I won’t bother getting into the problems that various editors have had with the text, nor will I go near to the critical overkill to which it’s been subjected in the almost hundred years since it’s first appearance. Melville’s writing is sufficiently straightforward and transparent to allow for a wide range of interpretations. Clearly, Melville was drawn to the story because of its lyrical qualities, its engagement with hard and detailed facts that yet admit of a skyful of metaphors. Like the Pequod, the Indomitable, the ship on which the story is set, must first be allowed to sail of its own volition before it is turned into a symbol. 

Billy Budd is a study of the antagonism and irreconcilability of good and evil. Billy, a “handsome sailor,” presented by Melville as a specimen of singular beauty among the pressed crew of a Royal Navy ship, comes into conflict with the ship’s master-at-arms, James Claggart for no other reason, Melville implies, than that his existence is a stark reminder to Claggart of everything he lacks and that he is preternaturally disposed to despise – his innocent good-naturedness reflected by his strikingly appealing appearance. Practically the instant he recognizes these qualities in Billy, Claggart begins to devise a way to destroy him. After failing to entrap him in a conspiracy among other pressed sailors to mutiny (at a moment in English history in which mutiny is an especially menacing word), Claggart boldly accuses Billy of sedition to the captain of the ship, Captain Vere, himself. Fond of Billy, as is everyone else on his ship, the captain suspects the accusation to be a lie, but must hear Billy defend himself and calls him to his cabin. There, faced with Claggart’s calumny, a tragic flaw of Billy’s – a stammer that grows worse when he is overcome with strong emotions – renders him incapable of defending himself through speech.(3) Standing opposite his accuser, struggling with his stammer to answer Claggart’s lie, Billy suddenly lashes out with his fist, catching Claggart square on his forehead, killing him. “The body fell over lengthwise, like a heavy plank tilted from erectness. A gasp or two, and he lay motionless.”

This is the point at which Captain Vere comes to the fateful – and ordinarily unwarranted – decision to conduct a “drumhead court” that will seal Billy’s fate before the Indomitable returns to the fleet. At the back of Vere’s mind, and the background of Melville’s tale, is the specter of mutiny, and it is in order to avoid it that Vere decides to establish Billy’s guilt for the death of Claggart and to expeditiously hang him. Doubtless, given the same facts, another tribunal could have arrived at such a verdict and executed Billy. But the effect of Vere’s decision, and its summary enaction, does circumvent whatever disturbance Claggart’s death and Billy’s captivity may have aroused in the ship’s crew. The circumstances of Billy’s hanging are related by Melville in one if the greatest scenes in literature. With a noose around his neck, Billy shouts “God bless Captain Vere!” and the crew murmur the same words back, just as Billy is hoisted to the top of the mast and the morning sun shines on him. Billy’s body is summarily wrapped in his canvas hammock, cannon shot is placed inside to weigh it down, and it is slipped over the side of the ship, with some men making somber note how the seabirds flew for some time over the spot where the body went down. The Indomitable rejoined the fleet without further incident, and in an engagement with a French ship, Captain Vere is mortally wounded, dying with the words “Billy Budd” on his lips. 

In 1948 British composer Benjamin Britten suggested to E. M. Forster that he turn Billy Budd into a libretto for an opera he would compose. The four act version of Britten’s opera was performed in 1951. But Forster had made significant changes to the story that muddled the import of Melville’s tale. Forster was attracted to the project because he was convinced by clues in Melville’s texts that he was a “suppressed” homosexual. This interpretation has become more widespread than is justified. As James Fenton wrote, "[Melville] was a daring writer, yes, but he would not have thought of himself as daring in that particular direction."(4) 

E. M. Forster, however, interpreted Claggart’s and Captain Vere’s behavior towards Billy Budd in terms of their suppressed homosexual passions. However this interpretation severely narrows the full import of Melville’s tale, it’s what Britten used as the framework for his opera. He would make a similar mistake twenty years later with Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, taking a cue from Luchino Visconti’s horrible film, and turning it into a tale of frustrated homoerotic passion, instead of a great artist’s final attempt to attain what for him had only been fleetingly attainable: an ideal of beauty represented in his imagination by a beautiful boy he meets at a Venice resort. 

The opera of Billy Budd has at least the beauty of Britten’s music to distract one from Forster’s unfortunate libretto. With Peter Ustinov’s film there is no such distraction. It is, simply put, a maritime disaster. Though set aboard a ship, which would challenge even an experienced director to find solutions to the monotony of possible views of the action, Ustinov wastes the formidable talents of his cinematographer Robert Krasker with quite pedestrian set-ups. But his casting of the three principle roles would’ve impeded him anyway. Casting Terence Stamp as Billy was like the casting of Diane Kruger as Helen of Troy. He is a fine enough actor, but how could he possibly succeed in embodying Melville’s angelic “handsome sailor?” Claggart is played by a quite misplaced Robert Ryan, too old and too American. His menace toward Billy is clear enough, but reminded me too much of his many film noir heavies. But the most miscast role is Ustinov himself as Captain Vere. The most crucial scene in the book is the confrontation between Billy and Claggart in Captain Vere’s cabin. Ustinov’s poor direction has Billy knock Claggart down with two joined fists, which would’ve been slow, clumsy and probably ineffective in killing Claggart. Ustinov shows him falling down and hitting his head against a jutting wooden block, which is presumably what kills him. But not before Claggart opens his eyes and grins at Billy, knowing that he, to, is finished. In the tale, as I have described, Billy, who is taller than Claggart, kills him with one punch to his temple. 

In the scene of Billy’s hanging, Ustinov couldn’t show us the actual hanging, but instead shows Billy’s shoes dropping neatly together to the deck below where he is hoisted to his death. This suggests something that Melville doesn’t show: that hanging Billy caused him to convulse enough to throw off his shoes. It isn’t even subtle in the film. And the only thing in the film that stops the crew from mutiny upon Billy’s execution is the appearance of an enemy ship, which impels the men to their battle stations. It is a muddled conclusion to a mishandled adaptation of Melville’s tale which, while seemingly spare, possesses implications that are cosmic in scope.

(1) I didn’t read Moby Dick until I was 43. And I’m glad that I waited.
(2) A World on Film: Criticism and Comment (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 
(3) “In this particular Billy was a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth. In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in his little card, as much as to remind us — I too have a hand here.”
(4) "The Sadist and the Stutterer," The Guardian, 2 December 2005.

One Singer To Mourn

The terminal stages of Katherine Anne Porter’s short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider, in which the heroine, Miranda, has contracted the Spanish flu and hovers between life and death for weeks and Porter takes us inside the hallucinatory conscious/unconscious states that Miranda experiences, make one think of Kafka or of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narratives. Except Porter was writing from experience, having herself contracted the Spanish flu and nearly dying of it. A writer with lesser gifts would’ve simply glossed over Miranda’s delirium, but Porter takes us down into them and shows us around a human mind on the border of life and death. 

For Porter, Miranda’s story was “nearly pure autobiography,” since she, too, had been a reporter for a hick newspaper (the Rocky Mountain News) in Denver in 1918, when she was 28. She was swept up in the pandemic that killed close to 700,000 Americans, more than the number of soldiers who died in the Civil War, and she came so close to succumbing to it that the hospital made funeral arrangements for her. 

Oblivion, thought Miranda, her mind feeling among her memories of words she had been taught to describe the unseen, the unknowable, is a whirlpool of gray water turning upon itself for all eternity . . . eternity is perhaps more than the distance to the farthest star. She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit that she knew to be bottomless, though she could not comprehend it; the ledge was her childhood dream of danger, and she strained back against a reassuring wall of granite at her shoulders, staring into the pit, thinking, There it is, there it is at last, it is very simple; and soft carefully shaped words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all. I shall not know when it happens, I shall not feel or remember, why can’t I consent now, I am lost, there is no hope for me. Look, she told herself, there it is, that is death and there is nothing to fear. But she could not consent, still shrinking stiffly against the granite wall that was her childhood dream of safety, breathing slowly for fear of squandering breath, saying desperately, Look, don’t be afraid, it is nothing, it is only eternity.

There is a moment in her delirium in which Miranda assents to death, finding herself in a shimmering landscape lit by an eternal morning light where a crowd of people approach her:

Miranda saw in an amazement of joy that they were all the living she had known. Their faces were transfigured, each in its own beauty, beyond what she remembered of them, their eyes were clear and untroubled as good weather, and they cast no shadows. They were pure identities and she knew them every one without calling their names or remembering what relation she bore to them. They surrounded her smoothly on silent feet, then turned their entranced faces again towards the sea, and she moved among them easily as a wave among waves. The drifting circle widened, separated, and each figure was alone but not solitary; Miranda, alone too, questioning nothing, desiring nothing, in the quietude of her ecstasy, stayed where she was, eyes fixed on the overwhelming deep sky where it was always morning. 

Lying at ease, arms under her head, in the prodigal warmth which flowed evenly from sea and sky and meadow, within touch but not touching the serenely smiling familiar beings about her, Miranda felt without warning a vague tremor of apprehension, some small flick of distrust in her joy; a thin frost touched the edges of this confident tranquillity; something, somebody, was missing, she had lost something, she had left something trainable in another country, oh, what could it be? There are no trees, no trees here, she said in fright, I have left something unfinished. A thought struggled at the back of her mind, came clearly as a voice in her ear. Where are the dead? We have forgotten the dead, oh, the dead, where are they? At once as if a curtain had fallen, the bright landscape faded, she was alone in a strange stony place of bitter cold, picking her way along a steep path of slippery snow, calling out. Oh, I must go back! But in what direction? Pain returned, a terrible compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire, the stench of corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus; she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a coarse white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body, and struggled to lift her hand.

Miranda’s feverish hallucinations, both strange and somehow familiar, her nearness to death and her painful and mournful progress back to life reminded me of the Rilke poem, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” in which Eurydice has died and Orpheus follows her into the Underworld and so charms Hades and Persephone with the beauty of his music that he persuades them to allow Eurydice to return with him. But only on condition that, on their journey back, Orpheus must not look at her. If he does, the bargain is nullified. Accompanied by Hermes, on their journey back to the surface world - to life - Orpheus can't resist looking back at Eurydice and - -

And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around —,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?

Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.(1)


Just as Miranda is awake again, she hears the noise of bells and singing in the streets outside the hospital. The war was over. But her young man, Adam, the soldier with whom she had reluctantly fallen in love, had died of the flu. Porter ends the novel with a defiant flourish:

No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.

The ending reminded me of another ending of another defiant and sad novel, Cesare Pavese’s The House on the Hill:

I don’t believe that it can end. Now that I’ve seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: “And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?” I wouldn’t know what to say. Not now at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only the dead know, and only for them is the war really over. (2)


(1) Stephen Mitchell translation.
(2) The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese, translated by R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1968).

To the New World

A very cold winter's night, so silent that the air seemed frozen, and, since there was no moon, congealed to the stillness of glass spread over England. Ponds and ditches were frozen; the puddles made glazed eyes in the roads, and on the pavement the frost had raised slippery knobs. Darkness pressed on the windows; towns had merged themselves in open country. No light shone, save when a searchlight rayed round the sky, and stopped, here and there, as if to ponder some fleecy patch.


In the chapter “1917” of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years, Eleanor Pargiter has gone to the home of Renny and Maggie in Westminster. London is darkened because of the war and Germany’s strategic bombing raids. When Eleanor arrives she finds that Maggie’s sister, Sara, is also there accompanied by a mysterious guest whom she calls Nicholas. With the children upstairs in bed, the party is dining in the cellar when, in the midst of the dinner, sirens sound in the street outside. Then a distant boom sounds. Anti-aircraft batteries ring the city, and as the party guests listen anxiously, at intervals the booming guns sound closer until one fires quite near the house. They wait for the bomb to fall.

"On top of us," said Nicholas, looking up. They all looked up. At any moment a bomb might fall. There was dead silence. One, two, three, four, Eleanor counted. The spider's web was swaying. That stone may fall, she thought, fixing a certain stone with her eyes. Then a gun boomed again. It was fainter – further away. "That's over," said Nicholas. He shut his watch with a click. And they all turned and shifted on their hard chairs as if they had been cramped.

"Now we will have some wine," said Renny. He examined one bottle; then another; finally he took a third and wiped it carefully with the tail of his dressing-gown. He placed the bottle on a wooden case and they sat round in a circle.

"It didn't come to much, did it?" said Sara. She was tilting back her chair as she held out her glass.

"Ah, but we were frightened," said Nicholas. "Look--how pale we all are." They looked at each other. Draped in their quilts and dressing-gowns, against the grey-green walls, they all looked whitish, greenish.

"It's partly the light," said Maggie. "Eleanor," she said, looking at her, "looks like an abbess." The deep-blue dressing-gown which hid the foolish little ornaments, the tabs of velvet and lace on her dress, had improved her appearance. Her middle-aged face was crinkled like an old glove that has been creased into a multitude of fine lines by the gestures of a hand.

"Untidy, am I?" she said, putting her hand to her hair.

"No. Don't touch it," said Maggie. "And what were we talking about before the raid?" Eleanor asked. Again she felt that they had been in the middle of saying something very interesting when they were interrupted.

But there had been a complete break; none of them could remember what they had been saying.

"Well, it's over now," said Sara. "So let's drink a health - Here's to the New World!" she exclaimed. She raised her glass with a flourish. They all felt a sudden desire to talk and laugh.

"Here's to the New World!" they all cried, raising their glasses, and clinking them together. The five glasses filled with yellow liquid came together in a bunch.

"To the New World!" they cried and drank. The yellow liquid swayed up and down in their glasses.

"What are you thinking, Eleanor?" Nicholas interrupted her. He calls me Eleanor, she thought; that's right.

"About the new world . . ." she said aloud. "D'you think we're going to improve?" she asked.

"Yes, yes," he said, nodding his head. He spoke quietly as if he did not wish to rouse Renny who was reading, or Maggie who was darning, or Sara who was lying back in her chair half asleep. They seemed to be talking, privately, together.

"But how. . ." she began, "--how can we improve ourselves . . . live more. . ."--she dropped her voice as if she were afraid of waking sleepers--". . . live more naturally . . . better . . . How can we?"

"It is only a question," he said--he stopped. He drew himself close to her--"of learning. The soul . . ." Again he stopped.

"Yes--the soul?" she prompted him.

"The soul--the whole being," he explained. He hollowed his hands as if to enclose a circle. "It wishes to expand; to adventure; to form-new combinations?"

"Yes, yes," she said, as if to assure him that his words were right.

"Whereas now,"--he drew himself together; put his feet together; he looked like an old lady who is afraid of mice--"this is how we live, screwed up into one hard little, tight little--knot?"

"Knot, knot--yes, that's right," she nodded.

"Each is his own little cubicle; each with his own cross or holy book; each with his fire, his wife .
. ."

"Darning socks," Maggie interrupted.

Eleanor started. She had seemed to be looking into the future. But they had been overheard. Their privacy was ended. Renny threw down his paper.

"It's all damned rot!" he said. Whether he referred to the paper, or to what they were saying, Eleanor did not know. But talk in private was impossible.

"Why d'you buy them then?" she said, pointing to the papers.

"To light fires with," said Renny. Maggie laughed and threw down the sock she was mending.

"There!" she exclaimed. "Mended. . . ." Again they sat silent, looking at the fire. Eleanor wished that he would go on talking--the man she called Nicholas. When, she wanted to ask him, when will this new world come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave? He seemed to have released something in her; she felt not only a new space of time, but new powers, something unknown within her. She watched his cigarette moving up and down. Then Maggie took the poker and struck the wood and again a shower of red-eyed sparks went volleying up the chimney. We shall be free, we shall be free, Eleanor thought.


It has been barely two weeks now since the Coronavirus stay-at-home quarantine began and already people are anxious to know what the outcome will be, what the other side will look like. There are predictions, some roseate, some belligerent, that people who come through it will be dissatisfied with their old way of life that made them so complacent and vulnerable and that they will demand changes. A new world or at least a new world order.

In his play Plenty, David Hare wrote about the “postwar disillusion” of a woman named Susan Traherne, who was one of the few women to serve in the SOE, the precursor of MI5, during the Second World War. Her story is told by Hare out of chronological order beginning with a scene from 1962 and then jumping back in time to 1943 when Susan is just 17 and working with the French Resistance during the German occupation. Susan’s story then proceeds through eleven scenes until we're back in 1962. In the play’s last scene, Hare takes us back to August 1944. France has been liberated and Susan is in the French countryside. She is so struck by the beauty of the summer day and by her intense optimism that, from this moment, she resolves that everything will be different. “There will be days and days and days like this,” she exclaims. It is, of course, an ironic, bittersweet ending for the audience who has witnessed the gradual decline of Susan’s – and, by inference, England’s – optimism and faith in the future. It was naive, of course, of Susan to have expected the exhilaration of the war’s end to last for very long. It was a beautiful illusion. But, I think, one would have to have a heart of stone not to afford her such faith in the future when the world had accomplished so much.

There is a long way for us to go in this pandemic, the greatest challenge of humanity in our time. Plenty of time for us to reflect on what has got us here and to decide what we need (not what we want) to get us out. When our day of liberation comes (with a vaccine) there will be time for all of us to savor the moment. It's - at most - only a few months away. But what a long way we will all have come when that sweet days artives! 

To the New World!

Mifune

Today is the centenary of Toshiro Mifune’s birth. The only reason I know of him is thanks to Akira Kurosawa, who saw him as the embodiment of the man of action that made so many of his films unforgettable. Incredibly, TCM honored him in a 24-hour marathon (ongoing as I write this) of ten of the films he made with Kurosawa. I’ve been lucky enough to have seen every one of them over the many years of my filmgoing life. But I must admit that I don’t really regard Mifune as a standard of greatness in film acting, the way I think of Marcello Mastroianni and Max von Sydow. He was very good in just about the same type of role in film after film. He is powerful, yes. But his very power limited him.

When Dwight Macdonald saw Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he wrote: “Toshiro Mifune plays Macbeth; at first his style is exciting, but it soon becomes monotonous, all that snarling and baring of teeth, those vulpine laughs.” Harold Bloom remarked that Kurosawa’s film, despite dispensing with all of Shakespeare’s poetry, was the closest film to Shakespearean that he had seen. I find myself standing somewhere in between these opposing opinions. 

By the time he got around to seeing Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Macdonald was even more skeptical not only of Mifune’s talent but disappointed by Kurosawa, from whom he expected a great deal more:

A satire (or a parody) needs a norm to be successful. Mifune isn’t it, even though he rescues the peasant’s pretty wife (by treacherously carving up her six guards) and is on friendly terms with the peaceably-minded innkeeper and cooper. Tigerish as always, Mr. Mifune is just another wild beast let loose on the unhappy town. (I don’t understand his reputation as an actor; he seems to me to be permanently stuck in his first role, that of the bandit in Rashomon.)”

While I don’t hold completely with Macdonald’s views of Mifune’s performances (and Kurosawa’s films), he does have a point. He was, however, apparently ignorant of the fact that, prior to his playing the bandit in Rashomon, Mifune played, in four other films for Kurosawa, a small-time gangster in Drunken Angel, a crusading doctor in The Quiet Duel, a police detective in Stray Dog, and an artist (painter) in Scandal. Granted, his international reputation was kick-started by Rashomon, and he became largely typecast by the 1960s. It is as a sword-wielding samurai – albeit the most awe-inspiring – that Mifune will be remembered.