A Ghost in the Family

For Halloween I’m looking back at James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family, which I was reading in June until I reached the central event of the novel: the death of Jay Follet, husband to Mary and father to Rufus and Catherine. 

Agee was writing a thinly-disguised autobiographical account of the death of his own father in 1916 when he was just 6. Since the story is told largely from the perspective of Rufus Follet (Agee’s middle name was Rufus), much of it is allusive and impressionistic. But when Jay, his father, is killed in a car accident, the story grows suddenly more carefully detailed. We learn, along with Rufus’s mother Mary, exactly how the accident occurred, even though there was no witness, and the strangely perfect condition of the body. 

In chapter 12, Mary’s family, including her father Joel, her hard-of-hearing mother Catherine, her Aunt Hannah and her younger brother Andrew, have gathered in a sort of vigil in her house while they wait for Jay’s brother Ralph to transport the body back home. Hannah and Mary have been drinking whisky toddies, and they are sitting around the large living room late at night talking to bring comfort to Mary, while Rufus and his little sister are sleeping upstairs. In the middle of this somber scene, something enters that is all the more strange for being presented so straightforwardly. At the time of the publication of the novel, Alfred Kazin mentioned that 

There are several scenes in it that are really hair-raising – especially one where the family, sitting together, concertedly feel the spirit of the dead father coming into the room. 

Everyone except Joel, who is a proud skeptic and contemptuous of his daughter Mary’s religious devotion, feels the presence, which Mary identifies as Jay, in the house. Here is Agee’s account in its entirety. 

"Hark!" Hannah whispered.

"What is it?"

"Ssh! Listen."

"What's up?" Joel asked.

"Be quiet, Joel, please. There's something."

They listened most intently.

"I can't hear anything," Andrew whispered.

"Well I do," Hannah said, in a low voice. "Hear it or feel it. There's something."

And again in silence they listened.

It began to seem to Mary, as to Hannah, that there was someone in the house other than themselves. She thought of the children; they might have waked up. Yet listening as intently as she could, she was not at all sure that there was any sound; and whoever or whatever it might be, she became sure that it was no child, for she felt in it a terrible forcefulness, and concern, and restiveness, which were no part of any child.

"There is something," Andrew whispered. Whatever it might be, it was never for an instant at rest in one place.

It was in the next room; it was in the kitchen; it was in the dining room.

"I'm going out to see," Andrew said; he got up.

"Wait, Andrew, don't, not yet," Mary whispered "No; no"; now it's going upstairs, she thought; it's along the-it's in the children's room. It's in our room.

"Has somebody come into the house?" Catherine inquired in her clear voice.

Andrew felt the flesh go cold along his spine. He bent near her. "What made you think so, Mama?" he asked quietly.

"It's right here in the room with us," Mary said in a cold voice.

"Why, how very stupid of me, I thought I heard. Footsteps." She gave her short, tinkling laugh. "I must be getting old and dippy." She laughed again.

"Sshh!"

"It's Jay," Mary whispered. "I know it now. I was so wrapped up in wondering what on earth… Jay. Darling. Dear heart, can you hear me?

"Can you tell me if you hear me, dearest?

"Can you?

"Can't you?

"Oh try your best, my dear. Try your very hardest to let me know. 

"You can't, can you? You can't, no matter how hard.

"But O, do hear me, Jay. I do pray God with all my heart you can hear me, I want so to assure you.

"Don't be troubled, dear one. Don't you worry. Stay near us if you can. All you can. But let not your heart be troubled. They're all right, my sweetheart, my husband. I'm going to be all right. Don't you worry. We'll make out. Rest, my dear. Just rest. Just rest, my heart. Don't ever be troubled again. Never again, darling. Never, never again."

"May the souls of the faithful through the mercy of God rest in peace," Hannah whispered. "Blessed are the dead."

"Mary!" her brother whispered. He was crying.

"He's not here any more now," she said. "We can talk."

"Mary, in God's name what was it?"

"It was Jay, Andrew."

"It was something. I haven't any doubt of that, but-good God, Mary."

"It was Jay, all right. I know! Who else would be coming here tonight, so terribly worried, so terribly concerned for us, and restless! Besides, Andrew, it-it simply felt like Jay."

"You mean…"

"I just mean it felt like his presence."

"To me, too," Hannah said.

"I don't like to interrupt," Joel said, "but would you mind telling me, please, what's going on here?"

"You felt it too, Papa?" Mary asked eagerly.

"Felt what?"

"You remember when Aunt Hannah said there was something around, someone or something in the house?"

"Yes, and she told me to shut up, so I did."

"I simply asked you please to be quiet, Joel, because we were trying to hear."

"Well, what did you hear?"

"I don't know's I heard anything, Joel. I'm not a bit sure. I don't think I did. But I felt something, very distinctly. So did Andrew."

"Yes I did, Papa."

"And Mary."

"Oh, very much so."

"What do you mean you felt something?"

"Then you didn't, Papa?"

"I got a feeling there was some kind of a strain in the room, something or other was up among you; Mary looking as if she'd seen a ghost; all of you…"

"She did," Andrew said. "That is, she didn't actually see anything, but she felt it. She knew something was there. She says it was Jay."

"Hahh?"

"Jay. Aunt Hannah thinks so too."

"Hannah?"

"Yes I do, Joel. I'm not as sure as Mary, but it did seem like him."

"What's 'it'?"

"The thing, Papa, whatever it was. The thing we all felt."

"What did it feel like?"

"Just a…"

"You think it was Jay?"

"No, I had no idea what it was. But I know it was something. Mama felt it too."

"Catherine?"

"Yes. And it couldn't have been through us because she didn't even know what we were doing. All of a sudden she said, 'Has somebody come into the house?' and when I asked her why she thought so she said she thought she'd heard footsteps."

"Could be thought transference."

"None of the rest of us thought we heard footsteps."

"All the same. It can't be what you think."

"I don't know what it was, Papa, but there are four of us here independently who are sure there was something."

"Joel, I know that God in a wheelbarrow wouldn't convince you," his sister said. "We aren't even trying to convince you. But while you're being so rational, why at least please be rational enough to realize that we experienced what we experienced."

"The least I can do is accept the fact that three people had a hallucination, and honor their belief in it. That I can do, too, I guess. I believe you, for yourself, Hannah. All of you. I'd have to have the same hallucination myself to be convinced. And even then I'd have my doubts."

"What on earth do you mean, doubts, Papa, if you had it yourself?"

"I'd suspect it was just a hallucination."

"Oh, good Lord! You've got it going and coming, haven't you!"

"Is this a dagger that I see before me? Wasn't, you know. But you could never convince Macbeth it wasn't."

"Andrew," Mary broke in, "tell Mama. She's just dying to know what we're…" she trailed off. I must be out of my mind, she said to herself. Dying! And she began to think with astonishment and disgust of the way they had all been talking-herself most of all. How can we bear to chatter along in normal tones of voice! she thought; how can we even use ordinary words, or say words at all! And now, picking his poor troubled soul to pieces, like so many hens squabbling over-she thought of a worm, and covered her face in sickness. She heard her mother say,

"Why, Andrew, how perfectly extraordinary!" and then she heard Andrew question her, had she had any special feeling about what kind of a person or thing it was, that is, was it quiet or active, or young or old, or disturbed or calm, or was it anything: and her mother answered that she had had no particular impression except that there was someone in the house besides themselves, not the children either, somebody mature, some sort of intruder; but that when nobody had troubled to investigate, she had decided that it must be an hallucination-all the more so because, as she'd said, she thought she'd actually heard someone, whereas with her poor old ears (she laughed gracefully) that was simply out of the question, of course. Oh, I do wish they'd leave him in peace, she said to herself. A thing so wonderful. Such a proof! Why can't we just keep a reverent silence! But Andrew was asking his mother, had she, a little later than that, still felt even so that there was somebody? or not. And she said that indeed she had had such an impression. Where? Why she couldn't say where, except that the impression was even stronger than before, but, of course, by then she realized it was an hallucination. But they felt it too! Why how perfectly uncanny!

"Mary thinks it was Jay," Andrew told her.

"Why, I…"

"So does Aunt Hannah."

"Why how-how perfectly extraordinary, Andrew!"

"She thinks he was worried about…"

"Oh, Andrew!" Mary cried. "Andrew Please let's don't talk about it any more! Do you mind?"

He looked at her as if he had been slapped. "Why, Mary, of course not!" He explained to his mother: "Mary'd rather we didn't discuss it any more."

"Oh, it's not that, Andrew. It just-means so much more than anything we can say about it or even think about it. I'd give anything just to sit quiet and think about it a little while! Don't you see? It's as if we were driving him away when he wants so much to be here among us, with us, and can't."

"I'm awfully sorry, Mary. Just awfully sorry. Yes, of course I do see. It's a kind of sacrilege."

So they sat quietly and in the silence they began to listen again. At first there was nothing, but after a few minutes Hannah whispered, "He's there," and Andrew whispered, "Where?" and Mary said quietly, "With the children," and quietly and quickly left the room.

When she came through the door of the children's room she could feel his presence as strongly throughout the room as if she had opened a furnace door: the presence of his strength, of virility, of helplessness, and of pure calm. She fell down on her knees in the middle of the floor and whispered, "Jay. My dear. My dear one. You're all right now, darling. You're not troubled any more, are you, my darling? Not any more. Not ever any more, dearest. I can feel how it is with you. I know, my dearest. It's terrible to go. You don't want to. Of course you don't. But you've got to. And you know they're going to be all right. Everything is going to be all right, my darling. God take you. God keep you, my own beloved. God make His light shine upon you." And even while she whispered, his presence became faint, and in a moment of terrible dread she cried out "Jay!" and hurried to her daughter's crib. "Stay with me one minute," she whispered, "just one minute, my dearest"; and in some force he did return; she felt him with her, watching his child. Catherine was sleeping with all her might and her thumb was deep in her mouth; she was scowling fiercely. "Mercy, child," Mary whispered, smiling, and touched her hot forehead to smooth it, and she growled. "God bless you, God keep you," her mother whispered, and came silently to her son's bed. There was the cap in its tissue paper, beside him on the floor; he slept less deeply than his sister, with his chin lifted, and his forehead flung back; he looked grave, serene and expectant.

"Be with us all you can," she whispered. "This is good-bye." And again she went to her knees. Good-bye, she said again, within herself; but she was unable to feel much of anything. "God help me to realize it," she whispered, and clasped her hands before her face: but she could realize only that he was fading, and that it was indeed good-bye, and that she was at that moment unable to be particularly sensitive to the fact.

And now he was gone entirely from the room, from the house, and from this world.

"Soon, Jay. Soon, dear," she whispered; but she knew that it would not be soon. She knew that a long life lay ahead of her, for the children were to be brought up, and God alone could know what change and chance might work upon them all, before they met once more. She felt at once calm and annihilating emptiness, and a cold and overwhelming fullness.

"God help us all," she whispered. "May God in His loving mercy keep us all."

She signed herself with the Cross and left the room.

She looks as she does when she has just received, Hannah thought as she came in and took her old place on the sofa; for Mary was trying, successfully, to hide her desolation; and as she sat among them in their quietness it was somewhat diminished. After all, she told herself, he was there. More strongly even than when he was here in the room with me. Anyhow. And she was grateful for their silence.

Finally Andrew said, "Aunt Hannah has an idea about it, Mary.„ "Maybe you'd prefer not to talk about it," Hannah said.

"No; it's all right; I guess I'd rather." And with mild surprise she found that this was true.

"Well, it's simply that I thought of all the old tales and beliefs about the souls of people who die sudden deaths, or violent deaths. Or as Joel would prefer it, not souls. Just their life force. Their consciousness. Their life itself."

"Can't get around that," Joel said. "Hannah was saying that everything of any importance leaves the body then. I certainly have to agree with that."

"And that even whether you believe or not in life after death," Mary said, "in the soul, as a living, immortal thing, creature, why it's certainly very believable that for a little while afterwards, this force, this life, stays on. Hovers around."

"Sounds highly unlikely to me, but I suppose it's conceivable."

"Like looking at a light and then shutting your eyes. No, not like that but-but it does stay on. Specially when it's someone very strong, very vital, who hasn't been worn down by old age, or a long illness or something."

"That's exactly it," Andrew said. "Something that comes out whole, because it's so quick."

"Why they're as old as the hills, those old beliefs."

"I should imagine they're as old as life and death," Andrew said.

"The thing I mean is, they aren't taken straight to God," Hannah said. "They've had such violence done them, such a shock, it takes a while to get their wits together."

"That's why it took him so long to come," Mary said. "As if his very soul had been struck unconscious."

"I should think maybe."

"And above all with someone like Jay, young, and with children and a wife, and not even dreaming of such a thing coming on him, no time to adjust his mind and feelings, or prepare for it."

"That's just it," Andrew said; Hannah nodded.

"Why he'd feel, 'I'm worried. This came too fast without warning. There are all kinds of things I've got to tend to. I can't just leave them like this.' Wouldn't he! And that's just how he was, how we felt he was. So anxious. So awfully concerned, and disturbed. Why yes, it's just exactly the way it was!

"And only when they feel convinced you know they care, and everything's going to be taken good care of, just the very best possible, it's only then they can stop being anxious and begin to rest."

They nodded and for a minute they were all quiet.

Then Mary said tenderly, "How awful, pitiful, beyond words it must be, to be so terribly anxious for others, for others' good, and not be able to do anything, even to say so. Not even to help. Poor things.

"Oh, they do need reassuring. They do need rest. I'm so grateful I could assure him. It's so good he can rest at last. I'm so glad." And her heart was restored from its desolation, into warmth and love and almost into wholeness.

Again they were all thoughtfully silent, and into this silence Joel spoke quietly and slowly, "I don't – know. I just – don’t – know. Every bit of gumption I've got tells me it's impossible, but if this kind of thing is so, it isn't with gumption that you see it is. I just – don’t – know.

"If you're right, and I'm wrong, then chances are you're right about the whole business, God, and the whole crew. And in that case I'm just a plain damned fool.

"But if I can't trust my common sense-I know it's nothing much, Poll, but it's all I've got. If I can't trust that, what in hell can I trust!

"God, you'n Hannah'd say. Far's I'm concerned, it's out of the question."

"Why, Joel?"

"It doesn't seem to embarrass your idea of common sense, or Poll's, and for that matter I'm making no reflections. You've got plenty of gumption. But how you can reconcile the two, I can't see."

"It takes faith, Papa," Mary said gently.

"That's the word. That's the one makes a mess of everything, far's I'm concerned. Bounces up like a jack-in-the-box. Solves everything.

"Well it doesn't solve anything for me, for I haven't got any.

"Wouldn't hurt it if I had. Don't believe in it.

"Not for me.

"For you, for anyone that can manage it, all right. More power to you. Might be glad if I could myself. But I can't.

"I'm not exactly an atheist, you know. Least I don't suppose I am. Seems as unfounded to me to say there isn't a God as to say there is. You can't prove it either way. But that's it: I've got to have proof. And on anything can't be proved, be damned if I'll jump either way. All I can say is, I hope you're wrong but I just don't know."

"I don't, either," Andrew said. "But I hope it's so."

He saw Mary and Hannah look at him hopefully.

"I don't mean the whole business," he said. "I don't know anything about that. I just mean tonight."

Can't eat your cake and have it, his father thought.

Like slapping a child in the face, Andrew thought; he had been rougher than he had intended.

"But, Andrew dear," Mary was about to say, but she caught herself. What a thing to argue about, she thought; and what a time to be wrangling about it!

Each of them realized that the others felt something of this; for a little while none of them had anything to say. Finally Andrew said, "I'm sorry."

"Never mind," his sister said. "It's all right, Andrew."

"We just each believe what we're able," Hannah said, after a moment.

"Even you, Joel. You have faith in your mind. Your reason."

"Not very much: all I've got, that's all. All I can be sure of."

"That's all I mean."

"Let's not talk about it any more," Mary said. "Tonight," she added, trying to make her request seem less peremptory.

The word was a reproach upon them all, much more grave, they were sure, than Mary had intended, so that to spare her regret they all hastened to say, kindly and as if somewhat callously, "No, let's not."

It may surprise you to know that I felt a little trepidation reading this passage in the novel because I was having something of a health scare of my own at the time. I even stopped reading the novel after the point of this scene for two weeks, and only finished the novel in July.

It’s unique in literature, this incidental intrusion of a supernatural element, and Agee didn’t live long enough to have to explain it. In January 1951, in Southern California to work on The African Queen with John Huston, Agee suffered his first attack of what was diagnosed as “coronary thrombosis.” After working on a few other movie scripts (including Night of the Hunter), in his last months he set everything else aside to work on A Death in the Family, which he started writing in 1948. He wrote to Father Flye, a long time mentor and friend, in March of 1955 that he was “dropping, by and large, from an average 12-17 [heart] attacks per day, 6-8 of them mild, to an average 6-8, nearly all of them mild.” On May 16, a heart attack killed him in a New York City taxicab. 

An interesting coincidence ties the deaths of Agee and his father together. They both died on May 16. 

I was born on May 16 three years after Agee’s death.

Happy Halloween. 

Blithe Spirit (1945)

It’s part of movie lore: when Noel Coward broke into movies in 1941, he was already adept at directing actors in dramas and comedies, but since he had no experience directing action scenes, he hired David Lean to direct and edit them and Ronald Neame to photograph them. In Which We Serve, based on the combat experiences of Coward’s friend Lord Mountbatten, was a great success in wartime England, and Coward went on to produce three more films based on his own plays, This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945), and Brief Encounter (1945), all directed by David Lean. 

The play of Blithe Spirit had been an enormous success in London’s West End and on Broadway in 1941. Hollywood wanted to make a film of it but, dissatisfied with how they had mishandled some of his plays (Private Lives [1931], Tonight Is Ours [1933]), Coward sold the rights to Cineguild, a film production company owned by David Lean, Ronald Neame, and Anthony Havelock-Allan. Since This Happy Breed had been filmed in Technicolor and was very successful critically and commercially, Lean decided to use the color process again on Blithe Spirit, despite the cumbersome process having to involve Natalie Kalmus, the wife of Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus, the founder of the Technicolor company. 

I recently gained access to two versions of the film available via online streaming. The first was in woeful condition, with horrible pastel colors smeared across the images indiscriminately. The restored version, available through Criterion and financed by the David Lean Foundation, is a marvelous spectacle all by itself. While the colors are slightly unstable, having to do, apparently, with subtleties in the lighting, the restored film looks splendid, with all the photographic glories of black-and-white in three-strip technicolor. A prismatic camera lens captured the color image on three separate strips of film that were layered when the film was printed to combine the colors. Natalie Kalmus was the Technicolor advisor who worked on the film, as she also had done on This Happy Breed, and she drove David Lean to distraction. She had authority over every decision made with regard to lighting, set decoration, costume design, and makeup, since the color process didn’t capture colors naturally, but had to be very carefully manipulated. This might explain why some of the colors in the film, like Rex Harrison’s indigo bathrobe or Margaret Rutherford’s scarlet dress at the séance, stand out more than others. Kay Hammond, who plays a ghost in the film, is made up and costumed in light green shades (except for red lipstick and nails) – cleverly using a color effect rather than a camera trick to alert us to her ghostly condition. 

Charles Condomine is a successful mystery novelist who, doing research for a new novel he’s working on, persuades his wife Ruth and two of their friends, George and Violet Bradman, to join him in a séance conducted by Madame Arcati, a spirit medium. Following her directions by sitting around a small table with their outspread hands touching, Charles, Ruth, and Doctor and Mrs. Bradman watch Madame Arcati as she chooses from among some records the Irving Berlin song “Always,” turns out the light, then addresses someone named Daphne, who causes the table to move – once for yes, two for no – in response to Madame Arcati’s questions. Getting no results, she goes into a trance, screams and falls down. The table then begins to rise and, when the four of them try pushing it down, it tips over. Just as Charles asks if he should pick pick it up, a voice tells him to leave it where it is. He asks Ruth if she said it, but she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The voice speaks again, but only Charles can hear it. He turns on the light and tells the others he was only joking. Madame Arcati is revived with some brandy, asks what happened and when told that nothing happened, tells them she’s convinced there is another psychic person in the house. When Mafame Arcati leaves, into the room through the closed glass door comes the ghost of Charles first wife, Elvira, who died seven years ago (she laughed so hard she brought on a heart attack). Charles can see and converse with her, but nobody else can. Ruth becomes convinced that Elvira has returned to ruin her marriage to Charles. She seeks the help of Madame Arcati, but she only knows how to raise ghosts, not how to lay them. 

The oddity of a play about the dead returning as ghosts being extremely popular during wartime (Blithe Spirit’s first run in London was 1,997 performances) was matched not just by its popularity on Broadway but by the comparable run of Arsenic and Old Lace, which opened on Broadway in January 1941 and closed in 1944 after 1,444 performances. Coward told Lean to avoid changing anything when filming the play. Lean added only some wordless exterior scenes, but he altered the ending drastically. Instead of merely leaving the house at the end of the play, provoking the ghosts of Ruth and Elvira to, poltergeist-like, tear it apart piece by piece, Lean has the ghosts assist Charles out the door and into his roadster. Then Lean sits the two ghostly wives on a bridge past which Charles’s car careens – and crashes. The wives move apart on the bridge and Charles’s ghost drops between them. The End. Despite Noel Coward’s furious objections to this alteration, it somehow works in the intensified make believe of cinema. 

The film is perfectly cast, with Kay Hammond and Margaret Rutherford returning to the roles they originated onstage. Rutherford is especially delightful as the extremely eccentric Madame Arcati. Rex Harrison is utterly beautiful as Charles, his performance making the absolute most of Coward’s lines. Lines like Elvira’s: “I haven’t seen a movie in seven years.” To which Charles replies “Let me be the first to congratulate you.” Or the line omitted from the US release of the film in which Ruth goes down a list of Charles’s amorous conquests and Charles interjects: "If you're trying to compile an inventory of my sex life, I feel it only fair to warn you that you've omitted several episodes. I shall consult my diary and give you a complete list after lunch."

When he reviewed the film My Fair Lady, Stanley Kauffmann remarked that it

is worth every penny of the $17 million it reportedly cost because it preserves Rex Harrison’s performance. Whatever one thinks of the musical, of the very idea of the musical, his performance is clearly a flower of artistic elegance with its roots in three-hundred-year-old comic styles, a miracle of ease that results from a lifetime’s training of superb talents... But—as against the play from which it was taken—the word “great” has, as usual, been too generously applied. Only Harrison’s performance begins to deserve the term. His first name has never seemed more apt.(1)

Harrison’s brilliance is far better served and supported in Blithe Spirit. It is a classic in the truest sense of the term. 75 years later, in its restored state, it still shimmers.

(1) The New Republic, November 15, 1964.

Chivying Cheever

John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” is about Neddy Merrill, a man who, for reasons unspecified (though likely the result of too much drinking), spends an Autumn day slowly remembering what he’s forgotten about the present unhappy state of his once bountiful life, while engaged in a cross-country excursion from a friend’s swimming pool several miles down what he has called the Lucinda River to his home, where his wife and daughters are waiting. Since all of his friends have swimming pools, he intends to swim every one of them – to swim home. Along the way Neddy discovers that all is not what it seems: not only is it not midsummer, but some disaster has overtaken his personal life. (1)

The story was published in The New Yorker on July 18, 1964. Movie mogul Sam Spiegel quickly bought the film rights and a script of the story was eventually crafted by Eleanor Perry with her husband, Frank Perry directing the film. The role of Neddy was offered to William Holden, who turned it down. Spiegel settled for Burt Lancaster in the role, but both Frank Perry and John Cheever, who had taken an interest in the production, believed Lancaster was miscast. 

In the chronology section of the Library of America edition of Cheever’s Complete Novels, it reads:

1966. That summer a film adaptation of “The Swimmer,” starring Burt Lancaster, is filmed in Westport [Connecticut]. Cheever frequently visits the set and finally gets to do a cameo in which he appears at a poolside cocktail party, greeting Lancaster and “this terrific 18-year-old dish named Janet Landgard."

When the film was finished, Spiegel wouldn’t give Perry the final cut and he was so mystified by it that, after doing nothing with it for several months except screen it at parties, he hired Sydney Pollack to shoot extra scenes - like the ludicrous horse track scene in which Lancaster and Janet Landgard run around the track, bounding over the hurdles in slow motion. Then Spiegel removed his name from the film and sold it to Columbia Pictures. The LOA Chronology continues:

1968 The Swimmer finally released in May after many problems: producer Sam Spiegel fires the original director, Frank Perry, and hires a young Sydney Pollack to reshoot a number of scenes in Beverly Hills. Cheever is mostly appalled by finished movie – particularly the overwrought score by Marvin Hamlisch (“Frank and I wanted Miles Davis for the music but instead we got a 65-piece all-girl string orchestra”), as well as the “Teamster’s Union hose-type rainstorm” through which Lancaster must stagger at the end.

I remember watching it on TV a few years after its release, long before I got around to reading Cheever. I remember finding it interestingly dream-like, somewhat like a Twilight Zone episode. Looking at it now, lovingly restored by Grindhouse, who released it on Blu-Ray in 2014, I find it an almost total failure. Frank Perry, who had already been noted for his arty touch, made far too many strategic mistakes, like allowing his cameraman (David L. Quaid) to shoot scenes through trees and foliage, zooming in and out, in and out of focus. 

I never imagined Neddy Merrill as a strapping 6’2” Burt Lancaster. He was 52 when he did the film, and his blue swimming trunks must’ve been carefully chosen to show off his package to best effect. So he spends most of his time onscreen (the entire film) sucking in his gut. At one point, when he arrives at the Hallorans’, who are so unconventional that they don’t bother to wear clothes, Lancaster slips out of his trunks to oblige them, and we are treated (if that is the word) to a view of his untanned buttocks. The frequent closeups of Lancaster’s face magnify his pock marks. The only improvement in the film as it proceeds is the gradual disappearance of Lancaster’s unnerving grin. 

Some characters not in the story are thrown in, like a 20-year-old blonde named Julie, played by Janet Landgard, who tags along with Neddy on his lunatic excursion until his intentions with her become obvious. He puts his hand on her bare stomach (she’s wearing a bikini) and quotes The Song of Solomon: “thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.” Shortly thereafter, Julie wisely runs. 

The only time the film works is when Neddy has to cross a highway. It comes closest to Cheever’s account:

Had  you  gone  for  a  Sunday    afternoon  ride  that  day  you  might have seen him, close to naked, standing on the shoulders of Route  424,  waiting  for  a  chance  to  cross.  You  might  have wondered  if  he  was  the  victim  of  foul  play,  had  his  car  broken down,  or  was  he  merely  a  fool.  Standing  barefoot  in  the  deposits  of  the  highway— beer  cans,  rags,  and  blowout  patches— exposed  to  all  kinds  of  ridicule,  he  seemed  pitiful.  He  had known  when  he  started  that  this  was  a  part  of  his  journey— it had  been  on  his  maps— but  confronted  with  the  lines  of  traffic, worming  through  the  summery  light,  he  found  himself  unprepared.  He  was  laughed  at,  jeered  at,  a  beer  can  was  thrown  at him,  and  he  had  no  dignity  or  humor  to  bring  to  the  situation. He could have gone back, back to the Westerhazys’, where Lucinda  would  still  be  sitting  in  the  sun.  He  had  signed    nothing, vowed    nothing,  pledged    nothing,  not  even  to  himself.  Why, believing  as  he  did,  that  all  human  obduracy  was  susceptible  to common  sense,  was  he  unable  to  turn  back?  Why  was  he  determined  to  complete  his  journey  even  if  it  meant  putting  his life  in  danger?  At  what  point  had  this  prank,  this  joke,  this piece  of  horseplay  become  serious?  He  could  not  go  back,  he could not even recall with any clearness the green water at the Westerhazys’,  the  sense  of  inhaling  the  day’s  components, the  friendly  and  relaxed  voices  saying  that  they  had  drunk too much.  In  the  space  of  an  hour,  more  or  less,  he  had  covered  a distance  that  made  his  return  impossible. 

An  old  man,  tooling  down  the  highway  at  fifteen  miles  an hour,  let  him  get  to  the  middle  of  the  road,  where  there  was  a grass  divider.  Here  he  was  exposed  to  the  ridicule  of  the  north bound  traffic,  but  after  ten  or  fifteen  minutes  he  was  able  to cross.

This scene in the film is followed by Neddy’s having to swim the length of an overcrowded public swimming pool, which is suitably appalling. But the scene goes on too long, and it’s followed by the worst scene in the film, in which he hobbles to the house of his mistress, Shirley Adams. She is played by Janice Rule, who had been brought in when Spiegel decided to reshoot the scene in which the role was originally played by Barbara Loden. 

When Neddy finally limps to what’s supposed to be his home, it comes as no surprise that he finds everything locked and unkempt. The disused tennis court littered with dead leaves, with its slack, sagging net, was poignant enough without Neddy having to hear ghostly laughter and and an invisible tennis match like the one at the end of Antonioni’s Blow-Up. And someone decided to throw in a rainstorm to boot. 

In 1968 Roger Ebert wrote of the film: "The Swimmer," is a strange, stylized work, a brilliant and disturbing one.” He also calls Lancaster’s performance his finest. The film flopped, despite some approving critical notices. It has since developed a cult following, for reasons that escape me. If it succeeded at anything, The Swimmer sent some viewers back to Cheever’s story.

(1) I wrote a piece, "Swimming to Bullet Park," about the story six years ago. 

A Rainy Day in New York

Lately I seem to be on a Woody Allen kick. As chance would have it, I wrote about the premiere of his film A Rainy Day in New York exactly one year ago. It had to settle for Paris for its premiere, since Allen’s producers (Amazon) got cold feet about being his producers. Two days ago Allen announced on Facebook that the film “will be playing in select theaters starting tomorrow.” I didn’t catch it in a select theater – I caught it on my Fox Movies cable channel here in the middle of nowhere (actually the Philippines). That, in itself, says a great deal about what’s been happening to Woody Allen’s work for the last few years. 

I’ve managed to see the two films, Café Society and Wonder Wheel, Allen made prior to Rainy Day and the latter film is superior only insofar as it isn’t a period piece. But it has two factors richly in its favor – like Manhattan, it’s subject is New York. So Allen shows us several of his favorite places and views, and Allen himself chose to stay behind the camera (where he has always belonged). The protagonist isn’t anything like the typical nebbish schlemiel invariably played by him. 

As usual, however, Allen’s characters are all more or less mouthpieces for his wisecracking dialogue. They are differentiated only because of the vicissitudes of casting. Again, Allen’s leading characters are virtual children. Timothée Chalamet, who was 21 when the film was made, plays Gatsby Welles, a student at an upstate New York college called Yardley, whose girlfriend, Ashleigh Enright (Elle Fanning, 19 during shooting) writes for the college newspaper and has landed an interview with celebrated Indie film director Roland Pollard in Manhattan. She’s never been to New York, and Gatsby, who just won twenty grand in a campus card game, offers to be her guide. 

In the film’s opening scenes at Yardley, Vittorio Storaro’s honey-glazed cinematography, in which it seems to be perpetually late afternoon, sets an autumnal tone. He has worked on Allen’s four latest films, and he is perfectly attuned to what seem to me Allen’s valedictories. Nostalgia has been his dominant theme since the 1980s, and here it's expressed in the music Allen uses throughout the film. "I Got Lucky in the Rain" is sung by Bing Crosby under the opening credits. 

The trouble with Ashleigh, as Gatsby soon discovers, is that she’s totally unworldly, a real hick. He quotes Cole Porter and she thinks it's Shakespeare. When she conducts her interview, Gatsby spends his time looking up old haunts. The city “has its own agenda,” however, and both of them are swept up by chance encounters. Ashleigh ends the rainy night in a raincoat with only bra and panties underneath, and Gatsby learns an eye-opening secret about his mother that completely alters his - not to mention our - understanding of her.

Allen’s rim-shot worthy one liners whiz past us (my favorite is when Gatsby’s mother asks him why he brought a whore to her party. “An escort," he corrects her. “Let’s not split pubic hairs,” she snipes), but most of them barely register as wit. Liev Schreiber, Jude Law and Diego Luna play types, not characters. It’s nice to see such actors playing even small roles in a Woody Allen film. But it would’ve been much nicer if they were given genuine roles to play. 

The two leads are supposed to be in college, but they remind me more of high schoolers - Holden Caulfield types, but without Holden's excuses. Allen's knowledge of New York is misappropriated by Gatsby Welles, even if his name approptiates the Great American Novel and Film. 

Selena Gomez, believe it or not, comes off best as Chan, the younger sister of one of Gatsby’s old flames. She shares his love for rainy days in New York, and she was conspicuous in her refusal to apologize for appearing in the film. As Justin Bieber’s ex, perhaps she had a bit more to gain than the others had to lose. Allen now has Rifkin’s Festival to promote, since no one else wants to. As for A Rainy Day in New York, I can think of worse things to do with a Sunday afternoon. 

No Parades

I’ve been reading Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain for a few days. I know the plot, where the story is heading, but it didn’t prepare me for a plunge, in the second chapter, into the mental state of Lester Farley, the character who plays an integral role in the drama of Coleman Silk‘s last days.

When we’re introduced to Silk, he is a 71-year-old retired college dean living in the Berkshires. After a contentious resignation from his position at Athena College and the sudden death of his wife from a stroke, Silk decides to tell his life story, writes it all down, but turns to his neighbor, Nathan Zuckerman, an established writer, to rewrite it for him.

Silk confides to Zuckerman that he has been unexpectedly revitalised by ecstatic sex with Faunia Farley, a local woman half his age. And Roth delivers a passage that is an enthusiastic endorsement of a drug whose generic name, sildenafil citrate, is far better known by its brand name Viagra:

I am a seventy-one-year-old man with a thirty-four-year-old mistress; I'm taking Viagra, Nathan. There's La Belle Dame sans Merci. I owe all of this turbulence and happiness to Viagra. Without Viagra none of this would be happening. Without Viagra I would have a picture of the world appropriate to my age and wholly different aims. Without Viagra I would have the dignity of an elderly gentleman free from desire who behaves correctly. I would not be doing something that makes no sense. I would not be doing something unseemly, rash, ill considered, and potentially disastrous for all involved. Without Viagra, I could continue, in my declining years, to develop the broad impersonal perspective of an experienced and educated honorably discharged man who has long ago given up the sensual enjoyment of life. I could continue to draw profound philosophical conclusions and have a steadying moral influence on the young, instead of having put myself back into the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication. Thanks to Viagra I've come to understand Zeus's amorous transformations.

   That's what they should have called Viagra. They should have called it Zeus.

But Faunia carries a history around with her, everything from sexual abuse by a step-father to physical abuse by an ex-husband named Les Farley. This ex-husband is sometimes in jail for his violent attacks on Faunia and sometimes in rehab for his alcoholism. What neither place addresses or treats Farley for is what is clinically known as PTSD. Farley is a veteran of two tours in Vietnam, and, though he survived without a scratch, his mental state is deeply damaged. While it didn’t require exceptional insight for Philip Roth to imagine what lasting effect the experience of war’s savageries must have had on an average young man, his expression of his mental state is a tour de force:

   The encounter with Farley. The encounter that night with Farley, the confrontation with a dairy farmer who had not meant to fail but did, a road crew employee who gave his all to the town no matter how lowly and degrading the task assigned him, a loyal American who'd served his country with not one tour but two, who'd gone back a second time to finish the goddamn job. Re-upped and went back because when he comes home the first time everybody says that he isn't the same person and that they don't recognize him, and he sees that it's true: they're all afraid of him. He comes home to them from jungle warfare and not only is he not appreciated but he is feared, so he might as well go back. He wasn't expecting the hero treatment, but everybody looking at him like that? So he goes back for the second tour, and this time he is geared up.

   Pissed off. Pumped up. A very aggressive warrior. The first time he wasn't all that gung ho. The first time he was easygoing Les, who didn't know what it meant to feel hopeless. The first time he was the boy from the Berkshires who put a lot of trust in people and had no idea how cheap life could be, didn't know what medication was, didn't feel inferior to anyone, happy-go-lucky Les, no threat to society, tons of friends, fast cars, all that stuff. The first time he'd cut off ears because he was there and it was being done, but that was it.

   He wasn't one of those who once they were in all that lawlessness couldn't wait to get going, the ones who weren't too well put together or were pretty aggressive to start off with and only needed the slightest opportunity to go ape-shit. One guy in his unit, guy they called Big Man, he wasn't there one or two days when he'd slashed some pregnant woman's belly open. Farley was himself only beginning to get good at it at the end of his first tour. But the second time, in this unit where there are a lot of other guys who'd also come back and who hadn't come back just to kill time or to make a couple extra bucks, this second time, in with these guys who are always looking to be put out in front, ape-shit guys who recognize the horror but know it is the very best moment of their lives, he is ape-shit too. In a firefight, running from danger, blasting with guns, you can't not be frightened, but you can go berserk and get the rush, and so the second time he goes berserk. The second time he fucking wreaks havoc. Living right out there on the edge, full throttle, the excitement and the fear, and there's nothing in civilian life that can match it. Door gunning. They're losing helicopters and they need door gunners. They ask at some point for door gunners and he jumps at it, he volunteers. Up there above the action, and everything looks small from above, and he just guns down huge.

   Whatever moves. Death and destruction, that is what door gunning is all about. With the added attraction that you don't have to be down in the jungle the whole time. But then he comes home and it's not better than the first time, it's worse. Not like the guys in World War II: they had the ship, they got to relax, someone took care of them, asked them how they were. There's no transition. One day he's door gunning in Vietnam, seeing choppers explode, in midair seeing his buddies explode, down so low he smells skin cooking, hears the cries, sees whole villages going up in flames, and the next day he's back in the Berkshires. And now he really doesn't belong, and, besides, he's got fears now about things going over his head. He doesn't want to be around other people, he can't laugh or joke, he feels that he is no longer a part of their world, that he has seen and done things so outside what these people know about that he cannot connect to them and they cannot connect to him. They told him he could go home? How could he go home? He doesn't have a helicopter at home. He stays by himself and he drinks, and when he tries the VA they tell him he is just there to get the money while he knows he is there to get the help. Early on, he tried to get government help and all they gave him was some sleeping pills, so fuck the government. Treated him like garbage. You're young, they told him, you'll get over it. So he tries to get over it. Can't deal with the government, so he'll have to do it on his own. Only it isn't easy after two tours to come back and get settled all on his own. He's not calm. He's agitated. He's restless. He's drinking. It doesn't take much to put him into a rage. There are these things going over his head. Still he tries: eventually gets the wife, the home, the kids, the farm. He wants to be alone, but she wants to settle down and farm with him, so he tries to want to settle down too. Stuff he remembers easygoing Les wanting ten, fifteen years back, before Vietnam, he tries to want again. The trouble is, he can't really feel for these folks.

   He's sitting in the kitchen and he's eating with them and there's nothing. No way he can go from that to this. Yet still he tries.

It isn’t so much the extent of the military’s brutalization of Farley as it was their failure to deprogram the trained killer, of transporting him from the systematic mind-fucking of combat straight back to the quiet Berkshire streets, to conscientious, live-and-let-live civilization and the expectation that he would simply have to put all that killing behind him without any help. Too many war movies are fascinated by battles but almost none of them show us the inability of some soldiers to readjust to their former lives and retrace to their former selves. And the fact that the Vietnam war was lost and that Americans made no effort to understand why and chose to turn its back on the war and its hundreds of thousands of veterans inevitably created monsters like Les Farley. 

Interiors

A man is looking out of a window. We see only the back of his head as a voice, presumably his, delivers the following speech:

I had dropped out of law school when I met Eve. She was very beautiful. Very pale, cool in her black dress, with never anything more than a single strand of pearls. And distant. Always poised and distant. By the time the girls were born, it was all so perfect, so ordered. Looking back, of course, it was rigid. The truth is she'd created a world around us that we existed in, where everything had its place, where there was always a kind of harmony. Great dignity. I will say... it was like an ice palace. Then suddenly one day, out of nowhere, an enormous abyss opened up beneath our feet and I was staring into a face I didn't recognise.

From the beginning, Woody Allen had a very clear idea of what a Woody Allen film should be. The reason he got into filmmaking in the first place was due to the mishandling of his script for What’s New, Pussycat? (1965). From that point on he chose to direct his own scripts. When the sixth film he directed himself, Annie Hall (1977), won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay (by Allen and Marshall Brickman), Allen’s credentials as one of the leading filmmakers of the era was nailed, and he immediately set about taking the biggest risk of his career – a drama that would make no concessions whatever to what Allen called “entertainment.”

To look from Annie Hall to Interiors is quite jarring. The man who had become a master (some had called him a genius) at making audiences laugh was strenuously avoiding laughter. He tells the story of a New York family: Arthur, a corporate lawyer father (E. G. Marshall), Eve, an interior designer mother (Geraldine Page), and their three daughters, Renata (Diane Keaton), Flyn (Kristin Gruffith) and Joey (Mary Beth Hurt). Eve is desperately neurotic, and when Arthur announces at the breakfast table that he wants to live alone for awhile, Eve reacts by attempting suicide. She methodically seals all of the windows and doors of her Manhattan townhouse and turns on the gas. She survives. 

Arthur vacations in Greece and returns with a woman named Pearl (Maureen Stapleton), informing his daughters that he intends to marry her. She is the opposite of Eve – ebullient, funny, and warm. The daughters react in different ways, with Joey siding entirely with her mother, despite her feeling that she wasn’t her mother’s favorite. The wedding takes place at the Long Island summer house. Sometime well into the night, Eve appears inside the house and Joey, who has been drinking all night, seizes the occasion to berate her. Eve drowns herself in the Atlantic. Joey nearly drowns trying to save her, but is resuscitated by Pearl. The film closes where it began, with the three sisters gazing through the windows of the beach house at the “peaceful” ocean. 

In his interview with Robert Bresson in 1972, Charles Thomas Samuels asserted that “in your films all the people speak with a single, a Bressonian voice.”(1)  However convincingly Bresson defended himelf against Samuels’s assertion, it is obvious to all but the most purblind Bresson fan that the people in his films, drilled by him in take after take to avoid all inflection, all dramatic emphasis, don’t speak or behave like real people. The problem is that, to a certain extent, Samuels’s point is applicable to every good filmmaker – especially to those who write their own scripts. All of the people in Woody Allen’s films speak the same language with a single voice. Here is a dialogue between the characters Renata (Diane Keaton) and Frederick (Richard Jordan) that is typical of Allen’s style throughout Interiors:

Frederick: You OK?

Renata: I just experienced the strangest sensation.

F: Well, you look kinda pale.

R: It was as if I had a sudden...clear vision where everything seems...sort of awful and predatory. It was like... It was like I was here and the world was out there, and I couldn't bring us together.

F: Could you have had one of those dreams?

R: No. No, because the same thing happened last week when I was reading upstairs. I suddenly became hyper aware of my body. And I could feel my heart beating, and I began to imagine that...I could feel the blood sort of coursing through my veins and my hands and in the back of my... neck. I felt precarious, like I was a machine that was functioning but I could just conk out at any second.

F: You're not gonna conk out. You gotta put those kind of thoughts out of your head.

R: Yeah. It frightens me, too, you know, because...I'm not that far from the age when Mother began showing signs of strain.

F: You're not your mother. You're not. You're not. You've been under stress and you haven't been sleeping well. Things like that.

Most of the actors deliver their lines creditably. Diane Keaton is experienced with Allen’s dialogue. Richard Jordan is not, but he gives a powerful performance in the film as a successful but dissatisfied writer. E. G. Marshall is given the most thankless role in the film, as Arthur, the egoistic patriarch who wants out of his marriage to Eve. Geraldine Page is the nervous center of the film, and she gives a brilliant performance as Eve. Late in the film Joey discovers Eve has come back to the summer house and lets her have it:

Mother? Is that you? You shouldn't be here. Not tonight. I'll take you home. You look so strange and tired. I feel like we're in a dream together. Please don't look so sad. It makes me feel so guilty. I'm so consumed with guilt. It's ironic... because, uh... I've cared for you so... And you have nothing but disdain for me, and yet I feel guilty. I think you're... really too perfect to live in this world. I mean, all the... beautifully furnished rooms, carefully-designed interiors, everything's so controlled. There wasn't any room for any real feelings. None. Between any of us. Except Renata, who never gave you the time of day. You worship Renata. You worship talent. Well, what happens to those of us who can't create? What do we do? What do I do, when I'm overwhelmed with feelings about life? How do I get them out? I feel such rage toward you! Oh, Mother. Don't you see? You're... not just a sick woman. That would be too easy. The truth is... there's been perverseness and wilfulness of attitude in many of the things you've done. At the centre of a sick psyche there is a sick spirit. But I love you. And we have no other choice but to forgive each other.

Joey doesn’t notice, but Eve has left the house and heads straight into the ocean.

It would be easy to argue, and it has been argued, that so much of the dialogue in Interiors is uncomfortably portentous and stilted. But so is the dialogue in Ingmar Bergman’s films. The difference is that Bergman managed to develop a style of pacing and framing that maximized the dramatic effect of his dialogue. He had at his disposal some of the greatest actors in the world and a great cinematographer. Woody Allen was clearly aiming at the same level of intensity, without having attained the same mastery of tone and proportion that Bergman worked toward for more than a decade.

It isn’t exactly Allen’s fault that no one was prepared for his sharp turn away from comedy into High Seriousness. The critical reception to Interiors was almost hostile. Bergman’s film, Autumn Sonata, was released the same year, and Vernon Young, who didn’t like the Bergman film, wrote:

If, without knowing anything whatever about the work of either director, one had seen Woody Allen’s Interiors and Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata in the order of their respective debuts in New York City, one might have easily concluded that the Swedish film-maker had attempted to imitate the American: the same photographic and cutting style, the same concentration on a handful of overwrought characters, and the very same subject – namely, maternal domination. (2)

Autumn Sonata was further evidence of Bergman’s decline into self-parody – but only because Bergman had been making films for thirty years. Interiors was only Allen’s eighth film (Bergman’s eighth film was 1949’s To Joy). I think Interiors is a revelation. If it hadn’t bombed, and if the critics had been kinder, Allen might have continued in the same direction. Instead, he made Manhattan.

(1) Encountering Directors (New York: Putnam, 1972). 

(2) “Autumn Interiors,” Commentary, 1979.