Dutch

Almost as an afterthought I got around to watching the John Hughes film Dutch yesterday. I meant to watch it after watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles on Thanksgiving Day, but it was getting late and I didn’t want to disturb the wonderful mood in which Planes had left me.

I wanted to see Dutch again because it, too, is a Thanksgiving movie, written and produced by John Hughes. It was directed by Peter Faiman, an Australian best known for Crocodile Dundee (1986). The last film Hughes directed, Curly Sue, was released in October 1991, four months after Dutch. While Curly Sue was a hit, Dutch bombed – largely because of a low key promotion campaign. The only “name” in the cast is Jobeth Williams, who has only three scenes. She plays Natalie Standish, recently divorced from Reed, with whom she shares custody of their son, Doyle. Doyle, who is attending a private boarding school in Georgia, is supposed to spend Thanksgiving with his father. But his father has an important meeting in London, or so he says. When Natalie phones Doyle to break the news that he’s coming to Chicago to be with her instead, he refuses to come. 

Natalie: I... I really want you to come home, Doyle.

Doyle: So you can get my approval of your new boyfriend? To appease your guilt?

Natalie: Look, you are old enough to be objective about me and your father and to understand why we're in the situation we're in.

Doyle: Yeah, I know. I understand. You couldn't make it work.

Natalie: If you could see both sides, you'd know that that isn't true. I love you, honey, and...and I want you home.

So Natalie’s boyfriend, Dutch Dooley, volunteers to go to Georgia and drive Doyle to his mother’s house. He tells Natalie, “There's no better way for two guys to get to know each other than to spend a couple of days in a car.”

The film was received with almost unanimous raspberries. Roger Ebert set the tone in his review, complaining that it was formulaic. But he misreads just about everything about the movie. I won’t make great claims for it, but Dutch is actually somewhat less formulaic than Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Dutch exposes something that a film billed as a comedy could barely handle: the pain of a boy abandoned by his father. Ebert complained: “As for young Ethan Randall, he seems smart and capable, but his character is allowed to be too obnoxious for too long, until we finally just get sick of the little worm.”(1) I can understand that Doyle’s pain, expressed so powerfully in direct physical terms (he wants the whole world to feel it), made Ebert squirm. With a father like Reed, the origin of Doyle’s angst isn’t too hard to pinpoint. John Hughes’s father was a salesman, which meant that his family were always moving: “I was kind of quiet,” Hughes told an interviewer. “And every time we would get established somewhere, we would move. Life just started to get good in seventh grade, and then we moved to Chicago.”(2) This admission doesn’t betray what could’ve inspired Doyle’s rage, except that Hughes had a lonely childhood. Doyle simply channels his loneliness into aggression. 

There is a quiet scene in which Doyle practices karate in an empty gym. Another boy, whose father works as the school janitor, enters to tell him that he’s invited to eat Thanksgiving dinner with his family.

Schoolboy: My parents wanted to know if, since you're not going home, you'd wanna come over to our house for Thanksgiving. 

Doyle: Don't think I could handle that much fun. 

Boy: Is that a no? 

Doyle: That's a no. 

Boy: Great. Have a nice weekend rotting in your own pissed-off world.

Doyle shadow punches the air savagely. When Dutch arrives and tells Doyle he’s there to drive him home:

Dutch: I told your mother I'd take you home for the holidays. 

Doyle: I have  plans. 

Dutch: Stay here?  You gonna watch the football game, make a turkey sandwich and hang  yourself  in the toilet? 

Doyle: I said I have plans. Leave it at that. Now please go.

John Hughes had never gone near the subject of divorce except in the script for Dutch. If he was going to treat the subject at all, he seemed determined to explore its hardest impact on a child of divorced parents. The acts of cruelty (there is really no other word for it) that Dutch and Doyle inflict upon each other on their extended journey to Natalie’s home are supposed to be funny, but when the viewer puts himself in the place of either of the antagonists, they are sometimes painful to watch. Doyle karate kicks Dutch in the balls and even knocks him out when Dutch tells him to hit him with his best shot. In return, Dutch abandons Doyle on the road and he has to walk miles through the snow to the motel. Then Doyle parks Dutch’s car in the middle of the road so a semi truck can smash into it. These two adversaries turn out to be more equally matched than either would admit. They wind up hitchhiking instead of letting Natalie find out that either of them has failed. Finally, having to sleep at a mission flop house, Doyle meets a woman whose husband lost his job. But they have a car, and after Dutch promises the husband a job at his construction company, they give them a ride the rest of the way to Natalie’s house. 

Dutch is a smaller, lesser effort than Hughes’s other Thanksgiving movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles. I found Dutch to be more strange, deeper than the earlier film. Much less funny, but more real. Doyle’s private school was shot at Berry College in Rome, Georgia at the height of Autumn. There is one shot in which a lonely Doyle walks defiantly through a field of dead leaves, kicking and stomping on them. There isn’t another soul in the shot, as if everyone had already gone home for the holidays but Doyle. Ethan Randall (later Ethan Embry) plays Doyle. He was 12 during shooting, and while his transformation into a loving son at the film’s conclusion is handled too neatly, his performance is balanced by Ed O’Neill as Dutch. He is grotesque. Even if his role is almost completely unsympathetic, he is convincing as a roughneck, hard-headed “working class clod” (Doyle’s words). But he is defeated by Doyle. His defeat reminded me of the beautiful Alexander Mackendrick film The Maggie, in which a wealthy American tries to wrest a boatload of his household goods from the Scots crew of a “puffer” – a small ship sailing the lochs and firths of the Scottish highlands. He, too, gives up at the end of the film. But Doyle persuades Dutch not to give up, and together they make it the rest of the way home. 

P. J. O’Rourke, who was a friend of John Hughes, spoke of his reverence for family: “Family was the most conservative thing about John. Walking across the family room in your stocking feet and stepping on a Lego (ouch!) was the fundamental building block of society.”(3) Even a family as splintered as Doyle’s is the only source of love and salvation for him. 

On a personal note, I once found myself stranded at a Catholic “Home for Boys” (read: orphanage) over the holidays in 1966. This, despite the fact that I had parents, neither of whom seemed to know what to do with me. The home, coincidentally, was also in Georgia. The only difference was that I was stranded there with my older brother. I was 8, and the experience affected him a great deal more. We were invited by a local family to eat Thanksgiving dinner in their home. It stands out in my memory because the family had a horse and I was allowed to sit in the saddle and ride it for the first time in my life. 

(1) "Dutch," Chicago Sun-Times, July 17, 1991.

(2) "Molly Ringwald Interviews John Hughes". Seventeen Magazine, Spring 1986. 

(3) ”Don't You Forget About Me: The John Hughes I Knew” The Daily Beast, March 22, 2015.

Home Going

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

(T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”) 

“Today is Thanksgiving Day,” I told myself this morning. As usual, I awoke at around 7, performed my ablutions, took my tablet off the charger and laid down again. I checked my emails, my Facebook messages and notifications, and I checked the weather in five different locations: Alpharetta, Georgia (where my niece lives and where it is mostly cloudy and 62 degrees), Denver (where my brother lives, clear and 33), Anchorage, Alaska (where my sister passed away, flurries and 35), New Gloucester, Maine (my future home, ice and 32), and, just to remind myself of where I am just now, a village on my island called CarayCaray (cloudy and 85). 

By 8, I’m out of bed and in my sala tuning my TV to the BBC. I take my Centrum Silver vitamin, plus 800mg of ibuprofen for the pains that the US Army gave me. I drink a strong coffee. Everything just like any other day among the tinkling palms. In other words, I go through the motions of living. Even on Thanksgiving Day.

W. H. Auden, in his poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”, lamented that the death of a great poet means so little to the overwhelming majority of people that

A few thousand will think of this day/As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

Doing something slightly unusual is the only way I could distinguish this day from every other. I can’t watch the Macy’s parade until 10 PM tonight, when it’s 9 AM in New York City. And the football games won’t be on until tomorrow morning. I can’t eat the traditional foods. Nobody raises turkeys (a bird native to North America) here. And I don’t have an oven to roast one in even if I had it. I could get barbecue chicken, or lechon manok, but it wouldn’t compensate for the lack of the genuine article. Besides, I would be enjoying my holiday repast alone, since Filipinos don’t celebrate today. It’s just an ordinary day to them.

So why do I bother to apostrophize this day? I could explain that it’s because I am a patriot who loves the country of his birth, the country of his parents’ birth. But that isn’t the real reason. The condition of living in a strange land, surrounded by foreigners can inspire an expat to try to blend in. But blending in isn’t feasible when you’re five foot ten, and on the hefty side, and as Caucasian as one can possibly be. It can also inspire an expat to go to the opposite extreme, to flaunt his foreignness, to become exaggeratedly American, to take exaggerated pride in his nationality. But calling undue attention to oneself is simply inviting disaster, since most of the natives are poor and they’re convinced that every American is a millionaire. 

Mid-afternoon, I watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles until it was almost dark. I first saw it in April or May  1989 with a good friend in a theater just outside my barracks on Naval Air Station, Fallon, Nevada. Like everyone else seeing it for the first time, the ending caught me by surprise and off guard. I never expected to get choked up by a John Hughes movie. But every time I’ve seen it since has always been around Thanksgiving.

Watching it again today, for perhaps the twentieth time, as soon as the final ten minutes approached, when Del and Neal at last arrive in Chicago and Neal figures out Del’s secret – that he has neither a home nor a family, the film cast its spell over me again. That ending, the way it sneaks up on you out of nowhere, gets me every time. I always see myself as Del, never as Neal. Forever drifting, having no center, no north star to navigate by. 

So here I am again, too many miles from where I used to think my home was located, among people who care about me but who have no means of helping me. I am thankful for them. I am thankful for my big brother and my niece, the last of my tribe. I am thankful for old friends. And for one in particular who has promised me a roof over my head when I manage, next year perhaps, to find my way to New Gloucester, Maine. And I’m especially thankful to the Social Security Administration for making it possible for me to retire at 62 and for providing me with a way forward, a light at the end of the tunnel. For too long I felt like I was in the tunnel at the end of the light. 

Happy Thanksgiving. 

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. (Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace” 1946.) 

Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film Cold War seemed to spark a wave of nostalgia for one of the darkest eras of world history, the period between the descent of the Iron Curtain shortly after World War II and the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991. The film tells a personal story of love and sacrifice that was inspired by Pawlikowski’s own parents. But in its period design, costumes, and especially its evocative black-and-white cinematography, it reminded people of a lost world of tragic beauty and of lost lives. 

By the time The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John Le Carré’s third novel, was published in 1963, espionage literature was thriving. Ian Fleming published most of his James Bond books in the 1950s, and the movie franchise was gathering momentum with From Russia With Love, the second installment, in wide release. The Bond films introduced the world to a new kind of hero, a cynical Cold Warrior whose sexuality was as much a weapon as his .32 caliber Walther PPK – except it wasn’t concealed. 

But Le Carré was after bigger game. He was attempting to write a serious novel on the same subject as Fleming, free from the winks and the nods at fantasyland of the Bond series. Le Carré’s spies were all too human. Leamas, the hero of In from the Cold, dies at the novel’s conclusion. And not so he could spring miraculously to life in the next installment. Alec Leamas is a 50-year-old agent based in sectored Berlin. We first find him at Checkpoint Charlie anxiously waiting for an agent to come across from the east. He peers through binoculars from a guard shack at the opposite gate only fifty yards away. The man he’s waiting for, pushing a bicycle, makes it past the first barriers and looks as if he’s made it. Suddenly the alarm screams, spotlights turn on him, he mounts his bike and starts to ride to safety, but the guards shoot him down. 

Leamas returns to London and stops at the “Circus” (whose offices in the film are incongruously on Trafalgar Square). He is shown directly to the office of “Control” who presents to Leamas some outrageous sophistry about the two sides in the Cold War having different aims but that use similar methods. “I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now? That would never do.” So he asks Leamas to stay out in the cold for awhile longer, to act like the disgruntled agent shunted to a desk, to get drunk regularly, and to end up on the dole – all of it to attract the attention of the other side and convince them that he may be ready to turn on his former employers. 

But it’s all part of the operation to cast enough doubt on a member of the East German Abteilung that it will encourage his subordinate to accuse him of treason. The operation succeeds, but Leamas wasn’t told who the real target was until its conclusion. “And suddenly, with the terrible clarity of a man too long deceived, Leamas understood the whole ghastly tuck.” In their last moments together, when she relentlessly asks Leamas why he did what he did, he bitterly tells her:

What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not. They're just a bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me, little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing "Cowboys and Indians" to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?

The additional dialogue in the film script is more explicit than in the novel. One of the writers, Paul Dehn, also worked on a few Bond films. When Nan invites Leamas to dinner at her flat, she tells him she’s a communist. He laughs and tells her he doesn’t believe in anything. He tells her a story about witnessing a small car and the family inside get crushed between huge trucks on the autobahn, and says “Communism. Capitalism. It’s the innocents who get slaughtered.” The innocents in the film are surely the idealogues – the true believers in the Worker’s State, Fiedler and Nan. At the last sad moment of the film, in which Smiley calls out to Leamas to jump from the wall and save himself, Leamas ignores him and climbs down to Nan, lying motionless on the ground, and he is shot down as well. 

The film is almost a perfect transposition of the book. Martin Ritt coaxed a beautifully-graded performance from a difficult Richard Burton. He wears a raincoat in nearly every scene, and when he goes to seed, he does it with aplomb. The revelation in the film is Claire Bloom as Nan (Liz in the novel - her name was changed for reasons personal to Richard Burton). When she is called to testify in a tribunal, there is a look of such disillusion in her eyes that the scene is terribly moving. Also excellent are the two German actors, Oskar Werner and Peter van Eyck, who play a Jew and a former Nazi in the Abteilung. Michael Hordern puts in a beautiful turn as Ashe, and there is even Bernard Lee, who played M in the first eleven Bond films, as a grocer beaten up by a drunken Leamas.

Crucial to the film’s effectiveness are Oswald Morris’s crystalline black-and-white images – far more evocative in 1965 for being necessary rather than an aesthetic choice in the Pawlinowski film. And Sol Kaplan composed a slow, sad score. A lugubrious saxophone contributes powerfully to the film’s overall tone of despair. At last finding something worth dying for, Leamas chooses to remain outside in the cold.

Joy in the Morning

In the summer of 1985, my unemployed sister set about reading every novel by P. G. Wodehouse she could lay her hands on at the public library. I don’t know how many it was, but I can still hear her raucous laugh emanating from the confines of her bedroom. Twenty-some years later, when I wanted to buy a Wodehouse novel, but had too many to choose from, I consulted her to recommend one to me. “One of the Wooster/Jeeves books,” she told me, “like Joy in the Morning.”

At the time I couldn’t locate that particular title. So I bought a copy of Psmith in the City instead. It was Wodehouse’s twelfth novel, published in 1910 and I loved it. Last spring I got around to reading another of Wodehouse’s 71 novels – Love Among the Chickens. Not the original 1906 version, but the 1921 rewrite, which everyone claims is an improvement on the original. I loved it, too.

At the end of October, with the November 3rd election only a week away, I decided to return to Wodehouse, and I found a copy of Joy in the Morning. I also found that it had a great deal more to recommend it besides my sister. James Wood called it “one of the funniest of the Jeeves and Wooster novels.” And Robert McCrum ranked it no. 66 among the 100 Greatest Novels. “A late-season masterpiece, Joy in the Morning is both an elegy and an encore.”

But aside from the delights of the text itself, Joy in the Morning has a somewhat miraculous history. In his essay “In Defense of P. G. Wodehouse,” George Orwell tells us:

When the Germans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early summer of 1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P.G. Wodehouse, who had been living throughout the early part of the war in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have realised until the last moment that he was in any danger. As he was led away into captivity, he is said to have remarked, "Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book."(1)

That was in May 1940. Wodehouse was 58 and had been working on Joy in the Morning, but in June he was arrested by the Germans as a “enemy alien” and sent to detainment in Upper Silesia. He left the manuscript of his unfinished novel with his wife. 

In a radio broadcast from Berlin, later transcribed for the Saturday Evening Post, Wodehouse said:

There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the safe side. 

In the habit of writing, while in detention Wodehouse wrote the novel Money in the Bank and, after his release by the Germans in 1943, he returned to his unfinished manuscript. Unfortunately, the Germans had already put Wodehouse to some use by persuading him to make radio broadcasts from Berlin that were interpreted by some British commentators as not just poking fun at the British but downright treasonous. The fact that Wodehouse was utterly innocent of anything other than being a boob has been established in the years since. “Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster,” according to one interviewer. 

But in 1943 Wodehouse, thoroughly embarrassed, sought refuge in the only place where the extreme limitations of his political sense didn’t matter – his writing. When he had finished the novel, he submitted it to his American publisher first, who published it in 1946. A British edition was published the following year. 

Wodehouse and his wife departed Europe for the U.S. in 1947. He had lived there before, and he had a long-standing relationship with American publishers and magazine editors. He took up residence for what turned out to be the rest of his life in a house on Long Island. 

One of Bertie Wooster's comic flaws is how he recalls his impeccable education in bits and pieces. He invariably manages to garble every bit of wisdom or poetry imparted to him by his masters so that it comes out as hilarious nonsense. For instance, he opens chapter XXIX of Joy in the Morning with this retelling:

I don’t know if the name of Lot’s wife is familiar to you, and if you were told about her rather remarkable finish. I may not have got the facts right, but the story, as I heard it, was that she was advised not to look round at something or other or she would turn into a pillar of salt, so, naturally, imagining that they were pulling her leg, she looked round, and – ping – a pillar of salt. 

That bit of a warning, “I may not have got the facts right,” only increases the comedy. This is perfect satire because it exposes the rock-bottom stupidity of an “educated class” as well as the uselessness of bothering to educate them in the first place. 

The gags abound in Joy in the Morning. Bertie’s Uncle Percy tells him that a man he is meeting at a fancy dress ball will be dressed as Edward the Confessor:

“A bearded bozo, was he not, this Edward?” I asked. 

“To the eyebrows,” said Uncle Percy. “Those were the days when the world was a solid mass of beavers. I shall keep my eye open for something that looks like a burst horsehair sofa.”

At the party, Uncle Percy sees the man in disguise, 

“And I refuse to believe that Edward the Confessor really looked like that. Nobody presenting such an obscene appearance could possibly have held the throne of England for five minutes. Lynching parties would have been organized, knights sent out to cope with the nuisance with battleaxes.”

Wodehouse found the title of his book in Psalm 30, verse 5: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” He closes the novel where he began, with tinkling contentedness:

It was as we [Bertie and Jeeves] were about half-way between Steeple Bumpleigh and the old metrop, that I mentioned that there was an expression on the tip of my tongue which seemed to me to sum up the nub of the recent proceedings. 

“Or, rather, when I say an expression, I mean a saying. A wheeze. A gag. What I believe is called a saw. Something about Joy doing something.“

“Joy cometh in the morning, sir?”

“That’s the baby. Not one of your things, is it?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it’s dashed good,” I said. 

(1) “In Defense of P. G. Wodehouse,” The Windmill, No. 2 [July] 1945.

1917

The extreme oddity of the First World War was its stasis. Armies took up stationary positions, dug in and stayed there for weeks or even months. Throughout the four years of the war, the front lines barely moved at all in some sectors. It was a protracted, and horrific, war of attrition.

According to Sam Mendes, the inspiration for the film 1917 was based on stories that his grandfather Alfred Mendes told his family when he was in his seventies. Alfred had served in the British Army and one particular story became the center of his script. 

"It wasn't until his mid-70s that he decided he was going to tell the stories of what happened to him when he was in his teenage years. And there was one particular story he told us of being tasked to carry a single message through no man's land in dusk in the winter of 1916. He was a small man, and they used to send him with messages because he ran 5 1/2 feet, and the mist used to hang at about 6 feet in no man's land, so he wasn't visible above the mist. And that stayed with me. And that was the story I found I wanted to tell." (1)

Two British Army lance corporals, Blake and Schofield, are tasked to carry a commanding general’s order across No Man’s Land, the desolate area separating the opposing trenches, and proceed to a forward position where a battalion of 1,600 soldiers are poised to attack a German position – and fall into a trap that will result in the destruction of the British force. One of the soldiers, Blake, has an older brother who serves in the battalion. Schofield, who is a veteran of the Battle of the Somme, accepts the assignment reluctantly, but Blake is mortally wounded early in the journey, and Schofield must fulfill the mission on his own. 

Mendes decided to construct his film as one complete and uninterrupted take, with his camera, operated by Roger Deakins, following Schofield from the opening to, nearly two hours later, the closing shot. When I first heard about the film and this seamless-seeming single-take construction, my first thought was that it was just a stunt. But within moments of watching it, I was swept up in its feeling of inexorability, of a duration comparable to the passing minutes the characters in the film were living out. There is a break in the design, however, when Schofield is knocked unconscious by a bullet hitting his metal helmet. The screen goes black for several seconds, and Schofield comes to where he fell, many hours later. 

As expected (Mendes’s grandfather lived to tell the tale), Schofield succeeds in delivering the general’s message in time to interrupt the battle, and he finds Blake’s brother, a lieutenant, to deliver the news of his death. Watching it, I remembered the Czech film Diamonds of the Night, in which two teenaged boys escape from a train bound for a German concentration camp and make their way to safety. The boys’ arduous flight in that film, however, was enlivened by flashbacks and fantasies. The film that 1917 most resembles is Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, which fixatedly follows its heroine, played by Sandra Bullock, in her increasingly desperate – and astronomically far-fetched – attempt to survive being stranded in space. The two films are also similar in their use of obtrusive music. 

1917 won a few Oscars, for Roger Deakins’s camerawork and for the sound design. Yet the sound design, presumably incorporating Thomas Newman’s music, is the weakest element of the film, and the one that prevents it from rising above the level of good entertainment. It doesn’t seem possible any more for a filmmaker to trust in the seriousness of his material, a good story told with striking images, without the, to me, intrusion of music. One has only to look at classic cinema and how sparingly their filmmakers used music, if they used it at all. Robert Bresson was quite right to insist that music adds a dimension to a film that it could do perfectly well without. As I watched the film and listened to the heaving of the sound design, I caught myself thinking how much more effective it would’ve been if there had been nothing but incidental sounds to accompany the images. Unfortunately, filmmakers today are afraid the audience will get bored. The film is made in such a way that it provides an immersive experience for the viewer – immersed in the experience of the messenger, Schofield. Over the course of perhaps twenty-four hours (excluding several hours of unconsciousness), we endure everything he endures, from putting his wounded hand into a rotting corpse to nearly being buried alive in a trench cave in to plunging into a raging river. So where is all that music coming from? 

But there are moments in the film that I won’t soon forget, such as the omnipresence of rats, the death of Blake (his face growing visibly ashen), a lieutenant telling Schofield “If you get to Colonel Mackenzie, make sure there are witnesses… Some men just want the fight”, the French girl hiding in a basement (along with Sam Mendes’s baby daughter), the wrecked French village illuminated by flares, and Schofield’s dash across an active battlefield to reach Colonel Mackenzie, who receives the order to call off the attack reluctantly, telling Schofield, “There is only one way this war ends – last man standing. Now fuck off, Lance Corporal!” 

Schofield locates Blake’s brother, then walks into a peaceful spring meadow, sits down under a tree and takes out two photographs, one of Alfred Mendes’s mother, with the words “Come back to us” inscribed on the back. (2)

We are not informed of how young Alfred Mendes felt about completing his mission, if he thought it was worth it or just some meaningless boondoggle in the midst of the enormous shattered death machine of the war. Before the end credits, his grandson dedicates the film to him:

FOR LANCE CORPORAL ALFRED H. MENDES

1ST BATTALION KING’S ROYAL RIFLE CORPS

WHO TOLD US THE STORIES 

(1) “‘It Was Part Of Me’: Director Sam Mendes On the Family History in ‘1917’, by Scott Simon, NPR, December 21, 2019.

(2) Some have mistaken the photos to be of Schofield’s wife and children. Alfred Mendes was just 19 at the time, and unmarried. 

Love and Death in Venice

 

“. . . but there is nothing so distasteful as being restored to oneself when one is beside oneself.”

Reading Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice in the year 2020 is not much of a discovery, even in Michael Henry Heim’s 2004 translation. Though I first read it in college more than 40 years ago in the H. T. Lowe-Porter version, it is much more a re-discovery. After a century of ecstatic praise by readers, followed by the film by Luchino Visconti and the opera by Benjamin Britten, I was prepared to find the allure of the text betrayed by traps set both by the author, Thomas Mann, after disclosures in his journals betrayed what were once called “tendencies,” and by both the gay filmmaker and the gay composer who had no difficulty, apparently, claiming Aschenbach as one of their own. 

Mann is not to blame for the film, made by a Communist Italian nobleman. Visconti didn’t have to alter the story at all. The changes he did make weren’t improvements. Instead of a great writer, inspired by Mann’s encounter with Gustav Mahler, Visconti makes Aschenbach a great composer, replete with superfluous flashbacks that make the resemblance to Mahler more than just coincidental. Not to mention all the Mahler “quotes” on the soundtrack, like the exquisite Adagietto under the opening credits. I was a precocious youth when I first saw it in the 70s, but I wasn’t so impressionable to mistake Visconti’s point in making the film. 

Nor is Mann to blame for Benjamin Britten’s tortuous opera based on the film and the novella, even if there is the consolation of Britten’s music. Britten composed it as a showpiece – the last – for his longtime partner, the great English tenor Peter Pears. 

I found nothing that would lead me to mistake Death in Venice as anything but what it is and has always been: a straightforward account of an artist’s abandon – his last – in a setting so sensual that he fails – or refuses – to protect himself from the ravages of the commonest and deadliest of epidemics. He succumbs to cholera, of all things, which he probably contracted from eating fruit sold on a street in Venice. 

I returned to Death in Venice because I had been reading Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, whose narrator drew comparisons between Coleman Silk, a septuagenarian former college professor engaged in a sexual relationship with a woman half his age:

It was something, I suppose, like watching Aschenbach feverishly watching Tadzio—his sexual longing brought to a boil by the anguishing fact of mortality—except that we weren't in a luxury hotel on the Venice Lido...

life—the intoxication with the last fling, what Mann, writing of Aschenbach, called the "late adventure of the feelings"—to reassert itself and take charge of him.

 The onslaught of freedom at seventy-one, the freedom to leave a lifetime behind—known also as Aschenbachian madness.

   "And before nightfall"—the final words of Death in Venice—"a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease." No, he does not have to live like a tragic character in any course.

Nor die like one. But he does. Like Aschenbach, Coleman Silk finds his quietus at the hands of the object of his desire. In fact, she dies along with him in a car crash. Aschenbach succumbs to cholera sitting on a Lido beach gazing deliriously at a Polish boy playing in the sea. The news of his death would not, of course, have mentioned anything about Tadzio. The existence of the “beautiful boy” was unknown to everyone in the world with the exception of his family and Aschenbach. Whatever has been made of Mann’s story, he was in no way confused about its meaning. His presentation of the nature of Aschenbach’s attraction to Tadzio is straightforward:

There is nothing more curious or delicate than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who encounter and observe each other daily—nay, hourly—yet are constrained by convention or personal caprice to keep up the pretense of being strangers, indifferent, avoiding a nod or word. There is a feeling of malaise and overwrought curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally stifled need for mutual knowledge and communication, and above all a sort of strained esteem. For a man loves and respects his fellow man only insofar as he is unable to assess him, and longing is a product of insufficient knowledge.

Some kind of relationship and acquaintance was bound to develop between Aschenbach and young Tadzio, and the older man was thrilled to discover that his interest and attention did not go wholly unreciprocated. For example, what induced the beautiful boy, when appearing on the beach each morning, to shun the boardwalk behind the cabanas and saunter through the sand in front of them past Aschenbach’s residence—sometimes coming needlessly close to him, all but grazing his table or chair—on the way to the family cabana? Was this the result of the attraction, the fascination of a superior emotion on a tender and thoughtless object? Aschenbach looked forward daily to Tadzio’s entrance and at times pretended to be busy when it occurred and let the boy pass seemingly unnoticed. But at other times he looked up and their eyes would meet. They were both as grave as could be on such occasions. Nothing in the cultivated and dignified mien of the older man betrayed any agitation, yet there was a query, a pensive question in Tadzio’s eyes, a hesitation in his gait, and he looked down, then sweetly up again, and when he had passed, something in his bearing intimated that only good breeding kept him from looking back.

Critics who attacked Visconti for his bald presentation of Aschenbach as a romantic paedophile were merely exposing their own misreading of the story. Aschenbach was attracted by Tadzio’s exceptional beauty – all the more exceptional for his finding it in a boy instead of a girl. Tadzio’s gender, in fact, makes him all the more unattainable, and Aschenbach’s passion for him so much the sadder. But just try to imagine readers’ reaction to Mann’s story if Tadzio had been Tadzia – if Aschenbach had developed a secret passion for a pubescent girl. Death in Venice would’ve been a forerunner of Nabokov’s Lolita. 

But there is something else about the differences that distinctive media impose on the adaptation of such a story. Visconti’s film could, quite naturally, not help but make Aschenbach’s ideal paedophilia more obvious to the viewer. But Visconti short-changed Mann in many ways, not least in his casting choices and his stiflingly chi-chi production design. He was quite deliberately trying to beautify Aschenbach’s sad fall, without realizing that he would have to utilize a style to match Mann’s prose. The man who once made Senso, about the sad consequences of an ill-timed love affair between a man and a woman, was strangely incapable of preventing Aschenbach from looking somewhat ridiculous.

The opera tries to make Mann’s short novel into a summation of a lifelong obsession of the artist. But there is some confusion whether the artist is Aschenbach or Benjamin Britten. When Peter Pears premiered in the role he was nearly 63, and his advanced age was audible as well as visible. It made one wonder if it was cholera that killed him or some  malady of old age. And there is the added disadvantage of Britten’s English sensibility imposed on Mann’s tale. The way the English treat Mediterranean settings, all the way from E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence to Lawrence Durrell, makes everything seem like an invitation to sensuality that the English climate – and the English themselves – have successfully suppressed.

Returning to Thomas Mann’s novella, then, is both a refreshing reminder of its disturbing beauty and a clearing of the decks. The refulgent language of the final chapter, used to capture a dying artist’s glimpse of an unattainable ideal, is ravishing and unforgettable:

But to him it seemed as if the pale and charming psychagogue out there were smiling at him, beckoning to him, as if, releasing his hand from his hip, he were pointing outward, floating onward into the promising immensity of it all. And, as so often, he set out to follow him.