After Apple-picking

I was drawn to a particular poem last month after watching a documentary film about Robert Frost. This is the poem:

AFTER APPLE-PICKING

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree 
Toward heaven still, 
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill 
Beside it, and there may be two or three 
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. 
But I am done with apple-picking now. 
Essence of winter sleep is on the night, 
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. 
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass 
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough 
And held against the world of hoary grass. 
It melted, and I let it fall and break. 
But I was well 
Upon my way to sleep before it fell, 
And I could tell 
What form my dreaming was about to take. 
Magnified apples appear and disappear, 
Stem end and blossom end, 
And every fleck of russet showing clear. 
My instep arch not only keeps the ache, 
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. 
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. 
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin 
The rumbling sound 
Of load on load of apples coming in. 
For I have had too much 
Of apple-picking: I am overtired 
Of the great harvest I myself desired. 
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, 
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. 
For all
That struck the earth, 
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, 
Went surely to the cider-apple heap 
As of no worth. 
One can see what will trouble 
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. 
Were he not gone, 
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his 
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, 
Or just some human sleep. 

I heard Frost recite this poem in the documentary in his dry, unemphatic way, and saw Richard Wilbur and Seamus Heaney discussing it. Heaney called it "Frost's Ode to Autumn. In fact it's the one place where he surrenders to the wood." The woods appear and reappear in several of Frost's poems; the best-known are probably "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Come in".

Certain that I'd encountered the poem before many years ago (when I read it much less attentively), reading it again was like reading it for the first time. It measures up to what Frost wrote in the introduction to his Collected Poems: "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride all its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."(1)

Right away, I could see that the poem was not one of Frost's easier poems. There are two Robert Frosts, and the difference between them goes much deeper than poetic success or failure. It must have been deliberate, since he noticed that some of his poems got a great deal more attention from readers than others, and who better than Frost knew that they were not always his most important poems. In his 1963 essay on Frost, "A Momentary Stay," Irving Howe addresses this:

"It might be convenient, but is also a dangerous simplification, to draw a sharp line between his popular and superior poems. The two have a way of shading into one another ... in his small number of distinguished lyrics ... the archness and sentimentalism have been ruthlessly purged; he is writing for sheer life. To read these poems, as they confront basic human troubles and obliquely notice the special dislocations of our time, can be unnerving—for they offer neither security nor solace. They are the work of a poet who, without the mediation of formal thought or religious sentiments, gives close and hard battle to his own experience. They seek to capture those moments when we confront experience in its bareness, observing some natural event or place with a pure sense of the dynamics of reception. They set out to record such tremors of being in their purity and isolation: as if through a critical encounter with the physical world one could move beyond the weariness of selfhood and into the repose of matter. But Frost, now supremely hard on himself, also knows that the very intensity with which these amounts are felt makes certain their rapid dissolution, and that what then remains is the familiar self, once again its own prisoner. Approaching a pure state of being, these lyrics return with the necessity of shaped meaning. And in their somewhat rueful turning back to the discipline of consciousness, the effect is both painful and final: they conclude with the reflection that the central quandary of selfhood, that it must forever spiral back to its own starting point, cannot be dissolved."

"After Apple-picking" is a very odd Frost poem, one that is so ambiguous as to invite different conclusions about its meaning. Only recall what Amy Lowell wrote when the Frost collection North of Boston was published in America in 1915: "The charming idyll 'After Apple-picking,' is dusted over with something uncanny." That "something" is not easily identified. On its smooth surface, with a lilting cadence and rhyme, the poem describes how very late in the year, the speaker has finished picking nearly every available apple from his apple trees. He is so weary from his labors that he wonders if he might sleep the whole winter, like the woodchuck (who is already hibernating in his hole). But he was already tired, he says, when he began picking in the morning. Like the world around him, he is winding down toward something more than simply "human sleep." The grass is hoary with frost. The snow will come soon.

If "After Apple-picking" is Frost's Ode to Autumn, it doesn't fall easily in line with an idyll like John Clare's "To Autumn":

Come, pensive Autumn, with thy clouds and storms
And falling leaves and pastures lost to flowers;
A luscious charm hangs on thy faded forms,
More sweet than Summer in her loveliest hours,
Who in her blooming uniform of green
Delights with samely and continued joy:
But give me, Autumn, where thy hand hath been,
For there is wildness that can never cloy –
The russet hue of fields left bare, and all
The tints of leaves and blossoms ere they fall.
In thy dull days of clouds a pleasure comes,
Wild music softens in thy hollow winds;
And in thy fading woods a beauty blooms
That’s more than dear to melancholy minds.

A mind must be melancholy to prefer Autumn to Summer. At the close of "After Apple-picking," does the speaker, as Seamus Heaney claims, "surrender to the wood"? I have written before about two other poems by Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Come in," in which the speaker is momentarily beguiled by a presence in a wood. "In many of Frost's poems," I wrote a year ago on this blog, "the voices of nature can be heard addressing him directly. But the things they tell him aren't at all what one might expect - like the thrush calling him to 'come in' to the woods at dusk or the beguiling beauty of a snowy woods that he stops to admire, until his horse pulls at his harness to remind him of his promises." The weariness of which the apple-picker speaks isn't simply physical. The sleep to which he is leaning, and the dreams he predicts will visit him, speak of a long year (a long life) coming to its close. It would be going too far, in this case, to say that what the speaker is going to is death. As Heaney says, it would rob the poem of all of its sensuous life.


(1) Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes."

A Tale of Two Dutertes

Last week I wrote about Arthur Koestler's efforts to get inside the headquarters of the fascist rebels in Spain in 1936. He believed that it was the only way anyone outside Spain would ever get a clear understanding of what was happening, since none of the liberal newspapers in  Europe did. The role of a foreign journalist inside such places of conflict and confusion can sometimes be vital. Since the election of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in 2016, I have sometimes felt like a foreign correspondent observing the extraordinary events that have taken place here. But, unlike Spain in 1936-38, or Germany after the election of Hitler as Chancellor, it seems that observers outside the Philippines have a far different, and clearer, view of events than ordinary Filipinos do.

Like the 2018 midterm elections in the U.S., which was branded as a referendum on Trump (and Trump lost), the election on May 13 here in the Philippines is a referendum on the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, whether or not anyone dares call it that. Duterte's six-year term in office is only halfway over. And if it is true that all of the congressional, gubernatoral, and mayoral races around this far-fung archipelago were a referendum on Duterte, the Philippine sitting president, unlike his American counterpart, achieved a resounding mandate. Despite a significant drop of more than twenty per cent in the president's public approval rating, it is still at a healthy 60 percent. A majority of Filipinos are convinced that Duterte, or "DU30", is the best man for the job. But they are not exposed to foreign media coverage of Duterte's performance, which is overwhelmingly negative. Which brings me to the central puzzlement: which of the two widely divergent interpretations of Duterte's performance in office is closer to the truth - the one in the Philippine domestic media that paints him as a bold and courageous champion of the people or the one in every international news outlet that paints him as a thug and a virtual dictator?

There is a long tradition of press freedom in the Philippines, but as vocal critics of Duterte's murderous drug war over the past three years have gone down, one by one, both political rivals killed in "ambushes," and elected officials, like Senator Laila de Lima, being arrested on manufactured charges and placed in "detention," it has become increasingly clear that the Philippine press is playing it safe. On any given day, camera crews from the nightly network news dutifully follow police engaged in "buy-bust" (aka sting) operations in the streets of Manila, nabbing tiny amounts of methamphetamine (called "shabu") or marijuana (both classified as "dangerous drugs") and a handful of pesos, and putting the pathetic faces of those arrested (when they aren't killed outright) on national TV. Meanwhile, Maria Ressa, one of the most distinguished Filipino journalists and editor of the online news organization known as Rappler, has been arrested on one charge after another, including libel and embezzlement, but they have not stopped her open criticism of Duterte's strong arm political tactics. Shelley named poets the unelected legislators of the age, because they alone have the freedom to tell the truth. Journalists, belonging to the Fourth Estate, have the same freedom and bear the same responsibility.

Who is Rodrigo Duterte? Now 74, he comes from a prominent provincial family in the far south of the country. He was educated as a lawyer and became a prosecutor for the city of Davao, a sprawling city on the southern coast of Mindinao, the largest of the Philippine islands, was elected vice mayor and then mayor of Davao. He served as mayor an unprecedented 22 years. Like most provincial politicians, Duterte ruled Davao with absolute impunity. We were given a terrible glimpse of such impunity in 2009 by what is still called the "Ampatuan Massacre," in which more than 50 people, mostly journalists, were gunned down when someone other than a member of the ruling clan challenged their monopolization of power and tried to file a certificate of candidacy in an upcoming election. He sent his wife to file the certificate and she was among those killed, along with her unborn child. Ten years later, the people who ordered the massacre, as well as those who carried it out, have never been prosecuted. One pathetic member of the Ampatuan family, named Zaldy, was tried and convicted. He was likely singled out because he drew he shortest straw.

Duterte organized "death squads" and even took part in their patrols of Davao City, randomly gunning down perceived lawbreakers. Human rights groups documented 1,400 deaths from 1998 to 2016. Despite Duterte's claims that he made Davao the safest of Philippine's major cities, it still has the highest murder rate and rape rate in the country. When he was elected president in May 2016, confident in his prowess as an enforcer of the law, he told followers he would make the Philippines drug free in six months. When six months had passed, he said he need another six months. Now, after three years have failed to see the Philippines made drug-free, questions are being raised about the success - or lack thereof - of Duterte's drug war.

What astonishes me is how clearly ignorant of foreign affairs Duterte has revealed himself to be, that he could think he could get away with his killing squads in Manila while the whole world was watching. Whenever Duterte and his tactics are criticized by foreign governments, as they were when Barack Obama was the American president, Duterte's reaction exposed his total ignorance of the proper role of a world leader when basic human rights are violated anywhere on the globe. But, of course, the Philippines is not in any position to judge the human rights records of any other nation. The International Criminal Court in The Hague initiated an investigation into Duterte's Drug War, that has accounted for as many as 5,000 deaths since he took office. He responded to their investigation by withdrawing the Philippines' membership in the ICC, but the investigation, we are told, will continue. Clearly, foreign pressure has demonstrated to Duterte that Manila is not Davao, and that he can no longer continue his "slaughter" (his word) of Filipinos, users and dealers alike, involved in the drug trade with impunity.

Clearly, what has happened is that the murderous methods of Philippine provincial politics have been visited on the national government. Soon after taking office, a "hotline" was set up for people to call to report "government corruption." Except it sounds like life in Nazi Germany, in which ordinary citizens were encouraged to inform on one another if they noticed they were doing or saying anything that was critical of Hitler. And once the "extra-judicial killings" (EJK) of drug dealers and users was underway, Duterte promised every policeman that he will protect every one of them from prosecution for violations of the law. Rumors ("tsismiss" in Tagalog) suggests that the primary motivation of voters last month was fear of the EJKs. Drug use has declined because dealers and users don't want to be slaughtered.

Despite his tough talk, the president is now visibly frail and barely ambulatory. He can't exit or enter a vehicle without assistance. Rumors have been flying for months about his health problems. Despite his failing health, his party's gains in the May elections will probably embolden him to double down on his drug war tactics. His foolish promise to eliminate the drug trade in the Philippines (which he couldn't do if he lived a thousand years) is bound to end in failure. As long as he doesn't address the causes of drug use and addiction, he is doing nothing but stand on the roof of the presidential palace and piss into an oncoming typhoon. And his piss is being blown right back in his face.

It is easy to remind oneself that the Philippines is a small, poor, and insignificant country. Duterte is counting on international indifference to the slaughter of Filipinos by Filipinos. He is counting on our "compassion fatigue" as well as our notoriously short attention span. Justice within the Philippines is next to impossible. It must come from without.

Tear Down Reading Gaol

"Prison life makes one see people and things as they really are. That is why it turns one to stone. It is the people outside who are deceived by the illusions of a life in constant motion. They revolve with life and contribute to its unreality. We who are immobile both see and know."

Excerpt from the Preface of De Profundis

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long. 

"The Ballad of Reading Gaol," Part V by Oscar Wilde


Two BBC News articles, from May 30 and June 6, reported that a building now derelict that was formerly known and utilized as Reading Jail faces an uncertain future: "The Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which owns the Grade II listed jail, announced last month it would sell the site. It said it was working with the local authority to look at alternative uses for the site, including housing. It added it wanted the site to 'get value for money for taxpayers'."

This news item would not have attracted attention (it wouldn't have been in the news in the first place) if a cell in Reading Jail hadn't been occupied between 1895 and 1897 by Oscar Wilde, imprisoned at hard labor for "gross indecency" (i.e., homosexuality, which was illegal in England until 1967). Now people and groups in Reading and around the world are trying to have the site protected as some kind of national heritage center.(1)

The same day I read the BBC report, Reuters News Service issued a report that "Public education officials in Colorado are considering a plan to tear down and rebuild Columbine High School, saying the site remains a “source of inspiration” for potential gun violence 20 years after a mass shooting there left 15 people dead."(2) Strange, how different people in different places think so differently about the disposition of sites of great suffering and injustice. Reading Jail is becoming a place of pilgrimage for LGBT people, just like Oscar Wilde's tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. But it appears that, because of their interest, the derelict old jail may soon be protected from demolition and turned into a tourist attraction.

Look at the remaining buildings at Auschwitz in Poland. It was the location of a Death Camp at which the Nazi Final Solution sought to, and nearly succeded in, exterminating every European Jew. The whole complex is protected and no one would think of pulling it down. It seems to me that Reading Jail, too, stands there rather like the remaining buildings at Auschwitz - as a monument to injustice and human suffering. But the injustice carried out upon Oscar Wilde in that place, irrespective of the totality of the suffering that was carried out there upon all of its far less famous inmates, whom Wilde describes in moving detail in his great long poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," that was written and published in France after his release, is personal, applicable to one man, and not to the more than one million people who perished at Auschwitz.

George Orwell once wrote that "The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp."(3) The Nazis tried to destroy the evidence of their crimes, but they didn't have time enough to complete the task. The preservation of the Nazi concentration camps (as well as the labor camps and death camps) as reminders of human depravity has its own special importance, especially when half of the millennials recently polled could not identify Auschwitz from photographs.

I think there is something distastefully fetishistic about the campaign to preserve Reading Jail - something sadomasochistic, like the Christian symbol of the cross, which is an instrument of torture. But if we could consult Oscar Wilde himself about the issue of the disposition of Reading Jail, is there any doubt that he would enthusiastically recommend what the people in Colorado are considering - that the offending structure should be razed to the ground? And that perhaps the site should instead be devoted to joy in the form of a peaceful park or a children's playground? A plaque should be all that is necessary to remind visitors to the site of what once stood there, commemorating its historical (and literary) importance, without having to go to the ridiculous expense of maintaining the decrepit building, which must by now be in danger of collapse.


(1) "Campaigners fight to save Oscar Wilde prison in Reading". Between January and March 1897, Wilde wrote "De Profundis" ("from the depths"), a letter to Sir Alfred Douglas.
(2) Reuters.
(3) "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali," George Orwell: Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

Darkness at Noon Reboot

And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

The writer Arthur Koestler had a nose for trouble, a willingness to confront it, and an odd confidence in his own safety. In 1936, when a rebellion against the Republican goverment of Spain broke out, and frustrated in his attempts to learn exactly what was happening, he decided to go to Spain - not to the relative safety of the Republican-held regions, as many foreigners were doing, but to what was then the capitol of the rebellion in Seville. At the beginning of his book, A Spanish Testament, Koestler described the extraordinary atmosphere of July 1936. When the democratically-elected government in Spain began to move to the Left and enact reforms that threatened land ownership and the authority and freedoms enjoyed by the Roman Catholic church, an organized rebellion commited to toppling the government arose with General Francisco Franco as its leader and military and material support from fascist Germany and Italy. But coherent news from Spain was either not forthcoming or was incomplete. Koestler explains:

On July 18th, 1936, when the Franco revolt broke out, it looked at first as though the revolt had proved abortive and that the Government was master of the situation throughout Spain. Then the news grew more and more alarming. By the end of a week it was clear that there was to be a civil war of long duration, with possible European complications. We greedily devoured a preposterous number of newspapers ... The part played by the Press in the Spanish affair was from the outset a most peculiar one. The rebels refused to allow a single correspondent of any Left-wing or even liberal newspaper into their territory, while correspondents of liberal newspapers with pronouncedly Right-wing views were equally unwelcome on the Government side. Thus a state of affairs was rapidly created whereby, roughly speaking, the Right-wing newspapers had correspondents only ont he Franco side, and the Liberal and Left Press only on the Government side. The communiqués from the respective headquarters were grossly contradictory, and almost as great were the discrepancies between the telegrams sent by thec orrespondents on both sides, for whom a drastic censorship, furthermore, made it impossible to send out unbiased messages.

"The Spanish Civil War," Koestler concludes, "had, as it were, infected the Press of Europe ... In these circumstances, as a journalist of liberal convictions I was bound to be tempted by the idea of getting into rebel territory." So, with credentials supplied by a newspaper, Koestler embarked two days later from Belgium on a ship bound for Spain. He tried to infiltrate the rebel stronghold in Seville in order to get the scoop on their activities. He was informed on by a former German colleague who recognized him and he escaped, bringing with him proof that Mussollini and Hitler were supplying the rebels with arms and personnel.

We are not living in the 1930s, when there was nothing but newspapers and radio to disseminate information (or disinformation). Nor can we argue that every news service in America is either Left, Right or Center, as they were in Europe in the '30s. George Orwell told us that "history is written by the winners," simply because what happened in the Spanish civil war is still a subject of controversy because the Government version of events was supplanted by that of the fascist rebels. And as writers like Jorge Semprun, in his script for the beautiful Alain Resnais film La Guerre est finie, pointed out, the war was still being fought thirty years after it was officially over. In some ways, it is still being fought more than forty years after Franco's death because it is now a war for the truth.

Today, there is such a multitude of sources and media outlets, on television and online, that it is simply not possible to be completely ignorant. No one today would be in the same position that Arthur Koestler was in, trying so desperately to know what is happening in any particular place of conflict that the only way to find out is to go there himself. And yet, what is happening in the civil war in Syria is far from certain. Assad's greatest victory is outlasting our curiosity about his massacres of his own people. We are suffering from what is being called "conflict fatigue" - but it's really nothing more than the usual apathy.

An even worse fatigue is afflicting people today - "information fatigue." Then the problem isn't the medium, but the message. It is no longer an issue of how one is informed but by whom one is informed. Not only are we now supposed to be wary of everything our government tells us, but the political agenda of media outlets, with billionaire ownership, is putting whole swaths of the population deliberately in the dark and keeping them there. It is not the media's job to comfort us and tell us only what we want to hear - even if what we want to hear is lies. Last week, NBC reported the reaction of a woman who is an admitted Fox News viewer to the revelation that the Robert Mueller report contained information that implicated President Trump for obstruction of justice. “I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before," the woman told a reporter. "I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.”(1)

While I watch CNN as my primary source of news, I also get news reports from Reuters, NPR, the BBC, and The Guardian - all liberal news sources ("liberal" in the broad sense used by Koestler, synonymous with "free"). My political leanings are Leftist, so my perspective on national news in the U.S. is, accordingly, Leftist. But the news itself is presented as politically neutral. Some people, particularly on the Right who insist there is a "liberal bias" in news reporting, will probably call this a naïve expectation. But if the mainstream media is Leftist, then so, I'm afraid, is American culture. It is Leftist because the prevailing cultural attitudes are progressive instead of reactionary. If pressed, most people will profess a belief that society can improve and is improving. The good society lies ahead of us, not behind us as reactionaries believe. We have not gone too far but not far enough.

But something akin to the political atmosphere of 1936 is upon us. The same polarization of viewpoints that Koestler encountered has been happening in the American Press for several years, and has accelerated since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. He went after support from a demographic group of Americans who felt ignored or overlooked and, because of his appeal to what most concerns them (whatever it is or the liberal media might think it is), they rallied behind him and keep on rallying, despite overwhelming evidence of his incompetence. He pulled off one of the biggest cons in history. The head of the Democatic National Committee announced last month that Fox News reporters will not be invited to upcoming debates. The 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination will formally begin next February. Nine months later voters will go to the polling stations to vote for which version of history will be told. You don't need Arthur Koestler to tell you it's going to be messy.


(1) The full report is here.

Claude Goretta

The Swiss filmmaker Claude Goretta died on February 20. As sometimes happens, news of the death of an artist I admire, a writer, musician, or filmmaker, reaches me late here on my island that time overlooked. I didn't get the news about Goretta until last week. Fortunately, someone at The Guardian knew something about film and had a memory longer than a gnat's to recall how Goretta had, more than forty years ago, made at least one film for the ages. In my memory, The Lacemaker (1977) invites revisitation, and amply rewards it.

The Guardian obit is replete with the biographical details one is accustomed to find: "born 23 June 1929; died 20 February 2019." (89 years, 8 months) But it is skimpy with insights into the man. For that, an interested cinephile will have to turn to what interviews are available online. Along with Alain Tanner (who, undeservedly, got the most attention) Goretta rode the New Swiss Cinema (was there an Old Swiss Cinema?) for as long as it lasted - less than a decade it turned out. Goretta emerged from Swiss television in the late '60s and returned to it in the late '70s. The last production of his that I have seen was an excellent biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who was from Switzerland) called Les Chemins de l'Exil (1978). Then - nothing. I never heard of him again - not until last year when I found a short film he made with Alain Tanner in London in 1957 called Nice Time, and also located a film he made in France in 2000 called Thérèse et Léon, an affectionate portrait of Léon Blum, French prime minister of the doomed 3rd Republic, and his wife. It reunited Goretta with Dominique Labourier, who played Gérard Depardieu's wife in Pas si méchant que ça (1975). Goretta's reputation, however, rests squarely on three films, L'Invitation (1972), Pas si méchant que ça (Not as Bad as All That, stupidly retitled The Wonderful Crook by its American distributor) and his masterpiece, La Dentelliére, The Lacemaker. All three were Swiss/French co-productions, which enabled Goretta to use French actors, Jean-Luc Bideau, François Simon (son of Michel Simon), Gérard Depardieu and especially Marlène Jobert and Isabelle Huppert. It also ensured that his films would be seen in the wider, French-speaking world.

In The Invitation, co-workers let their hair down at a party, with consequences that are somewhat predictable (it anticipated Bruce Beresford's much more biting Don's Party). If The Invitation showed more promise than substance, Pas si méchant que ça delivered, but with a very light touch. Gerard Depardieu is Pierre, the son of a furniture maker who gets in over his head when his father becomes ill and he has to take over the running of the company. He discovers that the company is in serious debt and, rather than close down and lay off all its employees, he resorts to a life of crime - robbing a bank, a post office, and a supermarket. And instead of finding customers to buy the furniture his factory turns out, he trucks it to deserted waste ground and incinerates it. Pierre is attracted to Nelly, a postal employee (Marlène Jobert), after he traumatizes her in an attempted robbery. He settles into a double life, with no apparent conflicts. But the police are soon on his trail and, inevitably, they catch him.

Goretta wrote an original script for Pas si méchant que ça, but for his next next film he relied on a script by the author of an award-winning novel. The Lacemaker is a wonder in so many ways. Its subject is a shy, innocent young woman who works in a hair salon in Paris. So disarmingly unspectacular, more still and unhurried than a Dardennes Brothers film, it is one of the best films of the '70s. That Pascal Lainé chose to make Béatrice (or Pomme to friends) the center of the universe for the whole length of a novel was a challenge, but Goretta's even greater accomplishment of giving - gifting - the length of a film production of weeks and dozens of people to her is even more amazing. Young(ish) filmmakers eager to capitalize on the modest success of their first feature efforts would never turn to such an unshowy, unassuming, utterly tender and attentive portrait of a young woman deeply damaged by her first contact with heartlessness, an apple bruised by life, by an experience that everyone else, it seems, treats so casually, so callously. Heartbreak? It's to be expected. The world will never align with our fantasies, with romance novels. Life always falls short of the ideal. When François, an upper class young man with whom Pomme has fallen in love, learns that she is a patient in a psychiatric hospital, and visits her there, and comes away knowing how deeply his thoughtlessness had hurt her, he is moved to tears. And so is the viewer.

So why, then, did Goretta sink into obscurity after such critical success? The answer isn't hard to discover. François Truffaut made an even bigger critical splash with his first three films, but as gratifying as this recognition surely must have been for Truffaut, it didn't make him very much money, and it didn't get him any closer to becoming what he evidently most wanted to be - a professional filmmaker with an assured future ahead of him. To achieve that, Truffaut had to forsake the world of little art films for more consciously commercial products.

The same can be said of a filmmaker who was more of a contemporary of Goretta's. Jean-Jacques Annaud made two films, La Victoire en chantant (known as Black and White in Color in the US) and Coup de tête, that got him enviable critical attention, but very little else. So he absconded into international productions starting with Quest for Fire, and, while managing occasionally to make a good film (like The Lover), the artist who made those first marvelous films hasn't been seen since.

I don't think Goretta compromised himself. I simply think that a reputation for small, quiet, unspectacular films like The Lacemaker wasn't the most promising way to establish one's career. He made twenty-five films after The Lacemaker, short films and features, most of them for Swiss television. Like the Guardian obit says, "Much of Goretta’s subsequent film work, including his second adaptation of a Ramuz novel, Si le Soleil Ne Revenait Pas (If the Sun Never Returns, 1987), remained little known outside francophone countries." We need to be reminded now and then that our access to even the finest film work is contingent on forces quite beyond the fairest or most sensible control. Now that he is gone, perhaps more of Claude Goretta's films will be more accessible. It can only contribute to our esteem of this fine filmmaker.

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

After writing for sixteen years for Fortune, Time and The Nation, James Agee, whose first love had been movies, wrote the narration and dialogue for the nonfiction film The Quiet One (1948). Having published a long, flattering essay for Life about John Huston, he was invited by Huston in 1950 to join him in California to work on film scripts. Agee adapted the Stephen Crane story "The Blue Hotel," which Huston liked, but chose not to accept (the script was later published and can also be found here). It was while he was with Huston that Agee suffered his first heart attack. Agee drank heavily, and so did Huston. But Huston liked living a hard physical life as well, and he may have pushed Agee too hard. Once Agee had recovered, Huston persuaded him to write the script for The African Queen (based on the book by C. S. Forester). Prior commitments prevented him from working with Huston to adapt Moby Dick a few years later. One of those commitments was The Night of the Hunter (1955).

In 1952, Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P fortune (1) and patron of the arts, produced the "anthology film" Face to Face, based on a rather odd pairing of stories by Joseph Conrad ("The Secret Sharer") and Stephen Crane. Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is a charming story about Jack Potter, a small town marshall who impulsively marries a young lady in San Antonio and, abashed at not telling the townsfolk about her and wanting to avoid embarrassment, he tries to sneak her back to town. Unfortunately, at the very moment he arrives with his bride by train, the town drunk, Scratchy Wilson, has gone on a rampage and is looking for the Marshall, who alone has had the ability to disarm him.

Agee wrote the script for the film, directed by Bretaigne Windust. It takes up only about a third of Face to Face, which is all the time it needed. Robert Preston plays Jack Potter. Never known for his subtlety, he is perfect playing the assured, resolute town Marshall, whose tenderness toward his bride is conveyed in small looks and gestures.(2) Marjorie Steele plays the bride, and she is probably the reason the film was made, since she was Huntington Hartford's second wife at the time. He helped her movie career along as long as he could until he gave up in 1960 and divorced her. But she is excellent as Jack Potter's bride - a role that is otherwise nebulous in Crane's story. She contributes to the mystery of just exactly how and why the two of them got married in San Antonio. Scratchy Wilson is played by Minor Watson, who had a long and prolific career that started at the Essanay Studio in 1916. Some clever camera work introduces us to him drinking a bottle of whisky and cleaning his pistols, preparing to "settle" things once and for all with Jack Potter. Agee himself appears in a small role (Dwight Macdonald called the role "the town drunk") in the Yellow Sky saloon.

Agee's script invents a few funny details not in the slight story, such as Scratchy actually scratching himself in his first scene (how else did he get the name?), shooting the preacher's doorbell so that it gets stuck ringing, and, at the film's conclusion, walking away from his confrontation with Potter, Scratchy looks at his pistols (while everyone watching holds their breath) and, instead of holstering them, he merely drops them on the ground.

Dwight MacDonald called the film "a delightful short comedy". It's delightful for its giddiness - it is Fred Zinneman's self-reverent High Noon spun around on its axis - Jack Potter, marshall in Yellow Sky, doesn't know that his nemesis awaits him there and that he is planning to shoot him just as soon as he appears. But, unlike Gary Cooper in High Noon, who goes around town, accompanied by that prodding song, "Do not forsake me, o my darlin'," searching for reinforcements, Potter confronts Scratchy unarmed. And instead of Grace Kelly lighting out on a wagon when zero hour draws nigh, Potter's bride is standing right beside her husband when he meets Scratchy.

The production certainly has a backlot look to it, with housefronts instead of real houses, and all the paraphernalia of a Western town without the usual rough justice and the moral rectitude of it. In its gentleness, the film is exactly what Stephen Crane would maybe have intended it to be: a send-up of all the dime novel Westerns so popular from 1860 onwards, that promoted a purely fictionalized image of the American West for the consumption of Easterners in cities starved for excitement. Crane would examine the effects of this fictional image more seriously in his longer story, "The Blue Hotel," set in a Nebraska town on the verge of the West, as close as a "Swede," his imagination filled with dime novel delusions, would ever get to the genuine article - even if the genuine article had disappeared completely by the 1890s, when Crane wrote the story. James Agee's script for "The Blue Hotel" is so rich in details of blocking and camera placement, it's a wonder it remains "unproduced."(3)

James Agee had done so much writing-to-order for so long, sometimes unsigned, that when he finally had the time to write as he pleased, he almost didn't know where to begin. His work on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men went largely unheralded (the necessarily oversized book, to do justice to Walker Evans's great photographs, was finally published by Houghton Mifflin), and his only novel, A Death in the Family, was left unfinished. That leaves us an early volume of poetry, his voluminous film writings and his film scripts. The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, now all but forgotten, is a beautiful short film, deserving of preservation and restoration, quite separable from The Secret Sharer, that occupies the rest of Face to Face.

Dwight Macdonald wrote a moving tribute to Agee when A Death in the Family was published. His long essay includes the following paragraph:

"James Agee died in 1955 at the age of forty-five. He died of a heart attack in a taxicab, and the platitudes about 'shock' and 'loss' suddenly became real. A friend I had for thirty years respected intellectually and sympathized with emotionally and disapproved of temperamentally and been stimulated by conversationally had vanished, abruptly and for good. I had always thought of Agee as the most broadly gifted writer of my generation, the one who, if anyone, might someday do major work. He didn’t do it, or not much of it, but I am not the only one who expected he would. He really shouldn’t have died, I kept thinking, and now this posthumous book makes me think it all the harder."


(1) A&P, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, was the largest grocer chain in America in the 1950s.
(2) Preston played the father who is killed in a car accident in the 1963 film adaptation of Tad Model's play All the Way Home, which was a stage adaptation of James Agee's novel A Death in the Family.
(3) The story was adapted in 1974 to a television film by Harry Mark Petrakis and directed by Czech filmmaker Jan Kadar. Except for the vivid performance by David Warner as the Swede, its alterations of Crane's story were unnecessary and the film is now in limbo where it belongs.

Breech Birth

Lillian & Dorothy Gish

For the past few years, a political movement has been gaining momentum in the world that is best known as "populism," but which could be more accurately described as "illiberalism." One of the major driving forces behind the movement has been a strong reaction against political correctness, an aggressive kind of radical liberalism that takes liberal values to altogether absurd lengths.

The May 4 issue of the Toledo Blade ran the following story:

"BOWLING GREEN — The longstanding Gish Theater is no more. Bowling Green State University trustees Friday afternoon voted 7-0 to remove the Gish name from the campus theater following student calls to do so, according to a university spokesman. For more than 40 years, the theater has honored actresses Dorothy and Lillian Gish. Members of the college’s Black Student Union questioned the theater's name because Lillian Gish is particularly well-known for starring in The Birth of a Nation. The film is a 1915 D.W. Griffith-directed silent-movie tribute to the Ku Klux Klan that is credited for reviving the white supremacist group. It also found that while the Gish sisters 'do not appear to have been advocates for racist or exclusionary practices or perspectives,' the content and historical impact of an actor’s work should be taken into account. The task force also stated it could not find documentation that Lillian Gish ever denounced the themes of the film or distanced herself from the director or his views."

According to the university spokesman, “We struggled with historical issues in today’s time and I think that, at the end of the day, that's what universities are all about ... As a public university we engage in these discussions and debate. While not everyone will agree with this decision, I know, this is what makes strong democracy. We listen to each other, learn from each other and move forward.” (1)

Oh, how they must have struggled! It is a well-worn fact that the pioneering D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation (1915) tells the story of the Civil War from the slave-owner's side and has a powerful propagandistic aspect. As I put it ten years ago on this blog, "The case for the movie as a motion picture landmark is secure, but its content is compromised by its distortions of both history and morality in the portrayal of a 'heroic' antebellum South filled with cheerful slaves and slave owners cavorting in a bucolic paradise, destroyed by the greed and envy of Yankees. The heroes of Griffith's movie are the Ku Klux Klan, riding to the rescue in the film's last reel ... When it was released it was a sensational hit, and made Griffith a fortune. This was due largely to the riots the film's screening provoked and the refusal of some major cities to show it simply in the interests of public order. It also inspired lynchings, an activity that usually needed no provocation in many places in America. It was attacked in the press and Griffith was labelled as a racist. In response, Griffith was inspired to make his next blockbuster, the extravagant and simple-minded Intolerance (1916). Lillian Gish continually defended 'Mister Griffith,' as she called him against the charge of racism. But the film tells a very different story."

Lillian Gish needn't have bothered trying to defend Griffith. It shouldn't have come as a great surprise that the first American film to argue, convincingly, for the artistic potential of the film medium should have been such an electric reminder of America's Original Sin. Griffith was a major artist of the 20th century, but the stories that he decided the new medium should tell were at least 50 years old when the film that practically invented Hollywood was made. The Birth of a Nation stands like some monument to an outdated understanding of why the Civil War was fought. And, like so many other such monuments, like the one for Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, its legitimacy as a historical statement is being questioned. I have already expressed my own opinion on the subject of monuments to Confederate heroes. They stand not as reminders of our sins, but as rebukes to the outcome of what many Southerners still call the War Between the States, a war that, for them, hasn't concluded.

The Birth of a Nation is, if you will, a magnificent work of propaganda - comparable to Leni Riefenstahl's love poems to Hitler, Olympiad 1936 and Triumph of the Will. When Griffith died so ignominiously in Hollywood in 1948, James Agee, himself a Southerner, got carried away enough to write this about him:

"Even in Griffith’s best work there is enough that is poor, or foolish, or merely old-fashioned, so that one has to understand, if by no means forgive, those who laugh indiscriminately at his good work and his bad. But even his poorest work was never just bad. Whatever may be wrong with it, there is in every instant the unique purity and vitality of birth or of a creature just born and first exerting its unprecedented, incredible strength ... There is not a man working in movies, or a man who cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes anybody else." As generous and well-intended as some of Agee's words sound, he was incapable, in 1948, of seeing just how far we have come from Griffith's attitudes in the seventy years since.

But why should Lillian Gish be held responsible for it? She was an actress who, like hundreds of others, appeared in the film, collected her fee, and moved on to her next project. (As much as I am appalled at the sheer waste of acting talent lavished on trash like the Harry Potter movies, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and the superhero movies, it's impossible to blame the actors, for whom they are nothing but [extremely] well paid gigs.) Gish was from Ohio, where Bowling Green State University is situated. Griffith was the son of a Confederate colonel who had a score to settle with the United States. Doubtless, Gish was utterly oblivious of Griffith's agenda in making The Birth of a Nation. He himself was incapable of seeing its broader implications and would never have dreamed how we react to it more than a century later. In 1969, Stanley Kauffman could write, "Trotsky's famous remark about Celine is that he 'walked into great literature as other men walk into their homes.' In aptness of genius, at least, the same can be said of Griffith and film. By now it's a commonplace that he gave the new medium its grammar; he also gave it many of its aspirations. What we see, first and fundamentally, in Griffith is a change of mind toward film that epitomizes - precedes - a huge cultural shift. At first he was ashamed of being associated with 'flickers'; he was a theatre actor and playwright, and he wanted to remain one. Within five years he had become oracular and evangelical on the subject of film ... The right man had come along at the right historical moment, and the result was a fury of creation that helped refashion the culture of the entire world." (3) All of this is just what any cinephile would say in any final assessment of Griffith's legacy to film. But the people who wanted Lillian Gish's name expunged from their campus were most definitely not cinephiles.

Needless to say, the BGSU spokesman was correct in admitting that not everyone agreed with their decision. Film historian Joseph McBride eloquently expressed his disdain for the decision in an essay published by Bright Lights Film Journal last Tuesday titled "Political Correctness Run Amok: Life and Lillian Gish at Bowling Green State University , Ohio." Expressing his understandable outrage at the decision, he wrote, "A university should be a place where the history of the arts is studied with care and perspective and the debate over artists’ legacies should be allowed to flourish, rather than a place where, as too often happens today, we try to obliterate from awareness the controversial aspects of our troubled history." (4)

Clearly, nobody has time for careful debate. Ours is an era of political intolerance, exacerbated by the election of a devisive and clumsy fool as president who seemed, during his campaign, to deliberately try to lose by spouting utterly stupid, sexist, racist statements, insulting every standard of civility. He continues to do so practically every day. And instead of provoking unanimous revulsion for him, tens of millions of Americans saw him as the Last White Hope and voted for him. As a reaction to his appeal to the lowest, commonest denomination, the rest of America is acting just as petulantly by demanding the immediate expulsion of every suggestion of disagreement or variation from the new draconian standards of correct behaving and correct thinking and correct expressing. As I suggested above, it is engendering a backlash that appears to be sweeping the world. It's getting to be difficult to imagine a positive outcome.

(1) Toledo Blade.
(2) James Agee.
(3) Stanley Kauffmann.
(4) Joseph McBride. McBride mentions in his essay that Quentin Tarantino denounced John Ford as a racist for his having appeared as a Ku Klux Klansman in The Birth of a Nation. This business of singling out actors for having appeared in a film that has fallen out of the Zeitgeist's favor reminds me of how Hitler went after actors who had appeared in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. One of them, Kurt Gerron, fled Germany to France, and thence to Holland. When the Nazis invaded, he and his family were taken first to Theresienstadt, where he was forced to make a film painting a cruelly false picture of life in the camp for foreign consumption. As soon as it was finished, Gerron and his family were shipped to Auschwitz and killed.