Billy Dud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Singer To Mourn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

To the New World

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Darning socks," Maggie interrupted.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

To the New World!

Mifune

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

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

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

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

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

Manifesto

In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilizations that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away. And even the smallest and most incomplete offering at this time can be a proud act in defense of that faith.

Katherine Anne Porter



 

The Years: 1913

I am reading Virginia Woolf’s next-to-last novel, The Years, a sort of family chronicle very unlike Galsworthy. More beautiful, personal and, of course, modern - published in 1937. It is divided into years in the lives of members of the Pargiter family, beginning in 1880 when most of the principal characters are children. A lot had happened to the family by the time Woolf got to 1913, including the death of the patriarch, Abel Pargiter. One of his daughters, Eleanor, to whom he was especially close because she never married and ran his household at Abercorn Terrace, has the onerous duty of selling the old house. It is one of the most moving parts of the novel (I haven’t yet finished it). So moving that I felt compelled to post a part of it here.


1913

It was still snowing when the young man came from the House Agents to see over Abercorn Terrace. The snow cast a hard white glare upon the walls of the bathroom, showed up the cracks on the enamel bath, and the stains on the wall. Eleanor stood looking out of the window. The trees in the back garden were heavily lined with snow; all the roofs were softly moulded with snow; it was still falling. She turned. The young man turned too. The light was unbecoming to them both, yet the snow—she saw it through the window at the end of the passage—was beautiful, falling.

Mr Grice turned to her as they went downstairs,

"The fact is, our clients expect more lavatory accommodation nowadays," he said, stopping outside a bedroom door.

Why can't he say "baths" and have done with it, she thought. Slowly she went downstairs. Now she could see the snow falling through the panels of the hall door. As he went downstairs, she noticed the red ears which stood out over his high collar; and the neck which he had washed imperfectly in some sink at Wandsworth. She was annoyed; as he went round the house, sniffing and peering, he had indicted their cleanliness, their humanity; and he used absurd long words. He was hauling himself up into the class above him, she supposed, by means of long words. Now he stepped cautiously over the body of the sleeping dog; took his hat from the hall table, and went down the front door-steps in his business man's buttoned boots, leaving yellow footprints in the thick white cushion of snow. A four-wheeler was waiting.

Eleanor turned. There was Crosby, dodging about in her best bonnet and mantle. She had been following Eleanor about the house like a dog all the morning; the odious moment could no longer be put off. Her four-wheeler was at the door; they had to say good-bye.

"Well, Crosby, it all looks very empty, doesn't it?" said Eleanor, looking in at the empty drawing-room. The white light of the snow glared in on the walls. It showed up the marks on the walls where the furniture had stood, where the pictures had hung.

"It does, Miss Eleanor," said Crosby. She stood looking too. Eleanor knew that she was going to cry. She did not want her to cry. She did not want to cry herself.

"I can still see you all sitting round that table, Miss Eleanor," said Crosby. But the table had gone. Morris had taken this; Delia had taken that; everything had been shared out and separated.

"And the kettle that wouldn't boil," said Eleanor. "D'you remember that?" She tried to laugh.

"Oh, Miss Eleanor," said Crosby, shaking her head, "I remember everything!" The tears were forming; Eleanor looked away into the further room.

There too were marks on the wall, where the bookcase had stood, where the writing-table had stood. She thought of herself sitting there, drawing a pattern on the blotting-paper; digging a hole, adding up tradesmen's books… . Then she turned. There was Crosby. Crosby was crying. The mixture of emotions was positively painful; she was so glad to be quit of it all, but for Crosby it was the end of everything.

She had known every cupboard, flagstone, chair and table in that large rambling house, not from five or six feet of distance as they had known it; but from her knees, as she scrubbed and polished; she had known every groove, stain, fork, knife, napkin and cupboard. They and their doings had made her entire world. And now she was going off, alone, to a single room at Richmond.

"I should think you'd be glad to be out of that basement anyhow, Crosby," said Eleanor, turning into the hall again. She had never realised how dark, how low it was, until, looking at it with "our Mr Grice," she had felt ashamed.

"It was my home for forty years, Miss," said Crosby. The tears were running. For forty years! Eleanor thought with a start. She had been a little girl of thirteen or fourteen when Crosby came to them, looking so stiff and smart. Now her blue gnat's eyes protruded and her cheeks were sunk.

Crosby was stooping to put Rover on the chain. 

"You're sure you want him?" said Eleanor, looking at the rather smelly, wheezy and unattractive old dog. "We could easily find a nice home for him in the country."

"Oh, miss, don't ask me to give him up!" said Crosby. Tears checked her speech. Tears were running freely down her cheeks. For all Eleanor could do to prevent it, tears formed in her eyes too.

"Dear Crosby, good-bye," she said. She bent and kissed her. She had a curious dry quality of skin she noticed. But her own tears were falling. Then Crosby, holding Rover on the chain, began to edge sideways down the slippery steps. Eleanor, holding the door open, looked after her. It was a dreadful moment; unhappy; muddled; altogether wrong. Crosby was so miserable; she was so glad. Yet as she held the door open her tears formed and fell. They had all lived here; she had stood here to wave Morris to school; there was the little garden in which they used to plant crocuses. And now Crosby, with flakes of snow falling on her black bonnet, climbed into the four-wheeler, holding Rover in her arms. Eleanor shut the door and went in.

Take Cover

In Part IV of George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up for Air a bomb is dropped inadvertently in the old center of Lower Binfield, the town where the novel’s hero, George Bowling, grew up in the Edwardian era and to which he has returned to rediscover the past. One of the most refreshing aspects of the novel is how it doesn’t romanticize the inter-war years, called by some the Long Weekend. But the years before the First World War must’ve seemed especially rosy in 1939 to a survivor of that war. It wasn’t Orwell’s generation (he was just 15 when the war ended), but Orwell was well acquainted with their psychology. 

What inspires Bowling to take his sentimental journey is the imminence of war in Britain. Was it inevitable or not? 

I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues, and the castor oil and the rubber truncheons and the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. Is it going to happen? No knowing. Some days it’s impossible to believe it. Some days I say to myself that it’s just a scare got up by the newspapers. Some days I know in my bones there’s no escaping it.

Those words, “rubber truncheons” appear seven times in the novel. They appear in Orwell's journalism as well. To suggest that they were a peculiar fixation of Orwell’s is to pretend that their appearance wasn’t deliberate. George Bowling wanted to know if such things were coming to sleepy old England. So he tells us about the world of his childhood and goes back 25 years later to see if any of it is left. Just as he is getting used to the reality that the past – the world he knew before the last war – has completely vanished, a bomber on a training run drops a bomb on the town by mistake. (Orwell describes the aftermath with telling details, like a thin stream of marmalade oozing along the floor of a demolished house mixing with another stream of blood.) 

I’ll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you’ve got at the back of your mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it—at any rate, I knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen.

And what terrifies Bowling even more than war is the “after-war”:

The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, sloganworld. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.

The after-war world that Bowling predicts never got as far as England. Orwell expanded on it in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four, but it was one that was all too familiar in the occupied countries of Europe. The British government knew that war was coming, but the avoidance of war at all costs was their guiding principle. Before war was declared, Germany had already re-taken the Rhineland, absorbed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia with no one to oppose them. It was somewhat reasonable to assume that appeasement would go on until the Germans possessed all of Europe. Whatever you did, appease the Nazis or not, the coming catastrophe could not be averted. 

When France was invaded in May 1940, its leaders decided, after just 6 weeks, to capitulate rather than put up a fight. The fall of France in June 1940 was eventually blamed by the Vichy government on the Third Republic and its failure to take Nazi Germany seriously, even after the invasion and rapid conquest of Poland, and to prepare France for when its turn would come.

But the Vichy government, anxious to place the blame for their cowardice elsewhere than squarely on themselves, also named certain films for having effectively demoralized France in the ominous months before the blitzkrieg arrived. This seems hard to comprehend even now, 80 years later. But two particular films, both masterpieces, were singled out for having grasped the terrible mood of the moment and for having indelibly expressed it. The two films were Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lêve and Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu. The films were banned and were both thought to be lost by the time of the liberation four extraordinarily long years later.

The vulnerability of France in 1939 was greater than anyone realized. It was best expressed in the last great effulgence of creativity on defiant display in its cinema. Jean Renoir, who had achieved popular success with the realistic melodrama, La bête humaine, in 1938, was given what grew into the biggest budget ever for a French film to make a film that was initially intended to be entertaining. When the film, La règle du jeu, was released on July 7, audience reaction varied from unfavorable to hostile. The producer demanded that Renoir cut the film, including all the scenes in which he himself appeared in the role of Octave. The cuts, eventually amounting to thirty minutes, simply made the film more confusing and audiences more hostile to it, until the French government banned it outright as detrimental to national morale. 

Like Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, the climax of Jean Renoir’s 1939 film The Rules of the Game takes place with an explosion – in the film’s case with a shotgun blast. Andre Jurieu is shot to death by Schumacher, a groundskeeper who mistakenly believes he is absconding with his wife. It is a completely unforeseeable end to the film, viewed by some as a satire on the French upper class on the eve of World War II. Renoir did everything he could to appease the public and cut and cut and cut his film, noting the things the audience didn’t like and removing them as much as possible. One of the things about the film that no one seemed to like was Renoir himself in the role of Octave. But why? 

Octave, although old friends of Robert and of Christine’s family, and a close confidant of Andre, is a peripheral character is every way. He is a hanger-on, without a title or a profession or any apparent means of income. If he resembles any other character in the film it is Marceau, the tramp poacher. In fact, one of the most touching scenes in film takes place near the very end, after Andre has been killed. Having to some extent caused the “accident” (he’s the one who brings Andre to Robert’s country estate and Schumacher was convinced that he was shooting Octave), he knows that it’s time to go. Octave and Marceau are leaving together, in the dead of night, and as they walk away from the chateau there is the following exchange:

Octave: “Where are you headed?”
Marceau: “Back to the woods. I’ll try to pick up some odd jobs here and there. And you?”
Octave: “I’m going back to Paris. I’ll try to manage on my own.”
Marceau: “We may run into each other again some day.”
Octave: “I doubt it. But you never know. Anything’s possible. Good luck!”
Marceau: “Good luck!”

Renoir’s film turned out to be a kind of memorial to a moment in history so fragile and transitory that it could never have lasted. Even before his film was finished the moment had passed. This is what gives the film a strange, lustrous beauty – we are witnessing the end of a society. Renoir enlisted in the French army film department and remained in France into 1940. When the invasion took place, he wisely fled to Hollywood. The maker of the pacifist film La Grande Illusion, that had dared to suggest that Germans and Frenchmen were brothers and that war was a big illusion, Renoir's name was high on Hitler’s list of people to be arrested by the Gestapo

Meanwhile, under the blitz in England, George Orwell seemed to enjoy the straightened conditions. According to John Carey, “Friends believed that he actually the shortages and discomforts of the war. He welcomed clothes rationing, and longed for the time when moths would have devoured the last dinner-jacket even if it meant everyone wearing dyed battle-dress in the interim.”

Such, such are my thoughts in the middle of my first week of self-quarantine here on my island among the tinkling palms. The virus has yet to penetrate this far. But the pandemic is still young.