Larkin, Eagleton and the Old Fools

Terry Eagleton is a Lancaster University professor of English literature. He is also an outspoken socialist. Normally, this shouldn't make any difference. George Saintsbury was the kind of extreme Tory that doesn't exist today, or not openly. World events since the Victorian Age, and developments in the arts and literature, have made such a world view as Saintsbury possessed indefensible. Yet Saintsbury's literary criticism is still valuable because he never allowed his political prejudices to interfere with his aesthetic values.

Using the words "aesthetic values" will immediately have some people reaching for their pistols. But Terry Eagleton, unlike Saintsbury, refuses to check his politics at the library door. Eagleton seems to view all literature as divisible between progressive and reactionary tracts. Since the death of Harold Pinter, he sees contemporary literature as having acquiesced to the perceptible shift in British politics to the Right. But he has always been disinclined to accept the established view of literary legacies. In 1993, he appeared on the BBC Four programme Without Walls to present his J'accuse against the poet Philip Larkin:

"It was Philip Larkin who wrote,

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

A verse that was supposed to have opened up a Brave New Era in modern poetry. But rarely, in my view, have we been more thoroughly duped. The truth is that it's Larkin who 'fucked up' his readers by seducing them into his own dingy world of boredom, self-pity, and disgust."

And so on the programme goes - an extreme exception to the common reception of Larkin - for another 25 minutes. Eagleton called in a number of people, including some of Larkin's closest friends, to confirm what we already know: that Larkin was a miserable specimen of a man, smugly conservative, exactingly selfish in his affairs with women, a bigoted racist, an avid collector of bondage pornography, who entertained pedaephilic fantasies.

But he was also self-loathing in the extreme. He clearly saw his own shortcomings as a human being and in his poetry regretted them some of the time but also sometimes celebrated them. I can think of few poets who had a more thorough and devastating self-awareness. But he made his weaknesses and shortcomings into strengths by making them into a central theme. It isn't exactly his own voice speaking in "A Study of Reading Habits," but it might as well be:

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar.  Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

(20 August 1960)
           
Exactly where did all that reading get him? And where did all the renown as a poet get him? Left alone with himself, as we all are at the end of the day, he wondered if any of it was worth it. What good was the fame (he was offered, but declined the Poet Laureate title), or the money, when it couldn't improve his looks, his goodness, his worthiness of love and happiness? Those things were for others, not for Larkin. What else could he write about, if not himself? Written in 1954 but not published until 1973, "Continuing to Live" stands alone, like a summation:

Continuing to live - that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
 
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.
 
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
 
And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
 
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
 
(24 April 1954/A Keepsake for the New Library, 1973)


For Eagleton, the truth that Larkin knew about himself must be rejected because it is not universal. Eagleton is a theoretic critic (as opposed to the non-ideological "belles lettrists"), and he is justifiably defensive about it: "To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem." Of course, if all we have to go on is what is "on the page," academics and critics would have no function outside of simply explaining to us what we have just read. So we are presented with all the salacious stories about a writer's life, his or her sexuality, politics, tastes. Last month I asked, apropos of V. S. Naipaul, if a writer's personal life should have anything to do with our evaluation of his writing. The private Naipaul was a considerably nastier specimen than Larkin, yet his fiction is outstandingly good.

Nobody said you have to like Larkin or, for that matter, any important writer. Plenty of people never liked Shakespeare, and said so in no uncertain terms. One of the people who didn't like Shakespeare and was appalled by his continuing reputation as a great playwright and poet was Leo Tolstoy. When he finally had had enough, Tolstoy wrote a diatribe against him in 1903.(1) All his life, Tolstoy confesses, he had read Shakespeare, first in Russian and German translation and later in English, but he had never been able to agree with the common conclusion about his greatness. Finally, in old age, he could take it no more, so he wrote his pamphlet, which has not, as far as I can tell, changed anyone's mind. It is almost like the book, written in the 1960s by a Swede who would not otherwise be remembered, called Anne Frank's Diary: A Hoax, that tried to convince people that Anne Frank and the Holocaust that consumed her was a scurrilous invention and a slander on the German people.

Terry Eagleton has probably read but hasn't learned from George Orwell's essay, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool." Orwell used the Tolstoy pamphlet twice, once in 1941 and again in 1947, as illustrations of "the frontiers of art and propaganda." Orwell was, like Terry Eagleton, a socialist. But he scrupulously rejected orthodoxy, especially when it interfered with judgement. Orwell was aware that every æsthetic preference "is either something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by non-æsthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug."(2)

All art is propaganda, Orwell claimed. But he also insisted that not all propaganda is art. "Æsthetic scrupulousness is not enough, but political rectitude is not enough either."(3) "Every piece of writing has its propaganda aspect, and yet in any book or play or poem or what-not that is to endure there has to be a residuum of something that simply is not affected by its moral or meaning - a residuum of something we can only call art."(4)

Orwell had in mind the Marxist critics who were his contemporaries, like Edward Upward. But he could have had Terry Eagleton in mind when he wrote:

"It is strange how invariably his æsthetic judgements coincide with his political ones. . . The basic trouble with all orthodox Marxists is that, posessing a system which appears to explain everything, they never bother to discover what is going on inside other people's heads."(5)

After parading a selection of witnesses for the prosecution, Eagleton concludes his video essay in the same tone with which he began:

"Defeatist, lugubrious, mean-spirited, implacably negative - in Philip Larkin, post-imperial Britain got the poetic talent it deserved. The Less Deceived, or, one might translate, No Flies on Philip, is the title of one of Larkin's early volumes, though few poets have been more deceptive. His poetry makes a virtue out of incapacity, and the ultimate value is just to live hopelessly, in solitude, without self-deception. Of course, you might claim the poet has a right to his or her misery. It's a way of seeing, after all. But Larkin made a career out of being a miserable old so-and-so who raised boredom, emptiness and futility to a fine art. He was a death-obsessed, emotionally retarded misanthropist who had the impudence to generalise his own fears and failings to The Way Things Are. And in the process he trapped his readers with him in a state of permanent casualty."

Eagleton has the ability to tell us everything he thinks is wrong about Larkin except why so many people continue to read - and enjoy - his poetry. By targeting his readers, Eagleton does manage to explain the origin of his distaste for Larkin. I think the reason Larkin is so widely read is because he writes poetry that avoids being deceptive, difficult, and diffuse. His language is the everyday, yet he often addresses subjects that are immense. Take this "death-obsessed" poem, "The Old Fools," as a prime example. Larkin doesn't avert his - or his readers' - eyes from the terror that awaits us all:

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:
Why aren't they screaming?

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can't pretend
There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines
How can they ignore it?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun's
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taking breath, and them crouching below
Extinction's alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.
 
(12 January 1973)


The points that Eagleton makes against Larkin are actually the very qualities that make him great, however negative they may seem. As Orwell wrote in closing his answer to Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare:

"There is no argument by which one can defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible. And if this test is valid, I think the verdict in Shakespeare's case must be 'not guilty'. Like every other writer, Shakespeare will be forgotten sooner or later, but it is unlikely that a heavier indictment will ever be brought against him. Tolstoy was perhaps the most admired literary man of his age, and he was certainly not its least able pamphleteer. He turned all his powers of denunciation against Shakespeare, like all the guns of a battleship roaring simultaneously. And with what result? Forty years later, Shakespeare is still there, completely unaffected, and of the attempt to demolish him nothing remains except the yellowing pages of a pamphlet which hardly anyone has read, and which would be forgotten altogether if Tolstoy had not also been the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina."(6)


(1) "Shakespeare and the Drama," published along with another pamphlet, "Shakespeare and the Working Classes" by Ernest Crosby.
(2) "Charles Dickens," 11 March 1940.
(3) "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," The Listener, 29 May 1941.
(4) "Tolstoy and Shakespeare," The Listener, 4 June 1941.
(5) Review of The Novel To-Day by Philip Henderson, New English Weekly, 31 December 1936.
(6) "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic, 7 March 1947.

Barry Lyndon

When it was first released in 1975, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon suffered the fate of being labelled (by Pauline Kael) a "coffee table movie" - like a coffee table book, oversized, too unwieldy for a paperweight or a doorstop, beautifully illustrated but otherwise useless. Many, even Kubrick fans, were puzzled at his choice of subject, after the technical wizardry of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the physical energy of A Clockwork Orange, both set in a not-too-distant (or not distant enough) future.

Thackeray's novel, serialized as The Luck of Barry Lyndon but published later as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., is not up to his best work.(1) He labored over it and was only satisfied when it was finished. In Malta, on a journey he described in From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, he wrote in his journal "Wrote Barry but slowly and with great difficulty." "Wrote Barry with no more success than yesterday." "Finished Barry after great throes late at night." Intended as a throwback to the picaresque novels of Fielding and Richardson, it lacked the robustness and humor of the originals, and Redmond Barry's adventures are not very edifying. What goes up must invariably come down. But it is also a short novel, just two hundred pages with nineteen chapters. So it comes as no surprise to read Thackeray's title to chapter eleven "In Which The Luck Goes Against Barry".

Kubrick's adaptation of the novel required changes, the most obvious of which was dispensing with Barry's first person narration and creating a third person narrator. This alteration distances us from the narrative, which was clearly part of Kubrick's design. (A significant part of Kubrick's design with A Clockwork Orange was the retention of Alex's first person narration, which makes the viewer root, however reluctantly, for Alex.) It isn't that Barry is an unreliable narrator. Kubrick's narrator merely helps gloss over the scenes that Kubrick had deemed superfluous - or logistically impossible. Near the end of his tale, Barry says unapologetically of himself, "I am of the old school; was always a free liver and speaker; and, at least, if I did and said what I liked, was not so bad as many a canting scoundrel I know of who covers his foibles and sins, unsuspected, with a mask of holiness."

As for the film narrative, Kubrick follows Thackeray closely, without placing emphasis on one incident more than another. Some details are altered or eliminated. For example, in the novel Barry recognizes the Chevalier de Balibari to be his uncle, whereas in the film he is only a fellow Irishman. Also in the novel, Redmond, a child of Nora's (Barry's first love) to whom Barry is godfather (it is easy to infer, given his first name, that he is Barry's son) is the source of considerable trouble to Barry in the late stages of the story. And Lord Bullingdon is sent to America to fight the rebels, is reported killed, but returns to England, by then a Viscount. He delivers a thrashing to Barry, but there is no duel, Barry is not wounded and does not lose part of one leg. Barry dies in prison in the novel, but the film tells us nothing of him after his return to the Continent. Aside from its dramatic impact, Kubrick may have added the duel with Bullingdon because Andrew Robinson Stoney, the adventurer whose exploits inspired Thackeray to write his novel, had once fought a mock-duel to trick his titled lady into marrying him. The film leaves us believing that Lady Lyndon still loves Barry, whereas the situation in Thackeray is much more complicated.

In Kubrick's films, he seems to have been driven by problems of visualization, like how to intelligently depict ape-men as well as man-made space ships in their element, or how to realize a dystopian vision of a world deeply different from our own that yet appears only slightly different. With Barry Lyndon, Kubrick apparently wanted to reproduce an 18th-century Europe that exists today only in paintings from the period, and to do so while being faithful to the light that he saw in them. "Natural lighting" is a misleading term. It doesn't always mean using existing light, the light we can see with the naked eye. To capture that would require the use of "fast" film lenses with adjustable irises - opening the iris to let in more light the same way the iris in our eyes dilates when the light is low. For Barry Lyndon, Kubrick acquired a still camera lens developed by the German camera firm Zeiss for NASA that they used to photograph the dark side of the moon. Kubrick had the lens attached to his film camera and used it when he wanted to photograph any interior scenes lit entirely by candlelight. Exterior scenes that required more flexibility with available light were shot with Arriflex cameras.

When looking back on the making of the film and their experiences of working with Kubrick, Ryan O'Neal and Marisa Berenso tell us a great deal about his technique. He never planned his camera positions, which required an extra amount of waiting by his actors for the setups. He kept his principal actors under contract for months (the film took a year to shoot) and in costume on the set because he never knew when he might need them. And he refused to use stand-ins for matching shots where they were not even on camera. Ryan O'Neal, stupidly ridiculed for being so out of place in the lead role, mentioned that, once stumped for an idea during shooting, Kubrick consulted a coffee table book of reproductions of 18th century paintings and, finding a domestic scene of a man and a woman seated together, told O'Neal and Marisa Berenson (who impersonated Lady Lyndon) to sit just like the figures in the painting.

The climax of the film is Kubrick's only improvement on Thackeray. The duel in the dovecote between Barry and Bullingdon is superbly staged and executed, and provides the film with its parabola, from the first duel that set Barry on his adventures, to the last that effectively ends them. Barry is banished, paid off with an annuity. The narrator (the lovely voice of lovely old Michael Hordern) tells us: "Utterly baffled and beaten, what was the lonely and broken-hearted man to do? He took the annuity and returned to Ireland with his mother to complete his recovery. Sometime later he travelled abroad. His life there, we have not the means of following accurately. He appears to have resumed his former profession of a gambler, without his former success. He never saw Lady Lyndon again."

Kubrick's terse epilogue (a closing title before the end credits) isn't Thackeray's: "It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now. Thackeray's close is neither as sad nor as weak: "The [Lyndon] estate has vastly improved under his Lordship's [Bullingdon's] careful management. The trees in Hackton Park are all about forty years old, and the Irish property is rented in exceedingly small farms to the peasantry; who still entertain the stranger with stories of the daring and the devilry, and the wickedness and the fall of Barry Lyndon."

I have watched the film several times, in a movie theater when I was 17, on video and on dvd.(2) So, after more than three hours of breathlessly beautiful photography, what does Kubrick's film leave me with in 2018? I suspect that the varying critical appraisals in 1975 can be traced to the writers' attitude toward the setting which, like it or not, Kubrick brings to vibrant life. Vernon Young in The Hudson Review took the time to describe the scene of the closing duel in detail, and concluded: "Barry Lyndon, a work of great beauty, striped with the bizarre, is substantiated by its historical location; it takes place in Europe of the 1700s." Young, of a reactionary bent, loved Europe, even as he hated what it was becoming in the 1960s and '70s.

Pauline Kael was (in)famous for never watching a movie more than once and for always going with her gut reaction. (Roger Ebert was her worthy successor in this practice.) I doubt that her assessment of Barry Lyndon had anything to do with its failure at the box office - the only Kubrick film to suffer such a snub from filmgoers. But I'm afraid she got as close to the truth as anyone in the intervening 43 years. In The New Yorker she wrote: "This film is a masterpiece in every insignificant detail. Kubrick isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures. Barry Lyndon indicates that Kubrick is thinking through his camera, and that’s not really how good movies get made—though it’s what gives them their dynamism, if a director puts the images together vivifyingly, for an emotional impact."

Barry Lyndon is as useless as it is exquisite. I am not entirely utilitarian in my judgements. A film can serve no purpose whatsoever and still provide one with a rewarding expense of one's time. But, like the paintings that evidently inspired it, Barry Lyndon just sits there on the wall (or the screen) in beautiful repose. While it comes closest than any other film to capturing, not the look of the 18th century, but how the 18th century wanted us to see it, it is a series of tableaux non-vivants. So we get the architecture and the clothes and how they appeared without artificial lighting. Given the relative dark of drawing rooms lit entirely by burning candles, we can at last understand why everyone wore so much makeup - otherwise no one (not even a Zeiss lens) could see their faces. As for the wigs, none of the characters in the film appears to age, but their wigs turn grey. But isn't the reason why they wore wigs to conceal their true age?

Alfred Hitchcock once argued that complaining about the content of his films was like wondering whether the fruit in a still life painting was sweet or sour. But if the painter is any good, we would know from the fruit's appearance whether it was sweet or sour. In Barry Lyndon all the fruit is made of wax, with all the appearance of life, but inedible.

But it was also the last Kubrick film of any substance, however lifeless. His next film was The Shining, which is so overwrought that it fails miserably even as a horror movie. (I laughed when Jack Nicholson went berserk.) It made me wonder if Kubrick intended the film to elicit frights at all. Barry Lyndon was revived in theaters in 2016, prompting a new audience to marvel at it. I marvel at how precipitously movies have declined that audiences can now find Kubrick's lost art so marvelous.


(1) Thackeray was an enthusiastic gastronome. The facsimile of the 1886 edition of The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. that I have incorporates A Little Dinner at Timmin's, which presents Thackeray's talents at their best.
(2) Kubrick personally supervised and approved the video and digital transfers of all his films.

He Said, #Me Said

Sigmund Freud is one of those intellectual mountains that have to be scaled before anyone can call themselves an educated person. He is also one of my heroes. Whatever has happened to his myriad "theories" - which are nothing but empirical postulations based on extensive and documented study - about human psychology in the eighty years since his death, psychoanalysis is an important and legitimate field of scientific research largely thanks to Freud. Of course, it was not as Science that Freud's writings first attracted my interest almost 40 years ago. My mother had been the beneficiary of several years of psychoanalytic treatment, for reasons that are related to the point I wish to make.

In his great book, The Tangled Bank, Stanley Edgar Hyman examined four men, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, James Frazer, and Sigmund Freud, and their achievements as imaginative thinkers, as creative artists whose great leaps in the dark contributed immensely to our understanding of humanity and our history. Whatever their specific scholarly and scientific contributions to their various fields, they were brilliant writers - managing to communicate in clear German and English prose the most complex concepts and ideas.

One of the hallmarks of a genius is his ability to recognize when he has made a mistake and to at least attempt to correct it. One of the first theories put forward by Freud was based on the analysis of dozens of subjects, women suffering from some form of neurosis (or "hysteria" as it was called at the time). Freud discovered that one of the consistencies between almost every individual case was the sexual abuse of the women at an early age by a male family member, usually the father. The abuse was suppressed by the child, made into a great lifelong secret until the effects of its suppression, a traumatic childhood event, resurfaced in the form of neurotic mental problems in later life.

Freud called his theory, "The Seduction Theory" and his research into the subject was published in 1896. Not long after he posited this theory, however, Freud decided to amend it. He decided that the claims of sexual abuse made by many of his female patients were actually admissions of sexual fantasy: that the women had childhood fantasies of a sexual nature that they later regarded as inappropriate, suppressed them, and that, when the women reached maturity, these fantasies resurfaced as remembered events in their childhood.

Freud's alteration of his original theory has been interpreted by some scholars and psychologists as an act of moral and intellectual cowardice. They argue that Freud knew that his Seduction Theory would cause enormous controversy in genteel European society, especially among men who were fathers of daughters. They argue that, faced with an awareness of the controversy that his feminine neurosis theory might bring about, Freud decided to backtrack and redefine the basis of his theory.

The change in Freud's theory was tied to his broader "Oedipal Theory" that applied to both women and men. Children engage in sexual fantasies that involve the adults in proximity to them. With boys, it is the mother who invariably becomes their first object of sexual desire, and it affects their whole sexual lives. One-third of the subjects in his initial Seduction Theory study were men. But Freud then argued that it was the mother, not the father, who was the seducer, in fact or in fantasy, for both infant boys and girls. The simple fact that his theory was named for the character from classical Greek drama reveals the extent to which Freud's theories were embraced as confirmation of existing poetic concepts. Artists - poets, playwrights and novelists, painters, sculptors and architects, even composers - found their oldest understanding of human behavior reinforced by Freud's rich metaphors and symbolism.

With the establishment of women's rights and the rise of Feminism, however, the most serious challenges of Freud's theories have come to the forefront. And his alteration of the Seduction Theory, and its underlying motivation, has come under serious scrutiny. Some now see Freud's suppression of evidence of sexual abuse by the father as simply his reluctance to challenge the patriarchal structure of turn-of-the-century European society. His theories that sexuality and sexual desire (the "libido") were at the root of nearly all human behavior had been controversial enough. Now that his theories were becoming established as scientific fact, he didn't want to further threaten the status quo. So he came up with a different interpretation of the cause of adult neurosis.

Whatever the true reason for the change of Freud's theory, accusations of sexual abuse are by now taken much more seriously. The #MeToo movement has effectively ended the careers of powerful men - from A-List actors to Hollywood Mogul producers to senators - based on accusations alone, on what "She said." Some of the critics of the movement, forgetting about the impact of this Moment in our sexual history, wonder why the accusers waited so long to bring their charges forward, citing the legal statute of limitations. The statute exists because eyewitness testimony is fraught with errors even when it is fresh in the memory. Over time, especially over several years, such testimony is subject to further errors from the interplay of memory and experience.

Yesterday a woman who has brought charges of sexual assault against a nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court asked that before she subjects herself to a public hearing in which the accused will be present, the FBI should investigate her claims. Not to corroborate her story but to establish her veracity. According to the protocols of the #MeToo movement, the nomination should be withdrawn and another candidate selected. If the career of Minnesota senator Al Franken could have been ended by accusations of misconduct alone, then why is this Supreme Court nominee still under serious consideration? Of course the process has become "politicized" - it was politicized from the beginning. Everything is politicized now. Justice Kavanaugh's nomination is toast. Stick a fork in it.

[Postscript September 21, 2018.

Since making the above post I have heard two arguments in support of Justice Kavanaugh. The first came from a group of "Republican women" who were careful not to denigrate the woman making the accusation of attempted rape against Kavanaugh, but attacked "the Democrats" for waiting until the eleventh hour to produce her letter. Then they said that every man shouldn't be held responsible for acts they committed when they were 17, inferring that attempted rape is an act that all men commit at that age.

The second argument was that simply giving Kavanaugh's accuser a hearing will encourage other women to come forward with similar accusations every time a man is nominated or runs for public office, inferring that the accuser is an opportunistic liar

My answer to both of these arguments is NOMINATE/VOTE FOR WOMEN ONLY. They can be trusted because they don't have penises.]

Keeping Watch

As I watch, from the other side of the world, the disaster in the Carolinas wrought by Hurricane Florence, I have very mixed feelings. I am amazed at the overwhelming response to the event - the number of people either appointed to provide support or volunteers who just want to help the people who live in the path of the storm, who have to endure the high winds, the heavy rains and the floods. But also the media coverage: CNN sent all its top reporters (Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon) to provide 24/7 coverage of what they are calling the "storm of a lifetime."

I find myself bemused by the sheer scale of the disaster response in the States, but not especially surprised. The reason is simply that response to disasters  here in the Philippines where I am living is nonexistent or simply too little, too late. As I write this, a category 5 Super Typhoon named Mangkhut in Asia (but named Ompong in the Philippines for utterly inexplicable reasons) has moved across the northern tip of the main island of Luzon with probable but, as of yet, unreported deaths and damage. There was another typhoon, at least as powerful, that passed close by my location in November 2013. It was named Haiyan to everyone else, but Yolanda to Filipinos, which has led to predictable confusion whenever the storm is mentioned to anyone outside fhe country.

Here are some things you won't see in the wake of Hurricane Florence that happened here after Typhoon Haiyan: police positioned to protect property, like Malls, abandoning their posts and going to help their helpless families; armed gangs going door to door robbing households of everything of value (and raping girls and women there); mass looting - entire malls stripped of their merchandise, grocery stores of their food; fishermen bringing drowned people up in their nets; hundreds of dead bodies interred in mass graves before they are even identified because morgues run out of space and there is no power (for almost 6 weeks); misappropriation of millions of dollars in international relief (the governor on my island detoured rice shipments and sold it all on the black market - I saw it happen); ordinary people setting up makeshift stores to sell the food they looted at exorbitant prices; price gouging of gasoline and other necessities. Plus a death toll at around 8,000 because people's grass huts and wood shacks were blown apart. No warnings, no evacuations, no rescues. No cellphone signal for 10 days, no internet connection for two weeks, no power for almost 6 weeks, no Anderson Cooper, no Chris Cuomo, no Don Lemon providing 24/7 coverage. Nobody cared. 

These massive storms are likely the consequence of climate change, or what they used fo call global warming. I am bemused, but again not exactly surprised, at the American inaction in the face of irrefutable evidence of what is happening and what is probably coming if something isn't done. Watching the news coverage of Hurricane Florence, which has stationed reporters on the shores of the Carolinas, I found myself looking up a poem by Robert Frost called "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep":

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be---
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

It was published in 1936 as part of the collection A Further Range, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The collection also contains "Desert Places," "Design," and "Provide, Provide." It isn't among Frost's best known or most popular poems, both because of its qualities as a poem, which are great, and because it is tacitly critical of his readers, humanity, that can't seem to find its way to looking farther or deeper into the universe. It can't even look at what is in front of its face the things that could spare it a multitude of problems - like climate change.

The poem's broader implications, which can't get much broader than they are, have been discussed to death since its publication. Still, the poem stands apart, unassailably itself. The best commentary on the poem I have read is in Randall Jarrell's book, Poetry and the Age. Jarrell was one of Frost's champions, who argued both against the superficial popular image of Frost as a Farmer's Almanac poet of homespun wisdom and the academic (wilful) ignorance of his occasional greatness, in poems like "Home Burial," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Acquainted with the Night," and "Directive." Here is Jarrell's commentary:

First of all, of course, the poem is simply there, in indifferent unchanging actuality; but our thought about it, what we are made to make of it, is there too, made to be there. When we choose between land and sea, the human and the inhuman, the finite and the infinite, the sea has to be the infinite that floods in over us endlessly, the hypnotic monotony of the universe that is incommensurable with us—everything into which we look neither very far nor very deep, but look, look just the same. And yet Frost doesn't say so—it is the geometry of this very geometrical poem, its inescapable structure, that says so. There is the deepest tact and restraint in the symbolism; it is like Housman's

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.

The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault:
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.

But Frost's poem is flatter, greyer, and at once tenderer and more terrible, without even the consolations of rhetoric and exaggeration - there is no "primal fault" in Frost's poem, but only the faint Biblical memories of "any watch they keep." What we do know we don't care about; what we do care about we don't know: we can't look out very far, or in very deep; and when did that ever bother us? It would be hard to find anything more unpleasant to say about people than that last stanza; but Frost doesn't say it unpleasantly—he says it with flat ease, takes everything with something harder than contempt, more passive than acceptance. And isn't there something heroic about the whole business, too - something touching about our absurdity? If the fool persisted in his folly he would become a wise man, Blake said, and we have persisted.

The tone of the last lines—or, rather, their careful suspension between several tones, as a piece of iron can be held in the air between powerful enough magnets—allows for this too. This recognition of the essential limitations of man, without denial or protest or rhetoric or palliation, is very rare and very valuable, and rather usual in Frost's best poetry. One is reminded of Empson's thoughtful and truthful comment on Gray's "Elegy": "Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem … And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society would prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy."(1)

Standing on the beach in the middle of a hurricane might seem like insanity, instead of when you're a reporter and a cameraman revealing what is in store for so many of us if we're not more careful. We must go on keeping watch, heedless of our native limitations.

(1) from Poetry and the Age (Knopf, 1953). 

The Return of the Soldier

Rebecca West was 25 when, 100 years ago, her first novel The Return of the Soldier was published. The First World War wasn't to conclude until November 11, but to speculate that the war's last battles, claiming its last dead or disfigured, were a tragic waste of life would be an admission that the dead millions in the three previous years of the war had died for something.

The novel is narrated by Jenny Baldry, the 30-something unmarried cousin of Chris Baldry. Chris is at the front, and Jenny lives with his wife, Kitty in a glorious house called Baldry Court, made even more glorious by renovations made since the death of Chris and Kitty's 2-year-old son five years ago. The scenes at Baldry Court make it seem as if the way of country life that the Great War brought to such an abrupt end was breathing its last in its own marbled mausoleum.

There has been no word from Chris in two weeks, and Jenny's concern is exacerbated by troubling dreams:

"Of late I had had bad dreams about him. By nights I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of No-Man's-Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety, if it was that. For on the war-films I have seen men slip down as softly from the trench-parapet, and none but the grimmer philosophers could say that they had reached safety by their fall. And when I escaped into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff and think of stories I had heard in the boyish voice of the modern subaltern, which rings indomitable, yet has most of its gay notes flattened: 'We were all of us in a barn one night, and a shell came along. My pal sang out, "Help me, old man; I've got no legs!" and I had to answer, "I can't, old man; I've got no hands!"' Well, such are the dreams of English-women to-day. I could not complain, but I wished for the return of our soldier."

Out of the blue, a middle-aged woman pays a visit to the house, and immediately we are subjected to the most horrific class snobbery, from Kitty and from Jenny herself. The woman is Margaret Grey, formerly Allington, who abruptly informs Kitty and Jenny that "Mr. Baldry" (she doesn't know his rank in the army), has sent her a telegram to a 15-year-old address, along with letters that convince her that he is ill. Kitty and Jenny at first don't believe her and think she is perpetrating a fraud in order to get money out of them. But the telegram is authentic. Having endured their insults and incredulity, Mrs. Grey leaves convinced that she should never have come.

Frank, Chris's cousin, who is "in the church," goes to France and discovers him in a hospital in Boulogne. He has suffered an unusual form of shell shock that has affected his memory and he believes that he is not married to a woman named Kitty with whom he had a deceased child, but that he is 15 years younger and is in love with Margaret Allington and that she, too, is as she was 15 years before and is in love with him. The letters he wrote to her are passionate love letters written by a man she hasn't seen since they parted company when she was a girl of 20. She, too, has married and (we only learn in the last chapter) lost a 2-year-old child five years ago.

Chris is told the truth about his wife (but not about the lost child) and he is invalided home to Baldry Court. He is happy to be home, though he doesn't recognize the house's renovations, and he demands that he see Margaret at once. Jenny fears he won't recognize the middle-aged Margaret, but she finds that "to lovers innumerable things do not matter."

While Chris and Margaret cavort like children in the house's gardens and woods, Kitty calls on the expertise of several doctors, who study Chris's case and examine him without knowing what should be done to bring him back to normalcy. But one doctor, a psychiatrist (a newfangled profession in 1918) named Gilbert Anderson arrives, confesses to the three women, "It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself." But Margaret, who goes upstairs with Jenny to make herself more presentable to the good doctor, discovers a photo of Chris's dead boy in Jenny's room. Realizing that both Chris's child and hers had died five years ago at the age of 2 leads her to conclude that "It's -- it's as if they each had half a life." This remark leads Jenny to think how she "had of late been underestimating the cruelty of the order of things. Lovers are frustrated; children are not begotten that should have had the loveliest life; the pale usurpers of their birth die young. Such a world will not suffer magic circles to endure."(1)

Margaret tells the doctor, who knew nothing of the child, and he suggests that it might be the key to Chris's amnesia. He tells them to find a memento, a toy or piece of clothing that could break into Chris's amnesia. Margaret volunteers, but expresses doubts, knowing that a cured Chris will have to go back to the war. But she relents, "the truth's the truth, and he must know it," and takes a red ball and a blue jersey out to Chris. Kitty and Jenny remain in the nursery and Kitty asks Jenny to watch from the window and to tell her what she sees.

"There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness of the earth. Under the cedar-boughs I dimly saw a figure mothering something in her arms. Almost had she dissolved into the shadows; in another moment the night would have her. With his back turned on this fading unhappiness Chris walked across the lawn. He was looking up under his brows at the over-arching house as though it were a hated place to which, against all his hopes, business had forced him to return. He stepped aside to avoid a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the grass; lights in our house were worse than darkness, affection worse than hate elsewhere. He wore a dreadful, decent smile; I knew how his voice would resolutely lift in greeting us. He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with the soldier's hard tread upon the heel. It recalled to me that, bad as we were, we were yet not the worst circumstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead."

As most critics noticed at the time, The Return of the Soldier is about how three women, all in love with one man (Jenny's unrequited passion for him is obvious), save him from the trauma of war. But if there is any weakness in this terse tale of a man whose confrontation with the painful reality of the modern world drives him into a denial of that reality and into a retreat long before experience, it is the patness of its resolution - the simplicity of Chris's "cure." Dr. Anderson's job is merely to point out to the three women things they figured out on their own.

The novella reminded me in places of The Beast in the Jungle, which makes sense since West was heavily under the influence of Henry James. Just beneath the lovely surface, in which Baldry Court is itself a place of dreams far from the trenches, there is a crushing pain. The only happy ending is Kitty's, who gets her husband back.

The transformation of West's intimate little novel into a film in 1982 is hardly a transformation at all. Everything seems to arrive intact on the screen, with a little welcome fleshing-out of the characters and their motivations. After a credit sequence depicting Ann-Margret (Jenny) watching over a sleeping Alan Bates (Chris) in the middle of what looks like a nocturnal battlefield, the film begins inside Jenny's dream, with her and Chris as children at play half in Baldry Court and half in No Man's Land - the cratered wasteland between the British and German trenches. Richard Rodney Bennett's music cries out insistently on the soundtrack as Jenny raises a stick like a rifle and - BANG! - she sees Chris blown to smithereens. The film shows us Baldry Court's social life both before Chris goes off to war and after he jettisons his memory. The role of his cousin, Frank (Jeremy Kemp) is greatly expanded in the film, and he is definitely NOT "in the church". And Chris is provided with terrifying visions of death that break into his otherwise placid home life.

One crucial scene not in the novel is an absurdity: Kitty and Jenny travel to France to find Chris. They find him in a ward crowded with other men. He recognizes Jenny but reacts violently to Kitty's suggestion that she is his wife. The absurdity of the scene is that it would be logistically impossible (and probably prohibited) for British families to travel to France to find their wounded soldiers. The scene in the hospital, in which people clamor around a nurse demanding information about their loved ones, is suitably nightmarish. An older man asks in a crushed voice as he passes the nurse on the stairs where he can collect his son's "things."

The film gives us more of William Grey, Margaret's husband (West merely sketches him in). He is played beautifully by Frank Finlay. I mean, what must he have felt about Chris's love letters to Margaret? There is a quiet scene in which he studies Glenda Jackson as she's cleaning up after the milk has boiled over on the stove, like he's trying to look into her thoughts.

Ann-Margret's performance is, thankfully, understated. Julie Christie's pretty frigidity is perfectly contrasted with Margaret's dormant love. Glenda Jackson gives by far the best performance. The scene in the child's nursery as she recalls the short life of her own child is heartbreaking. Ian Holm manages to impress in the tiny role of Dr. Anderson. But Alan Bates carries all the drama of the film, managing to suggest with his bearing alone something of the trauma he's been put through. The film shows us what Rebecca West could not: the very moment of Chris's reawakening. Shot mostly at middle-distance, the scene is perfectly staged. We first see him (from Jenny's vantage point at the window) enter on a bicycle, while Rodney-Bennett's music makes us feel suddenly protective of this middle-aged man who is about to be reminded of his child's death. Margaret presents him with a stuffed toy (ironically a soldier in khaki), he takes it and he acts exactly as if a veil has been lifted from his eyes. He gives the toy back to Margaret and strides resolutely ("every inch the soldier") towards the house. As he nears it, we can hear the sound of the heavy guns in faraway France, and as the scene fades we can hear the officer's whistle ordering his men over the top.

Alan Bridges directed adroitly, interweaving reality, memory, and nightmare in this ultimately sad tale. Hugh Whitemore, who died last month, wrote the script, and his additions to West's text - except for the hospital scene - are perfectly apposite. Two years after The Return of the Soldier, Bridges returned to the English countryside in The Shooting Party, from the Isabel Colgate novel. Set in 1913, and taking its cue from the rabbit-hunting scene in Renoir's The Rules of the Game, its prevailing sense of doom was somewhat overstated but exquisite nonetheless.


(1) Not knowing what to do about Chris, Margaret tells Jenny that she prayed and read the Bible, but it gave her no help. "You don't notice how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help."

Gullible Gilliam

The following thoughts are completely off-the-cuff - in fact they are provoked by a clip I ran across on YouTube, taken from what (I guess) is a longer discussion by Terry Gilliam for Turner Classic Movies, and I have had to transcribe his remarks on scraps of paper (I wasn't wearing cuffs at the time) in order to copy them here.

The short clip (just shy of 2 minutes) that caught my attention (without rewarding it) was titled "Terry Gilliam criticizes Spielberg and Schindler's List." By no means do I intend to add emphasis to Gilliam's utterly glib comments [I examined the merits of Gilliam's work a few years ago in "One Trick Python"], but the subject is fascinating to me because I still haven't quite recovered from the surprise (more like the shock) of finding so much in Schindler's List that is brilliant and moving and disturbing in quite positive ways, when it was made by one of Hollywood's most phenomenally successful whizkids, maker of Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and Jurassic Park. Though he indicated now and then (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun) a capacity for seriousness - that is, the ability to distinguish intelligence from mere cleverness and to reflect that ability in his approach to his material, it wasn't until Schindler's List that Spielberg showed us all what he could really do. Most of the time, the efforts of commercially successful film directors, writers, and composers to create something that they want people (critics) to take seriously end in disaster. Think of Liberace's first recording of his interpretations of works by Chopin, Liszt, and Beethoven. The music critics savaged it because, without the charming presence of Liberace himself in concert, the music sounded terrible. The recording quickly outsold every other available classical recording. When asked for his reaction to the critics' verdict on his recorded piano stylings, Liberace famously said, "I cried all the way to the bank." Who needs to be taken seriously when you're rolling in cash?

Here is everything Gilliam said in the clip:

"The great difference between Kubrick and Spielberg is Spielberg is more successful. His films make much more money. but they're comforting, they give you answers - always the films are answers. And I don't think they're very clever answers. And 2001 had an ending - I don't know what it means. I don't know, but I have to think about it, I have to work. And it opens up all sorts of possibilities and probably the next person I speak to has a different idea of what that end means. Suddenly we're in discussion, now we're talking. Ideas come out of that. That's what I always want to encourage. Spielberg, and the success of most films in Hollywood these days, I think is down to the fact that they're comforting, they tie things up in nice little bows, gives you answers - even if the answers are stupid, they're answers. You go home and you don't have to worry about it. The Kubricks of this world and the great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.

"There's a wonderful quote in the book that Freddie Raphael wrote about the making of Eyes Wide Shut. It's called Eyes Wide Open, and he's talking to Kubrick about Schindler's List and the Holocaust, and he says, 'The thing is, Schindler's List is about success. The Holocaust was about failure.' And that's Kubrick, and that's just spot-on. Schindler's List had ... we had to save those few people - AH! Happy ending. A man can do what a man can do, and stop death for a few people. But that's not what the Holocaust was about. It was about the complete failure of civilization to allow 6 million people to die. And I know which side I'd rather be on. I'd like to have a nice house like Spielberg, but I know which side I'd be on."

I don't know what the context of Gilliam's remarks was, but it was probably Spielberg's film A.I., which was based on ideas developed by Kubrick. Evidently, Stanley Kubrick saw the serious streak in Spielberg that I mentioned above, which explains why he consulted Spielberg extensively in preparation for the project A.I. When Kubrick died suddenly, Spielberg felt obliged to take over and finish the project. Heaven only knows what Kubrick would've made of the project, but Spielberg made a great mistake in taking the helm. As Stanley Kauffmann commented: "Spielberg's roseate view of science fiction--as a means to glimpse future possibilities--grated with the view of Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, in which the human race is riven by disjuncture between moral stasis and scientific advance." (1)

For several years, in the 1960s and into the '70s, Stanley Kubrick was the Great Hope of American film, just as Orson Welles had been for a short time in the '40s, before a series of tough breaks and bad choices effectively dashed that hope. After the success of Dr. Strangelove in 1966, Kubrick was in a position, with his own production company (Hawk Films, Ltd.), to make virtually any film he wanted. The first result was 2001, which was technically interesting, and remains the finest example of the science fiction film genre. But the "ideas" behind the film are damned silly. And the phantasmagorical ending, which makes perfect sense given the premise that some alien intelligence immensely more advanced than our own has visited the human species in the form of a black monolith that emits Gyorgy Ligeti music at certain moments in our evolution and has helped us along toward the ultimate immaculate conception of the "star child" who appears in the size of a planet to the grandiose opening notes of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra - to me, that ending didn't provoke discussion. It ended discussion.

Kubrick's next films, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining ... to list them is to relive one's mounting dismay at Kubrick's squandered talents. He left a number of unrealized projects at his death. Steven Spielberg adopted some of them - like Kubrick's long-cherished Napoleon project, which is being developed (the last time I checked on it) as a series for HBO.

But, Schindler's List is a success story? It's the story of real people, some of whom lived through the Holocaust. Spielberg's film doesn't elaborate on their subsequent lives, but that they owed their lives to the reluctant heroism of Oskar Schindler is not arguable. Spielberg's treatment of the story has its momentary missteps, but it is a formidable, if utterly unexpected, achievement from a filmmaker who proved that he had it in him. The fact that the importance of the film has sparked so much "discussion" is proof enough against Gilliam's point. I, too, know which side I'd rather be on.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, July 23, 2001.

War & Peace

Though they were in power for only 75 years, the Soviets saw great significance in anniversaries. The 10th anniversary of the October Revolution inspired them to commission major films on the subject from its best filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein. That Eisenstein's film, October, was released several months after the anniversary was the subject of an essay I published on the centenary of the revolution last November.

When the 150th anniversary of the 1812 invasion of Czarist Russia was approaching, a film adaptation of Tolstoy's epic historical novel War and Peace was commissioned by the state film production company, Mosfilm. Hollywood had already tackled Tolstoy's novel in 1956. Directed by the silent-era's King Vidor, it was a respectable dud, featuring the miscast Henry Fonda, who was too old to play Pierre Bezuhov, Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostova, showing off what Dwight Macdonald called her "good bone structure" and little else, and Mel Ferrer an utter nullity as Prince Andrei.

The movie was a box office success, but the Russians wanted to take back their national epic and the Soviet Ministry of Culture announced that they were going all-in with a mega-production of their own. The film that began principal shooting on the 1962 anniversary was eventually released in four parts between 1966 and 1967. The production was unprecedented, mobilizing the entire state film apparatus in the acquisition of artifacts to lend its production design and costumes the ultimate in authenticity. 

The appointed director, Sergei Bondarchuk, announced: “Our duty is to introduce the future viewer to the origins of sublime art, to make the innermost mysteries of the novel, War and Peace , visually tangible, to inform a feeling of fullness of life, of the joy of human experience.” Bondarchuk, who started his film career as an actor, appointed himself to play Pierre, the novel's central character, though he was almost as old as Henry Fonda. The ballerina, Lyudmila Savelyeva, played Natasha gracefully and naturally, and the film's highest-paid actor, Vyacheslav Tikhonov, played Prince Andrei in a finely shaded performance, despite also being too old for the part. But the actors, every one of the cast of literally thousands (one of the very last of its kind), are dwarfed by the scale of Bondarchuk's production. Though the grand balls are impressively staged, it is the battles for which the film is justifiably famous. 

And it is here that I must interject a disclaimer. The decision was made by Mosfilm, the film's production company, that the film would be shot on high-resolution 70-millimeter film stock, and not on the usual 35mm film, using anamorphic lenses to create a "letterbox" widescreen aspect ratio. This decision called for the use of special cameras to handle the film format, but also 70mm film projectors when the finished film was screened in cinemas. I have never had the opportunity to see Bondarchuk's massive film on the big screen - I have only seen it in a compressed digital format. Some films (some would insist all films) were designed expressly for the big screen. Bondarchuk's War and Peace exploits the special attributes of an outsized, panoramic big screen - one that can accommodate the 70mm aspect ratio - the same ratio as two television screens side by side. However closely I may hold my device to my face, I can only get an approximate, attenuated look at what audiences saw when the films were first exhibited in cinemas. When he saw the English-dubbed version of Bondarchuk's film in 1969, Roger Ebert was inspired to write: "It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and -- yes -- splendid movie. Perhaps that's just as well; epics seem to be going out of favor, replaced instead by smaller, more personal films. Perhaps this greatest of the epics will be one of the last, bringing the epic form to its ultimate statement and at the same time supplying the epitaph."(1)

My disclaimers out of the way, and mindful of the fact that the experience of watching a film conceived for a cinema screen on a 5 x 3 device is the future of what was once romantically known as filmgoing, I am able to recognize that this 6 3/4-hour War and Peace is a formidable, sometimes beautiful, and momentarily amazing film experience.(2)

There are three battles depicted in Bondarchuk's film - two in Part I, Schöngrabern (which was little more than a skirmish) and Austerlitz, and the major, full-scale Battle of Borodino in Part III. When asked about his experience of directing the battle scenes in the Hollywood production of War and Peace, King Vidor famously claimed to have had an advantage over Napoleon because he was in command of both armies. The first battle, Schōngrabern, takes up almost a half hour, beginning with a detachment of Russian soldiers singing like a Russian National Chorus as they enter the German town. The battle itself is staged as a crescendo of Russian and French soldiers, in serried ranks, converging on each other. One of the characters, Nikolai Rostov, has his horse shot out from under him and finds himself deliriously fleeing the field. On the soundtrack we can hear a strange sort of musique concrète, with modified instruments, attributed in the credits to Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. It is quite effective in contributing to the visual confusion witnessed by Prince Andrei. Such confusion, of course, required extensive (and expensive) preparation and teams of drill masters to marshal all of the extras - including many horses - through their movements - exactly like a general. (Look for the famous "cannonball-view" shot - a first, as far as I know, in filmed battle scenes.)

But Schöngrabern was merely a dress rehearsal compared to the Battle of Austerlitz. The historical battle itself was a demoralising rout for the Russian army, and Bondarchuk makes it into a convincing disaster. The moment when Andrei takes up the standard and screams "hurrah!" at the retreating Russian soldiers, only to be knocked down by a piece of shrapnel and find himself suddenly admiring the peaceful sky above him is one of Tolstoy's greatest narrative triumphs. Bondarchuk's handling of this scene is shaky, as if the sudden shift from the external of the battle to the internal of Andrei's delirium was too much for him.

I am compelled to proclaim that the Battle of Borodino, that takes up the last half of Part 3 has to be the greatest battle scene on film. It looks exactly as if a horrific battle takes place that the cameras were there to capture. The Russian army had retreated from the advancing French for weeks when the Czar demanded of his General Kutuzov that his army stand and fight. Far outnumbered, the Russians fought valiantly but managed only to slow Napoleon's advance in Moscow. Even Napoleon saw it as a pointless, if calamitous, expense of life, estimated at between 72,000 to 73,000 dead, wounded, or missing for both sides. Pierre foolishly shows up in fine clothes and a conspicuous white top hat to watch the battle, and his mounting distress at the desperate carnage around him contributes a personal perspective on the catastrophe. In a cinema, the effects of watching the scene must have been overwhelming. Even viewed on my tablet, the images and sounds combined to create in me a nervous, altogether distressing reaction. Two other war films that I've seen had a similar effect: Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron and Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. After watching Peckinpah's film in a cinema, I found myself trembling uncontrollably as I walked to my car.

After all the expense of rubles and testosterone that went into the re-creation of the battles in Bondarchuk's War and Peace, the single scene that I found most moving was the one you can find at the beginning of Book 6 of Tolstoy's novel, in which Prince Andrei, resigned to a joyless existence after the death in childbirth of his wife, refusing even to recognize the beauty of the spring day when he travels by coach to visit the estate of the Rostovs, sees an old oak standing alone, defiantly bare of new leaves and blossoms in the middle of a verdant forest. He recognizes himself in the oak. Then he sees Natasha, and overhears her at night in the room above his calling out to Sonya to come to the window to admire the night. To simulate the moonlight, the entire night scene in the film was shot with a blue tint - an old technique from the silent era used by Bondarchuk to remarkable effect.

Returning the same way he came, Andrei's coach takes him through the same forest of the day before. But the once bare old oak is unrecognizable - it has come back to life, responding to the irresistible pull of the spring with green leaves and white blossoms.

"Yes, it is the same oak," thought Prince Andrei, and all at once he was seized by an unreasoning springtime feeling of joy and renewal. All the best moments of his life suddenly rose to his memory. Austerlitz with the lofty heavens, his wife's dead reproachful face, Pierre at the ferry, that girl thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night itself and the moon, and.... all this rushed suddenly to his mind. 

"No, life is not over at thirty-one!" Prince Andrei suddenly decided finally and decisively. "It is not enough for me to know what I have in  me — everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the sky, everyone must know  me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!" (Book Six: 1808-1810, chapters 1-3)

This is the scene that every Russian once knew by heart, that the prisoners in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gather together to recount to one another in one of the novel's most moving scenes. The scene is almost like a personal memory to me, and to everyone else who has read it in the 150 years since Tolstoy's novel was published. Sergei Bondarchuk captures the scene beautifully in his film.

Though an impressive, sometimes daunting accomplishment, Bondarchuk's War and Peace fails to maintain a high enough degree of intensity and inventiveness to make it anything more than a series of richly detailed illustrations of Tolstoy's novel. Bondarchuk was tempted, as even some of the greatest filmmakers have been tempted, by the potential for sheer spectacle presented to him in Tolstoy's battle scenes. Although cumulatively effective in capturing some of the excitements and horrors of war (they completely overshadow everything else in the film), Bondarchuk is too much of a little boy, playing with his tin soldiers. Film has to be about more than just explosions to transfix the viewer's attention. I remember watching a television series about silent films when I was in my teens called The Toy That Grew Up. Judging from the box office receipts for the latest superhero/Star Wars movies, film still has a lot of growing up to do.


A closing note to film restorers. I can't say for certain that efforts to restore this 50-year-old film haven't already been undertaken. All I can say is that the digital version of the film available online is in sometimes execrable condition. I understand that the 70mm film stock used for the film was Soviet-made and often of such sub-standard quality that more than 10 per cent of the exposed footage had to be re-shot by Bondarchuk. The color in several scenes is in flux, as if the colors printed on the celluloid had bled into one another. This is especially noticeable in the battle scenes, in which the shifting colors seem to be a part of the atmospherics of sky, smoke, cannon blasts, and swarming masses of extras. In a strange way, the horrible condition of the film actually contributes to the hellish pictures of battle. The film I saw is in quite desperate need of restoration.


(1) Roger Ebert, June 22, 1969. Ebert's review can be found HERE. 
(2) The film is advertised on Wikipedia (consider the source!) at 431 minutes, more than 7 hours. The version I have seen, which has no perceptible lapses in continuity, is 405 minutes. Interestingly, the version cited on Roger Ebert's website is 415 minutes.