“There are no small parts, only small actors.”
(proverbial)
Wherein the author’s epic ambitions . . . hold (as to a pattern filed), while he, employed as a journalist in a way he finds analogous to the fetching position of shortstop (adopted in baseball in consequence of the preponderant right-handed batter) learns the value of quick (but telling) response.
STARDOM PLUS
Curious, variable “results” come to be published whenever and wherever seekers after “that elusive quality”—whether they be would-be entrepreneurs or putative hawkers—announce they’ve found it/they’ve got it. They’re talking about stardom. Purpose, radiance, oneness, strength, grace, the will, the ways . . . all that.
Stardom may be appraised as a quality, as a realm of no easy access, as a locked chamber: a fantasy tomb as a way of life. Is stardom accidental? Is it a visitation? Is it a compulsion—all that heaven allows? What makes a star, and who knows?
What is it that separates the star from fellow toilers? There is no explanation. They who think they know are mistaken. They who say they know are dangerous: do not entertain them; pass them by.
One verified method of celebrating as opposed to dissecting mythic celebrity (stardom) is to isolate the MC (star). First go hunting and capture ye your star. Be sure you know what you’re after. The star is not only not like fellow toilers at that point in history/geography; the star is not like other stars either. No two great singers are remotely alike. No star actress wears anybody else’s old hair or calls herself an actor. The prima ballerina assoluta is elevated, not hoisted.
Then examine the star in relation to the star alone. As Mrs. Siddons apparently had the wit to understand, honesty is the mark of a star. A star is honest in the most difficult way, and in the old meaning. It’s a pain to be a star. Toilers may eventually go home to rest. A star may be allowed the occasional luxury of assuming an attitude of repose; s/he may not rest.
Is stardom ephemeral? The controversy rages. Is the goddess you watched devouring fate her way last night on the Million Dollar Movie a star anymore as she plotzes just now across Seventh Avenue into the Stage Delicatessen fixated on cold tongue and Diet Dr Pepper? Is there a God?
The diva nearing ninety is a star. She’s a star if ever there was one. To ask why would be an impertinence. Watch her progress into the opera house. Consider her eternal. Thirteen years ago, on a summer night in Central Park, the ancient high priestess of the dance raised two potted flames up in her hands. She lifted her arms against the dark. Nobody in the world could know why. She was a star; that was all.
Stars understand their stances, but not apparently. “True stars impel; they need never campaign.”
Ten Things Stars Rehearse to Enforce Their Stardom
1. Glances of Withering Scorn
2. Concern
3. Poetical Attitudes
4. Political Attitudes
5. Repose
6. Passion (akin to Concern)
7. Empathy (with Cosmetics)
8. Composition
9. The Balance of Opposites (once called Paradox)
10. LOVE
Stars keep their interior journeys to themselves. Stardom demands secrecy. Obsession is obsession.
Examine then the star in relation to the star alone. Employ circuitous illogic exclusively.
Stalwarts devoted to diva are strenuously concerned merely with establishing the relation in quality (her oneness) between diva this day and diva yesterday. (And nothing is so over as yesterday.)
Picture people (all mankind) indulge most profitably in litanies, not comparisons. There is no yesterday on the screen. A name is a face is a voice is now.
Dancers dance tonight; they’ve never danced before. “The dancer is in competition with no one but him/herself.”
The realm of stardom: no such place. This mistaken notion is most often encountered in the wicked proposition that X, the star, apart from possessing that c’est ça, sine qua non, plus tax, “it”—the mystery passport—happens to have been in the right place at the right time. Thus souls have come to grief and ruination paying lip service to a spurious cartography—expounding, predicting, assuring, yakking—only in the end to discover that it is high time for them to check in their lips and their notions of service and go home. There is no land where stars bloom.
Stardom as a sealed chamber. This notion is romantic. It is thereby either all too true or just idiotic. If all too true, it is also currently all too bruited (about). Private lives are private hells—but hold! Our research will uncover the address. We find Madame X alone at home in hell—Lola Montez as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed as Norma Desmond as Alma Tormented. Or else private life is Toyland-bliss full of Madame’s souvenirs, all extensions of Madame’s immutable self—white carpets, mirrors, the Impressionists (or the Post-), marble halls. If the sealed chamber notion is just idiotic, if we may throw the French windows open and admit God’s own clear light and air, we can actually talk with the star, dance with the star, be with her as she eats and drinks and is merry. Art and life are for then fused. We are stars (for a brief spell).
The frailty of stardom. Madame is indisposed and will not sing. Madame est souffrante; elle ne danse pas. Rumbles of desperation on the closed set: the lady is incommunicado—call the agent. The High Priestess of Ptah has never been indisposed in her career; Aida may become indisposed between the boudoir and triumphal scenes. None of the Willis is quite likely to—God forbid—break a leg, but Giselle may split a tendon in the mad scene and find herself unable to come up out of the grave—so to speak—to jeté her way to salvation in the second act. Dress extras do not ever “go” incommunicado. The frailty of diva arises out of the demands she makes upon her voice. She may speak to her voice; she may not bully it. If she tries, the voice will out. The frailty of the prima ballerina is partly a consequence of the stress she puts on her center, which must become unwavering, and partly a literary device once translated and immortalized by a great lady of the screen. The frailty of great ladies of the screen is the consequence of and culmination of the belief in the frailty of women in Western civilization. As a belief, it is not long for this world.
THUH OPRA
“I know what I’ll do, I’ll throw ’em an opra.”
—Mae West, in Going To Town
What follows is eternally relevant—but it dates from, is dated by, 1978.
Mae West, eternal diva, empress of hilarity, essaying the role of Cleo Borden, fabulously wealthy cattle baroness and international temptress (in the film Going To Town, 1934), faces a problem: How to crash the set who summer out at Southampton; how to make a big splash among the dressy old bags who drink pink tea with their pinkies crooked in the air. “I know what, I’ll do,” Cleo/Mae decides. “I’ll throw ’em an opra!” So she does (or, she does so). She throws them a chamber production of Samson and Delilah. Mae West’s thumbnail Delilah is about the greatest thing she ever put on film.
“Opra” started out as chamber entertainment in late-sixteenth-century Italian palazzi. This season at the Metropolitan Opera House, Beverly Sills, no mean comedienne herself and one of America’s two top executive divas, gave a performance of the courtesan Thaïs which in many eerie ways seemed inspired by Mae West’s Delilah.
What can this mean?
Singing is the ultimate expression of sexuality. This is the meaning of all mating calls in this world. True passion does not speak, it sings. A sung mass is as much a ritual display of passion as is an opera. What it is, exactly, that singing does to the nervous system has never been explained, but it is certain that the music of the spheres is not instrumental but vocal. Angels sing. (They play harps for accompaniment.)
(Thus the author, seemingly addicted from an early age to word association and, hence, to psychoanalysis, chose his diva in a split second on a single hearing at the Metropolitan Opera House of the aria “Porgi, amor,” the opening of the second act of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. Victoria de los Angeles was, and is, the soprano’s name, and for him the name and the instantaneous nature of the decision—if private revelation in a box seat overhanging a public auditorium with, as the soprano of his dreams later averred, every main characteristic of the corrida, can be called such a thing—proved a double winner, for the onomastics of the name was, and is, quite beyond apt.)
Mothers do not play toccatas and fugues to soothe their terrified children; they sing lovely lullabies. Left alone to face the void, a pilgrim will sing, or if he cannot, hum. The sound the self makes in, to and for itself is the sound it most needs to “go on.” In opera, this need is expressed in terms of exhilarating combat, expressed in terms of “situations” often verging on hilarity, expressed opulently and thrillingly.
The Soprano
Balanchine says ballet is woman. So’s opra. The primary iconographic image of opra, even now, is that of an opulently molded woman, wearing a flowing gown and/or, perhaps, a helmet, carrying a fan or a spear. The ultimate operatic religious term is diva, which means goddess. The worship of the diva is a continuing function of operaphiles. This circumstance has come about because the diva is the anima image of the composer. All the greatest opera composers have been men. Men project their animas. The diva reigns.
Soprano is in fact a masculine word. It denotes simply one who sings sopra, or above the staff (that portion of the Western musical spectrum in which the regular host of humanity speaks and sings). The first soprani were young boys, acolytes of the Church of Rome, and castrati, a vanished breed. They carried on the tradition of the piping charmer-boys of classical antiquity. None too soon it became evident that a true woman could best produce the soprano thrust required to portray a true woman on the operatic stage. Thus were divas invented. Divas, like courtesans, have informed Western culture. The diva lives in a world of music, champagne and gems. The difficult part is the music.
The Mezzo-Soprano
She is the other diva. Her voice is of a darker coloration. She cannot sail to the very top of the female voice, but what she can accomplish in the middle and lower registers is often far more entrancing, thrilling and voluptuous than the sorts of warbles some soprani give out. She is often the heavy, the “other woman,” which, as in forties movies, opens up vast possibilities to crafty females. The classic example of mezzo-soprano composition is the role of the Egyptian princess Amneris in Verdi’s Aida. Others are the title role in Gluck’s Orfeo; Bizet’s Carmen; Fricka, in Wagner’s Die Walküre: Saint-Saëns’s Dalila; Santuzza, in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Some singers erase the distinction between soprano and mezzo-soprano by singing parts written for both, or in-between categories. (Maria Callas, Victoria de los Angeles, Régine Crespin, Christa Ludwig, Janet Baker, Shirley Verrett and Grace Bumbry are among those who have done so in our time.)
The Tenor
“The tenor? What about him?” (An anonymous diva, thinking like Mae West . . .) The tenor is the putative peacock in the garden of opra. Tenor singing signals lust. Tenors tend to be far more comically petulant, illogical and pretentious than divas. When they’re sexy, they’re very very sexy. When they’re not—Next! Great tenors are the rarest operatic species. Thus, when they impress, they impress forever. Ask anybody to name the biggest opra star ever. Caruso, period. Ask a Wagnerian who was the great Wagnerian heldentenor. Melchior. The very names Björling and di Stefano were magical in the forties and fifties, as the names Pavarotti and Domingo are today. And Vickers and McCracken and Gedda and Bergonzi. Tenors often get ideas. One current heldentenor, who sings Tristan, suggests that Isolde is really a figment of Tristan’s febrile imagination—a projection. (“If they buy that, they’ll buy me!”—one dissenting soul confessed.)
The Baritone
The baritone is the voice of the antagonist-father-brother-seducer-adviser-villain-also ran. Among the greatest baritone parts are Mozart’s Don Giovanni—written for, and often sung by, a bass—Verdi’s lago, Wagner’s Wotan, Verdi’s Falstaff, Debussy’s Golaud, Mozart’s Count Almaviva and Figaro, Berg’s Wozzeck, Bizet’s toreador, Escamillo. A good baritone voice is the most reassuring sound on the operatic stage (even, or even mainly, when portraying evil). A tenor’s hysterics may arouse, or provoke. The baritone statement tends to ground proceedings. Thus baritones tend to be stable persons. It’s in the nature of the job. Baritones accept defeat; tenors next to never. Tenors would rather perish. Baritones make better friends.
The Basso
He can be either profundo or buffo. The profundi tend to play wise old men; the buffi, foolish ones or younger rascals. The greatest basso buffo part is Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni; the greatest profundo, Mozart’s Sarastro in The Magic Flute. The line between the basso and the baritone is even fuzzier than the line between the mezzo-soprano and the soprano, but the true basso sound is one of almost infernal authority. Bernard Shaw decreed the music written by Mozart for Sarastro music fit to be put into the mouth of God. Considering the God he must have had in mind . . .
Opera Stardom
True stars impel; they need never campaign. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, opera stars were what movie stars are today. Limos and furs, caviar and champagne, affairs in the newspapers. Then movies, an equally bizarre, ferociously exigent and overwhelmingly seductive art form redefined stardom, reconstituted glamour.
The greatest opera star of all time was Maria Callas. Another great opera star is Birgit Nilsson. She possesses the biggest voice in the operatic world. Beverly Sills is a magniloquent opera star. For a time she had it all. The problem with opera stardom is that it goes when the voice does. Movie stars can last for decades; opera stars cannot.
Once, years ago, a great opera diva, a Metropolitan Opera star, a mainstay, a prima donna, was set to make her entrance as Tosca. A kindly stagehand stooped to help her with the train of her elaborate Act One costume. “Don’t bother,” she whispered, “they also pay me here to sweep the fucking floors.”
Considerations
Opera promotes seraphic absurdity. It, like toe dancing, is an outrageous enterprise. Operaphiles are dangerous. They are echt fanatical. (People who think that people who don’t think the way they think are menaces are menaces.) Opera is a potent word. It has informed the culture. Soap opera. Rock opera. Horse opera. Space opera.
What goes on at an opera? Too much for television. (Try watching one on television. Very little emerges: all gesticulating dolls.) Tales of love and lust and death—all that—sung out (or bellowed, chirped and crooned all too often). Also very funny things—meant to be so. Almost all the greatest musical shapers of the last four hundred years have grappled with the form. Beethoven wrote one single perfect opera, then stopped. Debussy also left the world one radiant masterpiece. The other great composers left quantities of them.
The Composer
The composer is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Of all the rubric pieties of the operatic enterprise, the one most bruited is “the composer’s intention.” The composer’s intention is impossible to fulfill. This is what makes opera a religion, the attempts to realize the composer’s intention. (Religion is kinetic bondage.)
There are certain definitions. There is a Mozart style, a Wagner style, a verismo style, a French style, a bel canto style, a “contemporary” style. Singers become specialists. Leontyne Price avows her best vocal pals are Mozart and Verdi. Her most conspicuous successes have been in Mozart and Verdi roles. Tito Gobbi is thought of almost exclusively in terms of Verdi villains (and the Verdi comic villain, Falstaff). Birgit Nilsson is the greatest Wagnerian singer of our time; Leonie Rysanek, the greatest exponent of the vocal style of Strauss.
The Conductor
The conductor is the composer born again—for a given performance. He must forge his intentions into congruency with the composer’s intention. Such as Toscanini did. Such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Thomas Beecham, Karl Böhm, and Georg Solti did. And Carlo Maria Giulini and Pierre Boulez do. Conductors may also become flamboyant stars, as did Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan, and as James Levine is in the strenuous process of doing just now. In America, where stardom is the established religion, “charismatic” behavior wins converts to opra. (“Yes, well, be that as it may . . .”—a dissenter.)
Attendant Priests
Opra is religion-circus-theater-spectacle. Stage directors, set designers, lighting designers, costume designers, publicity folk and collateral noisemakers—and even critics—make crucial contributions. This, as a circumstance, is not news; yet it provokes controversy.
Over a decade ago, a (then) youngish hot-shot stage director was given the job of mounting a contemporary opera’s premiere. He cheerfully announced to a group of his minions one afternoon that of course he hadn’t bothered with the music; he’d staged the play. Let the rest of them worry about the music. That venture sank like a cement block—containing the composer’s intention. Moral: Don’t hire a tin-eared hot-shot. An opposing argument: Too many singers, even still, have truculent manners in the matter of positioning themselves to make their noises. One remembers fondly that Callas could sing while waltzing (and even facing upstage). Somewhere the truth reposes. Scratch the tip of the iceberg on this question and the volcano explodes, mixing metaphor, fire, brimstone, ice and the composer’s intention.
This season, the astonishing beauty of the lighting plans for Tannhäuser and Pelléas et Mélisande proved what an enhancement such a contemporarily achieved “addition” can be. In each instance, the lighting partnered the music, telling all. This can have been no fortunate accident. The lighting designer tended to the music.
Operatic publicity folk are a valiant breed. In the clashing temperaments department, opra is as crowded as the movies, and the publicity staff must mediate day and night. They are performers, unsinging, if not unsung.
Opra is exactly like the atom bomb. No use asking where it came from. Much less ask why. It is what it is; it is.
The Metropolitan Opera
The building in which opera is housed, so far as most Americans are concerned, is still the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, a hideous blanched pile decorated in the tackiest decor imaginable, with Chagall’s cluttered whimsies pasted up on the walls, and, in the auditorium, polyurethaned cherrywood ingeniously contrived to look like Formica: they were certainly cultivating a new audience. It is a chilling theater to enter. It is, however, acoustically almost entirely satisfactory. Which means that when the lights go down the auditor has a fair chance of getting through the evening without falling asleep and having a nightmare and waking up screaming and causing some excitement. (Falling asleep is an old comic tradition at the opera. Oftentimes it is justified. In fact there are times when a body, if roused, is more than entitled to beg, “Please don’t wake me.” Opera can be killing. Let’s not name names.)
The Line, the Claque and Backstage
In the old days (the good ones), the line flourished. “The line” is the standing-room line at the Metropolitan Opera House. In those days it would form in the late afternoon. It was composed of a few hundred regulars—stalwarts—who formed alliances, friendships and marriages, who argued, who agreed, who fought the chill winters by attendance at operatic spectacle. Nowadays the line is an exigent assemblage of folks who wrangle. They buy tickets in the same way, but that is all. The differences between the old line and the new line are many and various and irksome.
The procedural rigors of standing on the line as it exists at the new Met—the constricted ambience, the self-appointed “placers” (one might as well be on line at the bank, or waiting for welfare)—induce the kind of torpor that finds expression in the generally insipid quality of the conversation carried on. The conversation on the line in our time bears the same relation to the conversation on the line at the old Met as Muzak does to bel canto. There is no scintillation. It is impossible to believe that anyone could be inspired to depict situations on the line in our time in any poetic or fictive way, that the line could nourish imaginations as it once did. What line folk are up to nowadays is ranting a lot, buying, selling and trading tapes, observing a bizarre pecking order and cruising.
The claque has gone out of fashion. At the old Met, groups of seedy gnomes would regularly organize claques for both the greats and the second-rates. Students were recruited in hushed tones by the gnomes, who would stand in the shadows near the arcade of shops and public telephones along Broadway. The approach was very much the same as “Wanna buy filthy pictures?” was in those days, and like peddling joints and poppers and angel dust is in our time. The going rate was two bucks, which meant that if a client went up to the Family Circle standing perches at the very top of the theater for $1.25, he could make enough on the deal for a snack. Plus he heard the performance for free. This was a way to sop up a little musical culture of an evening and get a few psychic rocks off in the bargain, yelping into the void, making like an opera singer. One was generally solicited for pro-screaming, for bravos; but in the seasons in which Maria Callas redefined operatic performance in New York, many were bribed to shout boos. (Students from the better schools never stooped to join this enterprise.) Debut claques were the most amusing. Occasionally one’s conscience so pricked one that, rather than cooperate in a scandal such as Charles Foster Kane might have created, one refunded the money and skulked away. The practice of claquing is generally regarded in our time as, well, tacky. The gnomes seem to have died out.
Going backstage was gorgeous in bygone days. Each diva had what was termed “the list.” To be put on the list—by one of the captains in charge of the diva’s fan club—was a very big deal. Sometimes one’s virtue lay on the line. Making the list was like making the fraternity/sorority. The only open list in the old days was Zinka Milanov’s. Everybody in New York seemed to be on it, and the diva would stay on in the dressing rooms until the wee smalls as hundreds filed in for signatures and open house. All one had to do was wait a half-hour in the freezing cold after a performance for whichever star to take off the makeup, have a belt of something and open the doors.
At the Lincoln Center lockup, select groups of the chosen are ushered into a waiting parlor backstage that looks like a seedier version of one of the rooms at Frank Campbell’s funeral parlor, there to congregate and/or suffocate until the diva of the evening appears. Going backstage is an ordeal these days. The knowing seldom bother.
The Metropolitan Opera is said—proclaimed, really—to be in the best shape it has been since the early 1950s. Whether or not this vaunted circumstance can be correlated to the surprising trend the Gallup poll recently reported—that more Americans are content with their lives in these United States than were in 1974—is worth considering. (Perhaps while listening to a Saturday broadcast or two this season. For opera foists illusion.) The one thing that is certain is that there are two distinct schools of thought and thinkers (neither of them being bribed by gnomes) on the merits of the Met’s artistic director and principal conductor, James Levine. Virtually the entire New York musi-critical fraternity (plus Harriett Johnson) considers him the cat’s couture complet. To many another seasoned listener, especially those who tend to be enthusiasts of (of all things) voices, he is rather Something Else. These are they, the immediate descendants of those Europeans who invented opera and have nourished it for nearly four centuries, the dwindling, aging, increasingly brittle backbone of a metropolitan, operatic culture that spread from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston across the length and breadth of the United States, who disapprove to the point of abhorrence the Wall of Sound the newly trained Met orchestra unleashes nightly under the baton of its gung-ho artistic director, who seems to have pared things down to a couple of bare essentials: no interpretation, just play, and for choice, just to keep things interesting (and the audience awake), two tempi: loud slow and loud fast—a barrier, through which few voices of any size smaller than those of Birgit Nilsson (or, though she’s off the roster nowadays, Eileen Farrell) may penetrate to make the odd dramatic point. (A significant exception to this perplexing routine: the phenomenal Leonie Rysanek, whose wild-card instrument, however on earth or elsewhere it was trained, is capable of cutting through any orchestral boom-box effect, not entirely unlike the way police-emergency-vehicle, ambulance and fire-truck sirens can be heard roaring up and down the avenues beyond the theater walls.)
Some sacred operatic precincts to which operaphiles make pilgrimages are the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace; the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, Wagner’s self-constructed sacred grove; the Teatro alla Scala in Milan—which by its very name summons up notions, visions, both of holy stairs and of a show-biz stairway to paradise; the Opéra in Paris, a hysterically monumental edifice erected to glorify the essentially imperial nature of the art form; the Vienna Statsoper; the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden; and Mozart’s unmarked grave.
Speaking of which, Victoria de los Angeles, no great enthusiast of either von Karajan, under whom she had sung Donna Anna at La Scala, or of Salzburg, commenting rather severely one evening at the Navarro, after having given a recital at Avery Fisher Hall, on the Salzburg festival and its politics, drew the following response from her by then dear friend the author: “You mean Mozart is spinning in his grave?” “No, Mozart is not even there in the summer; he has taken a grave at the beach.”
Close Encounters With Divas
Interviewing Leonie Rysanek, one of the two female stars of the current big Met hit Tannhäuser, is a grand experience. Sitting high over Central Park, pouring out strong coffee and slicing hefty wedges out of a big Viennese cake, offering the visitor a healthy belt of schnapps, she lounges, refusing all refreshment, and lights into a vividly detailed analysis of her role—the saintly Elisabeth, whose inner fire, flaring up and all over the turbulent music drama, leads the hero to a mystical salvation.
Miss Rysanek leaped to New York operatic fame in 1959 when she replaced Maria Callas in Verdi’s Macbeth. She was made to face booing claqueurs from the start, and she routed them all like a real warrior. She became famous right away for “the Rysanek dimension”—which detractors would describe as the notion of playing all her roles the same way, as bonkers. The truth is she found in each of her impersonations a vein of melancholy, fatalistic, introspective truth, and mined it in startling ways. Her Desdemona, for example, became an eerily precognitive collaborator in doom, rather than the more usual hapless sacrificial victim. Her Sieglinde in Die Walküre seemed consumed in exalted terror, even as she discovered and succumbed to passion. Her characterizations are relentless, and are all tinged with this arresting, often unsettling, quality. Rysanek cheerfully pours the visitor more coffee, stops, stands, paces about the room, looks over at her husband, who has been gently steering the interview in the most interesting directions, and flatly states that that is the way it must always be for her because of her Czech ancestry. Everything becomes clearer. She jokes, and chats about her famous friendship with Birgit Nilsson (who has publicly credited Rysanek with instructing her in some of the emotional demands of the parts she [Nilsson] had already made famous, and consequently of having helped her deepen her interpretations). She talks enthusiastically, approvingly, of James Levine. She paces, mentioning a persistent back problem, and offers more schnapps. She makes the visitor feel he is welcome to stay all afternoon. Her husband calls and postpones an appointment, and the diva talks on at such a pace that ambitions of complete recall on the interviewer’s part go right out the window—where they belong, as it turns out. The gestalt of Rysanek is immediate, and energizing. She says in as many words exactly what Maria Callas used to say—often sadly: “You see, I know what I do.”
Encountering Grace Bumbry at a dinner party given by a madcap operaphiliac swell from Kentucky, and having been apprised ahead of time that the diva had asked that the assembly not talk all night about opera, this guest was fortunate and most agreeably surprised at being seated to Miss Bumbry’s right at table, and treated to a delightful, non-stop, extremely animated outpouring all through the many-coursed meal. Exhilarated by her recent success as the second of the two women in Tannhäuser (the goddess Venus), she seemed delighted to hold both regal court and the floor, giving out bits of inside dope here and there concerning the progress of operatic affairs of state.
Grace Bumbry, an American and pupil of the late great Lotte Lehmann, made her first big splash in Europe and became famous in an extra-musical way for being the first black singer to appear at the Bayreuth festival (as Venus in Tannhäuser, in 1962). Her career as a mezzo-soprano was going full tilt when she decided (not capriciously, she will have you know) to switch over and up to soprano category. (Venus, as it happens, is one of those strange roles which can be sung by either mezzo-sopranos or sopranos.) She was full of gusto in anticipation of her Norma, which she plans for Covent Garden in June, and full of elegant mischief, telling tales out of the operatic arena. “And then she said to me, ‘Grace, . . .’”
She delighted the entire company, dwelling in relaxed conversation on the sillier side of the profession, while at the same time brimming over with goodwill and serious appraisals of her many distinguished colleagues, present and former. She spoke particularly of Rysanek, of Nilsson, of her reverence for Callas, of her affection for Victoria de los Angeles (her colleague in Bayreuth in that earlier Tannhäuser) and, now and again, this guest will avow, so as not to suggest we spent the evening in the company of an operatic Mary Tyler Moore, with a calculated degree of acid wit on this one, and that one, who, would you believe . . . ? At a sensible hour, Grace Bumbry departed, escorted by the madcap. She had proven enchanting.
Opra: both high hat and low down.
BROKEN GODDESS
“If you are being a woman, be a strong woman!”
Broken Goddess, a short chase-apprehend-agonize-surrender-vanquish-release release, features before all or anything else in the way of a realized work a grand apotheosis of the town’s most lovable, improbable, strong boy/girl trouper, whose name itself, redolent of the principle of LASTING in the graveyard dead of psychic winter, is the first and finest emblem of its wearer’s valiant, elegant presence in this world frame and time slot that is (provisionally) New York now.
Immortal Films’s offering is a slender fragment dealing in the tense exploration and delicate excavation of notoriously treacherous terrain (or space): the area behind the eyes—that nervous quicksand country where nightmares flash out of chaos to trap the soul and drown it in murmuring terror. Broken Goddess, a lustrous looking exposé of glamour-as-terror is, in flashes, credit enough to its homaged sources in myth and tragedy—in the manner of an impressive screen test—to encourage its creators to go to greater lengths and make a feature next time out.
The film as it rolls looks very much like the last part of something broken off from something else—the finale of some unsettled agon involving an anonymous dreamer and a frightening anima fantasy projection. The star is happily perfectly cast, being in the immediate sense so evidently a component creature, able in so being to suggest dim haunting correspondences with component archetypes in mythic dream realms—sphinxes, chimeras, manticores, seraphim, etc.—all refracted healing images heralding selfdom. Holly Woodlawn is a renowned and wonderfully adept practitioner of travesty whose performance is achieved on the screen at an assured velocity, always on pitch, always on the attractive qui vive, here telling the stark tale of some radical woe. (Drag these days is too usually a matter of shrieky kazoos and lurching frantic slapdash. With La Woodlawn the turn is all blazing trumpets and majestic supplication.)
The protagonist lopes down a long stone staircase into hell, at a purposed, measured, anguished pace. Feet, legs, torso and face pass in vertical review, revealing a shredded Amazon shrouded in mourning-black tatters, hounded down by Torment, driven to distraction at the reflecting pool over which Nike stands adamant sentinel. (The tinted black-and-white footage was shot in pre-to-early dawn at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park.) In the progress of the film it will be discovered that her triumph is merely her lasting, that her reward is renewal—the pagan actual grace the Self dispenses at great cost. The climactic self-realization, the Broken Goddess’s discovery of her own worth (unspecified in linear plot terms, as is the specific circumstance of her anguish), is fleshed out as the vision of the White Goddess—H.W. in a previous incarnation as a high-glamour blonde siren of the glossy mags parading in the air over the glistening lake in a set of attractive superimposed stills meant to be the numinous emblems of the Broken Goddess’s salvation—backward in memory and forward in resolve. The effect achieved is anomalous—Woodlawn’s performance in motion down in the dumps is much more gorgeous than Woodlawn’s rather conventional transvestite posture in stills, which seems to embalm chic—but the sequence succeeds in the cross-cut “dialogue” between the quivering creature in closeup and the retouched, lacquered creature zooming down out of the sky like some quasi-corporeal meteor. In these moments the luster of the performance becomes fully manifest. It is a technically problematical, jumpy transition which shifts the rhythm of the film rather abruptly. So far the Broken Goddess had been fleeing the camera, her tormentor—the camera playing a vicious largo game of tag, telling her there is nowhere she may hide it will not search her out, expose her. (The most memorable single tableau involving figure and ground in the film is a shot of H.W. couched in misery at the rim of the fountain with the graffito CRAZY emblazoned—courtesy of Gotham’s vigilante band of unit publicists—behind on the stone wall her head rests against.)
Some obvious if worn epithets generally employed to describe the music of Debussy in extra-musical terms advertise the film itself: spectral, pleading, aqueous, visionary, erotic, mordant. The use of La Cathédrale Engloutie to underpin the Vision Scene is particularly successful. The allusive Laura Nyro titles are attractive, but lend an unnecessary double emphasis—no words, printed or spoken, seem necessary—to the “dialogue” between the mind of the producer-director Dallas and the extraordinary mimic intelligence of his star—all mediated by the makeup artist and hair stylist, the production designer and the editor—a dialogue which goes a fair way toward demonstrating the radical truth that “nothing is lost if one does not try to say the unsayable. Instead, that which cannot be spoken is (unspeakably) contained in that which is said.”
When Holly Woodlawn walks back up the stairs into the dawn, she flashes a back the like of which has not been glimpsed on the screen in too long. It is a gesture which commands: “If you are being a woman, be a strong woman!” The impulse to leap to the top in a single bound to meet the star up there on the world’s plateau can best be expressed in another command—to Immortal Films: “Take that star and shoot her again!”
LUCHINO VISCONTI: IN MEMORIAM
“Count Luchino Visconti, Duke of Modrone, was born November 2, 1906, in Milan. . . . Young Luchino became acquainted early with painting, music and theater . . . He played cello and often visited La Scala. . . . His father organized plays and entertainments in a local theater.”
—New York Times, March 18, 1976
Operatic Visconti
All epitaphs are killing; they nail life down. (“So that was what it was all about, that life.”) Similarly evaluations of the works of geniuses (in the case of Visconti, le opere). Nevertheless, Verdian Visconti; the association does support.
Visconti was operatic in his cinematic creation not merely as a parallel/ consequence of his grand successes in the lyric theater, or of his intimate work shaping the career of the ultimate singing actress of the mid-century (Callas), but as a consequence of his inheritance. Operaphile Viscontiani, reversing the terms of the metaphor (“like opera”), see in his stage work the mark of the filmmaker, the adaptation of cinematic trompe-l’oeil (“tracking” revolves, flicker-lighting, pin-spot “iris” close-ups) to that arena in which a kind of spastic puppetry is the iron convention and theatrical m.o. (As if to comment on this convention, Visconti makes a great deal out of it in the opening scene of Senso, in which the flaming spirit of Verdi’s music is being acted out in the gallery of the Teatro Fenice in Venice by a “chorus” of Italian patriots—and only trumpeted and mimed by the ham singers.)
Visconti’s debt to opera, or rather his inheritance of its glorious abandon, is simply a function of his northern Italian aristocracy. What happens in the soul of every Visconti film is that the spirit of music-and-mimicry (called musicry), tutored in twentieth-century celluloid mysteries, becomes immortal-anew (as all “immortal” things depend upon re-election, to be brought back by popular demand). Polyhymnia and Melpomane, enlisted for screen tests, emerge in the Visconti canon as Magnani, Valli, Paxinou, Girardot, Cardinale, Bell, and Berger/Thulin, each the diva.
The Past: Lontani Giorni
“Time’s relentless melt.” The dissolve; the fade.
Director Visconti deals with that which is over, with that which is lost (including out the abandoned project, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu). All cinema can deal with in any case is the past. The forties are now regarded as Byzantine-distant, and the phrase “only yesterday” applies with literal force every time any important film is re-released. It was given to Visconti to trumpet the truth of passing and the past, musically in motion and pictorially in the revival of Renaissance painting in terms of acting bodies and vibrant backgrounds—and in so doing, so performing, that we are not only reminded but assured, not merely convinced but convicted as well. Visconti’s art is in this way the veriest Italian art, for in Italy the past, all of it, is everywhere to be seen and felt, corroded but enduring (like Visconti locations and situations).
Even in “contemporary” films, like La Terra Trema, Bellissima, Rocco and Conversation Piece, the whole weight of the past hangs heavy. The Sicilian fishermen are reincarnations of an ancient, heroic race, engaged in brutal conflict with “modern” commerce, torn as they are out of the original context of the pagan communal world and enslaved by “capital” interests. La Terra Trema is also, in formal terms, a tribute to the silent cinematic past and to montage, to Eisenstein, and to realism. The beautiful little girl in Bellissima is Anna Magnani’s neurotic version of her own lost self, a constellated puella aeterna; and the satire on Cinecittà and the “old-fashioned” mechanics of studio moviemaking (Visconti sees the future vistas: locations, panoramas) are surely to be read against the “new” cinema, of which Visconti was a founding genius (the romantic division). Rocco is a tragic dialogue between the illusory Arcadian past and the image of the dead father pinned to the mother’s widow’s-weeds, and the violent contemporary urban present (memories of a perpetual Sicilian sunshine summer shrouded in the falling snow of a Milanese winter). It is also an elegy on Christ, on classical notions of sainthood and on the death of the religion whose dancing ground is Italy. Conversation Piece is a frantic collision between the outside (now) and the indoors (then) in now/then Rome, a poem of a gentle man’s privacy, of its invasion by a gang of inchoate babblers and hellions ducking in and out of Pandemonium (the traffic). It is also an elegy on the Italian Renaissance and on Idealism, both all over.
White Nights is a film about childhood. The sound-stage sets and the snow are like a toy city and the third act of La Bohème; and the love pledges and betrayals are as arbitrary as the Eden games and expulsion games of the very young playing at growing up. Maria Schell is a child-waif, a Mélisande. The game of waiting for the lover’s return is a ritual of a return to the time of waiting, to latency, to the time between the injuries of birth and the fall.
Sandra (Vaghe Stelle dell’Orsa) is in the mode of classical tragedy, played on the ancient volcanic precipice of the town of Volterra, where the stage is set for a replay of an Orestean situation melodrama cloaked in the mannerisms of Jacobean tragedy, in which, however, the situations are each and all differing versions (the brother’s, the sister’s, the mother’s, the step-father’s) of what the secret past contains. The film is full of Pirandellian resonances: ambiguity, shifting memorial ground, and operatic touches—a mad scene, duets, crashing pianistic chords accompanying the outsize acting.
The short, shattering episode called La Strega Bruciata Viva (from Le Streghe [The Witches]) presents Mangano, the actress, in desperate flight from her accumulated past, ending up on some Alp, trying desperately to paste some of her past back on her face, to look like someone again, unwilling to be present (she knows the company in the lodge are slicing her to bits and tossing her into the flames of the open hearth), trapped without time.
Three Epics
Senso is the first Visconti color spectacular, and the first of his pictures to engage every level of his taste and passion: for music, for painting and architecture, for panoramic outdoor movement, for classical tragedy (revenge, madness), for the entwinement of political and personal destiny, and for surfeit, opulence, extravagant gesture (long shots of doors opening upon doors until there is a long hallway passage cut through the endless rooms, through which the heroine pursues and escapes). The Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) is all majestic supplication crossed with Maenad fury, an Italian Melpomene. Italian history is her history; she contributes to its fulfillment (risorgimento) and it enlists her doom (events conspire). Italy becomes all idea, compelling, symbolic. Livia becomes all role, all Revenge, sensation. The Italian inheritance, pagan sensation, Luxuria, dooms.
The Leopard, mangled in distribution, survives in a series of immense cinematic panels, which could be run in any order and which serve as emblems for the decay of a society. There are brilliant living friezes and frescoes, baroque groupings of stars and extras, intimate single portraits and elegant formal family groupings. There is the hot, dry pulse of sexuality; there is feasting and dancing, and talk of both natural and political philosophy. It is a portfolio, partially reclaimed, a series of gorgeous reminiscences of a great, doomed project: the epic of collapse, itself capriciously wrecked by enemies of movies.
The Damned, the first of the late-period Visconti, is a film in which each of the major characters is informed as much by archetypal symbolic content as by idiosyncratic, personal trait, and in which the maestro (able to summarize and distill, juxtapose and fuse, play, contort, and surround) investigates the origins of that conflagration which consumed European culture, leaving the very ashes and rubble out of which, among other aesthetics, that of neo-realism would rise. Visconti, presenting the day-before-yesterday, splashes the screen with lurid and combustible effects and situations, elicits brilliant corrosive performances (neo-Jacobean Guignol). From the lush family banquet to the mephitic cyanide wedding breakfast, where annihilation is the portion, Visconti, in the guise of Mephistophelean puppeteer-ventriloquist, mimes and voices, in socio-political costume (high fashion, low drag, uniforms, fetishes), those passions and terrors in which every sentient personal history abounds.
Aschenbach and Ludwig:
Portraits of the Creator
Of the quartet of summary masterpieces which installed Luchino Visconti up front in the motion picture pantheon, it is possible to say that, like the “big four” gemstones of luxury and Kabbala, they play off one another in ways unique in cinema history, in that each singularly and all together demonstrate the degree to which Visconti’s cinema was fulfilled by his great work in opera—and in particular the La Scala productions of the early 1950s in which he created the space into which the supreme singing actress of the century, Maria Callas, moved and fairly overwhelmed. The fire-music-sex-death spectacle The Damned is the ruby among them; the transcendental Death in Venice the emerald (the imperial gem); the transparently self-referential psychic autobiography Ludwig, the pinnacle of Visconti’s achievement, the diamond; and the heartbreaking L’Innocente the evening sapphire. An intimate knowledge of the music of the lyric stage enabled this great film director, this late-born genius of the Renaissance, to understand and exhibit to perfection the Paterian dictate defining aesthetic aspiration: in a perfect double helix, the heightened reality of gesture that is cinema—gesture parceled into segments and reassembled in the projection of quantified time into a mise-en-scène, and also/simultaneously the essentially musical (and for talking pictures, by analogy, the sung) condition of that great art which, following the single essential dictate of opera, prima la musica e poi le parole, lives on through time according to the regulated pulse of an equation derived from the value of both the mise-en-scène over the montage and vice versa.
A second Visconti, like a second Verdi, is an impossible conception.
MELO MAESTRO DOUGLAS SIRK
The Sirkite evangelist, exulting in the pictorial energy, wit, irony and classical pathos (juxtapose two or more of the above, depending on your capabilities), appeals with all guns drawn to the open-eyed and rhythmically witted (those younger viewers in this lesser time for whom revelation in motion pictures has become scarce). The Sirkite will point out how his hero husbanded his resources—forging an utterly vivid, personal style—and used it politically, in a personal politics: a dissection of the consequences of mendacity (and not only in Imitation of Life), making features which explore relentlessly moribund delusions and inauthentic perceptions in a world of material plenitude and spiritual desolation.
In an appreciation of four Sirk masterpieces of the fifties, we celebrate his bravura, as it worked simultaneously with and against popular, melodramatic material (“The Weepies”), turning story circumstances into Sirkian-stances. Sirk—staging pictures, creating impressions of austere isolation on the all-too-overcrowded gigantic wide screen—became the supreme circumventor (Sirk-Inventor) of the meretricious in mid-century Hollywood. (And since the Orpheum facts have long since convicted us of and sentenced us to living there in our fantasies, our Sirk is a true redeemer. That’s a religion, indeed.)
All That Heaven Allows (1955), Universal-International. Ross Hunter, producer. Director of photography: Russell Metty.
Sirk: “In melodrama it’s of advantage to have one immovable character against which you can put your more split ones. . . . The picture is about the antithesis of Thoreau’s qualified Rousseauism and established American society.”
Rock Hudson as a noble savage? Jane Wyman, America? Agnes Moorehead, America’s shadow?
Jane Wyman, a widow with two grown but not grown-up children (one a pompous, callow boy, the other a ridiculous girl-student of Freudian psychology), falls in love with the man who comes to trim the trees: Rock Hudson. Friend Agnes Moorehead warns: “Carrie! Your gardener!” Jane enlists, on the side of love. Rock meets Jane’s town friends. No possible communion. Jane vacillates. Then reneges. Rock departs, Jane alone, her children departed, realizes her mistake but does not ask for a second chance. She sits instead in front of an empty reflection in a switched-off television tube—a perfect Sirkian mirror. Suddenly she changes. She rushes to Rock, only to find him not at home. She departs. He returns in time to see her departing. He calls out, he slips, he falls, he concusses. (What more could anyone ask to happen?) Jane sits up with him through the night. At dawn, he wakes. They are together forever. (What more could heaven allow?)
The picture is simply plotted, gloriously shot, featuring New England (beautifully contrived postcards) fall and winter as seen through the enormous window of the barn Rock Hudson had built for himself and Jane to live in. Weather is a primary force throughout. Love blooms in full leaf, wanes in dead winter, when the evergreen trees are chopped down and taken to the town for Christmas. Love is reaffirmed in midwinter-spring, with the thaw-glazed field of snow blanketing the barnyard “in a silence deep and white.”
Jane Wyman lives in a tight little world in a tight big house with room dividers and latticed front windows barring her from a new life. She is widowed, worried, trapped, resigned, riddled with “decency” and alone. Rock Hudson’s barn is one great open space, out of the town; the window is one great sheet of glass. All within is serene. Hudson, the builder, possesses a certain modesty-in-strength, a Galahad quality, a Siegfried bearing: of a frank and open nature, innocent of cerebral guile, blessed with patience. . . . The Rock Hudson/Jane Wyman combination was the perfection of fantasy—Galahad to the rescue. The lady rescued. America, if she had listened to Thoreau.
Official mid-century America, overfed, victorious fifties meets the Thoreau-truth-teller. All That Heaven Allows is Sirk’s most wistful, elegiac statement. The picture says, “Would that it were. . . .”
Written on the Wind (1956), Universal-International. Albert Zugsmith, producer. Director of photography: Russell Metty.
Sirk: “Just observe the difference between All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind. It’s a different stratum of society in All That Heaven Allows, still untouched by any lengthening shadows of doubt. Here in Written on the Wind, a condition of life is being portrayed, and in many ways anticipated, which is not unlike today’s decaying and crumbling American society.”
The Sirk picture of Sirk pictures, consummate.
An oil-rich brother and sister, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, two Texas hellions, go on the rampage. Stack flies from Texas oil land to New York with his best friend (the once-more poor but truly honest Rock Hudson), corrals the most elegant woman in New York, Lauren Bacall (who else could better claim that title, then as now) and brings her back to Texas. She is dazzling and devoted and placates his demons for a time. Malone, having been desperate after Hudson since childhood, fails to corral him and concocts revenge. Malone to Stack, referring to herself, taunting: “She saw the end of a marriage, and the beginning of a love affair.” It is untrue, of course, but when Stack, who has been (wrongly) advised by the family doctor of his probable impotence, is confronted with Bacall’s eventual pregnancy, he attacks her and she miscarries. Lost and violent, Stack tries to kill his best friend, and is, of course, killed in the attempt. Malone, on the stand, sole witness to the killing, gives up and exonerates Hudson. She is left her dead father’s millions and who-knows-what life. Told in flashback.
The perfect Sirkian plot. His lifelong preoccupation with split-character, divided selves, pitted against integrated character, played twice at once in a perfectly paired quartet. Divided Stack against co-ordinated Bacall—“elegant” here signifying whole, instinctive, supportive, redemptive (traditional good-woman functions in pictures). Split, twisted, desperate Malone beating herself against the Rock.
The picture opens in a blast of wizard self-assurance, quick bold cuts from the exterior of the mansion as a car screeches up the drive; to below stairs where the first words are spoken by the sibylline black servants (“I heard talk. . . . There’s going to be a killing, et cetera. . . .”); to the entrance hall, all gaudy neo-classic pillars, crystal chandelier, sweeping staircase, and huge (latticed) windows; to an upstairs bedroom window framing the sensuous bloodthirsty Malone looking down at a severe angle at her revenge as the drunken Stack staggers into the hall below and quantities of dead leaves swirl in his wake. Then to the room where Bacall awakens. The camera pans on a desk calendar and, as the dead leaves are swirling below in the hall, the dead leaves of the calendar yield to the wind and blow backward to the beginning of the picture’s time.
Almost all of the picture is shot in barren settings, oil fields zooming past as Malone drives to a roadhouse in her sports car: the roadhouse, all tacky decor and jukebox that plays “Temptation,” the sterile house itself, the tank-town. Twice, once on the Stack-Bacall honeymoon, in Florida in the moonlight oceanscape, and once in an oasis in Texas, a small river and pool where Malone goes to hear the voices of her childhood—her brother and the man she desires—does nature enter to enforce the contrast, to imply hope, to suggest possible redemption. But in the honeymoon scene there is the eventually fatal revolver hidden under Stack’s pillow, and in the sylvan Texas scene, Malone only hears the voices of the past and hears herself taunting her brother, bargaining for the best friend’s affection. The character is bruised, and the performance is seductive and touching (among Oscar’s better choices). Why can’t the friend love the sister? We discover why, or how not, soon enough.
Stack acquires Bacall (Stack’s acquisitive compulsion to have the best, Malone’s compulsive venality, these are bred into the Texan-American Hadleys), and he’s obsessed with Hudson, to the extent that he feels supplanted as a son, hating him and loving him, pitifully, fraternally, asking when dying how they came so far from the river. It’s some family romance.
Stack, Malone, Hudson. It is an incestuous sibling triad that must perish—and Bacall must do it, unwittingly, directly—and it is a family as paradigm of society. (Sirk has blessedly never made a “message” picture in his career. As a cinematic genius whose trumps are irony and flamboyance, he works around The Literate Serious in sudden and vivid broad strokes.)
Malone goes berserk one night in her room, plays “Temptation” at top volume on the hi-fi and does a wild masturbatory Salome dance in front of Hudson’s picture. But Herod is not present in the father. He (Robert Keith) is a sick old man who staggers up the stairs while the dance is on, suffers an entirely appropriate cerebral hemorrhage at the top of the stairs and tumbles back down, dead, the way (we finally understand) the man-killer in Malone would really like Hudson to do. The cross-cutting in closeup of this maenad and that sick progenitor is electric. There had never been a nutritive mother. The offspring are withering. . . .
Bacall has nothing quite so attractive to do. What she does do is maintain tension. Oddly enough, and gratifyingly, this actress, whose entire career was founded on smart back-talk—elegant lip, ready mouth—plays the seriously wronged wife without a trace of miscast wanness. In casting terms it was like asking a thoroughbred to just stand there and rear its head from time to time. It’s a perfect balance.
In the end, Stack dead, Malone the heiress clasps a model oil derrick while sitting at the desk under her father’s picture. Electra in Dollarland. Hudson and Bacall drive away . . . naturally.
The Tarnished Angels (1957), Universal-International. Albert Zugsmith, producer. Director of photography: Irving Glassberg.
Sirk: “In a way The Tarnished Angels grew out of Written. You had the same pair of characters (Stack and Malone) seeking their identity in the follow-up picture; the same mood of desperation, drinking and doubting the values of life, and at the same time almost hysterically trying to grasp them, grasping the wind. Both pictures are studies of failure. . . . In both Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels it is an ugly kind of failure, a completely hopeless one.”
In quite another way it was that The Tarnished Angels grew out of “written.” It came from Faulkner’s Pylon. It is interesting nonetheless that Sirk speaks about the literary inspiration he tried to work into his vision on this picture more than any other. He tells Jon Halliday he used to read Eliot’s “Prufrock” aloud to Rock Hudson in order to let him hear his character, a Faulknerized Eliotesque outside man. To Stack he read from “The Waste Land”—Phlebas the Phoenecian and death by water. Methods. . . .
Rock Hudson, a newspaper reporter in New Orleans in the Depression, sets out to explain to himself for his readers (the viewers) the motives behind the wild daredevil fliers—ex-World War I ace Robert Stack; his wife, Dorothy Malone, a parachute jumper; and their sidekick-mechanic Jack Carson. The air circus is the existential arena. Malone is prostituted to an airplane dealer to further her husband’s ambition, and Stack commits suicide in the upshot, crashing his plane into the water. Hudson and Malone contact, but separate. The fliers, apotheosized, cannot live on the ground. They are the terrible angels who visit havoc upon the earth. When they betray themselves as human beings, they vanish into air.
Sirk: “The story had to be completely un-Faulknerized, and it was.”
Jon Halliday: “Outstandingly the best adaptation to the screen of any Faulkner, acknowledged as such by Faulkner himself.”
Faulkner is verbal music; Sirk is pictorial. Shooting in black and white, technically a come-down in 1957 (the U-I executives didn’t trust the story), the picture looks exactly right as it happens. In the fifties, America thought of the Depression as very much a black-and-white period, because its moving pictorial records—as opposed to the Hoppers and Shahns on still canvas—were all old newsreels and old movies in black and white. The seventies can put the thirties into color; the fifties would not. The fifties were a supposed technical triumph in themselves.
Working in black and white, shooting planes against worried skies, planes zooming around pylons in lunatic aerial carousel, shooting Malone, blown into the wind and hurtling toward earth until the parachute opens, Sirk is right in the realm of sudden and violent movement he favors. The scenes on the ground, crowded, crammed rooms eerily lit and as indebted to the grotesque in German cinema as anything he has done, point up the ironic treatment of the desperate, not-truly-heroic fliers—the Sirkian alternative response to, say, Hawks’s Dawn Patrol or Walsh’s Fighter Squadron, where the men prove themselves heroically. The tarnished angels don’t prove a thing.
It is a picture about sad losers, “narrated” by the there-and-not-there cynical Hudson. In contrast to his earlier “melo” masterpieces, the emphasis in The Tarnished Angels is far less on enlarged characters than on action—really unaction, reckless, positive inertia which kills human response, vitiates human concern.
Imitation of Life (1959), Universal-International. Ross Hunter, producer. Director of photography: Russell Metty.
Sirk: Imitation of Life is more than just a good title, it is a wonderful title: I would have made the picture just for the title, because it is all there—the mirror, and the imitation. . . .”
Andrew Sarris: “What was needed with this material was the ironic perspective Sirk’s cooly contemplative style provided for such projects as Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows. Neither indulging his glossy characters, nor indicting them, Sirk had the gift of making them come alive through windows, mirrors, and other shimmering surfaces. More important, Sirk confronted the absurd anguish of shrunken souls with shiny faces head-on.”
Finally, the definitive masterpiece.
Would-be actress-mother Lana Turner meets itinerant Negress-mother Juanita Moore on the beach at Coney Island when their daughters strike up a play-friendship. Juanita Moore becomes Lana Turner’s unpaid maid at first. Lana Turner sacrifices romance for her only love, her career; the black and white daughters grow up together. Lana prospers. The light-Negress child, Susan Kohner, finds Negritude unbearable, finds she can pass for white. Beaten by a boy (Troy Donahue) for imitating, she leaves home and descends to sleazy nightclub work. She struggles and makes her way. Her mother seeks her out and in the confrontation is forced to masquerade as Kohner’s childhood mammy. Lana Turner reaches higher and higher into stardom (an Italian film director enlists her artistic services), and her daughter, Sandra Dee, drifts along in the background. In the end, grief kills Juanita Moore. The climax of the picture is Moore’s grand and moving funeral, for which she has saved all her life, at which Susan Kohner makes a sudden, stabbingly appropriate appearance. In the wake of the noble black woman’s death, the remaining principals are faced with the consequences of their imitation lives’ careers. Susan Kohner is seemingly redeemed and reconciled.
Sirk: “I feel Imitation of Life and Written on the Wind . . . have something in common; it’s the underlying element of hopelessness. . . . In Imitation of Life you don’t believe the happy ending, and you’re not really supposed to. Everything seems to be O.K., but you well know it isn’t.”
The entire picture is trompe l’oreille and a feast for the discerning eye from beginning to end. Never has Lana Turner’s unctuously sincere pear-toned elocution been better pitted against the utter vacuity of her gaze, the deadly precision of her MGM comportment—that walk, that invisible thick slab of the World’s Great Quotations balanced on that perfectly poised head. Those Jean Louis gowns. It’s all there, perfect imitation of vitality. If ignorance is a delicate and exotic fruit whose bloom is gone if ever once touched, the Lana Turner character in Imitation of Life is the Queen of the Mangoes. The perfection of seeming, she can no more be touched—moved to real action—than Narcissus can kiss his image in the reflecting pool. As perfect a contrast and balance to the Juanita Moore character as is black to white, in color.
Susan Kohner, a newcomer, triumphed as the Sirkian split-character. (Imitation: another quartet: Turner and Moore, Kohner and Dee.) The scene in which Kohner is slapped down by the boyfriend is shot on the oblique, through a plate-glass window reflected. Reflection, chance seeing, reinforces for the viewer the pathos of the girl’s secret and allows the character her desperate alternative.
And desperate it is: Susan Kohner, sitting in a chorus line of chairs, joylessly kicking up one leg, holding a grotesque champagne bottle in the ugliest nightclub in the world (Sirk directing Cabaret . . . !), and immediately thereafter backstage, turning her back to her mother, sitting in her dressing-table chair, wounded and cruel. Her last permission, her final admission, is to her mother, to be embraced one final time. The next embrace is of the flower-decked coffin. Embracing death; leading life. For Sirk, deus ex machina, the anodyne.
Poet, debunker, triumphant charlatan, stunner, Hollywood visionary and magnificent obsessor. Douglas Sirk resides in Picture People’s Paradise.
JOE ACKERLEY
I
The Dog
My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley. Poseidon Press.
I had a dog once myself. (I know, I know, I hear you: the book review as attitude autobiog; but I simply don’t know how otherwise to get a purchase—I mean a grip—on this one. It is a bitch.)
I thought back to my dog, Tiny, when I looked at the first chapter heading of My Dog Tulip, “The Two Tulips” (trips on the tongue, doesn’t it), because there were two distinct Tinys, too. My dog Tiny . . . No, I can’t go on with it; let the dead rest. Poor Tiny, dear reader, was a schizophrenic—Spitz Pomeranian raised from a pound-reject pup by my brothers and me—who was very often very sweet in a dog’s dumb way, and had a very pretty white ruff (Tiny I), but whose most characteristic remark (Tiny II) was “Grrr.” (“You’re in my face.”) He terrorized our valiant family out in Jackson Heights for years, until one afternoon, long after my older brother’s departure, via Korea, for marriage and life on the West Coast, Tiny went for my mother’s face. (The testimony: “That dog saw me leave here with your brother in 1952, and your brother never came back—to stay—and from that day to this. . . .”) Tiny was, after a brief and brutal trial, summarily executed, in Jamaica, Queens.
Coincidentally, in the very same year as this vaudeville was playing the nabes, a bachelor was living in bliss with his dog, Tulip, across the Atlantic, in Fulham, a suburb of London, older but not unlike Jackson Heights in that . . . never mind. J.R. Ackerley (1896–1967), commonly known as Joe, was a respected literary homosexual BBC mandarin, whose other, far more interesting if not more lascivious, books than this, My Father and Myself and Hindoo Holiday, entitle him, it is generally agreed, especially among Tories, to a permanent seat in the celestial parliament and the permanent guarantee of installation for his stuff on the shelves of the book department at Brit-O-Mart, civilized high culture purveyors. In My Dog Tulip, first published three decades ago (you remember the ’50s), he immortalizes, in a style eerily reminiscent of John Cleland, the breathless adventures of his Alsatian soulmate, which consist in the main of a truly advanced sequence: his heroic and finally successful campaign to get the heroine laid, then pregnant, then parturient. . . . It goes on.
My problems with My Dog Tulip are telling. I react very strongly in the negative to Ackerley’s playing out his Oedipal melodrama (God rest the man, though, now he’s dead, along with Tulip and Tiny) on a dog. This, you will realize right away, is a rather stunning prejudice, and I confess it right off the bat, not necessarily to get time off in Purgatory, but so as not to . . . Skip it.
In my opinion, a man’s best friend is his best friend, not his goddam dog (and not his mother, after all). It may, I suppose, be inferred from the above that, had Tulip been a male (called, say, Toby) . . . well, I will admit that, such a predilection for the male of the species—any species—have I, that I can’t sit down to a lobster supper after a show without ascertaining, as did Nellie Melba, “Is it a cock?” Similarly, while working up this review, I came across a picture of the very first German shepherd—Alsatian in England—ever to win the Westminster. He’s called “Ch. Covy Tucker Hill’s Manhattan,” and he’s a great beauty. No trouble getting Manhattan laid, if you ask me. Know what I mean?) However (and in this I may have been merely, pitiably, the phobic young father to the prudish man before you), so far as I was concerned, if Tiny had a penis, it was evidently not only tiny, it was, importantly, Tiny’s; it wasn’t mine—not even by extension. Therefore, when it comes to Tulip’s cunt, well, I’m squeamish—or, as my old friend Ralph would say, “I skeeve on it.”
The great critic Harold Bloom writes, in A Map of Misreading (Oxford University Press, 1975, 1980; p. 76): “All interpretation depends upon the antithetical relation between meanings, and not on the supposed relation between a text and its meaning” (Bloom’s italics). Thus, I fear, even in my attempt at correlating the story of Tulip with the story of Tiny, I have failed, at least in compassion. I have similarly failed in my close reading of the prose ode My Dog Tulip, obviously because of the famous Bloomian belatedness (this review, long overdue, is that failure’s emblem) and because of belatedness’s attendant anxieties, thrust up from resistances, introjects and botched cathexes (how dare I scorn Ackerley’s Oedipal performance). Specifically—I own it—I seem to have come to grief (having, if I may boast and live, sailed through the clinamen, tessera, kenosis—those bowel movements of Tulip’s! Those uncleanly fluxes!—and hyperbole) between the rock of askesis and the hard place of apophrades. (Nightmares of the raging ghosts of Ackerley, Tulip and, yes, Tiny, afflict me lately. Tiny and Tulip, for example, fucking their brains out. And remember how it was when you first saw two dogs stuck together and cried? Well!)
To hell with me. The important thing about this book is that it is. “If no ‘meaning’ of a ‘reading’ intervenes between text and yourself, then you start—even voluntarily—making the text read itself (Bloom, ibid; italics same). And, for Tulip, that she got her man—and she kept him (italics mine). In the words of St. Ruth Draper (words we would do well to heed in these dissolute times): “. . . ought to be enough for anyone.”
II
The Man
The homosexual . . . is a delightful melancholy person when he does not indulge in sadistic passion with another man.
—Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
In contrast to this is the other kind of artist who starts off with crude representations of the secret self phenomena or personal aliveness which are pregnant with meaning for the artist but at first have no meaning for others. The artist’s task in this case is to make his very personal representations intelligible, and in order to do this he must betray himself to some extent. His artistic creations seem to him like so many failures, however much they are appreciated by the coterie; and in fact if they are appreciated too widely the artist may withdraw altogether because of the sense of having been false to his true self. Here again, the main achievement of the artist is his work of integration of the two selves.
—D.W. Winnicott, Human Nature
A few years ago, I went down to Rodmell, the little village near Lewes, in Sussex, where Leonard and Virginia Woolf, in connubial celibacy at Monk’s House, lived out the best years of their lives. It was from the bottom of the garden there that Virginia Woolf walked out, on March 28, 1941, with her pockets full of stones, into the River Ouse—an unhappy ending to an affective life irradiated with high literary genius but marred by the recurrent torments of depressive vertigo—an event to which I attempted to allude at the end of the tour of the premises. It was a remarkable one, in that visitors were allowed, even encouraged, to sit in the very chair the great writer had sat in, next to the wireless on which she’d heard the war news and the BBC Third Programme, surrounded by the verging-upon-hysterical craft decor lavished upon the Monk’s House interior by her more fortunately thick-skinned sister Vanessa Bell.
“I’ve been down to the garden’s bottom gate,” I remarked to the bright and amiably doughty middle-aged woman engaged by the University of Sussex to point things out to visitors, “but the path to the river is sealed off. Just as well, I suppose, or you’d be pestered by a lot of people like me, retracing her last steps: something that could, I imagine, quickly become rather ghoulish.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The path—down to the river. She walked into the river.”
(Sharp intake of breath; a hasty look around.)
“Ah, yes . . . Well, you see—this is it.”
Reading Peter Parker’s Ackerley: The Life of J.R. Ackerley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989) is the same sort of experience. I am grateful for the effort, and I commend the book in a general way to readers who wish to place Ackerley in a wider picture than he places himself in his own work—revelatory as it is—but there is no path in it down to the river. I didn’t care before I read it—and still don’t care nearly as much as I do about Virginia Woolf—about Ackerley or any of his friends, in the main self-regarding, facile, insular products of public schools and universities, men who, like E.M. Forster, were given to quasi-incestuous sadomasochistic passions with their peers, but I kept remembering that all the while I’d lived in England (and read everything I could by and about Virginia Woolf) I’d been fairly tormented by the sense of futility, and of waste, put into me by her great struggle to stay alive for as long as she managed to do. This book gives me something of the same feeling. “Practice equanimity, Mrs. Woolf,” was what a Harley Street physician said to her. And all the while her cousin James Strachey, Freud’s English translator and perhaps the most eminent psychoanalyst, after Ernest Jones, in England, said—what? Did what? Hoped she’d snap out of it, perhaps write her way out of it? This never made any sense to an American for whom the therapeutic—whether or not triumphant—was certainly a factor. I began to see then, have seen in the two decades since with increasing rather than diminishing frustration, and see again in this book, that so far as literary Great Britain is concerned, not even the diagnostic is reckoned really worthy of consideration in any but the most frivolous and anecdotal way. It is as if what Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell all those years ago had locked in, like some psychic version of the lethal London fogs Monet found so mysteriously attractive (before he came to the radiance of Giverny):
There is a deadness there—what is it—hopelessness. . . . That kind of defiant English rottenness—too strong a word—but a sort of piggishness!—As if they’ve thrown off Victorianism, Georgianism, Radicalism of the 30s—and now it’s let’s all give up together.
The late Bruno Bettelheim quotes Freud on biographers: “Whoever undertakes to write a biography binds himself to lying, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flummery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding.” This is too harsh and too ungrateful. What of reviewing biographies? Must I confess my own lack of understanding of (if I may put it upside-down) the German for flummery before admitting that I suspect Peter Parker of it? I do not suspect him of the more cynical intentional lying or concealment—and of no more hypocrisy than his age, nationality and education may have creased him with—and I must insist that he seems not to bother to hide his lack of understanding (even on the level of sociological grasp: for example, he numbers Philip and Ottoline Morrell among those distinctly more shabbily housed and gowned elect habitually referred to by Virginia Woolf as “the Bloomsberries”).
Writing, particularly writing biography, is like acting: it is between seven-tenths and four-fifths reaction. When it succeeds, the actor, paying attention to the subject’s circumstances and reacting to them, “becomes” the character (as, most happily, Lytton Strachey became Queen Victoria, a role he was born to play). When it fails, it becomes abreactive in tone: fitful, discursive and scolding. The reaction formation constructed in defense against overdoing the scolding and against the feeling of failure—failure to unite with the subject—is the reductive interpretation of a life, based almost always on a combination of the author’s own sense of inadequacy (the correct, if intolerable, feeling in the circumstances) and whatever available gossip is lying around in letters written about the subject by friends or enemies (almost always red herrings) or letters written by the subject to throw the overly inquisitive off the scent. (But a schooled analytical intelligence can often hold such documents up to the mirror of the subject’s nature—that quiddity inferred by his actions and the consequences he acknowledges—and thereby read the inverted script.)
Writers of consequence, no matter what flummery they permit themselves to be cajoled into uttering for publicity purposes during their lifetimes, take little interest in facilitating their biographies (no more than Cleopatra—so Shakespeare informs us, the guiltier he may color our satisfaction in seeing it done—wishes the passions and derelictions of her woman’s breasts betrayed by a boy player in a strapped-on, rag-stuffed bodice, piping her woes to the paying public).
That J.R. Ackerley, in spite of writing autobiography, tried to make it terribly difficult to know him, in life and for posterity, is not really an interesting or engaging enough ploy to be worked up into a full-length biography. Therefore, I’m bound to be severe with this book, even as I acknowledge with some gratitude the industry behind it; it seems to me the textual equivalent of those demireps of whom Samuel Johnson said, “Because they have made themselves public, they consider they have made themselves known.” Ackerley demonstrates the curious fact that the fascination putative writers of biography are apt to succumb to is really a kind of passion for cartography. (One of the first ways the bright child idling in the schoolroom is apt to lose his immediate grasp on the lesson at hand is by drawing maps of imaginary countries.) British university education and the arrogant confusion it fosters take to extreme lengths the metaphysics of microcosm and macrocosm, in which the individual entity is seen as recapitulating the nature and structure of the universe. A man, rhetoric aside, is not the measure of all things. Literary life is not life; it is a kind of map. (In order to represent life truly, it would have to be a map as inexorably and minutely detailed as the terrain of life itself.) If there are readers who can read biography without looking for the topographical contours of a life, I’m happy to say that I don’t know a single one of them. For all these reasons, I’m afraid I have to call this book a failure: stunted, smug, willful and unyielding. Peter Parker is, like his proverbial namesake, certainly nosy enough, but to little avail. Reviewers who have remarked that Ackerley has been given the biographical treatment he merits cannot have read him very sympathetically (or are, shall we say, conflicted).
A plethora of recent English biographies have been written merely anecdotally, aping the English novel—and the English novel, or rather its anemic successor, the twitchy English post-novel, is devoid of topography. You can pick one up several times a year and come a little closer to death breathing its atmosphere, but English fiction has ceased to be written to any soaring level almost since Virginia Woolf walked into the Ouse a half-century ago. (Time out for Ivy Compton-Burnett, Anthony Powell and Angus Wilson.) These new texts, fictive and factive, are moribund because their psychology—which was the only real excuse for the novel’s existence (it was the bourgeoisie’s comfortable, commodious replacement for the more rigorous epic)—is moribund; it has been lobotomized and its customary insight replaced by varieties of hectoring assertion. Here, for example, is Parker’s lively attack on a minor character, one of the Ackerley family’s neighbors on Richmond Hill:
Next door was Metcalfe’s London Hydro, a smart establishment presided over by Dr. Harry Wadd, a dirty-minded old fraud who spent as much of the time he could spare from fleecing his wealthy patients exchanging smoking-room stories with Roger.
Nothing informs or corroborates this detraction. I hold no brief for Dr. Wadd, or for any Wadds claiming descent, but really! One simply doesn’t do that kind of thing in biography. Or this next either, although as imagistic writing about the Battle of Britain it is quite effective. Unfortunately, it substitutes a snapshot of a symbol for the condition symbolized.
But it is doubtful Ackerley would have survived had he been at home, for all the ceilings came down and all the doors and windows were blown in. . . . A heavy bronze statue of a Greek boy, one of his favourite possessions, had toppled from its shelf and landed on the sofa where Ackerley usually sat. Thus he had escaped a fate which would have had a certain poetic justice: to be killed by Narcissus.
It’s no use writing hortatory sentiments about a cold cast-bronze Narcissus when you’re supposed to be creating the impression of hot breath on the mirror. (“You speak to me of narcissism,” wrote Artaud, “but I reply that it is a question of my life.”) But in order to do that, you must first understand and be able to delineate the two different senses of the crucial verb affect—which Parker is fond of using only in its first, that of pretend. Neither is documentation any guarantee of accuracy. The employment of hearsay inevitably creates the problem happily defined by Hugh Kenner as the “Irish fact”—that is, true for the speaker but not always admissible evidence—and, as Lady Bracknell says of the Court Guides, “I have known strange errors in that publication.”
The mechanism of denial that has recommended itself as the fit replacement for bourgeois novelistic psychology is not univalent but ambivalent or polyvalent. Denial is a dystonic reverse function (the obverse is ambiguity). Thus it is as axiomatic in England as anywhere else that there can be no denial where awareness has not been at play. The tragic, hubristic British rhetorical-epistemological habit of mind—Puritanism, utilitarianism, mercantilism, empiricism and water closets, from Hobbes (excepting Hume) to Matthew Arnold and Bertrand Russell (and his contention, disproved by Gödel, that mathematics is reducible to logic) down to contemporary rigorist grammarians—has consistently reinforced false verisimilitude and discredited anomalies, equating awareness (stimulus) with insight (response). All the while, the worst depredation suffered by Britain in its millennial cultural battle with the originator of its civilization, France, has been the gradual erosion of Britons’ ability to separate principe from pratique—a famous French specialty. For a long time now, the British have had no principles whatever, merely practices. (Americans have another problem, more melodramatic than tragic: an inability to separate principe from publicité.) There is a single viable perennial psychology, just as there is one evolving physics, and it does not, despite its most important modern exponent’s quirky admiration for England and the English language, issue from a pragmatic and basically “sane” English mode of perception: it is hot and wet and filthy, the way everything south and east of Calais is, in Britain, said to be. It is a mongrel; it bites (the way Ackerley’s dog Queenie, immortalized as “Tulip,” did); and its grammar is often atrocious. The British don’t want it any more than they want the Channel tunnel, but, as they say, there it is.
Having myself already taken up enough space abreacting, I must, in reviewing Ackerley, declare an interest. It is my belief, formed on the evidence of his published fiction and his diaries (as well as one undoubtedly adduced because, like Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest, commiserating with John Worthing over his beloved brother Ernest’s sudden death in Paris—“carried off . . . by a severe chill”—I am myself, so to speak, peculiarly susceptible to drafts), that Joe Ackerley was a lifelong alcoholic. That is to say, he suffered from the disease the American Medical Association lists as alcoholism, which some in recent years have called Jellinek’s disease. It is not a disease that always produces (though it sometimes does) rachitic panhandlers, screaming paranoiacs on airplanes, disoriented writers of genius on television talk shows and unlooked-for windshield cleaners at stop lights. It is a progressive and terminal disease that all too often takes its time. When it does not destroy its victims in youth or middle age through massive insults to the brain, it is certain as it worms its way through their lives to cause them to do untoward things on impulse: pouring urine out of boots through open windows and leering—toothless in the public street—at the immediate objects of their desires. Readers temperamentally resistant to discussing this malady (or of the narcissistic character disorder believed by many researchers in the field of addiction therapy to be, along with a certain metabolic irregularity, chief among its multideterminations, physical and psychic, hereditary and environmental), or readers for whom classic psychoanalytical theory and practice are simply subjects for parlor games and party turns, may stop reading here. I suffered a similarly dismayed reaction to Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde—a far more ambitious, sympathetic and successful enterprise than Ackerley, but one that even so fails completely to recognize, and therefore to delineate, what self-loathing in a homosexual alcoholic—no matter what degree of either talent or genius he has—really looks like. (It looks like the picture of Dorian Gray.)
Alcoholism is the allergic reaction to a chemical that paradoxically demands more of that chemical; it is related ontologically to D.W. Winnicott’s excitation/rest cycle and to feeding in the infantile, narcissistic stage of life. (Adult narcissists typically conceive the love object as comestible, as did Marcel Proust, and fantasize the commonplace “Oh, I could eat him with a spoon!”—therefore ensuring that the beloved becomes both execrable and excretable.) And it is related existentially to the fact that a pleasant or desirable-tasting liquid becomes both the sustenance and the destroyer (Quod me nutruit me detruit): the perfect type of punishment unconsciously sought by the infant who fears that his devouring love cannot be tolerated. (The infant consequently projects the “devouring mother”—an imago that cooperates by being able to “do unto another” what is seemingly being willed against her—by introjecting the Avenger.)
In a society and in an age in which the broadest public attention has been drawn to the desirability of rehabilitating victims of coalcoholism (indeed, in a handful of enlightened states, treatment of coalcoholism is covered by medical insurance), why should one have to cajole others into taking seriously what one wise coalcoholic has dubbed “the founding disease”? Alcoholism has been pandemic in the West since the expansion during the Renaissance of both Western cognizance and libido or—whichever may be thought to have occurred first—since the ante was upped over viniculture and the brewing of hops when Irish monks discovered how to distill ardent spirits: uisce beatha, “the water of life”—whiskey. (That alcoholism and coalcoholism have become a subject for jokes is the surest sign of therapeutic efficacy, for ridicule is merely denial in sports clothes. Just as twenty years ago the statement “Everyone knows somebody who is writing a novel” turned quickly into the question “Do you have a friend who is not writing a novel?” so the increasingly nervous observation “Everyone seems to know somebody in a recovery program for chemical dependency or codependency” has in the 1980s—thanks to the work done by persons of consequence, including at least three wives of prominent politicians—turned into the question “Do you have a friend who is not?”)
If there is not as much published in medical journals or available to the general public in Great Britain concerning “the addictions” as there is in the United States; if there are not as many facilities (of both the professional and the “self-help” sort) for the treatment of addictive diseases in that troubled society as there are currently in this one, that lack is certainly little excuse for a British biographer’s failure even to clock the boldest signs of narcissistic depression. Nearly every significant diagnostic and therapeutic procedure available to the English-speaking analytical community (apart, that is, from the erotic whimsies of Jungian theory and practice—essentially an elaborate reaction formation against psychoanalysis) proceeds out of Freud by way of Melanie Klein directly to the formulations of D.W. Winnicott—the pioneer, especially in terms of the vicissitudes of the child, if not in the world then at least in the English-speaking world (he died in 1971, four years after J.R. Ackerley)—and to the formulations of R.W.D. Fairbairn, whose thesis on narcissistic anguish poses the following question: “What are the states of ‘unpleasure and anxiety’ against which creative production may be used as a defense?”
In Fairbairn’s view—as recently summarized by Anthony Storr in Solitude—there exist two fundamental ones: the depressive and the schizoid. The emotion characteristic of the first is a feeling of hopelessness and misery; of the second, one of futility and lack of meaning. Not only is schizoid apathy different in quality from depression, but the two states of mind tend to occur in persons of different temperament and character structure. People threatened by a sense of futility and meaninglessness have not progressed past an early stage of emotional development, the “paranoid-schizoid position.” The others are further along, in the “depressive position,” and are much more extroverted. Both come under the Freudian oral phase, the first being concerned with suppose primitive emotions concerned with sucking and incorporation, the second with biting—the discovery and acting out of aggressive feelings toward the person providing food and love.
In the final chapter of Human Nature, the recently published summation of D.W. Winnicott’s thought, we read this terse account of the phenomenon of psychosomatic diseases (and we can only hope we have progressed beyond that stage in general opinion at which the term psychosomatic was taken to mean imaginary): “Analysis in terms of the depressive position reveals a great deal in these cases, particularly a defensive mood of a chronic kind with depression hidden at the core. This is called common anxious restlessness in childhood, or hypomania, and in psycho-analytic theory the restlessness is thought of as a manic defense against depression; a constant over-activity and bolstering up excitement leads to physiological alterations. . . . A source is also found here for the various compulsive indulgences.”
Both alcoholism and narcissistic disturbance are inherited; the first somatogenically and the second psychogenically. Alcoholics and other addicts tend to have family members who either abuse substances, are sexually compulsive or become abstracted or “dotty”—in general, who “check out” a good part of the time. In the United States, the cover, or buzzword, for this phenomenon is dysfunctional family. The family of J.R. Ackerley exhibits so much of this behavior, and of the compound psychosexual dislocations of father-daughter incest and mother-daughter rage, that the conclusion is inescapable that one and all survivors sought refuge down avenues of mood alteration.
Here is Parker on Ackerley’s sister Nancy:
Nancy had been bored. Her baby had been a brief distraction, but after his birth, Nancy’s boredom had given way to acute depression. . . . Whether she was suffering from the then unrecognized condition of post-natal depression or simply exhibiting the symptoms of what amounted to a constitutional dissatisfaction with life, is unclear, but her husband was worried enough to send her to England and to ask Dr. Wadd [remember him?] to keep an eye on her and send him bulletins about her progress.
The ruination of Nancy had begun very early on and she had failed to grow up. Indulged and, quite literally, spoiled by her father, she was accustomed to getting her own way and had developed from the small girl who stamped her foot and screamed until her desires were met.
“Constitutional dissatisfaction with life”? “Quite literally, spoiled”? Parker has been listening to too many of Margaret Thatcher’s speeches. (The prime minister as introjected Avenger: this psychic malady, like hysteria, can infect an entire body politic.)
Actually, the portrait of Ackerley’s sister done in these pages—that of a nervy woman clearly addicted to the dubious diagnoses of the medical profession and to the several mood-altering prescriptions she had been cavalierly dispensed, who seems, after decades of disorientation, to have recovered completely, in almost indecent haste, following her brother’s death—is an accidentally more detailed, complex and ultimately satisfying one from the histrionic point of view (and aren’t all characters in biographies read these days in casting terms?) than that of the book’s principal subject.
Parker’s reaction formation, abreaction, denial and reckless writing notwithstanding, he does lead off with great gusto on the superficial man, although I was dismayed by the book’s first sentence: “J.R. Ackerley should not have been born at all.” It might be supposed that, contrary to what I have already indicated, Parker is indeed identifying with Ackerley here, seconding his self-estimation, but in the first place, such a judgment is not in his brief, and in the second place, in a survivor of parental brutality, the feeling that one should not have been born is part not of the true self but of the false one; it is another introjected feeling, used as a defense against the terror of the true feeling: that it is “they” who must be annihilated. Surely “might not have been born” would have sufficed to indicate objectively the precariousness of the situation: a mother who loathed sex and a father who simply happened to be out of “French letters” one night early in the winter of 1896.
The story then picks up steam around the author’s own quasi-erotic assessments. So often does he contend in the first few chapters that Joe Ackerley was beautiful of face and form, that I began to remember the old joke about Joan Crawford pictures—the writers had to include asides every so often buttressing the fiat that here was one gorgeous woman—and the longer I looked for evidence in the photographs enclosed in the book, the more I began to imagine that Ackerley and Joan Crawford . . . The same jaw, the same shoulders. Parker is at some pains to suggest that his subject bore “a striking resemblance to the American actor Montgomery Clift,” but I hold out for Joan Crawford, perhaps because this biography strikes me in the same way as does Oscar Levant’s immortal summation of the actress in character, addressed to John Garfield in Humoresque: “She’s as complex as a Bach fugue!”
The (Joan Crawford–like) impression of willfulness and tempestuous perversity is reinforced by one of Ackerley’s characteristic double-edged remarks: “I fear that in my life I have disappointed a great many people. Having been attractive, there were more to disappoint than would have otherwise been the case.” (That remark is perhaps slightly more suggestive of a Mae West than of a Joan Crawford, and oddly reminiscent, too, of the counsel offered to a friend by one of our relentless contemporary American diarists, himself a rather famous and perhaps even valiant gladiator in the narcissistic arena. “The trouble with you and me is that we want everybody to love us—and we can’t know everybody!”)
Ackerley was luckier—if life’s a boon—than his older brother Peter. Their mother took so many “purges, nostrums and bodily exercises” (presumably excluding sex) to abort her firstborn that he showed up backwards, maimed with a double hernia. (The psychic upshot of this was his determined management of his own death in World War I, which resulted, of course, in his being greatly mourned, both in the family circle—Mauriac’s “serpent’s nest of blood ties”—and beyond it.) Joe Ackerley survived, on the face of it unscarred, to term, if only to atone his whole life long for intimidating his parents into permitting his birth. (Second sons have a notoriously difficult time of it as it is; Joe Ackerley’s deal is worthy of a script thrown at Joan Crawford—moreover, one thrown to her years before Humoresque, in the 1930s, when she tended to go before the public impersonating masochistic, if always boldly plucky, proletarians.)
So much for the energy expended limning face and form. Concerning that expended in detailing vicissitude, it is simply exasperating to read a plot paragraph that begins, “In spite of Roger’s frequent and extended absences, the family seems to have been a happy one,” refers to Ackerley’s bedwetting as “his one weakness” and concludes, “Amongst the household staff, two employees left an impression on him. The first was a boot-boy, and the impression was that of his hand on Joe’s bare buttocks in some childishly erotic game; the second a French nurse or governess who, when he ‘played with [his] little tassel as children do,’ took his hands away, told him he was dirty and threatened to cut off his penis with her scissors.” Are all English happy families like that, or are boot-boys and French nurses not reckoned family? That the parameters of Joe Ackerley’s sexual life can be drawn in his repellent charade with a French prostitute in the First World War and in the ambivalence of his prolonged masturbatory career, seeking and then “cutting off” a regiment of penile boot-boys, suggests something else. There is no demonstrable evidence in Ackerley’s record, written or spoken, that he understood the trajectory of his erotic life. As an adolescent, he thought of sex as having “nothing whatever to do with those feelings which I had not yet experienced but about which I was already writing a lot of dreadful sentimental verse, called romance and love.” (One cannot of course write, sentimentally or otherwise, about what one has never felt.) The boy-man who continued all his life to play puerile erotic games nevertheless never stopped looking, in spite of the sordid paucity of the stuff in his family romance, for love.
I do not intend to suggest that—in the notoriously inhumane and psychoanalytically monstrous formulation of the diabolical Edmund Bergler, the therapeutic Rumpelstiltskin of the 1950s who led the unsuccessful American rearguard opposition to the motion to strike homosexuality off the list of mental diseases—sexual intercourse between men is the “neurotic counterfeit” of heterosexual practice. Nor will I endorse for a moment either the dizzy and reductive view (Parker characterizes it as “strictly Freudian”) of the erotically spasmodic W.H. Auden, which strictly legislates the limits of male-male sexuality to the “‘oral,’ acting out ‘Son-and/or-Mother,’ or ‘anal,’ playing ‘Wife-and/or-Husband.’” I merely wish to indicate that Ackerley’s own evaluation of his instinctual object reach was so furtive and so fraught with imposed and inextricably intertwined—in the unfortunate English of James Strachey’s translation of Freud, “cathected”—delectation and disgust, as to suggest that it had never progressed beyond the melodramatic confines of the W.C.
Peter Parker allows that “in spite of what was to be an extremely promiscuous life (some ‘two or three hundred’ partners, according to his own calculations), Ackerley remained sexually fastidious. This fastidiousness was considerably compromised by the fact the [he] suffered from ejaculatio praecox, or sexual incontinence.” But this, though close (as part for whole), is not the issue: the issue was spoliation of a deeper kind. Ackerley himself confessed that his ideal friend “should admit me but no one else; he should be physically attractive to me and younger than myself—the younger the better as closer to innocence.” It is that exclusivity and innocence which the sexual partner’s projected loathing despoils in ejaculatio praecox, before he can tolerate that partner’s orgasm. This is narcissistic pathos at its simplest and most timorous. (The late critic Richard Hayes wrote of Eugene O’Neill, “Not artifice, nor any solacing reason could mediate the authority of his private pain.”)
Of course Ackerley lived in a treacherous time; all homosexuals did, and we should keep that in mind before we go after any of them. No mention of homosexuality could be openly made in England (not even when the whole populace was said to be singing “I Never Saw a Straight Banana”), and the middle classes really did believe that men of the lower classes owned cruder feelings than theirs and were capable of treacheries their mothers had never dreamed of. (They held these beliefs even after reading the novels of Marie Corelli—who, by the way, comes in for a rather knee-jerk sneer from Parker. This is yet another instance of the crudely digested, and belched, received idea. The author of Temporal Power was at least as authentic as Iris Murdoch is.)
Here is E.M. Forster warning Ackerley on his foray into the theater:
As for them nactor [sic] chaps, Joe, as many as you like, but many—take no one of them seriously, for you will then be asking for what they can’t give. So either many or none!
And here is Forster, the putative gay liberator, the author of Maurice, that (more overtly) homosexual Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on Ackerley’s attachment to a male member of the “lower orders”:
The standards which are so obvious to you are very remote to him and his class, and he was bound to lapse from them sooner or later. And by standards I mean not only conventions but methods of feeling. He can quite well be deeply attached to you and yet suddenly find the journey up [from Portsmouth] too much of a fag. It is difficult for us with out middle-class training to realize, but it is so.
These sentiments were shared by Ackerley himself, who, responding to Leonard Woolf on the matter of a likely libel suit against We Think the World of You, the model for the hero of which had been one of the great attachments of his life, wrote:
I am rather naïve in such matters, as I was explaining, rather tipsily, to Ian. It had not occurred to me that the working classes brought actions, even if they ever read books. . . .
Ackerley at his best, in My Dog Tulip (which embarrassed many) and My Father and Myself (which dismayed not a few), is wonderfully good. At his maudlin worst, he is like someone who’s been sitting up too late trying to read Ronald Firbank between the lines.
The days potter by here much the same. Sometimes the sad sound of their ticking gets into my ears as they disappear into history, carrying nothing in their delicate hands but a yawn.
(Of this Forster actually wrote: “Can the day that produced such a sentence be lost?”)
Fortunately, we have the best of Ackerley to read—the aforementioned My Dog Tulip, the fictional memoir Hindoo Holiday, My Father and Myself—and we know how good they are. For me the best passage Ackerley wrote occurs in My Dog Tulip, and concerns the suicide of an unknown boy.
And young Holland, where did he die? Where is the swamp into which he drove his face? Lost, lost, the inconsiderable, anguished deed in the blind hurry of time. The perfect boy face downward in a swamp. . . . The doctor who performed the autopsy remarked that the muscles and limbs were absolutely perfect, he had never seen a better developed boy in his life, nor, when he split open the skull, such deep gray matter. Ah, perfect but imperfect boy, brilliant at work, bored by games, traits of effeminacy were noticed in you, you were vain of your appearance and addicted to the use of scent. Everyone, it seemed, wished you different from what you were, so you came out here at last and pushed your face into a swamp, and that was the end of you, perfect but imperfect boy.
Ackerley had written more openly and more directly of himself, of his disappointment that the war experience that killed his brother had not made more of a “man” of the survivor: “I needed to have shoves forward. My own nature was not the sort that comes out well in emergency. If I had had a shove from the Major in the Boom Ravine in France I should have acted heroically, though I should not have wished to: his leaving it in my hands or putting obstructions in front of me was fatal to my character.” It is pathetically and dismayingly characteristic of a culture that simultaneously sentimentalizes and brutalizes childhood (by calling it the only “place” in which “character” is ever “formed”) that hell-for-leather bravado should be so equated with heroism.
Later, in fictive disguise in 1923, he continued in this vein. “Standing there he mocked himself with visions, saw himself going gloomily on, getting a little more slovenly, a little more weary, a little more acrimonious and dull, more hopeless, more abandoned. . . .”
And toward the end of his life: “How glad I was whenever my problems were forestalled or solved by [other] people. . . . As I have already said, I was ever one of life’s subordinates, I have always wanted someone standing at my elbow, throughout life, taking all my responsibility from my shoulders.”
To which the ever-scolding Parker (who, in a hilarious burst of dense snobbery entirely in line with E.M. Forster’s caution on actors, finds his subject’s geriatric passion for the pop singer Cliff Richard “inexplicable”) replies:
This melancholy self-portrait is so flagrantly at odds with the regard in which Ackerley was held, and knew himself to be held, that it could only have been written in the deepest dejection. It seems inconceivable that Ackerley could in all honesty believe that: “Ill-read, unmindful, of narrow interest. I often felt too stupid to connect a single book with a suitable reviewer’s name.” Apart from anything else, if this were true, the BBC would hardly have invited him back for a month at the cost of fifty guineas a week. In the final analysis, perhaps he did not believe it, for he did not incorporate these pages into My Father and Myself. He might also have reflected that, if he had made a mess of his emotional and family life and had wasted his time upon the work of others at The Listener, he had also managed to write a handful of very good books. He kept these volumes, a small but impressive stack, beside his bed and sometimes sat in pubs alone, rereading them and chuckling appreciatively to himself.
Ah, yes. . . . Well, you see—this is it.
RONALD FIRBANK
The Flower Beneath the Foot by Ronald Firbank. Penguin Modern Classics.
He was on his way here to us. He died in the spring of 1926, in Rome, at the Quirinale, as unfortunate a venue strategically as onomastically. (“Mind you, dear, he needn’t’ve died at all, had he chosen to stop at the Inghilterra,” is how one venerably raddled old Sibyl insisted at me on a Roman summer night a generation ago. In those years, if you were scheming to get noticed by “your own” on your European maiden voyage, you wore a lot of gray seersucker, you sported yellow or orange linen ties and you flashed your New Directions Firbanks. Dearie, do you remember the Caprice/Inclinations/Vainglory volume with the “Andrew Warhol”—cupid cover design and the Ernest Jones introduction: “Ronald Firbank is a better and more serious writer than it has ever been fashionable to suppose”?) Died writing The New Rhythum, a novel of New York, of which masterpiece seven chapters and assorted notes survive. (“I am writing a novel of New York, since I was never there . . . I hope to come out next year and develop it all.”)
I like to think we (they, the then “we”) would have welcomed him, had he (happy phrase!) “come out” to us. He’d have written for Frank Crowninshield’s veteran-smart magazine and for Harold Ross’s smart new magazine and been taken up (no, not done in, taken up) by Carl Van Vechten, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. Alexander Woolcott would have sniffed his hind parts, said something dreadful and been reprimanded by Helen Hayes. The Lunts and Noël Coward . . . never mind. Tallulah Bankhead would have said there was more to him and to his rare birds, met eye-to-eye, than there was to Maeterlinck’s. Once pictures started talking, his new-found friends, all of them gay for a buck, would have had him uncrated and shipped West by rail, in a rococo caboose marked “uncouple at Pasadena.” In Hollywood, he would have worked with Ernst Lubitsch, under Irving Thalberg, on Jean Harlow vehicles—because, you see, in The New Rhythum he had opened up a fresh vein of, as he put it, “expressions of the soil,” and he need never have looked back on the exquisitely finished vocabulary and acoustic (that twilight English of the cataleptic British Empire) he brought to a perfection unrivaled in his lifetime in Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926). Instead, he died at 40, of what was in those days politely described as “an excess of champagne and nerves” (officially, pneumonia). No “massive insult to the brain,” merely an exhausted cut.
Alan Harris, in the introduction to The New Rhythum and Other Pieces (London: Duckworth, 1962), says, “One thing is certain: New York or New Jerusalem, this last vision of the Firbank world, with its pervading atmosphere of a ballroom in Chedorlahomor—a faubourg of Sodom, as readers of The Flower Beneath the Foot will remember—fanned in defiance of Nature by breezes from the isles of Greece, is the authentic thing.”
So (authentic a thing) is The Flower Beneath the Foot, which I would place alongside Pirelli, Prancing Nigger (Sorrow in Sunlight) and Valmouth as the fourth precious gem in the canonic diadem. (It is, in fact, the ruby. Valmouth is the emerald, P.N. the sapphire and Pirelli the diamond.) It is the story of a girl who loves a prince, loses him to a princess and in consequence locks herself away for life in the convent in which she was raised. (“Oblivious of what she did, she began to beat her hands, until they streamed with blood, against the broken glass ends upon the [cloister] wall: ‘Yousef, Yousef, Yousef . . .”) The girl, Laura, becomes (as if at once, for the planet Firbank is time-warped) a saint. Her emblem: “Some girls are born organically good; I wasn’t.”
Saint Laura de Nazianzi is native to a country, Pisuerga, to whose queen she is attached as lady-in-waiting. Her mistress complains of her, “She reads at such a pace . . . and when I asked her where she had learnt to read so quickly she replied ‘On the screens at Cinemas.’” Laura dreams of being wed in Kiroulla, the capital, “under the low white dome, crowned with tourquoise tiles, of the Cathedral, which was known to all churchgoers as the Blue Jesus.” She dares voice her devotion for the offspring to the politically ambitious parent—“He has such strength! One could niche an idol in his dear, dinted chin!”—and is severely rebuked. “Enough!” “Holy Virgin,” murmurs Her Gaudiness, the Mistress of the Robes, as the lovesick postulant departs, “Should His Weariness the Prince yield himself to this caprice.” “‘It would be a fatal connexion,’ the Queen continued, ‘and must never, never be.’”
It never is. King Geo and Queen Glory descend from—where else?—England, with their beastly little fox-hunting daughter Elsie, and the fates grind Mlle. Nazianzi’s desires to ashes-of-roses dusting powder. Here is one passage in the prayer’s prayer, the dilemma, and the forecast of the eventual salvation, seraphically conveyed:
“Oh, help me heaven,” she prayed, “to be decorative and to do right! Let me always look young never more than sixteen or seventeen—at the very outside, and let Youself love me—as much as I do him. And I thank you for creating such a darling, God, (for he’s a perfect dear), and I can’t tell you how much I love him; especially when he wags it! I mean his tongue . . . Bless all the sisters at the Flaming Hood—above all Sister Ursula . . . and be sweet, besides, to old Jane . . . Show me the straight path! And keep me forever free from the malicious scandal of the Court. Amen.”
As Teresa of Ávila once said to a suppliant hermana, a fan of her Exlamaciones. “This just came hot off the griddle, Dolores—the answer to your frantic prayers. Read the summons, and weep without ceasing.”
Now, just in case you are not now, nor ever have been, Catholic (or any of the dressy smells’-n’-bells spinoffs), don’t feel excluded; there’s plenty in The Flower Beneath the Foot to unnerve you. There is Chedorlahomor: “. . . to gratify her own wildest whims, the dearest perhaps of which was to form a party to excavate (for objects of art) among the ruins of Chedorlahomor, a faubourg of Sodom.” There’s the languor and ecstasy of the summer palace, where “in the deserted alleys, the golden blossoms, unable to resist the sun, littered in perfumed piles the ground, overcoming her before long with a sensation of vertige.” There are the variegated anxieties of politics: “And brooding on life and baits, and what A will come for while B won’t, the Count’s thoughts grew almost humorous as the afternoon wore on.” And finally, supremely, there is the crucified narcissism worthy of Racine, of Rimbaud and of Oscar Wilde: “‘Before life,’ she murmured, ‘the saddest thing of all, was thrust upon us, I believe I was an angel . . . Oh, what did I do to lose my wings?? Whatever did I say to them! Father, Father, how did I annoy God? Why did he put me here?’”
V.S. Pritchett, that amiable yeoman of the garden in which everything seems lovely, right, has recently written of “the old, robust masculine tradition of British comedy from Fielding to Smollet [continuing] in our own vernacular.” (He’s praising Kingsley Amis.) You know the drill: good beef, nice bit of roast potato, thickish portion of pudding, a decent claret. There is another vernacular, one that can speak of “Laura’s sad little snatch of a smile”; one that celebrated the last (long—still with us) gasps of mock-monarchy and mock-religion in the formerly favored sceptered isle. It goes with ortolans, with wild rice, with, yes, champagne (and nerves) and with a divine bit of coeurs flottants. This book is written in it. Cherish it. It’s never (God willing!) going to wind up ionized on Masterpiece Theater. You’re charged to read it, merely.