The last line of The Holy Bible goes to Albert Finney as Sir in the 1983 Peter Yates film of Ronald Harwood’s 1980 play The Dresser. Sir is the fading star actor-manager of a Shakespearean theatre company trying to act its way through WWII England. His dresser, Norman, played by Tom Courtenay, is his assistant, who enables him to struggle through his last performance of King Lear. The film is largely a sequence of exchanges between the two men, who exemplify a Hegelian master-and-servant relationship of mutual dependency: Sir is lost without his dresser, and Norman anticipates having no role once Sir has died. In the midst of his panicked preparations, Sir laments that he cannot remember how the play begins, seeking a prompt from Norman then flying into a rage at having to be walked through it: “Take me through it?” he yells, “Nobody takes you through it, you’re put through it, night after night after night. I haven’t the strength.” Ever on the verge of collapse, Sir is repeatedly brought back from the brink by Norman, who chastises him in this circumstance on the ugliness of self-pity:
I must say, you of all people, you disappoint me, if you don’t mind my saying so. You, who always say that self-pity is the most unattractive quality on stage or off […] Struggle and survival, you say, that’s all that matters. The whole world’s struggling for bloody survival, so why can’t you?
Struggle and survival, and self-pity are the two poles that Sir stumbles between, lurching from one to the other. What illuminates and inspires him is a dedication to art, to drama, to performance, as indicators of human civilization, decency even, in the face of barbarity. Nazi bombs are literally falling on the city of Bradford around them as they act out that last performance of King Lear, with Sir frequently shaking his fist at the Nazis: “Bomb, bomb, bomb us into submission if you dare! But each word I speak will be a shield against your savagery, each line I utter a protection against your terror.” Norman, with comic punctuality, brings Sir’s self-centred grandiloquence back down to Earth with witty commentary: “I shouldn’t take it too personally, Sir […] I don’t think they can hear you, Sir.”
What permeates The Dresser is a sense of being out of time, of being at the end of things, of coming to the end of your rope and finding it frayed, of there being not enough time, to stop Nazi bombs with the words of William Shakespeare or to prevent or stay your own unravelling. With “La Tristesse Durera,” the Manics had played with the perspective of an elderly person, an old man and war veteran, coming to the end, and looking backwards in disappointment and bitterness. The song didn’t really work, due to its extreme corniness, but they get it right with “This is Yesterday,” a desultory take on the McCartney classic, perhaps the most vacant and soothing, and out-of-place song on The Holy Bible — the calm after the storm and before you hurtle into the maelstrom of the final three songs of the album, ending on the adrenalized note of “P.C.P.,” which once more reprises the theme of old age looking backwards: when I was young.
A young man identifying with old age as a way to express his sense of despondency or despair is something I can relate to. I remember doing it myself, as a teenager; my elementary school teacher, a kind old man, explained to me that what I was going through was not old age, but life. If I was feeling all this turmoil that meant I was living. T.S. Eliot does it too, with “Gerontion,” where he imagines himself “an old man in a dry month / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain,” crushed by history but absent any redemption of wisdom or revelation, a fantasy of getting to the end without the solace of understanding.
But imagining old age to be devoid of wisdom is a limited position, a product of selective reading, and that self-destructive worship of youthful purity that inhibits choosing the world of adult compromise. The young man cannot know how he will change, how his ideas will grow and mutate, expanding to embrace a life that to him now seems bitterly corrupt, but might, once he gets there, not seem that bad. The tendency to respond to this position with anger and frustration is strong, as is to judge this vision of adulthood and old age as a terminal decline, as impatient, short-sighted, fatally so. I’m in general happier and better adjusted at thirty-nine than I was at twenty-seven. It’s hard not to think of Bradfield’s comment: “Richey, if you could just have held on a little longer, things might have been a lot different. Maybe then you could have had all these things you wanted. You might have been happy” (qtd in Heatley). But perhaps, it is not so much a matter of thought, but endurance. And it being so damn easy to cave in. The Dresser’s Sir is impatient to be done with it, be done with it all: “I am being crushed, the lifeblood is draining out of me. The load is too much […] I cannot give any more. I have nothing more to give. I want a tranquil senility […] I cannot move that which cannot be moved.”