A fantasy

It snowed yesterday morning, a miniature blizzard in Cambridge, a fight against the elements in the biting cold. Head down, I arrived at work besnowflaked and damp.

Later in the morning, the snow turned into rain. I looked out of a window across the Backs, the snow melting on the lawn, and saw the University Library in the distance. I suddenly had the sensation that I was Leo in The Go-Between, in an unfamiliar house, the grey-brown sky outside, the puddles.

Perhaps if I try hard enough, I will become Leo, I thought. Sometimes when I really want something that my rational mind knows to be impossible (normally invisibility), I can make myself believe, momentarily, that it may happen.

I had to stop being Leo and go back to work, but for a few seconds it was nice to be somewhere else.

50 films: #2. The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1970)

It all begins with what may be the most famous opening line in twentieth-century literature.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

If you want your novel to be remembered, start it with a memorable aphorism. But after nearly sixty years of being quoted, it can’t help coming across as hackneyed, especially when stripped of its context. This is the paragraph that follows:

When I came upon the diary, it was lying at the bottom of a rather battered red cardboard collar-box, in which as a small boy I kept my Eton collars. Someone, probably my mother, had filled it with treasures dating from those days. There were two dry, empty sea-urchins; two rusty magnets, a large one and a small one, which had almost lost their magnetism; some negatives rolled up in a tight coil; some stumps of sealing-wax; a small combination lock with three rows of letters; a twist of very fine whipcord; and one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use was not at once apparent: I could not even tell what they had belonged to. The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, for the first time for over fifty years, a recollection of what each had meant to me came back, faint as the magnets’ power to draw, but as perceptible. Something came and went between us: the intimate pleasure of recognition, the almost mystical thrill of early ownership—feelings of which, at sixty-odd, I felt ashamed.

It seems appropriate to document my own discovery of The Go-Between, which began in a not dissimilar way, with the reawakening of the dead. My uncle William died in May 1998, and I ended up inheriting (i.e. taking) a number of his possessions. Among those books of his I took was a copy of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley (with his name written inside, I think – it was a book he had studied at school, but the edition was a more modern one, a light green Penguin Modern Classic). I also took a couple of boxes of unlabelled tapes, some of them blank, some not, which I scoured for items of interest. One of them, a chrome cassette dating probably from the 1970s and possessing a card insert that looked like one of these, had some extracts from what I identified immediately as the film of The Go-Between recorded on it. Listening to it was a curious experience, like William’s hand reaching out and taking mine. We didn’t have a video recorder until about 1990, and I remember recording the soundtracks of television programmes on my tape recorder when I was very young. How old must he have been when he recorded this? Fourteen, perhaps? That would have been around 1979. Before I was born, anyway.

I was sixteen when I eventually read it. I remember sitting at the front of a German classroom dipping in and out of it while I was supposed to be invigilating GCSE pupils waiting to sit their oral exams. It automatically became a favourite book of mine, partly, I suspect, because of the extra meaning it had already been invested with because of the associations detailed above.

The film of The Go-Between was the third screen collaboration of Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey, following two excellent films made in the years before, The Servant and Accident. Pinter had been asked by Losey to write a screenplay of the novel as soon as The Servant was completed in 1963:

[The novel] had such a tremendous impact on me that I actually broke down. Nothing less than tears. So I couldn’t see how, feeling as I did, I could write a screenplay. Then a month or so later, Joe talked me into it.

But wrangling over rights delayed production for several years, and it was not until 1970 that filming began.

The prologue to the novel shows Leo Colston, a man on the verge of old age, discovering a diary that reawakens memories of the long, hot summer of 1900, which he spent at Brandham Hall in Norfolk, the country home of his schoolfriend Marcus Maudsley. With Marcus incapacitated by measles, the 12-year-old Leo finds himself employed by Marcus’ older sister, Marian, to take letters between her and a local farmer, Ted Burgess. But Marian is engaged to Lord Trimingham. The traumatic end of the affair is something that echoes throughout Leo’s later life, and an epilogue, returning to the present, shows the adult Leo returning to Brandham to lay his ghosts to rest.

The point of chief interest in the film as opposed to the book is its structure. Whereas the novel is told in flashback, bookended by two chapters set in the present, the first setting up Leo’s story and the second resolving it, the film intersperses the past and the present. That famous opening line is spoken as a voiceover by Michael Redgrave, who appears later in the film portraying the adult Leo, over an image of a Norfolk field, followed by the child Leo (Dominic Guard) travelling with Marcus towards Brandham. As the film progresses, the older Leo becomes more prominent. We see him visiting graves at Brandham, taking a room, meeting Marian once more, all of these scenes intercut with the events of that childhood summer. Losey:

… what interested me primarily was the possibility of representing 1900 using shots from the present, not in a chronological, but in an almost subliminal sequence, superimposing voices from the present, so that threads which started off parallel gradually intertwine, and in the end past and present are one and the same. As you know, I am fascinated by the concept of time, and by the power the cinema has suddenly to reveal the meaning of a whole life from the age of 12 to 60, and by the effect that those few weeks lived at the age of 12 are to have on the grown man.

I imagine that this may be the effect that these juxtapositions have on the first-time viewer. Some critics have suggested that the appearance of the adult Leo throughout the film rather than at the end serves to undercut the tension of the narrative. The sight of the man that Leo has become may be too strongly suggestive of how his childhood summer ends. I think it’s just another way of telling the story. Pinter:

You can’t simply transfer a book to the screen. It doesn’t work, for reasons which should be obvious. In a film, you have to go for the essence of the story, to give the film its focus, with the other elements contributing to that focus.

The ending is altered from that of the book, though there is a similar sense of catharsis for Leo. In the book this is achieved by the south-west prospect of Brandham Hall returning to his memory; in the film it is done by the implication that he has defied Marian. I find the generosity of the book’s conclusion more pleasing, but the film’s ending at least does not amount to a desecration of the novel.

I suspect most of these essays will dwell for a while on the music, and Michel Legrand’s memorable score for this film is worthy of discussion. He is in many ways the ideal composer for such a film, a watercolourist rather than an oil painter. His scoring here recalls composers who must have influenced him, most obviously Poulenc (shades of the Aubade and other piano concertante works) – the forces he employs are two pianos and twenty-five accompanying instruments, most of them strings. His melody grows from nothing more than a four-note contour, which he manipulates in various directions while the harmony shifts underneath. (Beethoven did something similar in his fifth symphony.) It is the perfect accompaniment to the rain-spattered window we see while the credits roll, the sound of greyness.

Costume and art direction are exemplary, and contribute greatly at the start to the feeling of Leo as an outsider, a middle-class boy in an upper-class world. I have barely written of the actors yet, but they are in every way as one would wish them. Alan Bates’ portrayal of Ted Burgess entirely fails to dispel the growing feeling that he may be my favourite person in the history of the universe, while Julie Christie is radiant as Marian, and I cannot conceive of a better Leo than Dominic Guard.

Accounts describe the process of making the film as a joyous one. Losey fostered a close-knit family atmosphere, which must have been comforting to Dominic Guard. Guard was a shy boy, somewhat in the shadow, thought Alan Bates, of his older brother Christopher, also an actor; but he struck up close friendships with the other boys in the cast, Richard Gibson (later Herr Flick in ‘Allo ‘Allo) and Simon Hume-Kendall (whose turn as the pompous Denys is one of the film’s great joys; he later became one of the men behind the Sport newspapers). They used to play games and listen to records when not filming. Edith de Rham’s biography of Losey contains a delightful photograph of a cricket match being played by cast members on location at Melton Constable. The very glamorous Margaret Leighton stands at the crease in sunglasses and headscarf while Edward Fox squats bare-chested behind her, keeping wicket.

It is not surprising that such a sensitive and successful adaptation of the novel should have been showered with awards on its release. These included BAFTAs for Pinter, Fox, Leighton and Guard, and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which left Luchino Visconti miffed at the snub to Death in Venice. Maria Callas wrote to say how much she adored the film. But Pinter and Losey did not work together again. A planned adaptation of Proust did not come to fruition, and remains one of the more tantalising films never to be made. We should be grateful for their legacy.

Those of a sensitive disposition may not wish to sample this kitschy easy-listening version of the Legrand theme, which my fluctuating levels of discernment permit me to enjoy wildly.

Sources
Michael Ciment, Conversations with Losey. London: Methuen, 1985.
Edith de Rham, Joseph Losey. London: André Deutsch, 1991.
James Palmer and Michael Riley, The films of Joseph Losey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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Memory triggers

While on holiday a month and a bit ago, I came across a mysterious reminder on my phone. It had been set for 15th November and read simply ‘Donovan’. Had I set this reminder myself? I must have done, though I had no memory of it. And what on earth did it mean?

I turned the matter over in my head. I could approach this problem from two different directions: the word, Donovan, and the date, 15th November.

What does Donovan mean to me? Jason Donovan, of course. I was quite a fan of his when I was about six years old. And his father Terence, also in the cast of Neighbours when I used to watch it in the mid-’90s. Also Donovan, the singer-songwriter from the 1960s, of whom I know nothing (and, pace hippies, in whom I have approximately no interest whatsoever) and whom I probably confuse with Lonnie Donegan as often as not. And I have known of people called Donovan in real life, though not known them personally.

What about 15th November? Well, it’s no less attractive a date than many others. It is the birthday of mercurial Uruguayan midfielder Gustavo Poyet, currently manager of Brighton and, among South American players, the Premier League’s all-time joint top goalscorer – until, that is, Carlos Tévez overtakes him, which will surely happen before the month is out, very possibly away at Blackpool on 17th October. Watch the video below to see him put a couple past Man Utd legend Massimo Taibi. But apart from this spectacularly useless knowledge, I can’t claim the date holds any special meaning for me.

Nothing in these paltry associations, then, suggested any connection between the two known facts. I had frankly abandoned hope of deciphering the meaning of the word, but decided as a hopeless last resort to ask friends and relations for suggestions via Facebook. As I began to type the request into the status update box, the answer magically presented itself to me. Donovan is the surname of my piano tuner, and I need to call him in mid-November so I can book a time to have the piano tuned before Christmas.

Needs tuning before the little red tree goes up this year

I can’t work out which is greater: the complacency of my assumption that I would automatically work out what ‘Donovan’ meant if I forgot, or the shame of forgetting my piano tuner’s name. Or the proof this whole story provides of my irredeemable middle-classness. It’s funny, though, regardless of all this baggage, to contemplate how, after seemingly endless and exhausting efforts to remember a piece of information, the slightest mental process brings it suddenly into focus.

This instantaneous unlocking of information has, like everything I write, been better expressed elsewhere. This passage from the start of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley is one of presumably many such expressions. The narrator, now middle-aged, has discovered a diary that is to awaken a trauma that has been suppressed since his boyhood:

I did not want to touch it and told myself that this was because it challenged my memory; I was proud of my memory and disliked having it prompted. So I sat staring at the diary, as at a blank space in a crossword puzzle. Still no light came, and suddenly I took the combination lock and began to finger it, for I remembered how, at school, I could always open it by the sense of touch when someone else had set the combination. It was one of my show-pieces and, when I first mastered it, drew some applause, for I declared that to do it I had to put myself into a trance; and this was not quite a lie, for I did deliberately empty my mind and let my fingers work without direction. To heighten the effect, however, I would close my eyes and sway gently to and fro, until the effort of keeping my consciousness at a low ebb almost exhausted me; and this I found myself instinctively doing now, as to an audience. After a timeless interval I heard the tiny click and felt the sides of the lock relax and draw apart; and at the same moment, as if by some sympathetic loosening in my mind, the secret of the diary flashed upon me.

21 questions

Apologies in advance. I can’t expect anyone to read this. It’s just become much longer than is strictly necessary, and not in a good way like Schubert’s 9th.

*****

As suggested previously, I have no Grand Plan for this blog, just some vague ideas festering in the more distant recesses of my mind, a mind which is at the moment more than usually vacant, Dahlian matters aside. This vacuum I expect to persist for at least a couple more months, so in the meantime I will answer some questions for my own amusement and hopefully that of others. I like answering questionnaires about myself. I’m afraid it’s the closest I will ever get to Desert Island Discs or Private Passions. I wish there was a way one could wangle an appearance on one of these programmes without having to work to become a prima ballerina or CEO of Marks & Spencer first, but it can’t be done. I don’t want fame, but I do want to share things I love with other people. This is the same instinct that in a person of a different temperament would lead to a career as a teacher, or perhaps a DJ.

The template is taken from the regular “20 (plus) questions” feature from the American Playbill Arts website. Worth a look, I’d say. Maybe, if you have your own blog, you would like to post something similar.

1. A few works of classical music that you adore:

A lot of music I came to know when I was very young is still among the music I love most of all – Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye, Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé, Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances. Discoveries from later on – Bach’s chorale preludes, Beethoven’s late quartets and the op. 109 piano sonata, the Brahms symphonies, Prokofiev’s third piano concerto, much of Britten’s vocal and choral music and especially Rejoice in the Lamb, Fauré’s Messe Basse, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Debussy’s Jeux, Bartók’s string quartets, much of Chopin’s piano music, Copland’s Billy the Kid, the songs of Finzi and Warlock, Haydn’s Sturm und Drang symphonies, Messiaen’s piano music, Milhaud’s Carnaval d’Aix, Mozart’s violin sonatas and concerti, the Vesperae solennes de confessore, Requiem and C Minor Mass, and some of his music for piano four hands, Parsifal, Poulenc’s chamber and piano music, Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Sibelius’ fourth symphony, and assorted hymns and music from the Anglican Choral Tradition. That’s more than a few, isn’t it? Quite a lot to be going on with, in fact, and I hope and expect to write much less superficially about some of it in the future.

2. Classical music recordings that you treasure:

Thibaud and Cortot’s recordings of sonatas by Franck, Fauré and Debussy, Pascal Rogé’s Ravel, the early Britten/Pears folksong recordings, anything played by Marc-André Hamelin, especially his Godowsky, Grainger and Villa-Lobos, the Concertgebouw and Kondrashin’s Scheherazade, the King’s College/Cleobury recording of Rachmaninov’s Vespers, the Fischer-Dieskau/Demus Winterreise, Robert Tear and Philip Ledger’s Fraser-Simson Pooh songs (do give them a try), Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, Boris Christoff’s recording of Mussorgsky’s Nursery, the Choir of Westminster Cathedral’s Victoria on Hyperion, Anne Sofie von Otter’s Weill, and anything sung by Sebastian Hennig.

© Karlheinz Stockhausen

3. Favourite non-classical musicians and/or recordings:

Roughly in the order I got to know them, Fats Waller, Madness, the Beatles and the Kinks, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, and then various bands of my teenage years – Blur, Pulp, Radiohead, Eels, Fountains of Wayne, Ben Folds Five, the Divine Comedy, the Strokes – and singer-songwriters like Tom Waits, James Taylor and Aimee Mann. Flanders and Swann, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, John Shuttleworth. Musicals, generally in the film soundtrack recordings, especially My Fair Lady, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and West Side Story. Paul F. Berliner’s field recordings of Shona mbira music. (This is precisely the kind of thing that would get me into Pseuds’ Corner if I were somebody).

4. Music that makes you cry – any genre:

Very little. The only music that I can state confidently has made me cry without accompanying visual stimulus is the middle section of Ravel’s Menuet Antique, and that was at a time of emotional vulnerability. It makes me sound very cold and heartless, I know. There’s a lot of music that could make me cry given the right circumstances, but those circumstances rarely occur. Some kind of emotional syzygy is required to make it happen. “Salix” from Whitlock’s Plymouth Suite might do it, given favourable timing.

5. Definitely underrated work(s) or composer (s):

I’m not always very good at gauging exactly the standing of individual composers, but the more Respighi I listen to the more I love him. I think Howells would be more highly thought of in the classical music world at large if his greatest works weren’t so cloistered by being primarily for liturgical use. The most exquisite pieces of choral music he wrote forbid concert performance, and rightly so, even if that restricts the audience they reach. They are too special for the concert hall. I think there is a tendency to dismiss composers like Saint-Saëns and Fauré as mere craftsmen, which is something I would resist. Their chamber output alone gives the lie to this notion. And I wish Steve Martland had a higher public profile. His output is somewhat inconsistent, but his best music possesses a tremendous power and I think he has much of importance to communicate.

6. Possibly overrated work(s) or composer (s):

I am loath to describe any composer as overrated. Usually there is something I have missed somewhere, some key that I live in the hope of turning eventually to unlock a world of hitherto unforeseen joy. Vivaldi is a mainly closed book to me, as are various composers of bel canto opera. Rossini bores me, and so does most Berlioz I am familiar with. There are certain modern classical composers I could name whose output is anodyne in the extreme, but they at least are not overrated by anyone whose opinion carries any weight.

7. Live music performance(s) you attended – any genre – that you’ll never forget:

Noye’s Fludde conducted by my father when I was about five; The Pearl Fishers, my first full-scale opera, in Leeds, which I detested (the opera, not the city); the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and Gustavo Dudamel at the 2007 Proms.

8. A few relatively recent films you love:

The films I have loved most of all from the past ten years have tended to be quite violent. I really liked both the Mesrine films last year, and Zodiac. I went to see Bowling for Columbine twice, I thought it was so good. I thought Lost in Translation was sweet, and I don’t mean that in a damning way. With a little more exposure to it, I think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind could become a favourite. I love the melancholy of its opening. Moving a little further back, the ’90s films that continue to impress me most are probably Breaking the Waves and Magnolia. Tarantino as well.

9. A few films you consider classics:

I tend to find flawed films more interesting than perfect ones, but I think the film I love that comes closest to perfection is Kind Hearts and Coronets. I can discern no weakness in it. Older films that have bowled me over at the cinema are Buñuel’s Los Olvidados and Bertolucci’s Il Conformista. Other favourites – Malle’s films about childhood, Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films, Lindsay Anderson’s If…., 12 Angry Men, Dr Strangelove, Paper Moon, Walkabout, and anything with James Stewart.

Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne, unimpressed

10. A book (or two) that is important to you (and why):

There are many, but The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley is a book for which I do not expect my affection will ever diminish. It contains many of the qualities I also prize highly in music and films – tenderness, poignancy, fragility, and eventual redemption. There’s something about cricket as well. You can’t beat a cricket match in the middle of a novel. The absence of any comparable event is the one thing that prevents Anna Karenina from attaining true greatness.

11. Thing(s) about yourself that you’re most proud of:

Niceness, I think. I hope. I aim to be sensitive to other people and to give them the benefit of the doubt, and sometimes succeed.

12. Thing(s) about yourself that you’re embarrassed by:

Tendency towards public self-analysis.

13. Three things you can’t live without:

Three things I would be anxious to keep even if I were to lose everything else would be my sight, my family and my ability to play the piano. I suppose I’d get by without them, but it would be a struggle.

14. “When I want to get away from it all I…”

stay at home. Watching TV (especially sport), playing the piano and singing, listening to music. Standard relaxing mechanisms, really.

15. “People are surprised to find out that I…”

I really don’t know. I’m not a surprising person. I used to have a prodigious knowledge of trivia – composers’ dates, US state capitals, results of and scorers in every game Chelsea played in the 1999/2000 season – which might have taken aback the unsuspecting, but it has fallen away somewhat in recent years, and perhaps I am less odd as a consequence, which may be a positive development.

Jon Harley: headed the winner against Watford on 26th February 2000 and got a black eye in the process

16. “My favorite cities are…”

Cambridge and London.

17. “I have a secret crush on…”

Even if I had one I would not be able to reveal it without the question becoming a paradox, so I will refrain. But thank you for asking.

18. “My most obvious guilty pleasure is…”

Junk food? I suspect writing about myself is a vice I ought to try and crack. Almost anything else would be preferable.

19. “I’d really love to meet – or to have met…”

I’d make a total dick of myself if I tried to talk to my heroes. When I bumped into Stephen Fry this time last year I didn’t approach him, just tracked his movements in a stalkery manner and ended up sitting at a table next to him drinking tea and reading a book but saying nothing. If I hadn’t felt so tongue-tied I’d have liked to ask him whether he’d ever read Montherlant (this rather good piece suggests he has), but that’s such an unusual opening gambit that I’d probably have lost him immediately. Music, on the other hand, I feel more comfortable with. There are a number of people I’d love to have had the chance to perform with – Charlie Parker’s probably top of the list, but the more I contemplate the question the more I realise I’d love to have been in the Beatles. I could easily have played George Martin’s keyboard solo in “In My Life” if they’d only asked me and I’d been alive.

20. “I never understood why…”

No comment. I’ve lost interest in this myself now.

BONUS QUESTION:

21. Question you wish someone would ask you (and the answer to that question):

Q. What superpower would you most like to have?
A. Invisibility, though I expect I would abuse the privilege. I try to be realistic, but do occasionally find myself wishing so strongly for the power to make myself invisible, simply because I think it would be fun, that I almost believe it will one day be possible. It’s a big part of the appeal of Harry Potter to me.