'The Go-Between', LP Hartley's novel and film adaptations

The Go-Between

LP Hartley, 1953

 

LP Hartley’s ‘The Go-Between’ is one of my favourites about English repression, along with Terence Rattigan’s ‘The Browning Version’ and Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Remains of the Day’. It’s also one of my favourite bildungsroman, being a magnificent capturing of the turmoil of feelings and thoughts of a young man in the early stages of adult understanding, and the trauma of those feeling and thoughts on the rest of an adult life. If you are at all still prone to dwelling and flinching at childhood and teenage embarrassment throughout your adult life, the novel’s bookends are bound to be affecting.

 

In his introduction, Hartley writes, “More than any other part of the book, the Epilogue has been found fault with. The Prologue and Epilogue together, critics said, made a frame too heavy for the picture. I should have done better to stop with the discovery of the lovers in the outhouse and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination.”* Which in my opinion is quite wrong and misunderstanding, and would make this a far lesser text. It would be forsaking somewhat the insight into trauma and lifelong repression for far more prosaic suspense and scandal. As it is, there is a resounding sense of pending doom, of a past event never come to terms with, a moment of permanent scarring. Surely exclusion of these bookends would compromise the characters’ lifetime of misunderstanding, the realisation of their self-delusion, the ties of memory, which are integral to the tragedy. The opening reflection where the older Leo is having an argument with his younger self, blaming each other for letting the other own, is a passage I have always found profoundly affecting.

It's the tale of a sensitive Eton boy – with a schoolboy’s tendency towards the sensational – staying at a friend’s English estate during the summer of 1900, and unwittingly and increasingly entangled in clandestine adult passions. Hartley apparently wrote the novel meaning Marrian and Ted to be objected to, only to find that readers sided with the forbidden love. It’s a book surely to find more favour with rule-breakers and romantics. I mean, it opens with a quote from Jane Austen. But, per his introduction, Hartley seems happily to have the strength of his book as maybe something he hadn’t quite planned. Colm Tóibín’s introduction to the NYRB edition speaks of how he “had softened the character of Marian and Ted as he worked on the book and had been too interested in the aura of uncontrolled sensuality between them to bother disapproving of them.”** There is a passage where, having been at Brandham Hall a while, Leo’s happiness overrides the strictures of religion; his flourished sense of ease and joy makes him positively despise judgementalism. Away from the oppression of school and left to his own devices, Leo becomes happy and altruistic. Yet instead of leaving this feeling a triumph, it can be read that Hartley means the subsequent tragedy to be a punishment for this transgression, this blasphemy. Leo is a conservative child and his friend Marcus more so – they’re Etonians – but happiness suits him, kindness enlivens him, but he is left wide open and vulnerable to injury. Hartley is good at the bubble happiness puts a person in. Yet, ultimately it would seem that Hartley’s joy in seeing Leo happy – that is: the Leo from this passage that berates religion for judging people always as sinners – and Hartley’s/Leo’s fascination and bafflement with taboo sensuality makes this a far more empathic story than moral. This is the side that wins out.

 

The centrepiece is the cricket match, which takes up several chapters, bringing to the fore the class conflict which is otherwise always in the background. The themes are obvious, just as the use of signifiers and symbols are evident throughout the novel. For example, Leo eventually takes afront at the green of his suited gifted by Marion, its colour signifying his naivete when he wants so much to be considered adult (this is the early Twentieth Century where the concept if children as mini-adults is standard); the threat of deadly nightshade; blood on an envelope, etc.  But the theme of class war, otherwise just a given backdrop, is bundled up in this sporting confronting between the town and Brandam Hall. The sides seem relatively equal – one side by skill and the other by brute force – but it’s Leo, the outsider and inbetweener – that wins the day. And his catching Ted out is portentous in itself. The rules of the game keep the war in check, but the battle is there.

 

The school rules about a boy’s conduct are an ill guide for Leo’s negotiation of this adult world. Hartley is very good on Leo’s various motivations, at the complex influences on his decisions; for example, on why he reads Marian’s note and the decision arrived at from a schoolboy’s moral code. Leo also turns to greater forces, creates his own religion of “curses” to try react to and control what he can’t. Beneath all the conservatism and rubrics that he’s happy to accord to, Leo is a passionate creature really, sensitive and observant, naïve and imaginative; and the conflict of these opposing sides will eventually lead to a breakdown and lifelong “drying up”. 

There’s also a lot of pathetic fallacy, what with all the greatest summer matching Leo’s happiness and passion – which Leo wishes to get hotter and hotter – and the coming on of storms when things start to go wrong. It also alludes to Leo’s experiences being symbolic of the passing of a century’s innocence, something of the fin de siècle, as he often says his thinking of the promise of the next century and how it let him down. This is, after all, an aging man reflecting in the shadow of World Wars. Perhaps this is the novel’s most tenuous allusion, but there is no doubt that it is moving when he recounts on the subsequent losses during wartime in the epilogue. Yet such evident symbolism throughout the book never capsizes the subtlety and mystery. And note the heady rising of the heat at a moment with Ted… and a feeling like a “feather on a tiger”. It’s total accord with the symbolism and signifiers already established in the narrative and hints at the novel’s greater repression and mystery.

‘The Go-Between’ is not the paradigm of ambiguity like ‘The Turn of the Screw’, nor the Gothic mystery of ‘The Haunting of Hill House’, or such blatant class cruelty such as ‘The House of Mirth’, or the ripe nostalgia of ‘Cider with Rosie’; but it has a little of all of these and walks an eloquent and emotional path across English green fields all of its own.

And here is an excellent de-coding by grumblingappendix of the novel's deep signifiers, signposting what I have been coy about.

 

 

The Go-Between

Director - Joseph Losey

Screenplay - Harold Pinter

Stars - Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Dominic Guard

UK, 1971

 

The tone of the novel’s ominous prologue is well captured by the piano opening of Michel Legrand’s theme for Joseph Losey’s film adaption of ‘The Go-Between’. It is choppy and more resonant of doom-laden horror before delivering its flourishes of melodrama. This is an apt and astute choice, evoking the impending tragedy and emotional devastation of the novel’s prologue, creating the atmosphere of pending doom.

 

The scenes at first are rapid, with some narrative and some temporal play creating clues and a little abstraction. It instantly conveys that this is a story that resounds from one end of a life to the other; it reminds of Nicolas Roeg dicing around with time. Harold Pinter’s screenplay and Joseph Losey’s direction immediately know that this is the strength of the piece, as well as that primal scene, no matter if critics told Hartley that the bookends were too weighty. But then, as Leo settles into long, languid, sweltering summer days at the Hall, the pace discreetly slows as the tale unfolds. In fact, the first time the films pauses and lingers is on Julie Christie’s pretty sunbathing face. Any stiltedness is totally in accord with English Edwardian stately manners and Pinter’s often clipped dialogue conveys the distance between a person’s passion and performance as a personality. He cherry picks some of the best lines and details from the novel– there’s a dog rather than a horse called Dry Toast; there’s a bloodstained envelope – and, of course, starts with its famous and celebrated opening line about the past being a foreign country. Pinter’s sparse, splintering style is superficially at odds with Hartley’s flourishes, but Pinter gets to the nub of it, and Losey’s formal play captures the abstractions. Despite the obvious symbolism, both writers know to hold all revelations at arm’s length.

 

Dominic Guard sets a great rendition as Leo, all naivete and manners; his halting yet precise affectation when speaking capturing how out of depth he is and trying to rely on a certain kind of upper-class conduct. He exudes stiff upper-lipness in the face of anxiety. This hits its mark truly when Leo is in an emotional state, having been hurt by Marian, and badgers Ted into explaining “spooning” (silly word). Sweaty, upset, insistent and clutching in a way he never is elsewhere, it’s a heart-breaking moment of a child desperate to understand an adult world he isn’t prepared for. It’s a moment that Hartley himself seemingly saw as exceeding his own original: “- I wept at the scene where Leo questions Ted about ‘spooning’ – which is more than I did when I wrote my version of it.” Guard, in recollection, says he doesn’t remember being directed much, although he says Losey could be ruthless with others (Guard went on to be a psychotherapist). It’s all performance in the face of unease, of putting on a brave face but being out of depth. Even down to the detail that, by his own admission, Guard looks like he’s in pain when singing to a crowd.

 

My memory of the film is always of Leo running through vast green fields. They even painted some of the grass which surely only adds to a certain dream-like tinge to Leo’s memories. Julie Christie is effortlessly beautiful and disarming, radiating an unaffected charm that puts her as somewhat an outsider just as much as Leo. Edward Fox is effortlessly regal; Michael Gough full of that old man distractedness; Margaret Leighton perfectly glacial. Alan Bates is suitably raw and insecure in a particularly masculine way, his unaffected charm and temper showing how performative the Brandham Hall lot are by comparison. The moments between him and Leo are true highlights, always shuffling round each other and never quite coming to the point, but there’s a true warmth there. He’s someone else out of his depth.

 

It a brilliantly pitched rendition of the novel, where Losey’s playfulness and Pinter’s screenplay keep it from being just a highly respectable adaptation, but something that truly captures the oddness of the novel also.

 

The Go-Between 

Director

Pete Travis

Writer - Adrian Hodges

Stars - Jim Broadbent, Jack Hollington, Samuel Joslin

 

Which is quite what the BBC adaptation is. It’s a more straightforward version. Of course, comparison with Losey’s version is inevitable, and much is anticipated to be lacking. It tries to capture the conflict of Leo’s old and young selves arguing with one another, but it’s literal and it feels a little unconvincing, a little mundanely executed in that BBC heritage fashion. Jim Broadbent staring maudlinly from the train which rheumy eyes sets the tone. None of the crisp English repression here.

 

It is, of course, prettily filmed with the contemporary style of a constantly shuddering camera. The past is gorgeous green and gauzy, again hinting at sentiment rather than clarity. Jack Hollington as Leo is notably younger here, a far more passive entity with some of his verboseness even going to others. For example, he barely asserts himself with Ted Burgess when caught and injured on the haystack. Ted even mentions that he’s a little small for his age, but what we don’t truly get is Leo’s overcompensation by stressing the mannerisms of his Eton status. He is more bashful than anxious. Leo’s a little robbed of agency, but it does accentuate his vulnerability.

 

We get Trimmingham’s (Stephen Campbell Moore) injured face as far more than just an ornamental scar here, which is an improvement. The patriarch is removed, making way for more Trimmingham but missing the point of the there-but-absent patriarch. And the younger ages of Marian and Ted are more appropriate. Ben Batt is far more an obvious hunk here as Ted, rather than say Bates’ bit-of-rough, more erotised with nudity and adorned with a beard that is a little designer trimmed. He doesn’t have Bates’ presence of being and oversized boy. Some of the rough, raw edges of Losey’s version have been sandpapered off. Even little details nod at this: for example, Leo now says “Bad luck!” instead of “Hard cheese!”  There is a sense that everything is made that bit more obvious, less mysterious, knowing looks more readable. It gets increasingly worse when a voiceover is employed by Leo to explain his spells. But then it sidesteps Leo’s confrontation with the deadly nightshade. Even the pathetic fallacy is amped up to have Leo lying in a torrent of rain. It becomes obvious that this version is all Forbidden Love and sentiment instead of the mysteries of passion and misunderstanding. 

 

There’s a sense of a respectable cover version that fails to get at the essence. It replaces the insight and the mystery of Hartley’s tale by reducing it to just romantic tragedy and voiceovers. It's similar to how many adaptations of Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights' focus on Cathy and Heathcliff and forego the wider picture.

**

Ali Smith writes of Hartley's novel, “It is a masterpiece of double-speak and secrecy, somehow both ambiguous and direct,” and that’s the oddness and mystery I have referred to. Joseph Losey had already delivered crystalline, slightly untouchable and abstract films on Englishness with ‘The Servant’ and ‘Accident’, and this tone fits perfectly for telling Leo’s sad tale of a life ruined by knowing and not knowing, of innocence and manipulation. Perhaps in some way, the final revelation of “spooning” hinted in Leo’s mind of a love that dare not speak its name, and so he shut down and dried up rather than accept it. But that’s just one enigma to ‘The Go-Between’, a fascinating, lush, eloquent and sympathetic novel of growing up in the oddness and harshness of the English class system. And not to forget that the teenage Leo’s diary ends up written in a code long forgotten and impenetrable to his older self. Childhood is a foreign country too.

Different Seasons - Stephen King

“Different Seasons”

Stephen King 

This is the Stephen King collection of four stories superficially set around the seasons. Two novels, a novella and a short story: ‘Rita Heyworth and the Shawshank Redemption’, ‘Apt Pupil’, ‘The Body’ and ‘The Breathing Method’. Two are best known for being adapted into some people’s favourite films. 

There really isn’t any redemption in ‘Rita Heyworth and the Shawshank Redemption’. A guy who was wrongfully incarcerated escapes prison and his friend goes to him after serving his sentence. It makes for a cool title but where’s the redemption? The same kind of faux-poignancy afflicts the story’s by-line: “Hope springs eternal”. The hope to escape? But the escape seems like something Andy worked for over years and not quite a hope, which is surely something more abstract? I guess he would have hoped his digging away would lead to an exit, but…? And what would the narrator Red hope for? To meet Andy again after getting out? Again, it sounds nice but… doesn’t quite develop convincingly.

What we do have with ‘Shawshank’ is an enjoyable study of character and context. The description of the jail and its frictions are well conveyed. A huge ingredient and appeal of King is his style of some-guy-just-shooting-the-shit which makes him immensely readable. Sure, his skill and literary merit can be argued, but he is very easy to engage with and that is formidable, whatever his weaknesses… and my observations make it clear that I often find him just as wanting and annoying as compelling. 

But, as far as ‘Shawshank’ goes: tales of put-upon protagonists outwitting everyone else are always winning. Despite its ingredients of gang-rape and notes on prison corruption, it all succumbs to sentimentality which doesn’t quite feel warranted. There is a sense that all the ingredients don’t quite gel, that the whole doesn’t quite exceed the storytelling and ultimately that the sentimentality is a little like floral wrapping paper on a rusty cudgel. But the storytelling is gripping with numerous memorable scenes and characters. Although Rita Heyward isn’t even the relevant poster.

‘Apt Pupil’ doesn’t possess any sentimentality. It’s the tale of a couple of sociopaths trying to outwit one another. A teenager discovers that an old local man is in fact a former Nazi concentration camp general in hiding and blackmails him to tell stories about that experience. Just the “gooshy” stuff. 

What’s most striking is how King depicts an all-American boy, a thorough success and virtual prodigy, as an all-smiling sociopath, a budding serial- and spree-killer with a deep fascination for fascism. He’s too smart and introverted for the scruffy anger of, say, the Proud Boy movement, but we get the idea: he’s a wannabe Nazi. Grady Hendrix says of the young character: “[Bowden is] just an All-American kid (as King tells us repeatedly, as if type is a substitute for character) who turns out to be rotten to the core.” Meanwhile, the adults have no idea of the monster in their midst. But I see this as the root social criticism. 

It’s the most unforgiving story in the collection. The tale of the impasse reached by these sociopaths is not undermined or embellished by digressions or sentimentality: they wouldn’t feel right here. There is a deceptively protracted feel, as it takes place over years, but it’s all tightly wound. Aside from King needing to introduce another character later on to make things move on, it avoids succumbing to a trite showdown and it remains upsetting and chilling to the very last line. 

‘The Body’ is, of course, the source for Rob Reiner’s ever-popular coming-of-age hit film, ‘Stand by Me’ (1986). Actually, the change in title can be seen as indicative of the film weighting towards the nostalgic and sentimental. Not that King’s original doesn’t have these elements, but it’s a far more clear-headed and sad affair. It is, after all, a tale of four boys thinking that going to see a kid’s body will be an adventure. All around are backstories of abuse, neglect, bullying and abundant cruelty to give the lie to rose-tinted nostalgia. This is not a safe world for the kids. Indeed, despite the I-am-a-writer intrusions – the self-reflexive kind that can made King tiresome – there is the sense that narrator Gordon doesn’t quite know himself why this particular childhood memory is so dominant and defining for him. After all, it isn’t like he continued to be close to all the gang except Chris. Like ‘Shawshank’, it’s told from the perspective of a somewhat adoring friend – in this case, Gordon’s observations about Chris. Unlike ‘Shawshank’ that seems to lunge for the sentimental to make up for what it lacks, ‘The Body’ has natural pathos in abundance.  

The shortest piece is ‘The Breathing Method’ which is a different kettle of fish altogether, with King evoking a more traditionally Gothic and macabre atmosphere. Like Peter Straub’s ‘Ghost Story’, it’s set around a group of men getting together to tell tales. The narrator is somewhat desperate to join this somewhat abstract group (another men-only scenario, elbowing out the womenfolk) and there are hints of something uncanny at the edges. But its centre is one of the men’s tales of a patient and when she gives birth. It’s a full-bodied set-piece where horror, exploitation, pathos and black humour come to a heady and unforgettable peak. You can almost feel King gleeful smirk as he engineers this and, if the other tales nod at the genre, this is the one that leaves no doubt he is a horror writer. All dressed up in the civility of gothic pretension it may be, but this centrepiece is pure grand guignol.  

This is all a Big Boys Affair where women don’t get much of a look-in. They’re mostly murdered in ‘Shawshank’ and "cunts" in ‘Apt Pupil’ and ‘The Body’. Although ‘The Breathing Method’ focuses on a strong female, she is seen through male reportage; a doctor who stops to mansplain how the pain of childbirth is just female delusion. And this could be seen as a feature of character if there wasn’t a dearth of female representation elsewhere. One of the last insights into ‘The Body’s main protagonist Gorden is that he won’t cry in front of his wife because “It would have been pussy.” It’s probably meant to be a call-back to his adolescence when as boys they would call each other “pussies” all the time, but considering how he earlier chastised his younger self for the immature misogyny of his own writing, this doesn’t hint too much at a personal growth. 

King is immensely readable here and the shorter lengths keeps in check his waffling and digressions, to sharpen the focus. The digressions of ‘Shawshank’ colour the context and are riveting. ‘Apt Pupil’, although the longest, is lean and mean without recourse to rambling detours; even when it seemingly loses concentration to divert to a teacher character, this ultimately has purpose. ‘The Breathing Method’ is the kind of story that has plenty of accommodation for lacunas and irresolution. ‘The Body’ is the greatest offender with its insistent subplot of a young author and The Magic of WritingTM trying to pull attention away from the main tale. I for one have never been fond of the dragged-out pie contest barforama from the film and it isn’t much better here, superfluously filling out fictional-within-a-fiction minor characters that really don’t need the attention. There are plenty of secondary characters of interest in the main tale. And the chapter that’s just a presentation of Gordon’s first writing, adjacent to the main tale, smacks of self-indulgence and the whiff of ego (at least the pie contest is part of the main story). But there is often that with King’s writer characters… and there are lot of them in his considerable output.

I read ‘Different Seasons’ for a book group with a people that, aside from one lady, didn’t read horror fiction at all; but despite its nasty and crude edges, the general consensus was that King was a good writer that drew you in, even if he wasn’t usually your thing. I hadn’t read King for a long, long time, but ‘Different Seasons’ is evidence of how he has a natural gift for popularist fiction, and of both how readable and flawed he is. It’s a good one to convert the curious.  

Amusements

Darks Corners' excellent essay on the horror films of FW Murnau.

Talk Talk live in Montreaux, 1986.

The Pain behind "Baron Munchausen".

Rob Doyle on Philip K Dick's "Valis"

The art of 

Piotr Jabłoński

'The Prodigy' by Herman Hesse: nature vs eduction

‘The Prodigy’ – Herman Hesse

Originally ‘Beneath the Wheel (Unterm Rad), 1906 

Peter Owen Publishers translation, ‘The Prodigy’, 1957

Translated from the German by WJ Strachan

Herman Hesse’s bildungsroman 'The Prodigy' - the original title of 'Beneath the Wheel' is more explicitly aggressive -  focuses on Hans Giebenrath, an intelligent and sensitive boy, eager to please and excel from his provincial origins. But having successfully entered a theological school, he finds that its focus on the technical rather than the emotional education of the young drives him to a breakdown. Hans’ ambitions, wants and needs rest between the poles of the natural and educational worlds and the establishment falls far short of meeting these. 

School in ‘The Prodigy’ is a serious business which, if it is not openly abusive, is oppressive and devoid of compassion. There is no satirical take on teachers as in Mark Twain’s ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ (1876), or elongated sequences where the classroom is a chamber of humiliation and physical punishment as in James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ or David Storey’s ‘Saville’ (1976). In Joyce’s ‘Portrait’, the protagonist rejects the source of his torment, namely Catholic education, and, even if he is not happy by the book’s close, he has survived. Storey’s ‘Saville’ also features a prodigy, a son of a miner who, by strength of natural intellect, may ascend from his class origins; yet he is unable to escape the front room of his home and subsequent destructive bitterness sets in. In ‘The Prodigy’, it is not outright cruelty and sadism that defines the boy’s experience but simple indifference to whom Hans may be – an emotional depravation. It is Hans’ inability to truly rebel that is finally his fatal flaw. His friend Heilner personifies all the youthful and successful rebellion and bitterness that Hans cannot achieve and barely acknowledges within himself. Heilner is to some extent Hans’ inverse reflection, a parallel set up upon the first time that they meet. Both boys are strolling alone in the woods and meet at a lake. Both flatly agree upon the beauty of the place: their friendship is sealed. With Heilner as a companion, Hans can gradually fail his school and survive the consequences; but when Heilner is gone, Hans is lost, friendless and at the mercy of lessons and expectations, which leads to a breakdown. Friendship then emerges as a natural element, a counter-active force to the unnatural climate of education. 

In Twain’s ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ (1884), education is – albeit humorously – something to be avoided and the knowledge of the natural world becomes central and superior. Civility is to be satirised. Tom Sawyer may not be able to reject society absolutely – he always needs an audience to play to – but Huck can manage alone just fine. He is smart, cunning and eloquent in an effortlessly self-educated sense, and these qualities make him a survivor. He can take or leave culture. And not for Hans the precocious insubordination of the boys of Kipling’s ‘Stalky and Co.’ (1899), or Compton’s ‘Just William’ who quite happily pal up to upset establishment. It is not learning in itself that pressurises Hans – indeed, he has a voracious appetite for it – but rather the demands and concepts that culture has of education as an institution. There are a number of passages in which Hesse lays out this institution for indoctrination and compliance:

There was something wild, untamed, uncultured in him that must first be broken, a dangerous flame that must be extinguished and stamped out.

And: 

...it is the school’s job to break in the natural man, subdue and greatly reduce him; in accordance with the principles sanctioned by authority is its task to make him a useful member of the community and awake in him those qualities, the complete development of which is brought to a triumphant conclusion by the well-calculated discipline of the barrack square.

 [Penguin edition 1973, pg. 43]

It is not blatant brutality or unkindness that breaks Hans but rather that the education is at the expense of humanity, ignoring his sensitivity for his propensity for learning: school as a passive-aggressive tool for dehumanisation.

***

In 'The Prodigy', there is a moment when the order of narrative seems shuffled: the book begins with a brief account of Joseph Giebenrath’s life and then his son Hans’ candidacy for the ‘Lendexamen’; it is only late in the book [chapter five] that Hans’ earlier childhood pre-candidacy is detailed. Having “failed” at school, Hans returns home and visits the Falken where a host of memories come back to him as a prodigy. It has not always been local priests and teachers that have educated Hans. There is his brief but densely sketched friendship with a sickly orphan Hermann Rechtenheil [pg. 114] who taught Hans how to fish, to “study the weather” and a whole litany of practical and observational tricks. Even in this Hans has been an excellent pupil for his friend, but Rechtenheil dies quickly and leaves way for the subsequent influences of Heilner’s friendship. He too disappears and Hans’ need for a stronger, educating friend leaves him vulnerable and lost. But in Rechtenheil, Hans’ need for being taught and for the natural world had once been perfectly embodied. This sequence in which Hans’ early life is conveyed comes latterly in order to show that which he had forgotten and has lost in his quest to become a great student. 

Hesse endows Hans’ world with lengthily and beautiful passages on rivers and woods and nature, almost as eloquent and poetic as those of Laurie Lee in ‘Cider With Rosie’ (1959) (“almost” because ‘Rosie’ is pretty much peerless). Fishing is tied to Hans’ bond with nature and with giving him the respite and autonomy he desires as much as academic skill. When Herman is attracted to a girl, the imagery is of animals and (with the cart) the threat of civilisation and technology:

… this one was so lively and talkative and so indifferent to his presence and awkwardness that he drew in his horns helplessly and, slightly offended, withdrew into himself like a snail brushed by a cartwheel. 

[pg. 123]

It’s a lovely passage evoking the shyness and inelegance of first crushes and feelings of perplexing attraction. A similar mixture of the natural world and feeling runs through his desire, expressed by the imagery of breezes, of gardens, of clutching fences and stopping halfway across bridges listening to rushing waters. [chapter six] This isn’t quite innuendo, but the symbolism is clear. It’s overwhelming to Hans, being the susceptible soul that he is.

After a night of revelry that puts his observations and extroversion to the test, Hans is found drowned: but was this an accident or was it suicide? The ending argues that if we do not balance nature with nurture then disillusionment, alienation and self-destruction is, perhaps, the tragic end for sensitive souls who cannot cope. How we failed them. Or certainly this is how sensitive souls like to tell their narratives. This is a typical outcome for fictions based on outsiders of some form victimised by society (early texts exploring female roles who always seem driven to death, for example) and here it blends tragedy, suffering and a kind of wistfulness. If perhaps this sides too much with victimhood, Hesse nevertheless presents a fine tirade against education as a tool of indoctrination, and as such as antithetical to individualism and the natural self.

vs Ian Fleming's "Dr No"

"Dr. No" by Ian Fleming

Once you get past the misogyny and the racism - which you can’t because neither are particularly subtext - the problem with reading James Bond is that James Bond is a dick. His plans frequently require innocents getting killed; he generally blames the women; he is unable to treat women as adults; he antagonises and insults his captors instead of playing clever; he sulks when he doesn’t get his way. 

As presented by Ian Fleming, if this is an exemplary example of their agents it is a wonder the British Secret Service resolves anything. Head of the Secret Service, M, seems equally dickish, apparently only happy throwing his agents into serious danger without proper forethought. Assumedly, he is meant to be the stern paternal type, but he too seems like an idiot. For example, in “Dr No”, M16 agent John Strangways fails to send his daily message to headquarters: Fleming goes into great detail how Strangeways follows stringent routine every day, mentioning how even the keyboard he uses can pick-up his particular typing technique so recognise whether anyone unauthorised is making a report, etc, etc; and yet, when Strangways fails to report in one day, his superior M’s first reaction is to simply dismiss the matter on the assumption that Strangways has eloped with his female co-agent. It is only because Bond needs an easy assignment to help him recover from a previous mission that M thinks he might as well send someone to investigate, despite being certain that Strangways has simply done a runner for some sex. If I was a secret agent, I would surely hope for a little more concern and support. 

And when Bond arrives in Jamaica to pursue the disappearance, he arrives to find they have provided him with Strangways’ car… not so good at secrecy and subterfuge, this Secret Service. Well, let’s not forget that Bond uses his real name all the time upon arrival anyway. Most hilariously, when finally captured by Dr No – in a secret base that treats its prisoners like hotel guests – and his captors ask him for “next of kin”, he gives them M’s real name, we are told. And before that, he simply arrives in Jamaica and assumes Dr No’s guilt due to a mixture of xenophobia and local gossip; oh, there are certainly clues for concern about Dr Julius No, a Chinese-German, and his army of Chigroes (that people of mixed Chinese-Negro heritage, according to the book) but Bond jumps to the conclusion that the Doc is up to no good on his reclusive island almost from the off. He hires a local boatman, Quarrel, as his sidekick – not sure what training and qualifications Quarrel has for such covert operations, but…. - and Bond manages to survive a couple of assassination attempts, most memorably one involving a poisonous centipede crawling over his crotch and up his body. But what to do about being such a recognisable target in Strangways’ car? Well, Bond gets Quarrel to hire a couple of look-alikes to drive around in the car to see what happens: and the unfortunate impersonators are both promptly murdered. How about that? 

Anyway, Bond convinces Quarrel to take him over to Dr No’s island, despite the native’s fear of a dragon that is meant to prowl upon it. It is here, apropos of nothing but happenstance, that Bond meets his love interest Honeychile Rider. She is on the beach, collecting shells to sell. But this complicates things: what is what Bond to do with this luscious lovely? And more, how can he possibly ignore the deformity of her broken nose? Yes, the book stresses, this is such a “deformity” for a female; but luckily, like all other disabilities, after a while you hardly notice it! And this is exactly the kind of thing to distract Bond on his adventures. For her part, Honey has had a tough time of it, orphaned and raped (and that’s how the nose was broken) and now living off of her own wits. She has managed to avoid Dr No’s army and collect her shells for some time, and yet as soon as Bond turns up, she becomes a simpering female, clutching to him for protection. She is out of her teens and yet there is a passage where Bond takes time to wrestle with his conscience about whether to treat her as a “girl” or as a “woman”. Well, Fleming evidently makes the decision and for the rest of the book she is simply “the girl”. Doesn’t stop them from closing the book by having what she amusingly (and degradingly) calls “slave time”.

Fleming is quoted as saying, "I write for about three hours in the morning ... and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. I never correct anything and I never go back to see what I have written ... By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day."  And it shows: the plotting is purely whimsical, its consistency wavering, the plotting and ideas the kind to be expected from a hormonal teenager with all the cruelty, lack of discipline and unintentional humour that comes from that. We are a long, long way from John Le Carre’s George Smiley.

Dr No himself is a remarkable construction, the result of extensive plastic surgery and other physical modifications, let alone the fact that he is “one in a million” with his heart on the right side of his body (which saves his life). He is a heady mix of Chinese-German ancestry, Fu Manchu super-villainy in a Jamaican island hideaway. He also seems to think that Bond is the only one worthy of hearing his masterplan, which means he probably needs to get out more. Well, he thinks this one moment and then tells Bond he is not as clever as he thinks he is the next - which is both true and in keeping with the inconsistency of Fleming’s characterisations. For example, one minute Honey is a resourceful and admirable female presence and the next a weak sex interest in need of Bond’s protection; and the next she has the presence of mind and stamina to wait out an awful mass-crab attack. Bond is meant to be a super-agent, but that doesn’t mean he won’t sulk when imprisoned by a super-villain and when his plan to acquire a weapon falls flat (a plan, it might be mentioned, that features Honey getting a manicure). In one moment, Dr No’s soldiers are ruthless and efficient killers; the next they are intimidated and dissuaded from raping Honey by some vague and unfounded threats from Bond. It is all a little up and down and all over the place. It is as patch-work at Dr Julius No himself.

And it may well all be fun enough if its misogyny and xenophobia didn’t lead the book by the nose. These are not incidental traits as much as a watermargin through every viewpoint, and Fleming is simply not a good enough writer to circumnavigate these weaknesses. If you are not that way inclined, these might be insurmountable obstacles to enjoyment.

It is true that the film of “Dr No” manages to mitigate many failings of the book. M treats Strangway’s disappearance seriously from the start; there is much more detective work from Bond in the first half which is necessarily padded out more, particularly with assassination attempts. Bond is a jerk still, but he is also witty and far more enigmatic; more an anti-hero. The film is no less silly, but it delivers its nonsense with some flare. It is indeed remarkable to see how many of the defining traits of a Bond film are all present in his cinematic debut: the Bond-down-a-gun-barrel inset, the groovy opening titles, that theme tune, a sense of the  tongue-in-cheek rather than the campiness that would overrun the series later: all this dresses up Bond in a far more appealing aesthetic. 

"I, Mengele" by Philip Challinor

 

 

Philip Challinor’s book superficially looks like the real deal: one in a series studying cult films that spotlights a single example, discussing its conception, content, reception and context. Except the film is called ‘I, Mengele’, the publisher is the  British Regional Film Foundation (a co-ordinated regional subsidiary of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) and the context is a world where Hitler won World War II. This film is an epic blockbuster for an audience where The Final Solution is a reality and you had best make sure your ancestry holds up to scrutiny. There is nothing in the packaging to refute this.

‘I, Mengele’ (the faux-film) is a Josef Mengele biopic, which affords Challinor with plenty of jibes at the expense of the film business: pokes at ‘Schindler’s List’ and the fascist readings of ‘Lord of the Rings’, for example; there are jokes using others, such as Cronenberg’s‘The Brood’, and reinterpretations of classics such as Shelley's ‘Frankenstein’. All this in passing but spoken of in a manner familiar to any who reads about films and all of it false. Challinor has utilised alternative universes before, for example in ‘The Foundations of the Twenty-FirstCentury’ in which he uses the ghost story to highlight Nazi guilt. He is a writer that uses alternative realities to show the likely outcomes of certain political and/or religious agendas – a satirical tradition that can at least be traced back to Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ – perhaps most chillingly in ‘Security’.  Like ‘Security’, ‘I, Mengele’ shows how language can assist in making the unspeakable justifiable and normal given another context – particularly in this medium of the film study whose very casual academic leanings surely makes what it leaves unspoken (a Nazi dominance) more unsettling. For example, he quotes from faux-film reviews from newspapers which indicate, through opinions, that the Third Reich’s doctrine has been assimilated into popular culture; but those dissenting views are simply other attitudes to the film.

It soon becomes apparent that the black humour of ‘I , Mengele’ reveals something of how propaganda works, of how narratives help make all things palatable. For example, what at first might seem a gag at the expense of David Cronenberg’s ‘The Brood’[i] quickly fits into the body-horror that emerges through the plot of ‘I, Mengele’ where the enemy are literal monsters who do give birth to other literal monsters, and probably in monstrous ways. In this way, it is no mistake that Challinor makes this film a cross between biopic and fantasy epic, a natural progression from using fiction to make the enemy inhuman. By the time we reach the point where Mengele is regarding 'Frankenstein' and ruminating that one day it may be possible “simply to breed appropriate monsters for entertainment purposes and spare normal actors the inconvenience of heavy-make-up”, we are in a world where the Nazi vision of eugenics defines how this culture sees evolution.

The plot of ‘I, Mengele’, apparently follows the troubled-and-flawed-but-ultimately-heroic-protagonist narrative. Troubled by what he sees as his own potentially degenerate gypsy features, Josef  Mengele nevertheless gives all to the Fatherland with his experiments, at the expenses of his family. With this and descriptions of how the creators and industry make Mengel’s character fit more popularist dramatic and stereotypical forms, Challinor slyly makes us look at the tropes and narrative types that dominate culture and propaganda: perhaps we are left questioning the tropes that take what might be seen as heinous actions and makes them heroic. The book mocks mainstream cinema hubris whilst emphasising how it aids xenophobic stereotypes.

Challinor’s conceit gets to show his more playful, sardonic side and the slender length means it is not allowed the chance to outstay its welcome. Right to the end, it keeps the quips coming (note the faux-bibliography that includes the book ‘Musn’t Grumble: The British War Film from Empire to Defeat’, for example). It is a scathing satire and a delight for those who read about film and fiction for fun. Darkly funny, scary, thoughtful and clever.

Buy "I, Mengele"

Philip Challinor's The Curmudgeon

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[i]               “…The Brood, a family film based on the story of Magda Goebbels and her children”: this is a satisfying gag parodying David Cronenbergs classic horror, itself a twisted version of those themes made popular by films such as ‘Kramer vs Kramer’; but it also infers the context where this is would not be a joke as well as containing a scornful criticism of Magda Goebels.