Et in Arcadia ego: Brideshead Revisited, Revisited

 I drank soda water and smoked and freted

until light began to break 

 and the rustle of a rising breeze 

turned me back to my bed.  
Charles Ryder, Brideshead Revisited

 

April 2022: the weather remains oddly cold, dreary.  Where, oh where is our Spring?

Nature's chill sends me back to my relationship with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I am now Charles Ryder at the beginning of the novel, dealing with middle age--some regrets, some peace at where I am.

I came to the novel through the heralded 1981 Granada TV adaptation, which was the most lyrical, visually stunning program anyone had ever seen produced for TV.

The novel was one of many that my father picked up for me in the church thriftstore he and my mother visited every week, quietly building an impressive library for me until I was ready to partake.

The beauty of Brideshead is that it gives several of the ages of man a touchstone: I was in college when Sebastian & Charles seduced a TV generation. It was a thrill to be so young and read so young, to feel an affinity for the elan of their Oxford even in the quads of Rutgers.  Now I feel the weight and lightness of Charles's middle age, loving/understanding with a middle-age depth that the sanctuary light at the end does make all the difference.  (It's a nice touch that the first American edition of the novel was printed with a "sanctuary light" red cover. )

 ******

I first wrote this post several years ago when I had a very visceral reaction to a freakishly cold August. Same now for April 2022.

Thoughts of Brideshead flooded my thinking, along with long forgotten, but very stirring memories of my own visit to Oxford during my college years.

Midautumn has descended into the beauty of April. No, no, I’m not ready. I long for the warmth of air and brightness of the spring sun.

The relentless chill to rain will not last, they say.

This unnatural coldness has a strange affect on memory, summoning long unvisited thoughts. As I put on yet another sweater, Oxford 30 years ago fill my consciousness.

It’s Eights Weeks, and visitors are teeming everywhere. I’m with friends of friends at Wadham College boathouse to watch the races, followed by an "End of the Empire" dance.

We see a musical Alice in Wonderland performed in the Christ Church Cathedral Gardens. It is a magical, site-specific event: the Dean of Christ Church in Dodgson's day was Dr. Liddell & it was his daughters that Carroll wrote for. The Dean's Garden is next to the Cathedral Garden. The chestnut tree in the Dean's Garden is the one in which the Cheshire Cat sat, and Alice's little green door joins the two gardens. I feel like I have gone beyond the looking glass.

We attend a sung Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral, the exquisite lines of Victoria Missa O Quam Gloriosum soaring up to Heaven. It was my fist experience of an English choir, and I did not know the tradition of boy sopranos. I kept looking for the women who were singing such extraordinary notes.

Then over to the Turf for lunch. In memory there is much sunshine and warmth and beauty.

These real experience of Oxford entwine in my heart with Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

In the coldness of August I feel his epithet for book 1: Et in Arcadia ego: the haunting Latin phrase on the tomb in Poussin’s pastoral painting, considered to be uttered by Death, “I am also in Arcadia.” I quietly despair the mirror Ryder is for me "I'm homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless, Hopper."

The cold days in a New York August--a memento mori in the summer of a life. Yet. I am glad to be reminded of mortality, and Waugh, but thrilled that the warmth and sun of the season are coming back. It’s not over, there is eternally more. Something Captain Charles Ryder himself "found this morning, burning anew amid the old stones." I quickened my pace to the subway . . .

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 Mapeel     4/26/2022     current events, literature, Travel   

A New Year’s Reverie: When Memoirs Meet (Patti Smith, James Wolcott, Pauline Kael)

The streets are cold, it’s hard to get a cab, and your jacket isn’t warm enough--Metropolitan captures that chill discomfort and how the conversations that string between two people walking from one bleak stretch of the block to the corner are part of the invisible wiring of the city, the connective tissue through which memories, memoirs, novels, and, yes, movies are eventually made.

James Wolcott offered a Christmas Nocturne that pointed out why Metropolitan is a great Christmas movie.

For me, this part of his passage envisions the other holiday bookend, New Year’s Eve: wherever go you, you have to get back. However engaging the festivities are inside, they are so often connected by those cold, bleak, deserted streets in the middle of the night. And that connective tissue that spools out far beyond the chatter in the street is, as Wolcott says, the thing of memories and memoirs, which seems an appropriate subject for a December 31 post.

I read Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids in September of this year, and segued into Wolcott’s memoir, Lucking Out. The two together captured the art and soul of the 70s and pinged points in my own timeline. Reading the first-person tales of these cultural players I felt like a little ripple in the water from their radiating splashes, if I may be allowed such an aquatic metaphor.  My timeline put me at Rutgers College, in New Brunswick, NJ, in the midst of two of its vibrant scenes—indie/punk music, and poetry.

The Court and the Melody

Patti’s description of the beginning of her performing life and Jim’s description of the CBGB scene from its birth rippled into my later memories of the Court Tavern and the Melody Bar, New Brunswick, circa 1981, a nexus for new bands finding their voice in reaction to the revolution of Horses, Talking Heads 77, the Dead Kennedys, the B-52s, to name some of the standouts. When live bands weren't playing, the speakers thumped the new sounds, new rhythms (Ce que j'ai fait ce soir-là, Ce qu'elle a dit ce soir-là . . . . .Ay Ay Ay Ay Ay Ay Ay Ay). It was a good time to be young and dancing, dancing, dancing, with the thoughts of those papers that needed writing sliding away in waves of sweat.

Even some frats, Fiji in particular, had the vibe in the early eighties, at least for their parties. “Pulled me up” shook the house following Donna Summer, and jocks and denizens of the artistic dorm, Demarest, jumped “up, up, up” together, rubbing elbows and other body parts for the duration of the song, replacing the antipathy the cliques had when the same people passed each other on College Ave.

Wolcott from the epicenter:
“If I can pinpoint the moment the Heads burst through the attic and pointed north, it was the night when they introduced a new number, “Pulled Up,” where the joy whoop of “you pulled me up, up, up, up, up, up!” expressed a giddy, salvational energy that left Warholishm behind like a toy-model village as Astronaut Byrne shed gravity and saw angels knocking around. Not Blakean angels, like Patti’s, but Japanese toys.”

Patti in the epicenter:
In 2010 Patti played a benefit for the Court Tavern, along with The Smithereens and Slaves of New Brunswick, at the State Theater. She had never played there herself, but knew of its historical importance and current need for young bands.


“Smith had two raps for the night, one being about not just saving the Court, not just saving New Jersey, but saving “the whole fucking world!,” her arms often outstretched to hold, or pumped in fists over her head in triumph. The other was about simple perseverance being the key to almost any undertaking in life. Be it music, art, or owning a bar, she hammered home, passionately, that it was the people who kept going that matter, despite being thrown down and fucked over again and again, the people who get back up and keep going, despite the odds, despite what others may care or think, are the ones who triumph.” Mike Black, The Aquarian


William Blake & Allen Ginsberg

 I lived off campus for 2 years in the town of New Brunswick, for a short time in Kevin Hayes's apartment on Plum Street that was party central for the academic set. 

Kevin had a tradition of an annual blow-out party for the vibrant poetry scene in NB. One party from 1981 or ‘82 stands out: Alicia Ostriker, a poet who taught at Douglas, edited an edition of complete Blake poems for Penguin, which Allen Ginsberg liked and used for his own work. I think Kevin had arranged for Ginsberg to come for a reading, and then there they were in my old living room, along with the editors of the newly launched lit journal Long Shot, Eliot Katz and Danny Shot, and 100 others on couches, under couches, virtually hanging from the chandeliers. It was the scene from the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, minus the suits (but with several B-52's inspired bouffants).

At one point I was in the kitchen talking to someone about my Milton class with the delectable William Keach when Gregory Corso walked in looking for a bottle opener for his beer, and saying, “Milton. So here’s where all the intelligent people are.” What a great opening line. I’m sorry to report I was too unsure of myself to engage him in conversation. The graduate students, however, pounced.

Somewhere long after midnight I was standing on the 4th or 5th step down from the top of the stairs to the apartment, having a conversation with someone sitting on the landing. The door opened and Allen Ginsberg and some of his entourage were leaving. As he walked down the stairs behind me, he turned and kissed the back of my head. A literary benediction of the highest order. A little of just what an English major hopes to find at college.

Patti from the epicenter:

“...I went through our belongings and found exactly fifty-five cents, slipped on my grey trench-coat and Mayakovsky cap, and headed to the Automat. I got my tray and slipped in my coins but the window wouldn’t open. I tried again without luck and then I noticed that the price had gone up to sixty-five cents. I was disappointed, to say the least, when I heard a voice say, “Can I help?”I turned around and it was Allen Ginsberg.

We had never met but there was no mistaking the face of one of our great poets and activists. I looked into those intense dark eyes punctuated by his dark curly beard and just nodded. Allen added the extra dime and also stood me to a cup of coffee. I wordlessly followed him to his table, and then plowed into the sandwich. Allen introduced himself. He was talking about Walt Whitman and I mentioned that I was raised near Camden, where Whitman was buried, when he leaned forward and looked at me intently.

“Are you a girl?” he asked
“Yeah, I said, Is that a problem?”.
He just laughed. “I’m sorry. I took you for a very pretty boy.”
I got the picture immediately.
"Well, does this mean I return the sandwich?"
"No, enjoy it. It was my mistake."

He told me he was writing a long elegy for Jack Kerouac, who had recently passed away. “Three days after Rimbaud’s birthday”, I said. I shook his hand and we parted company.
Sometime later Allen became my good friend and teacher. We often reminisced about our first encounter and he once asked how I would describe how we met. “I would say you fed me when I was hungry”, I told him. And he did.”

Circles and Squares

 I took one film theory class in college, where we worked our way through the big Gerald Mast/Marshall Cohen compendium, which put Pauline Kael’s "Circles and Squares" right after Andrew Sarris’s "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962" so you can easily read the two together.

That’s a treat everyone should enjoy once in their lives.

Kael eviscerates Sarris with the simplest of tools: a close reading of the text, with her passion for what she sees as the idiocy of the approach—-and particularly his use of “internal meaning” and “élan” which she hammers on repeatedly-—making the pages almost too hot to turn.

One example, but there are so many:

"Sarris believes that what makes an auteur is 'an élan of the soul.'(This critical language is barbarous. Where else should élan come from? It’s like saying “a digestion of the stomach.” A film critic need not be a theoretician, but it is necessary that he know how to use words. This might, indeed, be a first premise for a theory.)"

Later she cries, “I am angry, but am I unjust?”

Wolcott from the epicenter:

"She couldn’t stand 'stiffs,' whose tastes were fully formed, rigidified, and stuck in the petrified forest of the past, and those of us sitting in the Algonquin were on the upswing of our careers, just starting our scouting missions. These were the years of encouragement. Some would stray off target, disappear into the reeds, defect from criticism under the pressure of unfulfilled expectations and career frustrations, or simply find something more frolicking to do, Pauline being more ambitious for them than they were for themselves. In a sense we would all fail Pauline because none of us would surpass her defiant nerve, her resounding impact.”

Pauline Kael was the second film critic I became aware of as a teen, when I discovered The New Yorker. (The first was Vincent Canby, because my parents were New York Times readers). I loved her writing, her voice, her mind.  Fast forward to September 3, 2001, I happened to be walking through a nighttime Times Square with The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cadfael, itself quite a moment in my own timeline. I looked up to see Pauline Kael dead at 83 making its way along the zipper. Neither of companions felt the pang of that news, which surprised me. Crossroads of the world, a crossroad of my life (although I didn’t know it then) and now the end of era, which was just a week away from the end of life as we knew it. Not what Kael had in mind when she opposed Sarris's Circles with Squares, but a cinematic moment I hope she would appreciate.

Happy New Years everyone! 

Patti Smith at State Theater Court Tavern Benefit, cover of Jim Carroll's "People Who Died"

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 Mapeel     12/27/2021     current events, Film, literature, poetry   

Snapshots of A Child's Christmas in Massapequa

There's a whole literature of vibrant writing from writers looking back to the Christmases of their childhood for memoir or fiction.

My favorite is Dylan Thomas's wildly florid prose poem of A Child's Christmas in Wales:

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

Dylan's writing is so exuberant it lead me to search for some memories of my own childhood Christmases . . .

years and years ago when the GI Bill first lead to the burgeoning of middle class suburbia outside of Gotham, and the next generation reaped the benefits of prosperity within its sprawl. A split level house meant having a staircase to bound down on Christmas morning. The anticipation of walking down those stairs made us all giddy.  As we descended, the living room came into view, dotted with brightly wrapped presents piled high in specific spots for each family member. It was a magical sight and the joys of the day were those that would never be matched again in quite the same way.



Katherine Anne Porter wrote the lovely "A Christmas Story"

When she was five years old, my niece asked me again why we celebrated Christmas. She had asked when she was three and when she was four, and each time had listened with a shining, believing face, learning the songs and gazing enchanted at the pictures which I displayed as proof of my stories. Nothing could have been more successful, so I began once more confidently to recite in effect the following:
    The feast in the beginning was meant to celebrate with joy the birth of a Child, an event of such importance to this world that angels sang from the skies in human language, to announce it and even, if we may believe the old painters, came down with garlands in their hands and danced on the broken roof of the cattle shed where He was born.

z

I shared my Christmases with my only sibling, an older brother. His presents were of no interest to me--a virtual litany of trucks, cars, trains, army men, model airplanes-- but we still were supposed to wait to watch each open one present at a time, so our parent's attention could focus on each of us, ping-pong like. There were some things he got before I was old enough to open presents that I liked, including styrofoam building blocks that you could build an igloo with and then get inside.

We don't know here that he will one day have his own family of two girls and a boy to share Christmases with and I could be the aunt in Porter's story.


Charles Lamb wrote an Elia story that also comes to my mind this time of year:

CHILDREN love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, . . .


We too liked to hear stories of our elders. Grandma O. told of one Christmas Eve she saw a spider on the ceiling, and thinking it was bad to kill a creature on such a night she let it live, and the family went out to Midnight Mass. When they came back, the spider had given birth and there were dozens of baby spiders "dropping all over the place" as she told it. That was too much for her and she got the broom.

We didn't sit upon our dear old dad's lap often, but this one Christmas Eve he wanted to read us "Twas the night before Christmas," and mom captured the scene that is so real it looks like a scripted movie set: the roaring fire, the stockings hung with care, the wreath, the hand-made paper chains lining the fireplace, the post war paneling and Eames-inspired chair and ottoman. 

We don't know here that my dad will die an early death from colon cancer, or that I will have more in common with Elia's tale of his Revery: Dream-Children than I would want:

"We [Alice and John] are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name”—and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor armchair . . ."

But there has been music. More music than I ever could have imagined.

For Dylan Thomas too, who closes his tale with this:

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Merry Christmas, One and All.

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 Mapeel     12/23/2021     Christmas, family, literature   

The Centenary of the Armistice: A Personal Cycle Closes and a Gash That Never Heals

"Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected... Its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its ends... Millions were destroyed because two people, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort, were shot... But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing meliorist myth... It reversed the idea of Progress."
Paul Fussell


This Sunday, November 11, 2018, at 11:00 am, a personal gyre of history closes for me.

I entered college with an attachment to the First World War, if that’s what you can call it, because of T.E.Lawrence. I had read through Seven Pillars of Wisdom in high school and fallen under its heady spell. Lawrence was a gifted writer who embodied the English literary tradition from the inside, and he wrote his own mythology simply because he could: he knew the power of the trope and how to wield it (and saw an opportunity in the newsreels of his own personal Barnum, Lowell Thomas).

To my Freshmen amazement, there was a class on World War One Literature, taught by Paul Fussell, based on his own National Book Award-winning The Great War and Modern Memory. It’s a cultural study/close reading of the literary tradition before WW1—particularly poetry--- and how it changed during and in relation to the war.

We did not study Lawrence, but I discovered the vast and profound literature of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and the work of Sir Martin Gilbert, John Keegan, and Bernard Bergonzi. Few people were looking at this work in the 1980s, and it made a deep impression on me.

The Shell Shocked Lord Peter

Also in college I discovered the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, and her Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Her novels are murder mysteries, not Zola-like realistic drama but it is notable that her sleuth is suffering from shell shock.  It is worked into the stories in such a matter-of-fact way, such was the reality of the fate of the returning servicemen from World War 1.

Wimsey is seen as a foolish ass in some ways to start, but we learn that he was severely injured by artillery fire near Caudry, France, and suffered a complete breakdown when he was demobbed. The foolish demeanor is his way of coping with the shell shock.

In Whose Body, the first Wimsey novel, when he pushes himself too far it leads him to hallucinate he is back in the trenches. Luckily his manservant Bunter is nearby:

"Put that light out, damn you!" said Wimsey. "Listen—-over there-—listen—can't you hear it?"

"It's nothing, my lord," said Mr. Bunter, hastily getting out of bed and catching hold of his master; "it's all right, you get to bed quick and I'll fetch you a drop of bromide. Why, you're all shivering—you've been sitting up too late."

"Hush! no, no—it's the water," said Lord Peter with chattering teeth, "it's up to their waists down there, poor devils. But listen! can't you hear it? Tap, tap, tap—they're mining us—but I don't know where—I can't hear—I can't. Listen, you! There it is again—we must find it—we must stop it . . . Listen! Oh, my God! I can't hear—I can't hear anything for the noise of the guns. Can't they stop the guns?"

"Oh, dear!" said Mr. Bunter to himself. "No, no—it's all right, Major—don't you worry."

"But I hear it," protested Peter.

"So do I," said Mr. Bunter stoutly; "very good hearing, too, my lord. That's our own sappers at work in the communication trench. Don't you fret about that, sir."

Lord Peter grasped his wrist with a feverish hand.

"Our own sappers," he said; "sure of that?"

"To be sure they will," said Mr. Bunter, "and very nice, too. You just come and lay down a bit, sir—they've come to take over this section."

"You're sure it's safe to leave it?" said Lord Peter.

A later novel, The Unpleasantness at the Belladonna Club, begins on Armistice Day, 1928, and the plot revolves around the fact that for the 2 minutes of silence at 11:00 am on November 11, nobody moves, so the killer can get to his target unseen.

It’s also notable for this exchange between Wimsey and Captain Fentiman from the war:

George: "I wish to God Jerry had put me out with the rest of ‘em. What’s the good of coming through for this sort of thing? What’ll you have?”

Wimsey: “Dry Martini.  Cheer up. All this Remembrance-day business gets on your nerves, don’t it? It’s my belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. However, it won’t do to say so. . . .How are things going for you?

George: “Oh rotten as usual. Tummy all wrong and no money. What’s the damn good of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax.”

* * * * *

That negative feeling toward the Remembrance Day services has been around since they began, particularly from the men and women who served. They ceremonies provide a psychological balm for some, and not for others. If there were no ceremonies, no remembrance, would that be better?

This lucite statue was created by the Commonwealth War Graves Foundation in collaboration with the Remembered and its inaugural Armistice 2018 Project, There But Not There. The poppy is from the gift shop at the Flanders Museum in Ypres, Belgium, the medieval Cloth Hall that was completely razed in WW1 and then rebuilt.

The problem of shell shock, of PTSD of the gash to the souls of the combatants--will continue as long as soldiers are sent to war to kill each other.  It's a matter of life and death for us all.

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 Mapeel     11/09/2018     current events, literature, television   

The Leftovers: I’m All in for the Final Season of Exasperations and Magic

I am all in for the niche ruminating about The Leftovers after the premiere of its 3rd and final season last Sunday because there is so much fun to be had. The series is a triumph of imagination, combined with the highest arts of TV writing, directing, and acting. It is pure enjoyment to be pulled into its narrative spell and try and makes sense of what’s going.

Warning: The below presumes the reader has watched the 2 seasons and the season 3 premiere, both for comprehension of points, and what might be spoilers.

1. Let’s start with the title: The Leftovers. Terrible title. Who doesn’t think of doogie bags from restaurants or Tupperware sitting in the refrigerator.

As for the Guilty Remnants sect, I see scraps of fabric, maybe because my mother is a talented seamstress, and she was always buying something from the remnant table, the fabric that was too small to sell in yardage.

So from a verbal/visual side, it was off to a strange start.

2. I began weekly watching in season 2, I don’t remember what drew me in to start.

So I binge-watched the first season to catch up, which was good because it helped me to connect some of the craziness very easily.

Season 1 tracked the original underlying novel. A pivotal episode— “The Garveys at Their Best”—comes 9 episodes into the 10 episode season.

As Sonia Saraiya said in the AV Club:

“Tonight’s episode offers a lot of helpful information. So what was the point of making us wait to see the backstories of these characters, nine weeks after the pilot, instead of making this, or some version of this, into the pilot?”

Messing with the narrative timeline certainly energized the storytelling.

It also meant that we learned about post Departure life first.  So when in episode 9, we were shown extended flashbacks to our characters before the Departure, something jumped out at me:


3. Much of post Departure world is a projection of Kevin's pre-Departure psyche.

Follow me:
Pre Departure: Kevin didn't want to stop smoking, Laurie wanted him to, and so he hid the fact that he smoked. 
Post Departure: Smoking is a part of the very faith of the Guilty Remnant and they smoke ALL THE TIME.

Pre Departure: Kevin didn't want a dog, Laurie did. 
Post departure: Kevin gets to shoot multiple feral dogs.  Like the smoking, a wildly heightened expression of feeling in his Pre Departure life.

Pre Departure: Kevin feels threatened by how competent and loved his father is. 
Post Departure:  Dad is certifiably crazy & put away.

There has to be some reason Post Departure tracts back to Kevin's psyche. Among the mountain of things not explained, this connection is never explained. In season 2, there are no more specific parallels, though season 2 is not from the novel, but is the extension of the story written by the novelist Tom Perrotta and Damon Lindelof.

4. For now I will consider Kevin and his multiple resurrections.

For Justin Theroux now has a world-class beard.

For Christological symbols abound, my favorite being the deer that appeared throughout season 1:

Sonia spoke of it in terms of Kevin:

“And then there’s the whole thing with the deer, which takes on a resonance and significance that implies a whole bunch about Kevin. The show has visited and revisited deer in unexpected spaces: The Garvey kitchen in 2014 is torn up because a deer got stuck inside; the wild dogs kill a deer in the pilot, leading Kevin to take up thinning their ranks. 

Stags are beautiful and dignified animals, and there’s a lot of subtext written into these huge beasts being trapped in houses, terrified. There’s even more subtext when Kevin introduces the idea that it’s just one scared deer that keeps getting confused.”

The stag is a medieval symbol of Christ. So a little interesting foreshadowing in season 1 that is leading to the Book of Kevin.

And now, season 3 episode one, The Book of Kevin. He may not want to be the new, New Testament, but his rational mind will need an answer for himself about his ability to cheat death, even if he rejects Rev. Matt's interpretation.

I try not to read things in advance, but apparently everyone knew that The Leftovers will end in Australia, and the prologue of The Book of Kevin was a look at the Millerites cult in 1844, in Australia.

Then the reveal at the end, with Nora, an aged woman. In Australia, with a dove/carrier pigeon coop just like the 1844 gang had.

Of course I don't know what this means. But if Lindelof and Perrotta write themselves into an end of times in Australia, I hope they do some serious homage to Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, and to a lesser extent Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, two pieces of art that got there first.

The novel On the Beach is much superior to the film. It is a terrific read, and the final page chilling.

The Last Wave (photo above) is one of those films that will stay with you your whole life.

Looking forward to episode 2—

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 Mapeel     4/19/2017     Film, literature, television   

My Editions of the Romantics: That Which Connects

"It has been estimated that at the time of Keats' death, the combined sales of the three books published during his lifetime amounted to 200 copies." 

Andrew Motion, The Guardian
January 23, 2010

Yet here we are, two hundred years later, and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association is running an international prize for essay and poetry celebrating the publication of the first volume.

How does a life that ended at 25 wield such power?

This year's theme is "To a Friend" and the idea of Keats's own relationships. It stirred in me enormous emotions about my own relationship to John Keats-- through the editions of his poems that brought him into my life. Like great choral music, if no one picks up the actual books and reads (or sings), the genius is silent.

First stirrings. 
In junior high school, just starting to be conscious of the names Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, I noticed books that had long been on the family  bookshelf: The Literature of England: An Anthology & A History, Vol. 1 & 2, Wood, Wyatt, Anderson, Scott, Foresman and Company, 1947; and Seven Centuries of Verse: English & American, A.J.M Smith, Michigan State College, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947.

They are my parents' college anthologies from the early 1950s! Each filled with representations of the Romantics.

As I sit up late many nights and page through the big books over and over I feel an enormous connection to the pages of the Romantics. I dive in so easily, read so easily, understand on an as-yet untutored level. And I develop a deep connection to these editions because they belong to my parents and bring me in communion with en entire world I long to know more about.

I only realized years later that I grew up with some casual peppering of some of the great quotes in casual conversation: my Mom, "It winter comes, can spring be far behind" whenever the snows came forceful; my Dad pronouncing "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" in the most sardonic tone when something wasn't going right.

For myself I felt particularly drawn to

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, 
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; 

That wonderful cadence and what I visualized as an Emerald City of books gleaming in gold: I did not know who Chapman was then. My love of this poem would lead me to getting a fairly significant and needed college scholarship because of an essay I wrote based on it. Hmm. So, those late night cogitations had meaning outside of my own heart. . . .

College
College brought the heady days of being an English major and spending hours with the poets I had met in the family's anthologies. I had the privilege of studying with William Keach for Romantics, and so was ushered into some of the finest thinking about the era and work and enjoyed expert tutelage about my own ideas.

On the larger canvas love came and went, was requited and unrequited in a strange venn diagram that included Paul Fussell and a shy student I'll call "Keats" who was courting me and whom I did not appreciate, blinded by my love for a "Byron" who would never be right for me.

For my birthday one year "Keats" bought me a handful of various Romantics tomes from our college town's wonderful used book store. He inscribed the Byron volume with "Happy Birthday--The years ahead, however thin the strands, however frayed , this one will still be strong, our love for theses books, especially Byron."

Sadly, as I had not appreciated the gift bearer, I barely even looked at the Keats volume at the time.

Turns out is it

The Poetical Works of John Keats  

Given From His Own Editions and Other Authentic Sources and Collated With Many Manuscripts

Edited with notes by H. Buxton Forman and Mrs. Keats and a Biographical Sketch by Wm. M. Rossetti

Complete Edition

A. L. Burt Company, New York

And Now
Looking into this realm of gold now unexpectedly renews my relationship with Keats as I discover the deep riches of this edition decades after I first owned it. (Its one glaring flaw is on the spine, which regrettably heralds Keat's Poems.)

The great Victorian biographer/forger H. Buxton Forman became friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti around 1871, which probably led to brother William's biographical sketch being included in the full poetical works volume.

Rossetti's sketch feels like a portal that daisy chains back to a direct connection to Keats and Shelley as in 'shaking the hand of the hand that shook Abraham Lincoln's hand.' Keats died in 1821, Rossetti was born in 1829, but twenty-five years on the outer circle was still very much alive to pass along knowledge to the literary Rossettis.  The New York edition is from 1906, although the Rossetti sketch is from some years earlier, as he refers to Frances Mary Llanos Gutierrez as "this lady still living in Spain and has a son known as a painter," and she died in 1889.

I love the cadence of Rossetti's prose and how he limns the overall sketch. He touches on many points that have since been much retold, including that Keats did not die from negative criticism:

"It is more to the purpose to say that the once very prevalent story that Keats had been extremely pained and dejected by the adverse reviews, even to the extend of losing in consequences of them  his health and ultimately his life, was a romance of literature. Shelley by a noble poem, and Byron by a jeer, are greatly responsible for the diffusion and acceptance of this fable: Lord Houghton has, to the deep satisfaction of all who value manliness as a portion of the poetic character, dispelled it once and forever." [page xi-xii]

Rossetti also captures the power of desire to be close to our bright star, remarking on the burial instruction to inscribe "Here lies one whose name was write in water":

"That is an age-long and shoreless water, which will continue flowing while generation after generation of men, his brothers and lovers, come to contemplate the sacred tomb in Rome, dominated by the pyramid of Caius Cestius. They have but to move some paces aside, and stand by a still more sacred tomb which opened in the ensuing year, 1822--that of the world-loving, world-hated Shelley, divinest of the demigods." [xvi to xvii] 

Rossetti ends his sketch with thoughts of the poet's character

"As of Keats's character, so of his poetry, enjoyment is the primary element, the perpetual undertone: his very melancholy is the luxury of sadness." [xviii]

"Keats, youthful and prodigal, the magician of unnumbered beauties which neither author nor reader can think of counting or assessing, is the Keats of our affections." [xix] 

Of all the magical ideas that Keats left us, the poem that suggests that poetry itself can replace drinking for mind/body altering experience is in some ways the most ambitious.

Ode to a Nightingale [Forman page 227]

"Away, away I fly to thee
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
But on the viewless wings of Poesy."

Benjamin Robert Haydon (and others, and the timeline) tell us that Keats was suffering from the untimely death of his brother Tom when he wrote it.

"Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies:"

Forman note: "Haydon, in a letter to Miss Mitford (Correspondence &c, Volume II, page 72) says of Keats--'The death of his brother wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began to droop. He wrote his exquisite 'Ode to the Nightingale' at this time, and as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous undertone which affected me extremely." [page 227]

We know that it was Haydon who gave a copy of the poem to Annals of the Fine Arts editor James Elmes, who purchased it and published it in the July issue, before it was published in the 1820 collection with "Lamia." I wonder if Keats really recited it to Haydon during the act of creation.

But of no import.

The poem has been explicated, close-read, metrically analyzed from every possible angle; I sometimes feel the weight of all of the thought, much of it profound, clever, nuanced.

I struggle to stay close to Keats in my own way, not merely a repository of Forman and Perkins and Hirsch (either of them).

Stanza 7
"Thou  wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 

Forman note:
"In the last line of the stanza the word fairy instead of faery stands in the manuscript and in the Annals: but the Lamia volume reads faery, which enhances the poetic value of the line in the subtlest manner--eliminating all possible connection of fairy-land with Christmas trees, tinsel, and Santa Claus, and carrying the imagination safely back to the middle ages---to Amadis of Gaul, to Palmerin of England, and above all to the East, to the Thousand and One Nights. " [page 229]

"Christmas! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?" 

And in my own happy dream state, that fleeting music can only be:

What can I give Keats,
Poor as I am?
If I were a poet
I would bring iambs;
If I were a scholar
Endymion's where I'd start.
Yet what I can, I give Keats -
Give my heart
Give . . . my heart. 

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 Mapeel     3/25/2017     literature, national poetry month, poetry   

Oscars 2016: "But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware"

I don't watch many films, partly because they flood me with so many references, so many cross connections, it's actually uncomfortable.  And while I leave film criticism to my betters, I offer some thoughts on a few films before the 88th Academy Awards.

*******

There are three Best Picture nominated films that are deeply connected for me: Brooklyn; Spotlight; Room. That's the order I saw them in. They are tied together in my psyche by the two forces of nature that is Irish Catholicism.

"For on the night he was betrayed he himself took bread, and giving you thanks he said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, saying:

Brooklyn
Brooklyn is a stylized snapshot of the emotional, inner life of the Irish who left the Emerald Isle and crossed the ocean in near steerage like "bricks for the Grand City Hall in New York. " {If you're of Irish heritage, you'll recognize that line.}

Some find it saccharine, and I can see why. That early elegiac scene with Eilis Lacey on the boat to the new world waving to her mother and sister on the dock feels contrived and cliched, and yet true. Generations of Irish parents watched as their sons and daughters left for a better life.  That took an enormous emotional toll on those people, those families. This film gives us a chance to feel some of that heartache, despair, sacrifice.

Eilis's entry to the US is sponsored by a priest from her village who left for the States long ago. He is like a fairy godmother: he gets her a place to live, and a job, the 2 most crucial needs for an immigrant. It seemed surprising to me that such an opportunity would be given to a young woman in the 1950s, and that the priest who sponsors her is not sinister. Imagine. An Irish priest from the bad old days (as opposed to the recent bad days) who is not abusing the protagonist. And I don't say that facetiously.

The film weaves its visual tale of Eilis overcoming homesickness, falling in love with an Italian American, and coming to terms with the duality of being an Irishwoman in New York. It evokes the era with the precision and beauty of Mad Men. And surprisingly, Eilis is not harmed. For some reason I kept waiting for something terrible to happen to her. I assumed Jessica Pare's shop supervisor was going to be cruel to her, and I was completely surprised by her compassion.

As a film, I think it has the most resonance for, well,  people of Irish Catholic heritage.

TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND EAT OF IT: FOR THIS IS MY BODY WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.

Spotlight
The telling of the Boston Globe's exposure of the systemic protection of abusive priests within the Catholic Church is a superb film.

It captures the journalistic process of the sickening discovery of an evil reality with no gratuitous sensationalizing of the monstrous evilness of the criminals, both the offending priests and all of their protectors.

As it happened, it's Globe's new editor, Marty Baron, the ultimate outsider-- "an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who doesn't like baseball" played with searing humorlessness by Liev Scriber--who asks the team why they haven't followed up on the case of John Geoghan, a priest who actually had been accused of molesting young boys.  The small investigative  team who write under the special section of Spotlight is then focused and slowly uncovers the systematic reassignment of priests who their superiors knew had abused children, instead of calling the cops.

And it's Baron who insists that for the investigation to be effective, it all has to tie to the highest authority, to Bernard Cardinal Law. Which the team is able to do. Michael Keaton, John Slattery, Rachel McAdams, and Mark Ruffalo are all standouts as "real" people who have to come to terms with what until then had been the unthinkable.

Many of the reporters at the Globe are the progeny of the historic kinfolk of Brooklyn's  Eilis Lacey from County Wexford.

Only today I saw a tweet of a plaque from somewhere in Boston that reads:

"In 1847 alone, 37,000 Irish refugees landed in Boston, on the edge of death and despair, impoverished and sick."

It would take the clarity of the Boston Globe's reporting, the home-team paper, to help raise the consciousness of these people whose religion and its institutions were part of their identity.

It's been hard for me, for many, to reconcile the magnitude of the evil of the institutional church alongside the power and mystery of the Mass that Christ entrusted to it.

The Globe reporting ran in January 2002, just months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The numbness of those murders slid into the numbness of this other kind of evil.

Following in the years after 2002, when so much of the abuse came to light, and the millions, or is it billions now? of dollars of collective settlements were reported, a friend told me her sister was converting to Catholicism. She had been raised Presbyterian, not practiced, and was in her 40s.  I remember thinking, how can anyone be attracted to this institution now, to this overwhelming corruption. And yet, at each Easter vigil, there are people of all ages, races, sexual orientation, taking the Rites of Christian Initiation of Adults.

Oh yes, because, the faith exists outside of the institutional church.

Spotlight affirms that smart, talented people can still investigate parts of the world that others want to keep hidden. And that there are equally talented storytellers who can bring their work into the broad cultural space that is mainstream moviegoing.

In a similar way, when supper was ended, he took the chalice, and giving you thanks he said the blessing, and gave the chalice to his disciples, saying:

Room
When I heard Room was from a novel by Emma Donoghue, I wondered if she was related to my old NYU professor Denis Donoghue, and yes,  she is his daughter.

Professor Donoghue, a leading literary scholar of Irish, English, and American literature, is one of those innately literary souls, and I enjoyed studying with him immensely. I also enjoyed his memoirs, Warrenpoint, of growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland. Denis met and married Frances Rutledge, and they had 8 children.

From an interview with Emma about her mother: "I'm her eighth child (the runt of the litter, she used to say fondly) and it's her boundless, playful and unsentimental kind of mother-love that I tried to pour into Room."

Emma was born and lived in Dublin for her first 9 years and was sent to Catholic Convent schools. I have no idea what her faith is now, but the knowledge is in her DNA.

In 2010 she published a novel about an evil and depravity of sickening proportions.  A man who kidnaps a 17 year old girl and imprisons her in a suburban shed to rape her every evening.

After 2 years a baby boy is born. The captor lets the baby live, and time moves on.

When the film begins, Jack has turned 5, and we see the routine of their lives together. Ma, as we first meet her, is doing an extraordinary job of giving Jack as happy a life as possible. He has no context for their dire situation, and so he accepts, and he laughs and plays like any other 5 year old.  We learn that Ma must be teaching Jack literary classics, as he knows the story of Alice in Wonderland very well. The egg-shell caterpillar, the toilet paper roll maze, the daily run around the tiny shed: all speak to the ingenuity, creativity, and staggering love of this mother for her son.

Brie Larson and Jack Tremblay both give luminous performances.

But the evil is so pervasive.

Like the priests who prey on children.


TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND DRINK FROM IT: FOR THIS IS THE CHALICE OF MY BLOOD, THE BLOOD OF THE NEW AND ETERNAL COVENANT; WHICH WILL BE POURED OUT FOR YOU AND FOR MANY FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. DO THIS IN MEMORY OF ME.

It's hard for anyone to reconcile evil with an all-loving God.  Satan, Original Sin, all the explanations pale in the sight of horrifically hurt people.

And with so much pain in the different worlds of these films, a song drifted up from my memory:

"I hope you make a lot of nice friends out there
But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware"

Such a simple, melodic song from the musician we knew as Cat Stevens (born Steven Demetre Georgiou), who after a spiritual journey became Yusuf Islam back in 1978.  My BFF had an older sister, which is how Tea for the Tillerman came into my life, back in the day. I didn't know it was written for Patti D'arbanville, but the "remember there's a lot of bad and beware" struck me, even at 10 years old.

I love this line from Yusuf's Wikipedia entry: "Although his father was Greek Orthodox and his mother a Swedish Baptist, Georgiou was sent to St. Joseph Roman Catholic Primary School."



* * * * *

So what do I think should win Best Picture?

The Martian.

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 Mapeel     2/27/2016     Film, Ireland, literature, Oscars   

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: Death Amid the Beauty

A cautionary tale about the beauty of the snow from 2010.

“Whose woods these are I think I know”

Central Park. The genius of Olmstead and Vaux's landscaped naturalness, an oasis of primordial power amid the world's greatest concrete canyon. Its majesty and magic beckons city dwellers, even on

“the darkest evening of the year”

when the city is being socked by a monstrous mixture of wet, heavy snow, sleet ice, rain, wind.

No equine is present in this tableau to give a harness bell a shake,
But there is some sense of cosmic mistake.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”

That is our park, especially with the fairy land decoration of snow amidst its arboreal splendor of 80-foot high American elms trees.


“But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”

Robert Frost captured for the ages a man’s pause, hinting at the weariness of life and evoking a moment of ambivalence about the point of going on.

The man who was killed today in Central Park when a 100-pound branch fell and struck him directly had no such moment. He was walking through the woods on a snowy evening, and then he was dead.

If this tragic scene wasn’t poignant enough, he was walking on the Mall, through the Literary Walk stretch, where Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Friedrich Schiller and others stood helpless witness to his death.

A mighty tree branch, falling under the weight of snow and hitting one individual: you can almost see Death himself leaning on a power saw at the base of the tree, pulling his dark robes tighter around him as the sleet starts bouncing off his bones.

May this gentleman, at this writing not yet named, find peace in eternal rest, as surprised as he will be to be approaching the Pearly Gates.

 “How strange, I was just walking through the Park on my way home . . . “

I hope St. Peter gently fills him in on the details.

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 Mapeel     1/23/2016     current events, literature   

A Tale of Driving in the Blizzard Meets O. Henry

In honor of today's blizzard, here is a New Yorker’s first-hand account I found of driving in a blizzard from Teterboro, New Jersey to Massapequa Park, Long Island. I like it for its detail of the great roads of the Metropolitan area and the sheer driving description. Though a city girl with no car, I love the roadways of Gotham and the car culture of the people who know them intimately.

Plus, there is an O. Henry-like twist at the end.

“I left Teterboro (NJ) at 3 pm and the ground was already covered. The snow fell heavily (but fine)—about 2 to 3 inches per hour.

"I made good time to the GW Bridge, but then the back-ups began. We moved ever so slowly along the entire length of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (Ha!). After finally navigating a rise at the juncture of the CBX and The New England Thruway the way was pretty open to the Throgs Neck Bridge. It was difficult, though, because the road had not been plowed, and the snow was blowing and blinding and my windshield wipers were not working very well.

"The rise in the road I mentioned was part of the problem with the CBX and set the stage for the rest of the trip—many cars (the drivers really) could not climb even the slightest incline without skidding and getting stuck. Quite a few of them ended up perpendicular to the traffic flow.

"I took the Throgs Neck without a problem and the Clearview Expressway to Northern Blvd., where I got gas (Thank God!) This phase of the trip was relatively uneventful.

"Back on the Cross-Island things crept along. (I had thought about staying on Northern Blvd. but I knew the further East I went the hillier it would become so I decided against it.) No one could get on or off the L.I.E. because the entrance ramp/incline was blocked by snow.

"We inched along, sliding and avoiding the abandoned cars. It was incredibly slow going.

"Finally, after getting up an incline near New Hyde Park road I saw another world---there was no backed-up traffic! Eureka! There were a few cars moving in front of me in a single file and I joined the procession. There was only one lane open (still no plowing, but some plows passed us on the other side, going into Queens), and with my windshield wipers not working at all by this time, I found it difficult to keep in line, but somehow I managed.

"This strange caravan wound its way to the junction of Northern State and Meadowbrook Pkwy and since the cars in front of me went on Northern State, I did too. Soon the three cars in front of me pulled to the side to either rest or clean their windshields or whatever. That left me in the lead!

"I was virtually driving blind. I sat forward as far as I could with my forehead practically pressed against the windshield with my chin on the steering wheel. Besides struggling to stay in the lane that had been traveled before (and de facto plowed) I had to be careful not to hit the abandoned cars. Grueling doesn’t begin to describe it. And it just didn’t end.

"The whiteout effect was so strong that I missed the turnoff for Wantagh Pkwy, which I had intended to take. I finally managed to cross-country (practically) at Hicksville Rd and make my exit. I was making progress when I ran into a snow bank on my left and the snow blew up and completely blocked my windshield so I had to stop and clean it off.

I must say it was quite an ordeal. I was really afraid I would not make it home. I finally did, NINE HOURS later. I had a triple martini.”

(As a point of reference, Teterboro to Massapequa Park is a 2-hour trip.)

/>

Here’s the thing about this description: it’s from a letter my father wrote in me on Ash Wednesday, 1983, when I was away in England as a senior in college!

He wrote me letters once or twice a week, this being the world before email. My father was an expert driver-—I love the swipe he takes at the drivers who can’t keep from skidding (it’s not the cars, it’s them).

Holding the letter in my hand brought me back to my flat at Southampton University, sitting on my bed reading it for the first time. He had a distinct, beautiful hand writing that some people found hard to read.

He could not have imagined me rereading it in the 21st century. Nor did he know he would die two years after writing it. We know not the hour nor the day.

The Master Celtic Interpretation of "A Christmas Carol"

Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol was published as a novella on December 19, 1843, in London. For me, the 1951 Alastair Sim film version--released as Scrooge in the UK--is one of the most perfect realizations of literature to film ever created. 
What is it that sets the Alastair Sim version produced and directed by Brian Desmond Hurst apart from the rest?

Well, I’d say it’s because it is the perfect Celtic marriage: a Scottish actor and an Irish director. Seriously. The Celtic DNA knows how to deal with ghosts, tormented souls, and redemption like no other race, and they would have a particular affinity with the creative genius of their Anglo-Saxon cousin Dickens.

Ireland's Most Prolific Early Director

Brian Desmond Hurst was born in East Belfast in 1895 into a working-class family of iron workers. In 1914, he enlisted in the British Army and survived the slaughter at Gallipoli with the Royal Irish Rifles. He went to Hollywood in the late 1920s and it’s not surprising that he became friends with John Ford — some accounts said he was one of Ford’s assistants — and had a cameo alongside John Wayne in Hangman’s House (1928).

In 1933, he moved back to England, and the films he directed were steeped deeply in the Irish and English literary tradition: a version of John Millington Synge’s great play Riders to the Sea (1935), which he shot in Connemara with actors from the Abbey Theatre; Ourselves Alone (1936), a love story set against the Irish War of Independence (and the translation of Sinn Fein, a factoid I first learned from a Columbo episode!); and The Tenth Man (1936) based on the play by Somerset Maugham. In the 1940s, he directed several war films/re-creations, some would say propaganda, working with the Ministry of Information. One is A Letter from Ulster (1943), where "Hurst was able to persuade one Catholic and one Protestant soldier to write letters home, explaining their impressions of their stay." Another, Theirs Is the Glory (1946), was about the British forces in Operation Market Garden.

I don’t know how the job of directing and producing Scrooge, as it was released in Britain, fell to Hurst, but it was an inspired choice given his sensitivity to literature. And then his DNA kicked in.


An Ulster man grows up believing that the supernatural simply coexists with the natural world. Hurst in his own words: "I don’t remember very much about my mother because I was only 3½ when she died, but I remember running into the house one day and asking her for a biscuit. I was still dressed then as a little girl, because in Ulster we believed that the fairies only stole little boys, and didn’t want little girls." Sure, everyone knows that.

From Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight — where he wrote down "true tales" of ghosts and spirits and faeries as told to him by various people — to the Conor McPherson film The Eclipse, with Ciaran Hinds as a volunteer at a literary festival who is drawn to an English author who writes ghosts stories — Celtic culture simply abounds with the dead and the undead sharing all sorts of things. Hurst’s literary nature combined with his Irish sensibility helped create magic on screen. The film’s atmosphere is authentically creepy, treating the ghosts with respect, and then truly joyous, as we know the Irish can be.

Alastair as Ebenezer

The other part of the magic, of course, is in the person of Alastair Sim. He was born in Edinburgh in 1900 to a mother from the Inner Hebrides who only spoke Gaelic until she moved to the mainland in her teens. Need I say more about Sim’s understanding of the Celtic soul? Like Hurst, there wasn’t much in Sim’s earlier work that hinted at such a perfectly realized lead performance. He was the clichéd "character actor" in the 1930s, moving up to lead in B pictures in the '40s. After Scrooge, his fame was for portraying — in drag — the headmistress in two St. Trinian’s films.

Under Hurst’s direction, Sim gives the naturally nuanced performance of a lifetime. Every line reading sounds like extemporaneous, unscripted dialogue. Nothing is caricature, even the difficult "humbugs." His heart of stone at the beginning is perfectly cold and icy, with no hint of camp. His interview with Marley completely comfortable once he gets over the shock. Sim beautifully realizes every fiber of Ebenezer. The Dickensian-named Bosley Crowther, critic of The New York Times in the 1930s and '40s, summed it up like this:

In short, what we have in this rendition of Dickens' sometimes misunderstood Carol is an accurate comprehension of the agony of a shabby soul. And this is presented not only in the tortured aspects of Mr. Sim but in the phantasmagoric creation of a somber and chilly atmosphere."

It’s the final transformation, then, into the light, that I believe makes Sim’s good portrayal superlative.

Giddy for Us All

One of humanity’s deepest fears is that of missing out: missing out on love, on a career or a creative dream. It’s a harsh reality for everyone at some point. You accept the defeats small and large because you have to; as they say, "what can you do?" As Ebenezer slowly begins to see how mean he has become, he fears The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come — the Phantom — and his own death.

"How are you?" said one [man of business: very wealthy, and of great importance]
"How are you?" returned the other.
"Well!" said the first, "old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?"

And to underscore that Scrooge's soul is headed to Hell, Arthur Rackham's illustration of this exchange shows an enormous cloven-hoofed Satan looming behind the two businessmen, with his long fingers gesturing to Ebenezer. The Phantom then leads Scrooge to the cemetery and the great scene of Scrooge seeing his name on the tombstone.

"Spirit! he cried, tightly clutching his robe. "Hear me! I am not the man I was. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

In his agony he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit stronger yet, repulsed him.

Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reverse, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bed-post.

When Scrooge wakes up back in his bed, he’s thrilled but doesn’t know what day it is, how long the spirits have taken. When he learns that he hasn’t missed Christmas he is elated, light as a feather. He hasn’t missed it!!! The joy at being given another chance is like no other. (And, if you believe that what you “haven’t missed out on” is the eternal salvation of your soul, the elation gets kicked up a whole other notch). Sim’s Christmas Day giddiness is one of the great gifts to cinema. (And George C. Scott's attempt at giddiness is the most leaden of the variations.) If Scrooge can become that happy, than surely there is hope — for everyone.

Hurst rounds out the film with a great soundtrack. Music. Another thing the Irish know something about.

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 Mapeel     12/20/2015     Christmas, Film, literature