Poetry and 40s cinema

This follows up a post of 3 March. In Portrait from Life (released as “The girl in the painting” in the US) (1948) a British officer goes to the British Occupied Zone to look for a survivor of concentration camps who is also the daughter of an Austrian research chemist who has survived the war in London. He knows her face because the chemist recognised it in a painting which had been made at a resettlement camp – the painter had given some details before dying (of drink, essentially). The officer locates the girl but she has amnesia and has also another set of parents – mystery. She does not remember being Austrian. There is a doll which the daughter had given to the chemist to keep him from feeling lonely, without his family. He sends this to the officer and he confronts the girl with it. I found this hard to watch. The amnesia is part of what we now call PTSD and the recovery of such painful material was likely to cause her a breakdown, I thought. In the scene, the English major, a dominant older male figure, forces her, in quite a threatening way, to recover her memory ... using toys from her childhood. She is a mentally ill DP, he is an Army officer, it’s like an interrogation… I didn’t want to watch it. The ambiguity of the “dangerous healer” reminds me of “The Seventh Veil”, where the ambivalence is the key thing in the whole film. (also scripted by Muriel Box) So this may be Muriel Box’s personal vision – although both stories come from pre-existing novels. That passage where she is under great stress and trying to remember a lost life struck me as summing up the Apocalyptic drive – her rational mind was of no use and she was swimming through dark waters looking for an exit. The Apocalyptic theory predicted this although their poets were not necessarily able to find it for themselves. Of course she does remember the doll, it is called Mitzi and this means she can find her father again. She also knows how to make a musical box open and play, the things show the truth.

The Apocalyptic thing is related to PTSD, as a legacy from the First World War. They locate culture inside PTSD – inside shell shock, to use the term of 1918. So recovery from PTSD is what they are all directed towards. The poems descend into those dark waters and open senses that do not need light.

The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “Girl in the picture” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a Preminger film called “Laura”, see earlier post.) “Corridor” starts with war trauma, the hero was blown up in WWI and recovered only at the cost of an idee fixe in which he looked for a young woman who would incarnate a 16th century painting he owned. This is a variant on the “painting quest” and he also swam in the same dark waters. It is interesting that culture shows an intact world which traumatised people can look to for undamaged ideals. The doll is a sort of intact version of the shattered living girl.

Of course I would like to find more films using the same themes, but it is hard to search through a lot of B-movies, even with the help of YouTube. I really can’t think of a poem in which the basic 40s problem is resolved and the wandering soul emerges into the daylight. I think the approach via films or paintings shows up aspects of Apocalyptic poetry that are reluctant to surface.

My feel is that Apocalyptic poetry got the neurotic state of Europe circa 1939 but by the time 1945 had come, and the mood had shifted to healing, recovery, rebuilding, new life, the style had broken up and was drifting as wreckage, unable to produce major works. I emailed Jim Keery about this restitution idea and he instantly came back with an example of restitution in poetry, being Julian Orde's "Conjurers". This was published as a pamphlet by Greville Press in 1988, and one would dearly like to know the date of composition. Orde (1917-74) was a 40s poet but this poem (of approximately 30 7-line stanzas) may not be so early. It is about insect metamorphoses in a garden and I thought it was too literal, but if you decide that it is allegorical then it becomes like Peter Redgrove or Nicki Jackowska and is definitely about coming to life and bursting through the slough of old lives. The rhyme scheme is so neurotically exact that I would guess the 1950s.

As a face at window palely pressed
Moves, leaving the glass dark,
So now this bottle
Darkens, though a full
Rigged ship awaits tomorrow’s test
Of spindle spars and stays. The clock
Tells fourteen days have passed in the ark.

(The moth is in the shroud like a ship inside a bottle, waiting to raise its spars and shake out its sails. Stays as in mainstay. The shroud loses transparency as the body inside it swells.) So that is ABCCABB? The poet puts seven caterpillars in a tray, the stanzas have seven lines, the pupae take 14 days before moulting. She was WS Graham's girlfriend and the ships may relate to his Seven Voyages? I can see this was published in Poetry Nation in 1976. David Wright guesses the date as before her marriage in 1949, but gives no support for that.
In the film, the girl gives an earlier description of her childhood. The major sees a poster advertising a brewery, pinned up in the camp, and notices that the details she gives seem to come from the poster. This was good writing, I thought – the idea that the past was such a wound that it could not come back, and screen memories gathered in front of it, rolling out to prevent sight, stilling the questions by supplying something thin as ribbon, rigid, of set expression. This is the origin of kitsch. That was terribly depressing as a story but it also pushed us out into the world of post-war trauma, a genuine world with a large population. One has to ask if the world of Fifties culture was simply systematic kitsch, still in denial, or if it was genuinely recorded reconstruction, loving homes, children being nurtured. There is that trio: the painting that comes to England, the poster with a view of oldtime Salzburg (or wherever it was), and the music-box. I guess Mitzi the doll is like the chrysalis, in the poem, waiting to be unwrapped. And becomes the adult young woman, on being unwrapped?

Jim tells me that his edition of Orde's Selected Poems is coming out from Carcanet during 2024. He claims that someone found a parcel of 150 Orde poems under a bed in New Zealand and sent it to Carcanet. This would actually be Orde's first book.