PRESS RELEASE
On the Margins of Great Empires
Selected Poems
Andrew Duncan
Published in June 2018 by Shearsman Books
Seeing this sequence as a large, articulated work, put into its sections and with the culminations of a sustained amplitude, I esteem its achievement very highly. It is strong and active with the questions of power which underlie the strength; the instrumentalism of language is put under sustained pressure, both of invention and expression, and the outcome is negotiated closely across a wide range of historical predicament and moral passion. The method is conspicuously unoriginal, but its uses are strikingly productive and grand. – J.H. Prynne (1982)
Peter Porter, in a letter to Simon Jenner, 2003:
We talked on the phone about Eratica a little. .... But this letter is really about one thing, namely Andrew Duncan's Skeleton looking at Chinese Pictures, which I have been reading at intervals now for some time. I think that certainly it is a remarkable book and I also recognize that I must inhabit a shamefully restricted part of the literary world for me not to have encountered his poetry before this[.] …
What I admire most in Duncan's work is his willingness (indeed enthusiasm) for not confining things to any sort of ghetto. He likes as much history and mediaevalism as Pound but he also aspires to a contemporary concern for life in our modern mercantile mess. His chief fault, it seems to me, is a sort of verbal vertigo: too many words spin round and round[.] It's excellent the way he refuses to be cowed by any sort of notion of appropriateness or decorum, so that runic and traditional poetics mix with the city of London and sexual turpitude in modern life.[…] There are many properly 'big' poems – something which doesn't get attempted sufficiently these days, presumably because it gives hostages to fortune.
if I say that I am reminded at times of Peter Redgrove, Lawrence Durrell, and even David Jones, with a touch of a more unbuttoned Geoffrey Hill, I am not implying any kind of influence ... It is certainly a rich book and now that I have marinaded my mind in it, I expect to return to individual poems with greater pleasure and understanding.
*
(AD) So this replaces the 2001 volume which is out of print. A lot of the poems post-date 2001.
The title comes from a book by Mircea Eliade, adapted. It is, directly, a line from “When history becomes myth”, a poem which uses themes from L’éternel retour. The reference is to folk cultures untouched by metropolitan literary systems.
Eliade says so many peoples were doomed to suffering and disappearance “because they live in the neighbourhood of empires perpetually striving to expand”. This phrase became “on the margins of great empires”.
There is a sentence in that 1982 Prynne letter “the displaced feeling corresponds to the Randgebiete and Randsprachen of an internalised but hostile imperium”. The German words are in the title of a book by Wolfram Eberhard, which approached the history of Chinese society through an idea of highly different regional components which contributed different things to the rising farming/ urban/ State complex. I was studying Chinese briefly, for about six months, in 1976, I spent time in the Oriental Studies library at Cambridge, and they had Eberhard’s book. The words mean marginal regions and marginal languages, and the phrase on the margins of great empires refers also to that Letter. I changed subject to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, and these really were Randsprachen.
The margins I am thinking of are not doomed to disappearance, I don’t think, just quiet under the huge din of megalopolitan cultures.
In the margins of the great empires
provincial cultures turning slowly on themselves,
a self-locking aggregate crossing the rim
of recurring. The abiding, the filling. Tales
in the prison where Campanella was held.
Occluded
at the place where nothing is altered, the bottom
of a great lake.
Let us enter the greater forgetting
far from the decay of forms
mere laggards in the march of high ideas.
Disposed in the likeness of goodness
descend in the likeness of companionship.
Friday 8 June 2018
Sunday 3 June 2018
a new angle on New Romantic poetry
The
prism of my crystal fears: a new angle on New Romantic poetry
It
is almost 20 years since James Keery re-invented the study of the New
Romantics with his work
“Schönheit Apocalyptica”, and the era of sensational new interpretations has given way to a more
solid phase of cataloguing and labelling the finds. But I am offering a new line on the poetry – not to
cast into doubt the findings of modern research, by Keery, John Goodby, Nigel Wheale, and others,
but to shed light from a different direction. This is by approaching the poetry from cinema.
“Schönheit Apocalyptica”, and the era of sensational new interpretations has given way to a more
solid phase of cataloguing and labelling the finds. But I am offering a new line on the poetry – not to
cast into doubt the findings of modern research, by Keery, John Goodby, Nigel Wheale, and others,
but to shed light from a different direction. This is by approaching the poetry from cinema.
There is a whole line of cinema criticism which presents British cinema as succeeding only where it is realistic and frankly faces social issues. Bypassing these is taken as a sort of evasion of responsibilities, a refusal to honour your debts. Lindsay Anderson seemed to believe, at his desk, that understanding the arrangements for finance and censorship in the British industry, grasping British social problems, and making great films, were roughly the same thing. One cannot get far with this subject without mentioning Julian Petley’s 1986 essay “The Lost Continent”, where he suggests that the climactic form of cinema is not realism and even that there is a current of English cinema which has avoided realism and swum towards quite other goals. This whole debate is highly relevant to Apocalyptic poetry and its frank rejection of realism and social relevance – and suggests a link between that stance and certain highly emotive and assiduously forgotten films of the 1940s. This line of cinema is described in The British Cinema Book, a collection edited by Robert Murphy. Two passages are of special interest. One quotes the producer Herbert Wilcox: he made “happy, unclouded pictures. We do not want sadism, abnormality, and psycho-analysis” and clarifies “What he was referring to was a loose group of psychological melodramas (usually crime thrillers) which could be classified as British film noir. The central type in these films was the misfit, often a fugitive […] always tormented, desperate, unable to find a safe haven or a secure identity. In some films these protagonists begin to doubt their own sanity, and the result is breakdown or uncontrolled violence […] the actor who most often embodied this type was Eric Portman.” Portman (1901-69) was the Nazi submarine commander in 49th Parallel. He “starred in Great Day (1945), Wanted for Murder (1946), Daybreak (1946), Dear Murderer (1947), The Mark of Cain (1948), Corridor of Mirrors (1948) and The Spider and the Fly (1949). In all these films he played tormented, sexually insecure failures.” "Leonard Wallace noted that Portman had a large female following: ‘It’s the strength being harried and tested by circumstances that really gets the girls suffering for him … No-one is better than Portman at expressing with a haunted, tortured, expression of the eyes and face otherwise taut and immobile, the inner bitterness of a strong man’s soul.’ Picturegoer readers, presumably from both sexes, voted him into fourth place in the 1947 poll for his performance as the tormented serial killer in Wanted for Murder.” Another chapter in the same book (by about 40 film scholars) also recalls Portman: “his intellectual forehead, hooded eyes – now cloudy, now gleaming – and tight yet sensual mouth suggest ‘ordinary people’ thoughtfulness.” “In Wanted for Murder he plays the Hyde Park strangler, and attributes his murderous drives to his hangman forefather (hereditary tendencies? Or morbid imagination? or both?).” In two films where he is the rival of Maxwell Reed, he is “suave, supercilious, secretive, rational, deadly jealous.”
Fans
of Apocalyptic poetry will recognise many of these traits in the
poetry we like. It would be crude to state that the fugitive’s
exclusion from society echoed the Apocalyptic rejection of the State,
the war effort, science, reason, and so on – but not untrue. While
the analogies with dreamlike thrillers split the poetry, since only
some of the poetry fits inside them (notably Thompson, Barker, and
Beecham), the popularity of the films suggests first, that we would
have Apocalyptic poetry even if there had been no manifestos,
secondly, that we do have to allow for an element of the public mood
during a finite period of the 1940s which fuelled art, in various
genres, with specific predilections. How could Portman be fourth most
popular star of 1947 for playing a serial killer? In Daybreak he plays a hangman whose wife is involved with the thuggish and yet sexually charged Maxwell Reed. He fakes his own death to frame Reed, who is convicted– and Portman visits him in his cell, before carrying out the final act of revenge. In a compromised resolution, Portman confesses rather than completing the story. Then he hangs himself.
I found a copy of Film Review for 1948 which has an interview with Portman. He says "Something aloof, uncertain, perverse perhaps [...] these are the qualities I look for in film roles." (The omitted words were 'not necessarily unpleasant, if that is a quality'.) He says that 'Corridor of Mirrors' was his favourite role. Portman
was not the cineaste who gave rise to this whole line of films, he
was just an actor who had certain qualities, of ambiguity, high
intellect, good looks, and anguish, among other things, which were necessary to
carry these strange and perverse plots. Yet, the interview suggests that he was choosing roles as part of an artistic strategy, so that his films (for that time) are part of a single statement, however obliquely made. Evidently, over a period of
roughly three years, he had a “drawing power” which meant that
this was a commercial formula and that people bought tickets because
they knew that a film with Eric Portman would carry certain moods and
that was what they wanted. An actor saying that he seeks out perverse roles is as close as you were allowed to get in 1948 to saying "I am a pervert and I want to play gay roles". Film Review shows him in the top ten (British) actors in 1947 but not in 1948, the mood was already evaporating.
Corridor
of Mirrors is related to French films by Jean Delannoy and
Jean Cocteau, as the write-up in ImDB says. “In Corridor of
Mirrors he plays a rich mystical aesthete who thinks he
murdered Welsh beauty Edana Romney in a previous life. In effect, he
frames, and then hangs, himself.” He has a French name because the film has a French plot. The text on the cover of the DVD
tells us “Mangin [Portman] becomes obsessed with his new muse
believing she is the reincarnation of his lover from a former life,
whose portrait hangs in his home. He adorns Myfanwy with antique
jewels and precious fabrics, making her the double of his first
mistress. As their relationship escalates, Mangin’s controlling
nature becomes too much and during a sumptuous Venetian-style ball he
has planned for her, Myfanwy rebels against his brainwashing and
tries to run away…” Mangin was recuperating from wounds
after the First World War when he received the insight that he had
lived before and loved a woman who looked exactly like the Edana
Romney character. The unstated link between prophecy and PTSD or
shell-shock is significant. (Cocteau made a film of Beauty
and the Beast and Corridor is a version of
Bluebeard.) He frames himself for a murder he did not commit - repeating the climax of Daybreak by hanging himself. This was a commercial formula - crazy, why was this commercial?
The
writer and producer was Rudolph Cartier, better known as the producer
of all the first three series of “Quatermass” on television. To
be exact, he co-wrote the script with Edana Romney, the female star.
The words “antique jewels and precious fabrics” and “sumptuous
ball” are code-words, people in 1948 simply wanted to see these
things no matter what the plot of the film was. (Cartier was
Austrian and directed, as Rudolf Katscher, a 1933 Peter Lorre film,
for UFA.)
The
agreed break-through moment for poetry is around 1933. George Barker, Dylan
Thomas, and David Gascoyne are starting to write poems in a
fundamentally new style. This was the substance on which the theory
of Apocalypse, in 1937 and later, was founded. It had tendencies in
common with Surrealism – which was of all things a productive idea,
one which spread in a thousand directions. My argument is that the
Surrealist line in cinema produced a kind of film in the mid-40s
which coincided with Apocalyptic poetry because this too had
Surrealist DNA. But also – the poets watched films.
As
is well-known, the 1943 American film Night of Fear starts
with a sequence in which the protagonist enters a room full of
mirrors, apparently in a trance, to kill someone in an act for which
he has no motive. The next day, he has a memory of it but thinks it
was a dream. I wanted to address the link between a corridor of
mirrors and a room full of them. Both are an excuse for exotic and
ambiguous sequences of visual information. Both tend to abolish the
outside world of objectivity – the actor is as it were trapped in
his own head, advancing only into mirrored space. But also, to expose
the presence of Surrealism in American popular cinema – in a
sub-genre of film noir where the hero is carrying out dream-like
actions, under the influence of concussion, hypnosis, or traumatic
dissociation. This is not presented as the free dissociation of the
Parisian surrealists. Nor, due to censorship rules, is it presented
as due to drugs – we have to imagine the trance-like and
suggestible states of various noir heroes as taking place without
drugs. Key elements of certain New Romantic poems were thus present
in cinematic culture. In the novel, significant examples of
dissociation and involuntary but compulsive action are in Hangover
Square (by Patrick Hamilton), and Traitor's Purse,
by Margery Allingham. In Allingham’s novel, the hero has concussion
and amnesia, only able to follow a plan he does not understand and to
escape from the police, who want him for murder. These plots
noticeably resemble the stories of many Apocalyptic poems, where the
protagonist is moving through the plot of a dream or an allegory,
hunted by terrible dangers, unable to plan rationally but able to
utter unnatural knowledge of Fate. The original Apocalypse, of John,
can be fitted back into this realm, as an allegory involving
prophecy, involuntary and inexplicable knowledge, visions which are
partly paranoia.
If
we take a passage from a Dunstan Thompson poem –
Where
skullbone banners, no pity flags, are flying
Before
the cruel and radium caves, he lairs
His
treasure. There, while jackals scream, Lord Vulture,
Wing
caged in crystal, sings his subtle airs
Of
praise, recalls how orchid adder hissed
Above
the crypt when lion and lover kissed.
Nightmare
is livelong by a never-ending:
In
the most mandrake forest, I walk, love lost,
Through
panther grass towards no good morrow. Agave
Leaves
like hundred years impale my ghost
On
yesterdays of youth. At crossroad stands
The
strangler with his four and frantic hands.
(“Lament
for the Sleepwalker”)
–this
resembles Night
of Fear because
of the four hands (two people trying to strangle each other in the
mirrored room) and the sleepwalking quality. But the striking
resemblance is in emotional ambience. Whatever the brilliance of
Thompson’s language, the tone is one of hysteria, doom, persecutory
anxiety. The raw material of Night
of Fear is
also what Thompson is drawing on. Film and poem have the same high
pitch. (The image of a bird’s wing trapped in crystal also appears
in a poem by Audrey Beecham, “Whose blunted beak has tried a
million years/ To breach the prism of my crystal fears.”) Thompson
and Cornell Woolrich, the source writer of Night
of Fear,
were in the same place, hearing the same music.
Corridor has
a protagonist, Paul Mangin [Portman], who is animated by involuntary
and compulsive actions due to re-incarnation. This is a variant on
hypnosis, dissociation, drugs, etc. It is, however, the exit of a man
from daily life into a myth – which is what the Apocalyptic poets
were trying to bring about. (The model was certainly
Delannoy’s L’éternel retour rather than recent
poetry.) The reincarnation theme, illustrating a fantasy about love
outlasting death, was present in popular films quite outside film
noir – for example The Man in Grey and Morning
in Mayfair. In Corridor the scenery is a house
which is quite literally created by the protagonist as the
realisation of a dream, a besetting vision. Objective scenery is thus
replaced by dream symbols – mimicking what the director of an art
film might do, and this is a step towards an English art cinema, but
also mimicking a large number of New Romantic poems where the action
is taking place in a dream landscape. A fully realised art film would
be an apocalypse – an unveiling of what is hidden, where the
unknown exhibits itself in highly sensuous and yet irrational form.
We are entitled to imagine New Romantic poems being recited by
Portman. In the mansion, there is a corridor of mirrors – behind
each one is a 16th C style dress – for Romney to wear, as
she opens each door. (The echo is of Bluebeard, but what we
experience is unchained narcissism.)
Watching Corridor has
a strong retrospective colouring for someone who watches Hammer
films: because their standard scene of the travellers entering a
magnificent castle from which the host is mysteriously absent is so
clearly taken from Corridor. The standard costume of the
vulnerable female stars is also derived from the brocaded dresses
worn by Edana Romney. Corridor is a women's picture:
there are almost no scenes without Romney, and her affair with Paul
Mangin is viewed entirely from her point of view. She dresses up,
tries on jewels, and looks at herself in the mirror, and
Mangin is present mainly as a spectator for her display. At one level, Mangin is a male character who collects women's clothing: but he is not a gay character in any way, the emotional seduction of the film is that a female star is acting passively in submerging in a complete fantasy world set up by a perverse male character. This is the propulsion of the film and it's very sexy. The brocade dresses are just elements of his amour fou scenario. Naturally the film shows her breaking free and, in flash forwards, getting married to someone else and leading a healthy life in Wales; it's 1948, she can't just go on enjoying the fantasy.
Nigel
Wheale has already written expertly on the links between Michael
Powell’s “A matter of life and death” and a sequence in Lynette
Roberts’ Gods with Stainless Ears. There is another
style of cinema, the melodrama associated with Gainsborough Films,
which has links with Forties poetry and which needs to be brought in
when we are considering the tenor of the time. What I am saying is
that we need to look beyond the high-budget romances of Gainsborough
and consider also the paranoiac and dreamlike noir which seized on
Eric Portman as its face.
The
movement “Apocalypse” had legitimate sources in Lawrence,
Berdyaev, in the critique of merely sociological literature, in
Personalist theology, and so forth. But some of the poems also bear
noticeable resemblances to scenes in the films of the time. The view
of film historians is that, although the Forties saw a great number
of realistic films, in which the techniques of the documentary moment
were adapted into fiction which reflected the objective nature of the
war and of military technology, the cinema audience also wanted
escapist films – to get away from rationing, bad war news, the
absence of lovers on war matters. A larger share of the audience at
home was female – without simplifying too much, this inclined
film-makers to have female protagonists, to make melodramas, and to
use luxurious settings (especially clothes). The melodrama did not take off in 1939: it only took off when the war was won, roughly. It expresses boredom with the war. Since the 1960s, maybe
specifically since an article by Andrew Sarris in 1963, historians
have tended to agree that the practice of film history in mid-century
devalued women’s films and devised several negative aesthetic
categories into which women’s pictures could be safely stored and closed in darkness. As Petley pointed out, British film critics didn't like melodrama and only gave points to films which had a large component of documentary and social realism
The
memory of L’éternel retour is clouded by its role
as something which was aimed to please the Nazis. The Nazi grip on
the French film industry, during the Occupation, was especially hard.
The title is a translation of die ewige Wiederkehr, a
phrase used by Nietzsche. The neo-classical composition of the
visually gorgeous film was arguably a homage to the neo-classicism of
Nazi visual art, such as Arno Breker sculptures. Even Jean Marais’
fair hair was interpreted as a homage to Aryan values. Pushing that
idea away, we can agree that the utter material deprivation of France
during the Occupation, with the occupation administration
confiscating every commodity to support the German economy, favoured a
stylised genre of spectacular fantasy film, of which Delannoy
was the chief director. (The exactions were part of the peace
conditions accepted by the Vichy government and affected the
unoccupied zone as much as the occupied one.) Les visiteurs du soir is the other obvious example of spectacle-film for the hungry. The point is that war
conditions favoured luxurious dreamlike fantasy, even if
democratic countries also had a dominant line of realist dramas
involving ordinary people. When we see English poetry involving
mythic fantasy and super-sensuous images, it does resemble certain
Forties films. A more fundamental aspect of Apocalyptic poetry is the
focus on the self and its subjective states to the exclusion of
objective factors and even realism. This is easily detached from the
“ideological ground” of living in a permanent state outside
history and inside apocalypse, as argued by Berdyaev. Indeed, we can
quite easily attach it to melodramatic films – both the lush
Gainsborough romances of the period and the dark thrillers
in which Eric Portman starred. We can even see it as a protest
against the close-down of the consumer economy for the benefit of war
production (and expenditure on aggression).
There is an American
film called The Brighton Strangler (Max Nosseck, 1945) in which an
actor who has had a long run of playing a murderer in a play called
The Brighton Strangler suffers concussion after a bomb strike and
then starts to re-enact the play by committing real murders. This is
an unwatchably bad film due to the stupid psychological basis.
However, it shows the lead figure acting out a compulsion in complete
disregard of reason and calculation, and this suspension unignorably
resembles the basic rule for Apocalyptic poetry. Humans generally
consider their actions and conduct an inner argument to maximise
success in a set of long-lasting social games. They exploit
predictability by means of complex inhibitions, and compulsion makes
them unattractive as allies as well as unable to react to
circumstances. But evidently the point of departure for the
Apocalyptic style in poetry is to suspend all that and give way to a
compulsion – in which you can hear prophetic truths. Even if you dislike
the poetic style, you have to explain why its key feature is also
present in the dregs of popular culture, a cliché which a tired
scriptwriter can resort to without thought.
A corollary is that
we may need to look past the intellectual sources of Apocalyptic
poetry (in Lawrence and Berdyaev, as worked out first by John
Goodland) and look for broader reasons why these “trance
narratives” were accepted and also why people desired to experience
them in art. There is almost too much evidence. It may be that the
worst of the films, and also the worst of the poetry, both surviving
in large quantities, give us a less defended, more naïve, version of
the theme.
Take the motif of a
character who drinks to excess and where the resolution of a mystery
is that he has committed a murder in a dream state, had a blackout
afterwards, and cannot remember that he has committed the murder. In
“The Black Angel” (film, American), he actually investigates the
murder and helps to solve it. As you pile up stories that use this
theme, it becomes obvious that Apocalyptic poetry is written in a
blackout, the poems tend to be inconsistent and inconclusive because
a “second draft” is impossible – the creative process is
disconnected from the conscious self. In poetry, the trance state is
felt as desirable – it is interesting that in film it is mostly
frightening and involves the protagonist in horrible acts. The
playing out of buried compulsions reminds us of drug culture, a few
decades later – but this is just an interesting coincidence. The
use of opium and cocaine was hardly unknown to the Surrealists or to
Hollywood scriptwriters, but it doesn't explain why audiences found
the “compulsive state” so attractive. We
can list various narrative settings:
The
hero is a prophet and focuses the true forces of history as knowledge, which he utters in this state (Gascoyne)
The
hero commits murder in a trance-like state, possessed by hypnosis or
morbid heredity
The
hero is sleepwalking
The
hero is enacting a myth under the influence of ancestral dramas
The
hero is acting irrationally under the control of l’amour
fou
Obviously
these are quite different, but they all have in common the
disappearance of reason in the surrender to irrational compulsions. I
would like to add the spirit possession described in Kathleen Raine’s
poem ‘Invocation’. James Kirkup’s poem ‘The Glass Fable’
(published in Poetry Quarterly in 1943) describes a
dream which affects two people, who travel to the same place to meet.
He
rises, slowly, in a long,
slow
trance
ritual,
receptive
dance
an
iridescent manuscript
is
buried in the tomb of his loins.
While we would not normally see Kirkup as an Apocalyptic poet, he is very close to some of the poets we have mentioned. His poem takes the male lovers to a palace made of jewels – this is a literal echo of the jewelled landscapes of the Biblical Book of Revelations, but also resembles the “precious jewels” of Corridor of Mirrors. This would redefine Revelations as a spectacle film in the line of L’éternel retour!
The
crystal floors are deep, and spring
from
wells of molten glass, the rooted walls
that
fluctuate are fluted coral cliffs
rising
from the antipodes, and lift
diminishing
perspectives, turrets, towers
The
effect is as if the molten glass were semen, and the frozen glass
were a social surface, a place where two male lovers are happy –
which is threatened with collapse (“pour in avalanches down/ deep
deliquescent graves”). The crystals are a climax before it happens
(so to speak). Fable also includes a corridor of
mirrors. The link of prophetic trance to noir blackouts is a stretch,
but Gascoyne’s diaries of the time show the kind of character who
inhabits sleepwalking film noir: anxious, drugged-up, hyper,
obsessed, vagrant. So the besetting impulses of Night of
Fear connect to the dreamlike beasts of Apocalypse (where
heaven has a "sea of glass"). Is Kirkup's
the same glass as in the corridor of mirrors?
There
is a group of poets who fall outside the well-defined Apocalyptic
realm but who represent an obvious shared ideal, one which is typical
of the Forties. We might benefit from defining another centre of
attraction for poets, and temporarily masking out the Treece/Hendry
statement of ideals. There is a whole anti-realist hemisphere of the
world. If you make Raine, Barker, Beecham, and Kirkup the centre, you
develop a different map.
John
Goodby’s work on Dylan Thomas’ Notebooks, especially, has
emphasised that the key developments were around 1933. So how do we
align this with a line of cinema that patently wasn’t there until
1945? I think we have to re-think the development of Apocalyptic
poetry. It was a broad movement and the subdivisions could be of
great importance. Poetry written in 1933 or 1935 could not be a protest against the deprivations of the war economy – this is a puzzle. As for the end of the movement (and James Keery has
been collecting Fifties Apocalyptic poetry on a large scale), the end
of the tormented/fugitive hero film cycle (and the effective end
of Portman’s career as a star) suggests that this was a brief
flare-up, and that public taste moved on. (Some of the thematic
material migrated into the genre of horror film.) The suppressed broke out, briefly, and the sense of release was wildly exciting; and then suppression was re-installed. The Fifties saw a
new sensibility, family-oriented, Christian, aimed at reconstruction
and the revival of trade, etc. The British melodramatic film is scarcely there in the 1950s. A group of works, in painting,
theatre, cinema, and ballet as well as in poetry, went out of fashion
and was buried and forgotten – ready to be salvaged to memory in
the 1987 New Romantic exhibition, or later. The return to normality in film may not have followed exactly the same dates as the normalisation in poetry. The 1950s ended, culturally, in 1965, as so many people have said.
I
think we have to consider a new definition of Forties poetry in which
"total subjectivity and access to a egocentric Sublime" are
the key terms, and which is still sharply visible when we contrast
70s publications by those poets – so Raine, Gascoyne,
Barker, Jack Beeching – with other publications, in the
70s. This sidelines the straight Apocalyptic line, with its
derivation from Berdyaev. The consequence of passivity and steadfast
belief in feelings is that this manner erases the masculine – it
converges rather clearly on the (traditionally) female genre of
melodrama. When you release what was repressed and unconscious, in a society which imprisons gay men, some of what is released will be homosexual narratives, allowed to flourish and complete. But this new style is not straightforwardly gay poetry (or gay cinema),
rather it advances into a territory where the oppositions are
erased.
[Many
Forties pictures arrived on a memory stick which I acquired I know
not how, perhaps while sleepwalking. One of these is Frenzy (Vernon
Sewell, 1945?, aka Latin Quarter), which has much the
same plot as Corridor of Mirrors. A sculptor kills a
model to put her inside a sculpture which records the image of his
dead former beloved, etc. Although I am a Derrick de Marney fan, in a
modest way, I admit I couldn’t watch this – it is too similar to
Roger Corman’s Bucketful of Blood, and I couldn’t
take it for that reason. Also the plotline is much like an ancient
Janet Gaynor film (possibly Street Angel, 1927). All too
obviously, the young woman inside the stone is like the wing inside
the crystal. I intend to watch this batch as time allows, and it does
include three Eric Portman films.]
[I
was distracted by a minor character in Corridor. As the
couturier, he struck me by his slyness, perversity, and the ambiguity
and tension which he gave to his lines. After searching a bit, I
realised that I had recently seen him in two other films (the
1952 Pickwick Papers and The Return of Paul
Temple) and also that there was an infantile memory, as he had
played the sheriff of Nottingham in the long-running Fifties TV
serial of Robin Hood. This was an early example for me of
being fascinated by the villain and bored by the psychological
blankness of the hero (Nigel Greene?). Wheatley was an astute
actor who could suggest complex and not necessarily pleasant
twists of his personality in brief screen appearances. Alan Wheatley boxed set, anyone?]
Julian Petley's essay was published in All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (edited by Charles Barr, British Film Institute) in 1986.
REACTIONS POST RELEASE
addendum. From a chat strand:
The recently published uncensored version of Kenneth Tynan's diaries contains an interesting entry that sheds light on the roots of the obsessional aspects of Eric Portman as person and performer. Tynan mentions knowing this "this ferocious, self-loathing, sporadically brilliant actor in the fifties" when he began working on a biography he never completed. One evening Tynan and his first wife visited the actor in his Chelsea apartment where he lived alone with his Irish valet. The evening began well until Portman [...]After providing Tynan with this revealing anecdote, Portman became paranoid and accused the critic of being responsible for the recent arrest of John Gielgud for importuning and planning "to do the same to me". The actor became violent and pounced towards the Tynans forcing them to seek refuge in his bedroom. Portman's Irish valet smuggled the Tynans out and apologised for his master's behaviour. "He's always like that. Every weekend we go down to his cottage in Conwall. He gets tight and the first thing he does is smash every mirror in the house. I have to replace them every Monday morning. Good-night, sir".
The link between the mirror story and a film called ‘Corridor of mirrors’ is so obvious that it seems clunky and suspect. However, I am convinced that Portman influenced a group of films he starred in towards being a “personal myth”, which is what neo-romanticism was supposed to achieve and generally did not. He must have chosen 'Corridor', it was a semi-independent art film and he can't have got paid very much for it. Tynan gives that story at second hand, and there are reasons for suspecting Tynan’s version as being camp backstage gossip rather than literal truth. Tynan made a living (late in life) out of retailing showbiz gossip, albeit at a very high literary level. It fulfilled his emotional needs (and not just economic ones). A actor has to spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. The story is answering the question why nobody wrote a biography of Portman - Tynan abandoned his project for writing one.
>>
Very
engrossing piece with a fairly novel vantage onto Apocalyptic poetry
and noir cinema of the late 40s. However in advocating an ‘egocentric
Sublime’ are we not risking a sensate preoccupation, hedonism and
an amount of moral ambivalence, not a naturalising realism to anchor
us to our place of acting and being. However, a very unexpected
perspective!<< - James Allison
reply:
I
think this makes concrete the argument against the Apocalyptic mode.
I agree about the risks. But there was another risk. People doing war
work all day and at night studying for a technical exam or watching
films about people doing war work. The films show bad people who do
not give way to the group. The risk is of a total loss of
entertainment value. Conformism taking over every cell. The art world
losing autonomy and just being an
extension of the state/corporate sector, which defines people as
workers. In about 1950, a lot of people who had been working as
propagandists for years saw this as an imminent possibility and were
radically against it. You can be too group-oriented! So
this is a risk too. The Apocalyptic theory foresaw this in circa
1937, on theoretical grounds, and designed a counter-measure. The
insistence on subjectivity
in the Forties movement is not aggrandizement but a withdrawal to a
reduced zone, a refuge. It was the warfare state which did all the
aggrandizement. The alliance of States, in the war, which
desired peace and freedom, had to have a refuge area, where this
desire was in sight in the form of subjectivity. People needed art,
in 1942, in a way we can't comprehend. I agree there was a risk, in
the egocentric manner, and it's significant that the romantic style
in cinema had disappeared by 1950 – while declining in poetry (but
not vanishing). I don't have analogous data for ballet, music,
painting. The 1940s were full of crosscurrents and, while you can
find the “new romantic” style all over the place, it obviously
wasn’t dominant.
The
problem in the 1950s was conformism – most people agree on that by
now. Julian Petley's point was that a lot of virtuous English realist
cinema was rather boring. That applies to poetry as well. (AD)
The recently published uncensored version of Kenneth Tynan's diaries contains an interesting entry that sheds light on the roots of the obsessional aspects of Eric Portman as person and performer. Tynan mentions knowing this "this ferocious, self-loathing, sporadically brilliant actor in the fifties" when he began working on a biography he never completed. One evening Tynan and his first wife visited the actor in his Chelsea apartment where he lived alone with his Irish valet. The evening began well until Portman [...]After providing Tynan with this revealing anecdote, Portman became paranoid and accused the critic of being responsible for the recent arrest of John Gielgud for importuning and planning "to do the same to me". The actor became violent and pounced towards the Tynans forcing them to seek refuge in his bedroom. Portman's Irish valet smuggled the Tynans out and apologised for his master's behaviour. "He's always like that. Every weekend we go down to his cottage in Conwall. He gets tight and the first thing he does is smash every mirror in the house. I have to replace them every Monday morning. Good-night, sir".
The link between the mirror story and a film called ‘Corridor of mirrors’ is so obvious that it seems clunky and suspect. However, I am convinced that Portman influenced a group of films he starred in towards being a “personal myth”, which is what neo-romanticism was supposed to achieve and generally did not. He must have chosen 'Corridor', it was a semi-independent art film and he can't have got paid very much for it. Tynan gives that story at second hand, and there are reasons for suspecting Tynan’s version as being camp backstage gossip rather than literal truth. Tynan made a living (late in life) out of retailing showbiz gossip, albeit at a very high literary level. It fulfilled his emotional needs (and not just economic ones). A actor has to spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. The story is answering the question why nobody wrote a biography of Portman - Tynan abandoned his project for writing one.
Labels:
1940s poetry,
Apocalyptics,
cinema,
Eric Portman,
James Keery,
Julian Petley,
melodrama
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