War-weary

War-weary

I was reading Max Hastings’ overall history of the Second World War (“All hell let loose”, 2011). I was impressed by a remark about the rate of desertion on the Italian Front, by 1944; he has 30,000 soldiers ‘absent without leave’. I figure that the 8th Army was about 200,000 people and, given that many of them were artillery, line of communication troops, staff, catering, etc., this is a high proportion of all the combat troops. Hastings emphasises that it was the units facing imminent death, or also delayed death, who produced most of the deserters. They were the ones who had watched large numbers of their comrades die or get carried off on a stretcher. His wording is “The rear areas teemed with military fugitives, men ‘on the trot’… Thirty thousand British deserters were estimated by some informed senior officers to be at liberty in Italy in 1944-5 […] and around half that number of Americans.” He also records “capital punishment was deemed politically unacceptable.”

This sheds a light on the New Romantic line of poetry. After all, the key to that movement was opposition to the war – starting from opposition to the State. And then to propaganda, to mobilisation, to directing culture towards “the morale of the Home Front”, etc. So, they were the party of not being militarist. I am used to thinking that they didn’t matter, because not enough people opposed the war, but it now looks as if they were on the wrong side because so many people didn’t want to fight, and the problem is that their party was far too large. I can't easily place myself on the side of the anarchist-pacifists.

Hastings stresses the legal difference between desertion and being “absent without leave”. He notes that "official war histories set the desertion figures much lower". This sounds like protecting a state secret. I think the point is that the senior officers were aware that it was the fighting men who had this problem. Desertion is a crime, subject to military law, which might imply execution. But these were actually the men who had won all the battles, from El Alamein on. So, you could have a large pool of people who weren’t reporting to their unit, weren't on parade, but weren't written up as illegally avoiding combat. I think it means this.

I have never seen anyone write about the desertion issue. I think we can talk about a lot of people being war-weary, certainly after D-Day, but probably after the end of the North African campaign. People saw victory on the way, but they had also had enough. This is when you see escapist films being made (the Gainsborough melodramas). You didn't really have a free press, and I can imagine that a journalist in Italy who used the phrase “war weary” would lose accreditation instantly, and just be sent home. I am wondering if the newspaper, back in London, would have printed the story. News was part of the war effort. So possibly there were plenty of journalists aware of this desertion issue, but they didn’t write up the story.
The questions around New Romanticism aren’t wholly about rhythm, imagery, etc., since really the issue was whether you believed 100% in the war effort and the State, or if you wanted to have a personal life and a personal space. But that exposition of “personal myth” as the sacred space of culture aroused mass hostility from people who also believed in the war effort, and who saw troops evading combat in Italy as the greatest threat to the country.
A page posted by Leeds University's Film Studies department says "After 1943 though, a violent swing against realism carried British cinema away from the war to the exoticism of the Gainsborough costume films, the spiv cycle and the whimsical nostalgia of Ealing comedy." The paper is by Robert Murphy, whose book on 40s British cinema I have read a couple of times. It identifies a return to the war theme in 1950, with "The Wooden Horse" and "Odette". I suppose we could define that date as the end of war-weariness. It is also when the New Romantic thing is agreed to have come to an end (or at least become marginal). This dissatisfaction in the last two years of the war is important also because it opened a space for people resisting being part of the Cold War Effort in the 1950s and 1960s.

My guess is that people, after 1945, wanted films to tell the stories which had been kept out of the newspapers during the war. A release of totalitarian strictures. None of the films did this, because the commercial weight was with depicting heroism, social unity under pressure, group coherence, etc. The films all identify the State with virtue and unity – with the voice of Society, in fact. They continued the melodies of wartime propaganda, even though they were made by private businesses, not by any arm of the State. Evidently, a lot of people didn’t share that memory. The films weren't very good, and faded away after 1960, although I don’t think disappointment was the only factor in this.
OK, some of those war films are worth watching. I certainly liked "Ice Cold in Alex" and "The Small Back Room." And "The Silent Enemy".

Hastings’ footnoting is unclear, but a source he does cite is a Brigadier R.A. Penney in ‘The Penney papers’, available in an archive. He does not cite a printed source, and I do not recall seeing any film or novel which tells this story of soldiers “absent from duty” in Italy in 1944-5, although it looks like one of the most interesting stories of the war. I wonder how they got home, how they were eventually mustered out, etc. I think the story with deserters around 1946 is that they were all amnestied and care was taken to avoid anyone being able to count them.

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.

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.

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 49^th 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

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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)

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.

Audrey Beecham and melodrama

Audrey Beecham and melodrama

Themes. Research into melodrama and women’s pictures has uncovered a set of conventions which on rotation seems to relate to a style of poetry being written in the 1940s, and further to expose a shift of the rules which moved this style into the past. Thinking of which film actor or actresses should deliver them is a way of thinking about or describing poems. This line also sheds light on mid-century British women’s poetry, an area which I have been trying to research.

It probably isn’t important to explain why mid-century women’s poetry was no good, since everyone accepts it. However, even in the Fifties you have significant work by Kathleen Raine, Kathleen Nott, and Beecham. It is of interest to ask what imperatives of the time they said No to. Audrey Beecham’s 1957 volume The Coast of Barbary fitted very badly into the scene of Christianity and affirmative culture around it:

The rootless, fastly bound to the rounded earth

Are dragged by tides and shoulder-glancing moon.

In childhood they renounce the tarnished spoon

And dance upon a howling rim of mirth.

By centrifugal force spinning from birth

Taunted and driven by a half-learnt tune

They spill their sands out for the singing dune

Or wander through uncharted wastes of dearth.

(from poem 1 of the 'Sonnets of the Twelfth House' section) Fitting in badly was basic to its being brilliant poetry. Centrifugal means nonconformist. People emotionally dragged by the moon are also called lunatics. Renouncing the tarnished (silver) spoon means rejecting your parents, part of a bad childhood. The music which should guide their steps is the tune they can’t quite get hold of. By being so overwhelmingly negative in emotional timbre, this reveals what continents of experience are opened up to sheer egoism. It leads out of affirmative culture – other women’s poetry of the mid-century is generally conceded to be unproductive and trapped inside values which made art difficult. I should point out that the 'twelfth house' is an astrological term glossed by the poet as 'The twelfth house signifies secret or private enemies, prisons, captivity, bondage, evil spirits, torments... this is a Cadent falling house'. Again, “It hath signification of private Enemies, Witches, Witchcraft… it is the House of Self undoing.” Beecham was part of the New Romantic movement, and her first book did not appear until 1957 partly, we suspect, because of that affinity. The dust jacket has Kathleen Raine saying “Her vision is of the dark, sinister side of feminine experience[.]” The title is glossed inside via a line from Vergil which describes a barren and hostile shore, and:

I am tired land and poor [...]

Piracy has played beneath my skylit eyeholes.

Men were enslaved to pass their lives in pain.

Monkey tribesmen clustered on my shoulders

Many times enriched my dust with richest rain.

(‘The Cruel Coast of Barbary’)

The literal meaning of the passage seems to be about monkeys pissing on the sand. This would be in effect a parody of procreation: not seed but urine, not humankind but monkey, not soil but dust. This is not what you expect in a poem of 1957. The ‘rain’ could possibly be blood, expended in some tribal feud. The speaker is the Barbary Shore, the land itself, around Tunis, Algiers and Tangiers. The curse underlies the whole book, the Desert Shore is barren because of past transgressions. The “eyeholes” are presumably ports, openings on the outside world. We wander the desert shore in an abiding state of longing for earth, woods, and sweet water. The ‘Sonnets on the Theme of Love’ seldom deviate from a steady shriek of horror and loathing. Sterility of the earth points to a drying up of fertility and nurture – as the feminine virtues, thus also to a radical exit from feminine nurturing into disruption and, apparently, misery.

Barbary is isolated, not just among mid-century women poets, but also among works of New Romantic poetry. Light can be shed on it via 1940s melodramas, a line of British films which was identified with women and loss of restraint, and by-passed by male critics more interested in theory, documentary, and social issues. Nonetheless there is a line of English film critics facing up to the irrational and enjoying it. Alan Lovell’s view on this is worth quoting: “I remember preparing for a course in British cinema by reading the plot summaries of all the films made in 1946-7. What appeared to be a melodramatic current stood out. Many films seemed to be marked by extravagant plotting and characterisation. The dramatic forces which shaped the dramas were emotional and large-scale, the fictional worlds marked by erotic cruelty, violence and perverse relationships.” So far we have a good equivalent for Thompson and Beecham. But Lovell goes on “Seeing the films produced a huge disappointment. I quickly became aware of how the elements which had interested me were downplayed and made safe by the writing, camerawork, acting and direction.” Of course, he is right, and we have to consider whether English creativity found it easier to succeed in less interesting styles. Now some plot summaries of certain films starring Margaret Lockwood. “Madness of the Heart (Charles Bennett, 1949) bombs for the opposite reason: cinematic overload. Margaret Lockwood hesitates between the convent life and marriage to a rich Frenchman, shrinks from his viciously snooty family, loses but then regains her sight, she feigns blindness to entrap her murderous rival[.]” “In Bedelia, (Lance Comfort 1946) Margaret Lockwood is a Riviera socialite who poisons her three husbands. In The Wicked Lady, as a cavalier socialite, she poisons an oppressively puritanical old servant (Felix Aylmer)[.] [Lockwood is also] in Jassy, where her devoted mute maidservant (Emma Canon), thinking to help her mistress, poisons brutal Basil Sydney, inadvertently framing her.” In The Man In Grey (1943), she plays Hesther: “Hesther is an adventuress. Bereft of social status, she attempts to usurp Clarissa’s position. [Rohan marries Clarissa but] Their contacts are characterised by passion and physical aggression, leading finally to his beating her to death when he learns she has murdered Clarissa. The film is unrelenting in its portrayal of the component of cruelty[.]” Fairly obviously, suffering is central to these plots, and inflicting suffering on others, in the pursuit of love or wealth, is the other main preoccupation. No less obviously, this matches exactly with the interests of Audrey Beecham in Coast of Barbary. (paraphrases quoted from film historians Marcia Landy and Raymond Durgnat) Quite apart from being avant garde, she is thoroughly connected to Gainsborough melodramas and to cinematic appetites which had become completely hors de combat by 1952. While this was a genre which was only around for half a dozen years, Lockwood certainly wasn’t the only star making this kind of film, and a much longer list could be developed. In Wicked Lady, you will doubtless remember, she also becomes a highwaywoman, robbing coaches in a mask just for the thrill of it. This is a bit like Jane Russell in Son of Paleface and Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar, although the differences are equally important. When Beecham writes

But after death their wasted days shoot stars

Across the jagged course, the Dragon’s Tail,

And light the chain of chasms where their fall

Sundered a plain. The livid cage-like bars

Wherein they blundered will dissolve like hail

And carrion fate resolve in clarion call.

('Sonnets of the Twelfth House')

it is apparent that key features are unhappiness, those Twelfth House feelings, and passion: the tone is completely undetached, it is frustration which blows up eventually to geological scale – tearing the landscape apart. The poem is about passion surviving death. This matches the luxuriously staged suffering of 1940s melodramas. Another poem about passion after death is ‘Fossil Bird’:

A changing world fell on me as I slept:

Yet, crushed in two dimensions, have I kept

The pattern of my predatory lust

Impregnable against the earth’s slow rust.

She says the rock “has tried a million years/ To breach the prism of my crystal fears.” I looked at a whole lot of poetry written in the 1970s, and found an isolated group of poets who wrote in a melodramatic style, like Beecham’s, and who had all been active in the 1940s. I think we have a generational shift whereby poetry in this manner ceased to be written, and this is co-ordinated with shifts in acting style and in the wider cinematographic array of British films, advancing during the 1950s but stemming from a documentary tradition which goes back to the 1930s or arguably even earlier. The poets who continued to write in this florid manner were Jack Beeching, Kathleen Raine, and George Barker. Take this passage from Beeching:

Mordant on retina as acid smoke,

Hot dreams of eremite, or prisoner,

Degrade the vigil with a Judas kiss.

Only a lover’s bodily embrace

Tattoos a never-fading cicatrice.

(from “Words and Deeds”)

This was published in 1970, but is strikingly like Beecham’s 1957 poems. It sticks out in 1970, because it is surrounded by poets whose style it has nothing in common with. I would like to quote a poet who faded after the 1940s, Dunstan Thompson wrote a poem which equates sex with being devoured:

The lion is like him and the elusive leopard:

Nine lived, he ranges – killer cat – my heart.

Green is the hanging moss, and green the jungle

Creeper: green where the gold plantations part

Their bamboo branches for a murderer's head.

In green courts he eats meat from the green dead.

See, like a rajah, how he ravens fine food.

The long claws fork their lightning; diamond, his teeth,

Glitter of jewel jaws, dazzle–glaze their mirrors

Black blood and purple, stained points of glass. Beneath

Lascivious fur, his regal muscles flex,

Digesting fire, the marrow root of sex.

(from 'Lament for the Sleepwalker', in the volume of that name, 1947)

This certainly involves “erotic cruelty, violence and perverse relationships”. It is melodramatic, not just because it favours glamorous suffering, but because of its divine egoism. The world outside the poet and the loved object simply does not exist. This relates to star cinema, something which is unusual in Britain, but which was certainly there in the 1940s, for Gainsborough Films. The arrival of a documentary attitude, stressing the objective aspects of life, made this sort of poem impossible. A radical and pioneering recall to awareness was Julian Petley’s 1986 essay “The Lost Continent”, a voicing of a suppressed line of English cinema which uses that key phrase, “always received critically with fear and disapproval”. Petley does what is hard to do in the daylight, he advances into a position where melodrama is normal and everything else is frustration. We have to go through this position to get to a proper evaluation of writers like Beecham and Thompson.

Beecham published a second book in 1980, A Different Weather. It does not add new themes to the first one and it feels like a room of 1957 which has clung on to its space. It is good in the same way:

Praise be to that most powerful bird of prey

Who rose from the smoke of equinoctial foam

And carrying a rose at whose single heart love lay

Laid it upon a heap of stranded stone

Boulders herded in swirls and dumped by the sea.

(‘A Different Weather’)

The poem “Four Portraits in the Manner of Francis Bacon” is interesting because it puts Beecham in a context, even if it is a sub-world of Fifties London. This portrait is “The Bone Man”;

A bird’s frame is white and yet grey and of bone

A bird’s beak is stiffer and dryer than stone

Yet this man is greyer and far more skeletal than

Any cluster of parched bones to wet which

A screaming stream ran.

Again, this reminds me of Dunstan Thompson. The two stanzas I have quoted use the same basic imagery: stones, water, birds, prey. Beecham keeps saying the same thing, but it becomes less elusive and more convincing with repetition.

Jim Keery has responded with one of Beecham's never-reprinted poems, from 1940:

Norway Poetry London No. 3, November 1940, pp.47-48.

Once the sound of its drum has burst the eardrums

And the loud shriek anguished at last to silence

Love of itself is vanquished;

But the relinquished

Hold of the lover sleeping binds the mind

To levels lower and to those more stale

Than pools of stagnant rain beneath the earth.

Spain, our ace, was tricked by molten gold:

And our sly trail unrolled on Europe’s map

Slugged action, flounders now through snow

To race the waiting bomb-burst of our hearts.

The rhythmical stop-go

Of fate’s two eyes suffice to hold us back

From any courage which would jeopardise

The bonds which hold our honour to a rack.

O England, may your blight of boredom melt

Like sweat of love, and may your wind ride up

Above the doldrums of a boring war

To blast the flags that flap in national shame

Out of the sky

And cheer the hands that fail

And fall from masts.

People are agreeing with me that Beecham was good. (Does “Love of itself is vanquished” mean “the excessive narcissism of my ex-lover has collapsed” or “excessive pain has made me unable to love again” or “love destroys love” or “my illusions about you are over”?) Does the bit where the wind “cheer[s] the hands that ... fall from masts” have the wind make the sailors cheerful as they fall from the rigging, or utter cheers of appreciation as each one falls?) The thesis I set out with was roughly that “mid-century women poets had an ideal of being ladylike which they put through in poetry and which proved to be a tangle of inhibitions which made their poetry faint and unmemorable”. I got this idea while listlessly watching old English films and thinking how unimpressive the female stars were – refined but faint. Beecham could prove this idea because her poetry is impressive but at the same time malevolent, barbaric, unrestrained, perverse, etc. I don't think this proves any idea of why the others were no good. If we take 4 women poets of the 1950s (Roberts, Beecham, Eithne Wilkins, Kathleen Nott), none of them is in the standard anthologies (Allott and Lucie-Smith). Only Beecham is writing in a melodramatic way. The striking thing is how forgotten they were, by the living literary opinion I know about. Wilkins never got a volume out. More effort is needed to dig up the poets who were forgotten by the “family values” culture of the 1950s and the mod superficiality of the 1960s. Nott and Beecham in particular should be recovered (see postings on this blog), but there may be others I don't know about.

The problem with the big grand music of the British Poetry Revival, whereby everything happened after 1960, is that it buries the poets of the 1950s. I have been guilty of this. The dominant culture of the time was repressive, conformist, privately pessimistic. Poets who were crushed beneath it should not be blamed for inventing it. The Fifties were full of frustrated and rebellious people, and it was those people who made the Sixties happen.

Beecham's most famous poem is “A Spell”, which is a curse of the lover or ex-lover (published around 1947? and in the Rexroth anthology 1948, then called “Exile”). Jim Keery pointed out that this is like the curse with which Kathleen Raine cursed Gavin Maxwell in 1957 (and which he wrote a book about, Raven seek thy brother). I am not sure this belongs to the history of poetry, but it is a bit linked to the spell-forms which dominate Raine's terrific book “The Year One”, 1951. These again were copied, formally, from the Hebridean spells and charms printed in the “Carmina Gadelica”.