Picked up Faber & Faber’s published screenplay for The Heat of the Day, written by Harold Pinter, based on Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, filmed by Granada Television in the UK. The script is excellent — love Pinter — but my favourite line was on page 20. The character Harrison is being cryptic and menacing. He will be played by Michael Gambon, she by Patricia Hodge. The teleplay airs in 1990.
HARRISON
[…] if you and I could arrange things between us, things . . . might be arranged.
STELLA
Oh, for Christ’s sake, get to the point! What the hell are you talking about.
Silence.
Well said, Stella! What absolutely everybody would want to say if they could climb into a Pinter scene. Also note the very deliberate omission of the question mark, which makes the line dismissive rather than inquisitive.
The line isn’t in the novel — I own a copy, having bought it because I love Darkness Falls from the Air by Nigel Balchin and I read an article that lumped the two together. But I haven’t actually read it, I keep meaning to. But I checked the early chapters and found the Harrison-Stella scene. All the dialogue is different, but it all sounds amazingly Pinteresque. Comedy of menace. But since Pinter had to condense, he’s thrown out all the specific words and just kept the tone.
Here’s a bit of Bowen:
Harrison uttered a deprecating laugh. He then said: ‘Ever mentioned my name?’
‘You mean, has he mentioned your name to me?’
‘No; have you mentioned my name to him?’
‘I’ve no idea; I may have; really I don’t remember.’ She paused and ground out her cigarette. ‘Look here,’ she said, ‘you asked yourself here this evening — it would not be too much to say that you forced your way in — because, you said, it was urgent that you should tell me something. Just exactly what have you come to say?’
‘As a matter of fact, that is what I’ve been getting round to. Now we’ve got there, I hardly know how to put it.’
She, on her side, could not have sat looking blanker. It was a trick of Harrison’s to drop rather than raise his voice for emphasis: he thus now said ultra-softly: ‘You should be a bit more careful whom you know.’
‘In general?’ Stella returned, in a tone which by contrast was high and cool.
He had, as though under instruction, kept his eyes on the photograph. ‘Actually, I did rather mean in particular.’
And on like that for pages, marvelous pages. Insinuation and deflection. Pure Pinter, avant la lettre, and at greater length than a TV play could allow.
So I suppose I have to read the novel, and I ought to watch the TV play. But now that I’ve read this I’m more inclined to watch BETRAYAL and TURTLE DIARIES, also scripted by Pinter, and read his script for The Proust Film, which I also bought — Joseph Losey’s unmade, untitled Proust project. Instead of which I’m reading Connie Willis’ Blackout and All Clear, also set in WWII, and just watched EICHMANN, with Thomas Kretschmann, written by Snoo Wilson of all people and directed by Robert VAMPIRE CIRCUS Young. But I don’t have anything to say about it.
It was to this city, drunk radiant with contradictions — ‘Chicago, the jazz-baby — the reeking, cinder-ridden, joyous baptist stronghold, Chicago, the chewing gum centre of the world, the bleating, slant-headed rendezvous of half-witted newspapers, sociopaths and pants makers,’ to quote one of its more restrained self-descriptions — that Beatrice Welles brought her family. It was certainly she who brought them: her husband, though enamoured of the stage and its citizens, and partial to fine wine and good food and concomitant fleshly pleasures, showed no sign of needing to move to the source of these things, and Dr Bernstein, according to Orson, only left Kenosha to be near Beatrice. He spoke of it as ‘a paradise he’d lost … my mother used to make HEARTLESS fun of that.’ As for the boys — cosy and comfortable as they’d surely been in Kenosha, this huge and thrilling city was the biggest playground a child could imagine. This is where Orson Welles grew up, this swaggering, boastful place, which sneered at New York as a provincial cousin. Here was anything and everything they could want — provided they had the money. And, thanks to Richard Welles’ golden handshake, they did. Had they not, it might have been a harsh life; they would have shared the squalor and deprivation of a large portion of the city’s population, the immigrants in their northern ghettoes, the blacks in theirs on the South Side. For these people, undernourished, brutalised, cold, Chicago was hell. ‘For God’s sake,’ cried Margaret Anderson at the end of her first editorial for The Little Review, one of Chicago’s many little magazines, ‘why doesn’t somebody start the revolution?’ All the conditions were present, enough to make a Marxist despair at its reluctance to occur. But Chicago was still too high on itself. Even the poor were swept up in its undeniable confidence, which last till the Big Crash — ten years away, in 1929. After that, nothing would ever be quite the same again for Chicago. In Alston J. Smith’s phrase, ‘there was the manic phase. Then came the depression.’
…I was born in Chicago, Illinois, so damned long ago that I wish I had never told anybody when. Both my parents were of Quaker descent. Neither was a practising Quaker. My mother was born in Waterford, Ireland, where there was a very famous Quaker school and perhaps still is. My father came of a Pennsylvania farming family, probably one of the batch that settled with William Penn. At the age of seven I had scarlet fever in a hotel, and I understand this is a very rare accomplishment. I remember principally the ice-cream and the pleasure of pulling the loose skin off during convalescence …
Ben Hecht was always falling in love–though he never tumbled harder and faster into that ecstatic state than he did when he met Chicago. “The city of my first manhood,” he called it. The place enthralled him with its blur of rooftops and chimneys, its signage and streetcars, its windows, its water, its sky, an especially its crowds. Its crowds! Dashing through downtown, he’d stop suddenly, transfixed, as all those strangers rushed by him on the sidewalk. “I sometimes felt shy,” he’d later write of his teenage infatuation with the fact of this great human swirl, “as I stood against a building watching people pass. What if some bright pedestrian saw what I was doing–having a love affair with the faces of the city! It would be hard to explain.”
Both Hecht and Minnelli, in different ways, were keenly aware of the new sensibility — though, like most other artists in their generation, they inherited certain attitudes from the era of l’art pour l’art, which they brought into modern times. Hecht, for example, never lost his taste for the epigrammatic wit and iconoclasm of the 1890s; his early novels, Fantasius Mallare and Count Bruga, are saturated with Yellow Book affectations, and even The Front Page has a vaguely Baudelarian nostalgie de la boue. For his part, Minnelli became a more engaging blend of the aesthete and the modern entertainer, working not in words but in clothing and decor. In 1937, Esquire described him as “the incarnation of our preconceived notion of a ‘Village type’ — flat black hat with a wide brim, loose collar and no tie around his thin neck.” In publicity releases, Radio City Music Hall emphasised his vanguard taste: “Young and, confessedly, a modernist, Minnelli revels in … torch songs, music from the heart of Harlem and picturesque angular furniture.”
Ten minutes off for a tea-break in the middle of the night in that place and I couldn’t find a seat, not one. All them Greeks had it, Poles, Greeks, Blacks, the lot of them, all them aliens had it. And they had me working there… they had me working…
Henry did that counterpoint business that you’re not supposed to be able to do unless you have two right arms and four extra fingers, and he got that boiler puffing, and he got it shaking, and he screamed his Henry Walker “WoooooOOOOO!” and–he finished. I came in on the tubs and beat them up till I couldn’t see for the sweat, hit the cymbal and waited.
His assistants cluster about him. He is severe with them, demanding, punctilious, but this is for their own ultimate benefit. He devises hideously difficult problems, or complicates their work with sudden oblique comments that open up whole new areas of investigation–yawning chasms under their feet. It is as if he wishes to place them in situations where only failure is possible. But failure, too, is a part of mental life. “I will make you failure-proof,” he says, jokingly. His assistants pale.
Seven passages from seven page seventeens taken from my vast collection of page seventeens.
Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu by Simon Callow; Raymond Chandler Speaking edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker; Ben Hecht: FIghting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman; The Films of Vincente Minnelli by James Naremore; The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, from Harold Pinter Complete Works 2; Black Country by Charles Beaumont from The Playboy Book of Short Stories; The Genius from Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme.
Christmas, for some reason, means limericks — here’s one of mine. Trying to do seasonal spins on famous monsters.
And here are a few Shadowplay Christmas cards to cut out and keep.
Of course, once you’ve cut them from your computer screen, it will have rectangular holes in it, which may be an inconvenience. I suggest scrolling until the holes are blocking your view of the advertisements.
shadowplay 