Camus 50 years gone

M

Sarkozy proposes to move the body from Lourmain to the Pantheon in Paris.

Kierkegaard:
The destruction of Jerusalem

He weeps over Jerusalem.

And yet the city was still standing in its glory, and the temple still held its head high, higher than any structure in the world.

And Christ Himself says, “If thou hadst known in this thy day the things which are for thy good!” But to this he adds, “Now they are hid from thine eyes.” In God’s eternal counsel its destruction is determined, and salvation is hid from the eyes of its inhabitants.

Was the generation then living more wicked than the foregoing generations to which it owed its life?

Was the whole nation corrupt, was there none righteous in Jerusalem, not a single one who could check God’s wrath?

No, its destruction was determined. In vain the besieged city looked in anguish for a way out, the army of the enemy crushed it in its mighty embrace, and no one escaped, and heaven remained shut and sent forth no angel except the angel of death which brandished its sword over the city.

Is this the jealousy of God, that He visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, in such a way that He does not punish the fathers but the children?

What answer should we make? Should we say:

“There have elapsed now nearly two thousand years since those days. Such a horror the world never saw before and never again will see. We thank God that we live in peace and security, that the scream of anguish from those days reaches us only very faintly. We will hope and believe that our days and those of our children may pass in quietness, unaffected by the storms of existence. We do not feel strong enough to reflect upon such things, but we are ready to thank God that we are not subject to such trials.”

Can anything be imagined more cowardly and more disconsolate than such talk?

Is then the inexplicable explained by saying that it has occurred only once in the world?

Or is not this the inexplicable, that it did occur?

And has not this fact, the fact that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even the most explicable events?

If once it occurred in the world that man’s lot was essentially different from what it ordinarily is, what assurance is there that this will not recur?

What assurance that this is not the true thing, and what ordinarily occurs is the untrue?

Or is the true proved to be such by the fact that it most often occurs?

And does not that really often occur which those ages witnessed?

Is it not what we all of us in so many ways have experienced, that what occurs on a great scale is experienced also in a minor degree?

“Think ye,” said Christ, “that those Galileans whose blood Pilate commanded to be shed were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered these things?” It was a providential dispensation, you will say, not a punishment.

But the destruction of Jerusalem was a punishment, and it fell with equal severity upon the innocent and the guilty …

EITHER/OR – The Ultimatum

The more things change …

Alfred Hitchcock presents …

… a fine elderly unemployed couple, about to be bounced out of their home, try to work things out.

… the trauma of losing your job.

Namath: Family resemblance

This photo of Joe Namath and Bear Bryant, 1965, is so reminiscent of my family, both sides of which also hail (like Namath) from Pennsylvania, that it seems fit to file.

The Jets victory in 1969 remains a big memory, inseparable from my father. Ardent Jet fans in rural New Jersey.

Film: The White Ribbon —
Crisis of the Old Order

Magnificent. Must see. Glorious black and white. Gloriously and utterly un-American. One recalls why, when we were young, people thought film was a serious art.

It’s a psychological whodunit, to begin. So it’s natural the reviews would focus on the puzzles. Even so …

Spoiler Alert. The rest of this is for people who’ve seen it already. Unless one cares not to preserve a fresh first viewing.

Even so, the lack of comment in the reviews on the treatment of social history is surprising. This is what struck my mind throughout, and seems upon further thought the Grund of the story, the spine of the script.

Confirmation here comes (after dozens of hints) rather late when the Baronness declares she is leaving the Estate, and indeed leaving Germany — and is taking her son, the family heir.

Thus dissolves the Baron’s household, the power atop the village social structure, and the employer of most of its people.

Why does the Baroness bail? Because she has fallen in love with a banker in Lombardy, who swept her off her feet with his energy and sophistication, and was good with the boy.

Thus the Gentry gives way to the Liberals — the industrialists and their bankers, the Capitalists, the Bourgeoisie beloved of Saint-Simon — atop the pile of struggling classes.

Each of the adult male characters speaks for a familiar estate/class of late feudal society. Only the Officer is missing. But his clamor can be heard at film’s end, as his day dawns in 1914.

The Doctor serves well as a representative of Modern Science:

– mistreating, after deeply exploiting, the pre-modern Midwife (his professional precursor in the Middle Age now vanishing). He despises her “stench” and finally wishes she were dead.

– abusing the trust and curiosity of his daughter because, as he explains to the Midwife, his passions are autonomous, ungovernable, beyond good and evil. Robert Oppenheimer comes to mind. Or How I Learned to Love the Bomb.

Whether the Doctor’s unexplained departure at story’s end marks him (and Modern Science) a monster or a black hero turns perhaps on whether one comes to feel he has adopted (acknowledged?) the Midwife’s retarded son or, prefiguring the Nazis, has euthanized him. That his own boys are named Adolph and Rudi (Hess?) puts a point on the question but doesn’t decide it.

And note, most broadly, that while the children of the Minister and the Doctor are in close congress, their fathers seem to exist in separate towns. Or ages. Like Christendom and its successor Modernity.

As for details, a dozen otherwise odd and/or disjointed events in the film find justification (beyond gratuitous thrill-making) and make simple sense when considered as social history or pathology.

E.g., the Minister’s suppression of his son’s sexuality. The boy’s face (on the poster above) says it all: One of these decades that kettle’s gonna blow.

His name is Martin. Dubbed, no doubt, by his earnest father in honor of Luther. But as quickly as that came to mind I thought of Martin Bormann. Portrait of the Sadist as a Young Man.

Also interesting, in this vein, is the crudely bon-vivant and violent Steward of the estate, occupying his position of petty power between the Baron and the Peasants. In southern Italy such pastoral players were the root of what blossomed, as Noble control faded, into the urban mafias.

And, indeed — the Steward has been cast (Josef Bierbichler) as a hulking dark and garrulous Italian type, utterly distinct in appearance and behavior from the reserved Saxons that populate most of the screen. In particular his joking with ladies about sex stands out. Are we are to guess he was hired from Uncle Eduardo’s estate in Lombardy? Perhaps to keep the increasingly restive Peasants in line?

The film compares, then, to Bertolucci’s 1900 (in essence, not style).

To The French Lieutenant’s Woman — though much more Fowles’ novel than the film.

And to Ivy Compton-Burnett, who across some 20 novels, all set in late Victorian mansions peopled by failing grownups and bitter, biting children, told an epic story of social decline and shifting class loyalties and behaviors.

Both Bergman and Dreyer of course also come to mind, for various reasons, re both style and concern to tell social history, even if one believes Fanny and Alexander were happy kids.

It seems, then, that A.O. Scott, in particular, missed quite a big boat here. He seems to have been mezmerized by the spectacular surface psychology — and thus left to complain that Haneke told a shallow story (oh so familiar in America) that blames the Nazis on “child abuse.”

On the contrary: The surmise of the narrator (the now-old Schoolmaster) that this story, even if less than perfectly true, may help explain what the kids went on to accomplish in their prime, working hard and playing hard, seems well supported: The dissolution of the Old Order, and the Blow in Sarajevo (the first war and its disastrous sequelae), gave the deviant Nazis an opening to power.

Thank goodness it couldn’t happen here, where a prosperous and populous Middle Class exercises sovereignty in a vibrant constitutional democratic — uh, hmmm …

Finally, no reviewer I’ve seen has suggested what, after two viewings, seems clear: the gentle, somewhat bumbling Schoolmaster, played by Christian Friedel, is intended to be understood as Jewish.

The kind features of his face, his distinctively dark hair, his distinctively broad education, all support this reading, but also:

– his bitchy chastisement by the Baronness about church music and the church calendar;

– the otherwise pointless evasion of his would-be father-in-law at the matrimonial negotiation, who remarks that the teacher’d be better off working in his father’s shop in town (where your kind belong); and

– at story’s end, the abrupt and monstrous dressing down he suffers from the Minister after suggesting that the latter’s children are sadistic criminals. Denounced as “repulsive” and threatened with prison, ordered to “get out” and never return, he timidly acquiesces.

Thus fails, too — when the Other challenges at a stroke both Bible and Blut — the structure of Assimilation.

That the Schoolmaster when young was a Jew well at home in Bismarck’s young nation-state casts new light on his opening sad hope of somehow explaining “what happened later” as an effect of the alienating contradictions of old Christendom and its dissolution under pressure of Modernity’s miracles and wonders.

“The world’s not going to collapse.”

Twice we hear this during the year the Schoolmaster is required to wait for his bride: a naive but golden girl from a nearby town, daughter of a straight-shooting German Arbeiter, the very best that society has to offer a man of the Schoolmaster’s station.

But then comes the news from Sarajevo, and the marriage — consummation of Assimiliation — doesn’t come off.

Instead the erstwhile groom goes to war, for the Kaiser. And afterward, he tells us, never returns to the baronial village, returning instead to his hometown, to take over his father’s tailor shop. Which leaves the tinkling of Kristallnacht in one’s ears as the story fades to black.

We first met the Schoolmaster with his arm around Karli, the retarded boy, framed in the schoolhouse door — as the gang of kids, somewhat distant, snidely look on and sneer. It’s difficult not to think here of the Third Reich’s select victims. The kids will go on to burn both books and teacher.

Click

2009 in review

“A London taxi driver tied one end of a rope around a post and the other around his neck and drove away, launching his head from the car.
Sarah Palin published a book and Sylvia Plath’s son hanged himself in Alaska.
Scientists in San Diego made a robot head study itself in a mirror until it learned to smile.”

From the Yearly Review in Harper’s.

An evening at Fancast:
Night People in Paris, Texas

Saw three remarkable films last night on Fancast, the Poor Man’s Friend.

1. The Elephant Man. Magnificent again.

Brings to mind Dwight Gooden’s glorious rookie year, in that David Lynch never made a better film, although great things did follow.

Gorgeous black & white — in 1980. BEFORE Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. I had transposed the two in memory.

Had the last American feature distributed (just barely) in b&w been Faces by Cassavetes in 1968?

People who know their movies probably know.

Anthony Hopkins here became a film star.

And John Hurt, hidden behind the hideous mask, yet so there, won the British oscar, and it seems perhaps a squeeze of Charlotte Rampling.

Hurt went on to be Winston in Michael Radford’s 1984, four years later.

Two milestones to be proud of.

Or three, counting Charlotte.

M

2. Mister 880. 1950.

Young buck Burt Lancaster as a Treasury cad on the heels of genial counterfeiter Edmund Gwenn, who three years before had been Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street.

In each case nominated for an Oscar.

M

3. Night People. 1954. Berlin. Or at least a few long shots to establish the Geschmack. In stark raving Technicolor.

Gregory Peck is a colonel of Army intelligence, stiff as a board, but the script is so good, along with Buddy Ebsen and Broderick Crawford, that it’s great.

The story is as realistic, violent and accurate as to the ways of Spookdom as any John Le Carre. What’s odd is the deadpan vaudevillian humor. An odd mix not easy to pull off, I imagine.

But they did.

And there’s a Soviet colonel who wants to defect. Colonel Peck has made the arrangements.

The Russian’s one demand?

To be re-settled in Paris, Texas.

?!?

The Russian, during the war, when Russ and Yank were friends, had passed through on a flight from Kamchatcha, east across the Bering Sea.

Had stopped to refuel in Paris, Texas.

And ever since had been dreaming … Of a girl?

Natasha Kinski ?

His daughter?

Had he promised her Parisian mother to return?

Alas. Berlin was to be his last battleground.

And did mom finally fail, leaving their daughter to the streets, to which years later she fled in return?

I suppose none of this is news to people who know their movies.

Newsweek said (of Wim Wenders’ film):

It is a story of the United states, a grim portrait of a land where people like Travis and Jane cannot put down roots, a story of a sprawling, powerful, richly endowed land where people can get desperately lost.

But not without reason?

M

Israeli scholar re Nation’s dubious distinction

NY Times review of The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand.

Richard Burton
speaks to the epigone

M

Four half-hour chats — from 1980 with Dick Cavett.

A fine heart and mind. And interesting times.

He talks remarkably of his father, a coal miner. And of alcohol and his saving-grace wife, Susan.

The four clips, linked here, are from the NY Times site, where Cavett has a column:

Part One. Wales. His father the coal miner.

Part Two. Growing up poor & orphaned but happy. Stumbling into acting & catching the bug. Laurence Olivier. John Gielgud.

Part Three. Garbo. His journals. Writers. Bogart & Bacall & John Huston. Spencer Tracy. Hubris. Elizabeth Taylor. His own films. The Bogey stories are fun.

Part Four. Demon Rum. His wife Susan. A taste of Camelot.

And throughout: the slings and arrows of acting and life and other arts, from one who learned most of what he knows out of school.

Bravo, PBS. And Mr Cavett, who fields a number of short-hoppers with thoughtful aplomb. Noticed him about town some months ago, looking spry.

M

Camelot on Broadway, with Julie Andrews, 1960-61

M

Alan Jay Lerner and director Moss Hart adapted Camelot from T.H. White’s rejuvenation of the King Arthur legend, The Once and Future King. Frederick Loewe came grudgingly aboard to write the music.

Burton and Julie Andrews were the original headliners, the latter as Guineviere, fresh from her smash in My Fair Lady, also by Lerner and Loewe. Robert Goulet got his first break as lovelorn Lancelot. Broadway’s advance-sales records were broken.

The show had been five hours plus in out-of-town trials, with Loewe and Hart seriously ill and Lerner suffering marriage trauma. The latter in later years was keen to credit Burton’s “faith and geniality” for holding the production together.

It opened on Broadway in early December 1960. Senator Kennedy had defeated Vice President Nixon four weeks earlier.

Twenty years later, it’s between performances of a Camelot revival at Lincoln Center that Burton sits with Cavett. Exhausting exercise, at age 55.

Weeks later Burton had radical back surgery. The pain or a certain constriction can be seen in his eyes.

M

Night of the Iguana, with Sue Lyon, 1964

M

Talking at frank length about alcohol, Burton credits his wife Susan with likely saving his life.

Four years later he was dead. At 59.

I remember my mother grieving a bit, not for having lost a star, but something closer to the bone, bearing on early deaths of her oldest brother and father, the latter whom, like Burton, died in his 50s of a brain hemorrage.

M

With Liz Taylor

Life in bloom.

He met Elizabeth Taylor in 1963, while filming Cleopatra, at the time the most expensive film in history.

M

M

They were married twice, from March 1964 to July 1976, taking sixteen months off in June 1974.

Was it Nixon’s resignation …?

M

M

It’s generally thought that they acted out private life, with encouragement from Mike Nicholls, as Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

M

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966

M

M

M

M

Six years after the last divorce, he speaks of Taylor as a good friend.

And argues she was a great screen actress, underrated because of beauty, but due for rediscovery and immortality.

M

M

Asking about his diaries, Cavett suggests that Burton is in essence a writer.

The actor allows he’s had ten or so extracts from his journals published — but merely in places that pay well. Ladies Home Journal. Cosmopolitan.

Then offers that he admires writers above all other “craftsmen,” and prefers their company, among artistic types, finding painters “inarticulate” and actors wont to tell stories rather than converse.

Throughout, comments about acting and the business focus on scripts and mention authors.

Post mortem, a book was carved out of his journals, and published to rave reviews.

Seems the thinking man’s world found itself shocked to find he was not a gigolo.

M

Boom! 1968

M

He speaks of his father, Richard Jenkins, as a genius coal miner. The stories are laced with alcohol and affection.

But elsewhere he spoke of the man’s violence. And when the father died in 1957, his namesake son, 32 and famous, did not attend the funeral.

His mother had died when he was two, giving birth to her thirteenth child at age 44. He says he has no memories.

At some point the state made master Richard Jenkins a ward of Philip Burton, one of his schoolteachers and a scholar of the theater. The lad’s passion for rugby was channeled elsewhere.

“I would rather have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than Hamlet at the Old Vic,” the actor later said. (So reports biographer Melvyn Bragg.)

It’s curious that he speaks at such length about his father with Cavett, yet so briefly — but with honor — of Philip Burton, whom he reports alive and well and living in Key West.

M

The Longest Day

M

The photo at the very top here is also from The Longest Day, where Burton stands out, — amid a huge top-drawer Hollywood ensemble, and among the work-hard-play-hard Yank soldiery — as a quiet, hard-drinking RAF pilot on the verge of losing his nerve.

One imagines he cherished the role, having served in the RAF for three years during the war.

M

M

He came home intending to return to Oxford, but found the town so crowded at that moment with veterans that his chances to make the rugby squad were deemed poor.

So, instead, with Philip Burton’s aid and comfort, he answered an ad for an acting job …

M

M

His last film was magnificent: Michael Radford’s 1984, shot in the spring of Orwell’s year.

John Hurt was an obvious and indeed perfect Winston.

Less than obvious was Burton as O’Brien, the Ministry of Truth officer who watches then arrests Winston, methodically interrogates and breaks him, then washes his brain. A fierce minimalist perfect performance.

He died months later. August 5.

The 1984 now seems a bookend to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, from John le Carre’s breakthrough book. Another great minimalist characterization in an important film about secret police.

M

The cold spy, with celestial Claire Bloom. 1965

M

HOWEVER …

I hadn’t realized, knowing only his post 50s films, that Burton’s roots were so wide and deep in the English theater

More than once he tells Cavett that he doesn’t watch movies at all, work aside, and suspects only ten or twelve of his 60 or so are worth preserving from fire.

M

M

His Hamlet here in 1964 was much remarked upon.

There’s a filmed rehearsal run-through available on CD, which became the basis, two summers ago, of a revival extravaganza on a big screen in Central Park (if memory serves) and then the Public Theater.

M

M

I missed it. But do have the CD, which is always a bit disappointing, because the actor is indeed running through the text.

Watching the erstwhile rising rugby star run, however, one can imagine the fearsome athletic power he brought to the role. An Achilles of a Hamlet.

Able to snap Claudius’s neck with a hand.

M

M

Burton speaks highly of Gielgud, who directed him in Hamlet but also later remarked that Burton was, indeed, too rough for the role. Meaning, perhaps, nothing more, or less, than that he was a Welshman.

Toward the end of their chat, Cavett notes that his wife had performed with Burton years before in Munich.

The actor responds with a taste of Hamlet’s second soliloquoy in German.

M

M

The passing of Paul Newman a year ago left me feeling similarly bereaved.

Is it only in context — contrasted with the luminaries and prospects of our day — that Burton seems so remarkable here, chatting with an urbane fellow traveler of the cosmopolis, as Reagan’s presidency, which just a few months before had seemed as always a ludicrous long-shot, so lugubriously dawned?

M

February 8, 1966

M

M

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot

The Camelot company did an original cast album in 1961. Burton refers to the lovely royalties with a smile, and replies to Cavett’s request for a piece of his quality by noting that viewers may yet buy the record.

The music had caught on inside the Kennedy White House. Mr Richard Burton had been invited to dinner.

And after the state murder, Camelot inspired Jackie to compare her husband’s administration to the court of young Arthur, who after innocently pulling a sword from a stone had found himself king, and gone on, legend goes, to do noble things.

M

February 6, 1968: Bobby, Liz, Richard and Ethel.
Four months later a dream fully died.

M

JFK, incoming, was not much like Arthur: His progress to the White House was long planned and well contrived, and he’d been working in town, in Congress, for twelve years already, and had been raised in a family that traded at the highest levels.

Nevertheless, his odyssey once arrived at the big house was indeed that of an Arthurian ingenue, quick on his feet, able to sniff rats, and change course, intent on nobler things.

M

M

Burton was banned from the BBC for speaking of Churchill as a mass-murderer and quasi-fascistic racist in his conduct of the war.

He spoke of himself as a socialist, life long, and his pride in honest labor is the steady note in the tales he tells Cavett of his father, and the sisters who raised him, and his six brothers all of whom went to the mines.

Yet to avoid the King’s tax man, the escape artist resided in Switzerland, from the 50s onward.

And is buried there, in Celigny, on the shores of icy majestic Lake Geneva.

M

My Escape to the West

A friend, recently recapping my second novel on Facebook, impuned the character of its catalyst, that gentle lady.

Her honor at the stake, I saw no choice but to tarry long enough to explain the curious circumstances of her last night on earth.

Here then, a quick synopsis, for posterity.

Sergei. The narrator. Born 1922 in the Volga Hills, veteran of the war, prominent scientist — but banished to Bohemia for being a pain in the butt during the 60s. There to teach chemistry. Our hero. He limps.

And encounters a local woman, his age, late one night while brooding about town. This is Prague 1986, as Chernobyl is about to blow. Earlier that evening his younger Czech girlfriend had laughed away his marriage proposal.

The new woman — who would certainly bristle to be called a prostitute — squires him about as the night lengthens, testing various hotspots.

He deflects her questions by telling her he’s a philosopher — but she is careful to introduce him as her “American philosopher friend” to avoid having doors slammed in their faces, the sad Russians being generally despised in the Bohemian underground.

Later, finally back at her place, she expires during misfortunate attempts at love making. The circumstances are obscure, but our narrator protests his innocence. To some ears, perhaps, persuasively.

The next day the papers call it murder most foul — and blame it on an American Philosopher who will soon be apprehended.

But sooner than later a clever policeman catches the true scent. And so the game’s afoot.

The Prague Surrealists, among whom Segei these many years has found what little comfort he can in that baroque backwater of a burg, are of course no help. The twittering fools.

Nor are the guardians of the Soviet embassy, who discover, upon answering his knock, that Sergei’s knowledge of certain weapon systems is entirely obsolete. And so set him free. So to speak.

But perhaps his great friend, Ludek, urologist to the nomenclatura of the Castle, psychotherapist to their children, well connected to be sure — But Sergei daresn’t confess. Such a sordid affair …

And then finds that Ludek has invited to the weekly Surrealist group session a pushy American Philospher. ?!? Just happened to be passing thru town.

Well. Circumstances, of course, compel all. In the end Sergei has no choice but to flee to Berlin, helter skelter, where, who knows, things may work out.

Thus his memoir: MY ESCAPE TO THE WEST.