mars in aires (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. robert dassanowsky & john s. barrett)

Lernet-Holenia’s novel, the second of this year, takes place in the days at the start of the Second World War. A veteran Viennese soldier, Count Wallmoden, has no real inkling that war is about to break out. He becomes besotted by Cuba, a mysterious woman, a femme fatale. Just before he has an assignation with her, his company begins to march into Poland. The world is on the brink of war but Wallmoden is distraught he cannot meet up with Cuba. He is certain that the military manoeuvres will end shortly and this will all blow over. The account of the march into Poland is detailed and specific. It doesn’t have the feel of the start of a world war, and Wallmoden compares what is happening with the horrors of the First World War, which he fought in, and feels that it’s quite lightweight. Until he is almost killed as the battles intensify. It’s a fascinating account of a moment when the horrors that will be shortly unleashed are only just emerging from their chrysalis. The tale is also a ghost story. Cuba, Wallmoden is later told, has died. He later meets a woman in a deserted Polish mansion who has the same name. A ghost story in times of war feels even more  understandable or plausible. (One thinks of the seances in Gravity’s Rainbow and the fascination in the First World War.) Mars in Aires is a novel which on one level feels straightforward, but contains a concealed level of complexity, even danger. 

“However, there is no doubt that we – and how often! – for moments, for days, yes, sometimes even longer than that, are in completely different realms, even though we think we’re here, and we live a life there and do things about which we know nothing. But we do live it, that life, and perhaps it’s the real one.”

sullivan's travels (w&d preston sturges)

A film about filmmaking. A film about filmmaking when the world is at war. What is the lodestar the filmmaker should follow? A dissertation on the state of the nation? Or escapist entertainment?

Sullivan is a successful Hollywood director who makes crowd-pleasing comedies. But his social conscience is nagging him. He wants to learn how the other half live. So he sets off to roam the country as a tramp, albeit in the company of the charming Veronica Lake. His journey is meticulously plotted, moving from broad comedy towards a suggestion of social realism, with a  twist at the end which would make any script doctor happy. At one point, at his lowest ebb, Sullivan is a prisoner who attends a prison cinema screening in a church. The screening is of a Disney cartoon, which everyone in the audience finds riotously funny. This scene, smartly meta, offers a précis of the film’s premise. Sullivan laughs and realises that cinema as entertainment possesses a healing value which social realism, he believes, never will.

There’s a couple of points about this scene: firstly it takes place in a black southern baptist church. According to Wiki, Walter White, the Secretary of the NAACP, wrote to Sturges: “I want to thank you for the church sequence in Sullivan's Travels.  I was in Hollywood recently and am to return there soon for conferences with production heads, writers, directors, and actors and actresses in an effort to induce broader and more decent picturization of the Negro instead of limiting him to menial or comic roles. The sequence in Sullivan's Travels is a step in that direction… “ So one way the film impacted was counter to the film’s eventual thesis. The other point is that Sturges originally wanted to use Chaplin instead of Disney, but couldn’t get the rights. Of course, Chaplin spent his life negotiating the same balance between entertainment and social realism, and perhaps his films triumphed as a result of their amalgamation of the two: stories about tramps that made people laugh.

Because some of the most telling scenes in Sullivan’s Travels are when Sullivan and Lake visit the marginal, impoverished world of down-and-outs, giving them some kind of representation. We’re only a few steps away from Rossellini’s neo-realism. Film always has to tread a line between entertainment and politics, laughter and the cruel realities the artform emerges from. Sullivan’s Travels does as good a job as anything you’ll see at exploring these contradictions, even if the stated resolution doesn’t exactly reflect the reasons for the film’s effectiveness. 

tobacco road (d. ford, w. nunnally johnson)

Tobacco Road is adapted from a stage play, written by Jack Kirkland, in turn adapted from the novel by Erskine Caldwell. It deals with a family from the Deep South that has fallen on hard times, following the depression. The family has turned into a group of likeable larrikins, who drive like maniacs, squabble and seem to survive on a wing and a prayer. In the introduction to the film, it was asked why these characters would have appealed to Ford as the subjects of one of his movies. But the family belong to a lonG line of hillbillies, a strand of US culture which can be traced from Huckleberry Finn to The Dukes of Hazard right through to JD Vance today. The idea of a genial company of characters living off the land is embedded in the North American psyche, and not so very far removed from Thoreau. These characters have an innate charm which is loosely tied up with the idea of freedom, a freedom to break the rules and live how they want to, which has inspired US consciousness since the earliest days, and Ford does a stirring job portraying their rumbunctious energy. 

the last tycoon (fitzgerald)

The Last Tycoon is an unfinished novel, and there’s something fitting about this in so many ways, as so much of Fitzgerald’s writing is about the unattainable, the out-of-reach. Furthermore, it feels as though the author was perhaps, like his protagonist, Stahr, at the end of the line, conscious of his fragrant mortality. The novel is about a dying man, and the writer knew of what he was speaking.

The novel is full of comments about the role of the writer in Hollywood. Cecilia, the narrator, daughter of a fellow producer, says: “I grew up thinking that writer and secretary were the same, except that a writer usually smelled of cocktails… they were spoken of in the same way when they were not around - except for a species called playwrights who… were treated with respect if they did not stay long - if they did they sank with the others into the white collar class.”

Fitzgerald, perhaps his era’s finest novelist, looks on with a jaundiced detachment at the way the movies changed the pecking order of image and word, relegating the writer to the role of a factotum deployed to help realise the dreams of the great visionaries such as Stahr. At another point Celia says: “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” Stahr has a pragmatic attitude to narrative, which is something embodied by actors telling the public want they want to hear. “Our condition is that we have to take people’s own folklore and dress it up and give it back to them.” This feels as true today as it was back then, even if some of the folklore is now cannibalising itself (Star Wars, Marvel, The Crown).

At one point Stahr decides to make a film about revolutionary Russia and watches Chien Andalou and Dr Cagliari, with Fitzgerald adding the brilliantly subversive note that “he had the script department get him up a two page treatment of the Communist Manifesto”. Perhaps we can sense here Fitzgerald seeing how cinema and its adjuncts would eat politics whole and repackage it for the masses, in order to make a profit. But it’s Fitzgerald who is the cynic, rather than Stahr, finding himself trapped in a world where the values he inherited are being used in a back lot for a B-feature. 

hangover square [patrick hamilton]

On one level, Hangover Square could be viewed as a cruel, neo-misogynist text, trapped in a repetitive rut. The protagonist, Bone, a schizophrenic, is fatally attracted to Netta, a femme fatale whose only objective is to exploit Bone for anything he can offer. She leads him on, takes his money, ridicules and humiliates him and unsurprisingly his thoughts turn towards revenge. Netta is far from a sympathetic character, and never becomes any more than two dimensional; the reader is given little insight into why she is like she is, what has turned her into such a malevolent soul. Furthermore Bone’s masochistic pursuit makes for a weak protagonist, one whose refusal to learn from his errors becomes more and more frustrating. 

On the other hand…. Hangover Square is perhaps a novel which is less interested in psychological veracity and more interested in recounting the kind of fever dream of the build-up to war. The novel opens on the eve of 1939. and Bone’s calvary runs parallel to Britain’s descent towards war. Netta and her sidekick Peter are both staunch believers in Chamberlain and the Munich deal, something which Bone despises. Hamilton clearly posits Netta and Peter as quasi fascists, potential Hitler sympathisers. They represent something rotten in British society. (There are echoes of Maclaren Ross here.) Britain itself teeters on the verge of fascism, a country where people have nothing better to do than get drunk and ride the hangover and get drunk again. As such Netta and Peter represent an amoral core at the heart of British society, which can only be excised with violence. 

To categorise Hangover Square as cruel or misogynist, as I’ve just done in the opening paragraph, is perhaps to miss the point. Because the cruelty is representative of its time. A time gripped by a fever, on both sides of the channel, one that needed to be cauterised and expunged. Once again, a writer seems to suggest that if Britain hadn’t had to confront a foe across the water, it too might have drifted towards fascism. Far from nearly destroying Britain, the war came just in the nick of time to rescue it.