brief encounter (w&d david lean, w. noël coward, anthony havelock-allan, ronald neame)

When the lights came up in Montevideo’s Cinemateca, there was more one person who could be seen unashamedly in tears. How can a black and white, subtitled British film made in 1945 continue to exert such an effect? The answer is twofold. On the one hand it’s simple. This is one of the classic cinematic Ur-Love Stories. The account of the doomed love affair of Dr Alec Harvey and Laura Jesson represents a transcendent vision of that thing called romantic love upon which so much of our western dreamlife is predicated. Their love is uncomplicated, unconsummated, and clear as mountain stream. It is a kind of dream we are born and bred to share and when we witness this framed within the rectangle of the cinema screen, it has a potency that real life, with all its complications, struggles to emulate. On the other, this is a result of delicious artistry. From Lean’s opening shot, as the camera initially focuses on Stanley Holloway flirting with the station cafe manageress, before panning to the protagonists, the film exudes a delicacy blended with high passion. We are spies on this couple’s intimacy. Coward’s script is a thing of joy, blending reserve with those moments when the reserve breaks and Howard declares, with an unbridled simplicity, that he loves Laura. The violence of love is laid bare, the way it creates great joy, but an equal measure of sorrow. Somehow Coward manages to squeeze in a reference to Keats, the prince of romantic poetry. This violence would, of course, have had a heightened resonance at the time of the film’s release, a moment when so many relationships would have flowered briefly only to be torn apart by war. Of course there is something that feels inimically British in the way that the characters wrestle to keep their passions under control, but at the same time the film makes one think of another great unconsummated cinematic love story, Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. The yearning of love, also known as the tugging of the heartstrings, is a universal emotion. Lean and Coward’s encapsulation of these emotions, delivered in the flesh by the sublime performances of Howard and Johnson, reverberates across the decades.

 

the bridge on the drina (ivo andric)

First things first. Ivo Andric’s novel is completely radical in so far as its central character is not a human or even an animal. It’s a bridge. Which is in theory an inanimate object, but the novel traces the way in which this inanimate object touches the lives of those who live on either side of it, over the course of hundreds of years. This isn’t a typical approach. Shape shifting, generation busting novels come along every now and again, (eg Orlando), but even these rarely span 600 years. The effect is oddly hypnotic. Characters recur, particularly towards the end, and at times the novelist notes something that happened to an ancestor in another era of the bridge which we have already seen, but the emphasis remains, more than anything else, on the bridge.

And what the bridge represents. Reading about the novel and knowing something of the history of Bosnia (where the novel is set), something my generation became aware of back in the dog days of the post-Yugoslav wars, one notes there has been criticism of Andric for being too pro-Serb, and anti-Moslem. I have to say that this did not strike me during the reading of the novel. This might have to do with my ignorance in terms of reading the codes, but it felt to this reader as though the novel was a constant celebration of ethnic and religious integration. Generation after generation is marked by a harmony where the greatest threat is the possibility of the river flooding. The only time this harmony is disturbed is when politics rears its ugly head, and suddenly the differences between the townsfolk become an issue, where for decades or more the mix of Serb, Moslem and Jew has allowed each to value the differences of the other.

As such, it feels as though the bridge itself is more than something that links two sides of a river. It is also the bridge between cultures. Whenever the bridge is threatened, the community as a whole, consisting of these different peoples and their stories, is also threatened. The affection that permeates the novel for people from every walk of life feels tangible. The Bridge on the Drina doesn’t read, to an ignorant stranger’s mind, like a novel setting out to promote discord, but one seeking to bridge difference. 

prater violet (christopher isherwood)

Who says there’s anything new under the sun? The notion of auto-ficcion is sometimes bandied around as a post-modern concept, but here’s a resolutely modernist Isherwood constructing a novel wherein the central character is one Christopher Isherwood and reads for all the world like a piece of non-fiction. The conceit helps to lend authenticity to a minor text, which describes the author’s experiences as a screenwriter working for a Viennese film director, Friedrich Bergmann, (modelled on the real life director Berthold Viertel), contracted by a British studio to make the powder puff movie. The details of movie making in the thirties are enjoyable and suggest a world that hasn’t changed all that much. In the first decade of this century I spent a fair amount of time drifting around the edges of the old film world in Soho and the characters who crop up in Prater Violet are dead ringers for the down-to-earth figures one would meet there. The novel’s twist occurs with the Austrian Anschluss when the director’s family is threatened by the Nazi takeover, which in turn puts the film in jeopardy. Isherwood’s novel is too discursive to really engage with the implications, but even so, the way the people working on the film react to an event in a distant country which will eventually have unimagined consequences in Britain feels disconcerting, the insularity contributing to a blasé lack of concern, something Isherwood is aware of. The novel was published in 1945 and one can imagine Isherwood working on it during the war, mindful of the way in which the events that lead up to the catastrophe were ignored; in the words of Auden: “How everyone turns away, quite leisurely from the disaster.”

brideshead revisted (evelyn waugh)

Reading this book is a journey through the wardrobe. A journey back in time. To being a teenager. To belonging to one of the most privileged, renowned schools in the world. A place marked by medieval craftsmen, Christopher Wren, Gibbons, Mallory, Victorian gothic, the first world war, the second, the wars to come. A place steeped in the history and nature of England and being British. A place I turned my back on, rejecting the roots I had been assigned, seeking to retain only the most catholic aspects of an education that offered existentialism, Colin Wilson, drugs, deviance, depression, repression and, for some, the birthright of privilege.

In the midst of the years I spent there, Waugh’s panegyric appeared as a luscious television series. Touched by old and new generations of British acting aristocracy. Geilgud, Olivier, Irons and more. Someone somewhere screened the episodes for us, and no matter how large the distance which might have been supposed to exist between the twenties and the eighties, the television in fact reflected our lives. The fey Sebastian and the louche Anthony Blanche were characters we knew well, fossils that had survived. And along with their feyness we also recognised their romanticism. A doomed hedonism, gilded with a hint of religious transcendence. The curse of entitlement. The mysteries of the elite.

I went away and sought to leave it all behind. Cut my ties and sought to enter into something more akin to the “real” world, as subsequent friends and partners might have put it. And these characters, both the fictional ones and the ones who echoed their fictional forefathers, came to seem egoistical, blinkered, narrow-minded. Crass. Indeed, some of their likes can now be found flitting around the current government, my contemporaries, shallow souls whose lives have been lead within this insulated bubble of privilege.

I left Waugh’s world behind and I never read the book. Indeed, I struggled with British literature per se, especially from the 20^th C. So much of it filtered through the sieve of inured Oxbridge privilege, so far from the pulse of the world. But now, in Montevideo, I felt a yearning, a good Waughian word, to reconnect. Because, I suppose, there’s a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are aspects of England, Britain, the England of which Winchester, with all its mordant beauty, was a part, which will always have a hold. With the sense or ironic detachment which accompanies knowing the value and the absence-of-value attached to this culture, so apparently ancient, beseeching so much respect.

Waugh’s Ryder, the book’s narrator, ends up becoming a cynic, cursed by his association with Brideshead. He cannot bring himself to love his own family, even his children, The very notion of love is so lost in the Arcadian fields of Sebastian’s youth that he never recovers it. His relationship with Sebastian’s sister is a pale imitation, sacrificed on the altar of this agnostic cynicism. Conventional values and desires pass him by. He yearns for the transcendent, to live in a Poussin pastoral, the world kept at bay by beauty. Realising this is something he cannot have (and those who do have it don’t want it) reduces him, stymies his ambition, leaves him in middle age as nothing more than the husk of his youth.

Ryder is a model for many who have the fortune to attend the Winchesters of the world, which keep on trucking, Oxbridge and its ilk. Real life is a disappointment in the wake of the romanticism of youth. The drive to do things, to make the world in your image rather than pursue a forlorn image of Englishness, is missing. They find a way to make society accommodate them, carving out their anointed niches, but everything is hollow. Life becomes a perpetual hangover. It’s no surprise that Blanche declaims TS Eliot through a megaphone. This is the danger of history: it consumes the muscles from within, a silent malevolent host.

All of which helps to explain why I should turn to this book now. On the one hand, it is a symptom of homesickness, or nostalgia (albeit a nostalgia for a life which has nothing to do with the one I lead when in London). And on the other, if I read this book in the UK, it would quite possibly make me ill.