the ice storm (d. ang lee, w. rick moody, james schamus)

Ang Lee’s nineties hit is such a curious film. On one level it is a hideous examination of suburban USA, a world where the bad haircuts and fashions match the dubious morals in the time of Nixon. On the other it’s a tender-hearted coming of age tale, peopled by a whole school of future stars, including Maguire, Ricci and Wood. Lee skewers the vacuous suburban world with real dexterity, helped by some great acting from Kline, Joan Allen and Weaver. At one moment, Weaver, on her hilarious waterbed, one of many succinct touches, is seen reading a Philip Roth novel. We have been transported into a ghoulish world of wannabe predatory men who are in real life a bitter disappointment to their women, either as husbands or lovers. Only the children, lead by the gloriously off-beat Maguire., hold out some kind of hope for a better future, once the ice has melted. (Of course we now know that the ice is melting far too fast and the better future is as illusory as ever). It’s intriguing to see how effectively the outsider, Lee, disembowels the North American culture, in a fashion neither Hanecke or Wong Kar Wai, for example, managed. Sadly I didn’t get a chance to see any of his other films in the Cinemateca cycle. A last note - the strangeness of hearing Bowie’s voice at the end in the song that covers the closing credits. For all that Bowie might have ended up spending the last years of his life in New York, he sounds resolutely un-American, faintly out of place, like the man who fell to earth, albeit, the Englishman who fell to earth. 

cider with rosie (laurie lee)

At one stage towards the end of the book, Lee states that he is describing the last gasp of a way of life which existed for a thousand years. The arrival of the motor car would destroy a social fabric which had survived more or less unchanged since the village he lived in had been founded. So there is a double nostalgia at work in the text. On the one hand for the people, family and friends of his youth. On the other for a world which exists no more, which cannot be revisited. 

Reading the book I thought a lot about my grandparents, in particular my grandfather, who was born in Suffolk and moved to the outskirts of London in the wake of the great depression. HIs upbringing was urban (in Ipswich) so there are many differences, but he too was born into a world that was conclusively lost by the time he was in his mid twenties. My grandfather loved the automobile, the joy of speed which it brought, the connectivity. One of his many jobs as a young man was to be a coach driver, where he would take groups on excursion, much as Lee describes his village’s visit to Weston-Super-Mare. The great game of these excursions, my grandfather told me, was to stop at as many pubs as possible and get the coach driver drunk. Luckily for him, my grandfather was never a great drinker. 

Lee is, one senses, more of a poet than a prose writer, something that works in his favour in what is a Proustian memoir. His evocation of place possesses a sensory feel which is intoxicating. There’s also a disarming honesty, which resists any sense of shame. Warts and all is the way. This also speaks of a rural life which possessed less romanticism, less concern for the niceties of life (killing animals, sexual encounters at an early age, causal violence). There’s a rugged shrug of the shoulders in Lee’s depiction of his teenage flings or the violence of a farmer’s fist. This was how people were and always had been. To suggest that they were failing to adhere to moral or political codes would have seemed bizarre to the villagers, who were instead adhering to a code that had been formed, as Lee puts it, over the course of a thousand years. 

The comparison with Proust is interesting. Lee is no Proust, no-one else was or shall be. Yet his invocation of a lost world is rooted in a quest to capture it in the word. Like Proust, he appears to write in an easy, fluid way, the words seem to “come naturally”. However, the efficacy of each word feels like an imperative. The wrong choice of word would conjure another memory, not the one the writer seeks to invoke. As such the writing is driven by a fierce pragmatism that leads to great beauty.

a moment of war (laurie lee)

I picked this memoir up under the arches of Waterloo Bridge, with Sedley. The bookstalls under the arches feel like a throwback now. Firstly as we now live in a digital age, secondly in the allowance of the use of prime public space to such a marginal enterprise as second hand bookselling. There’s always a book there you feel like buying, one that will take you by surprise.

Lee’s Spanish Civil War memoir felt an appropriate find. Lee is an unfashionable writer. He was a background voice in the childhood of anyone growing up in the second half of the twentieth century in the UK. A connection to another, supposedly more innocent age, allied to the romantic, Hardyesque notion of the wanderer, the rural exile. In this sense Lee’s journey echoes those being taken in other parts of the globe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as the countryside is emptied with people seeking work in the great cities. Yet as ever, the ideals of romanticism and the actuality exist at arm’s length. Lee’s account of his year in Spain is a hard, dispiriting document. He arrives late, with the war already being lost. The in-fighting, which Orwell also wrote about, means he spends more time incarcerated than he does fighting. There’s more chance of him being killed by a Republican bullet than a Fascist one. It’s an account of someone on the losing side, trying to understand why. His poetic but always accessible prose escorts us through a strange year of defeat, even if at times it reinforces the sense that he was but a visitor, lending his time to the cause. Having said which, he is clear in his account that the Spanish civil war was the precursor of the war that followed, and as such there was no real escape to be had from the fascist enemy. You could flee the battle, but the war would catch up with you in the end.

When they remove the second hand booksellers from beneath Waterloo Bridge, perhaps this will be the day that we realise the battle has well and truly been lost, there is no escaping the war.