A Stranger's Tear

Apparently I can no longer re-toast myself a signature half pastrami, half corned beef sandwich from Mamaleh's without spending the rest of the evening singing the same-named hit from a 1917 American Yiddish musical. The Folksbiene never seems to have revived it and if the rest of the score was as catchy, they really should. (I am charmed that the composer clearly found the nickel conceit tempting enough to revisit in a later show, but that line quoted about the First Lady, didn't I just ask the twentieth century to stay where we left it?)

At the other end of the musical spectrum, spatch maintains it is not American-normal to be able to sing the Holst setting of "In the Bleak Midwinter," which until last night I had assumed was just such seasonal wallpaper that I had absorbed it by unavoidable dint of Christmas—it's one of the carols I can't remember learning, unlike others which have identifiable vectors in generally movies, madrigals, or folk LPs. Opinions?

Thanks to lunisolar snapback, Hanukkah like every other holiday this year seems to have sprung up out of nowhere, but we managed to get hold of candles last night and tomorrow will engage in the mitzvah of last-minute cleaning the menorah.

P. S. I fell down a slight rabbit hole of Bruce Adler and now feel I have spent an evening at a Yiddish vaudeville house on the Lower East Side circa 1926.

At this point if I have a circadian rhythm it seems to be measured in days, but last night after two doctor's appointments and an evening of virtual seminars through the euphemistically designated career center, I fell over for something like a cumulative thirteen hours and still got through this afternoon's calendar of calling more doctors and the next stage of the career center in time to run out into a cold pastel sunset out of which the occasional flake of snow drifted with insulting singularity. I am delighted by the rediscovery of silent Holmes and also by my camera's cooperation when trying again for the beautiful fungi I had spotted on an earlier walk, clustered on the stump of what used to be a sidewalk tree and has now pivoted to Richard Dadd. I dreamed intensely and have no idea what Alex Horne was doing in there.

As the title indicates, "Threnody for Five Actors" is a ghost poem for its subjects and its inclusion in On Actors and Acting: Essays by Alexander Knox (ed. Anthony Slide, 1998) is maddening because it is accompanied only by the note, "This poem is from an unpublished manuscript titled Screams and Speeches. The five actors named here were all victims of the Blacklist." First of all, you can't drop the existence of an entire manuscript at the very end of a slim selected works and expect the interested reader not to scream, especially when the only copy the internet feels like telling me about seems to be held in a collection in the Library and Archives of Canada, which feels currently even less accessible than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Secondly, and speaking as a person who has been called out for the density of allusion in their stories and poetry, this poem could have done with some notes. The editor was obviously concerned enough about name recognition to parenthesize Julie Garfield as John and Bud Bohnen as Roman, but then why not list their dates so that the reader can see for themselves that all five actors died between 1949 and 1952, mostly of heart ailments, stressed by the hounding of the FBI and HUAC, at the grandly superannuated ages between 39 and 59? If you don't know that Mady Christians originated the title role of John Van Druten's I Remember Mama (1944), then her verse will make much less sense, but catching that one makes me wonder what other references I may be missing, such as in the stage work of Canada Lee or J. Edward Bromberg. Lastly, since it's the only poem I have ever read by Alexander Knox—instantaneously in October, but it's been a rough fall—if he wrote any others I'd like to be able to read them, even if just for comparison. Slide mentions his wicked limericks in the introduction, but unforgivably includes none.

( We know by now that time does not take sides. )

With this one example to go by, he was a better playwright than poet, but except for the self-deprecation which should definitely have hit the cutting room floor, it's hard to want to edit much out of a poem with so much anger at the injustice of a country that wastes its artists in scapegoating xenophobia, besides which there's at least one good line per actor and sometimes more. He wouldn't even have been living in the United States by the time of its writing, having burned off the last of his contract with Columbia by the end of 1951. He hadn't burned off his anger. No reason he should have. I may be confused by the existence of his Hollywood career, but I'm still pissed about the politics that snapped it short. The twentieth century could stop coming around on the guitar any measure now. On Sunday, I'll be at the HFA.

After years of not even being able to pirate it, spatch and I have finally just finished the first series of BBC Ghosts (2019–23), during which he pointed out to me the half of the cast that had been on Taskmaster. I recognized a guest-starring Sophie Thompson.

This article on the megaliths of Orkney got Dave Goulder stuck in my head, especially once one of the archaeologists interviewed compared the Ring of Brodgar to sandstone pages. "They may not have been intended to last millennia, but, now that they have, they are stone doors through which the living try to touch the dead."

I wish a cult image of fish-tailed Artemis had existed at Phigalia, hunting pack of seals and all.

Any year now some part of my health could just fix itself a little, as a treat.

Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.

When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went to fact-check this assertion immediately because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.

Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.

spatch and I have been married for twelve years. A round dozen of anniversary gifts looks as though it adds up to the woven road of silk. Here we are still, intertwined and traveling.

Once again the Malden Public Library comes through with Kate Dunn's Exit Through the Fireplace: The Great Days of Rep (1998), a capacious, irreproducible oral history of repertory theatre in the UK. Its timeline of personal recollection runs from the 1920's into the decade of publication, documenting a diverse and vivid case for the professional and communal value of regional theatre without rose-glassing its historically shabbier or more exploitative aspects; its survey includes the subspecies of fit-up theatre which flourished primarily outside of England and devotes chapters to stage management, design, and directing as well as acting and the factor of the audience. It's a serious chunk of scholarship from a writer who is herself fourth-generation in the theater, which must have helped with assembling its roster of close to two hundred contributors. It's just impossible to read much of it without cracking up on a page-by-page basis. Despite the caution in the introduction not to view the heyday of rep as a perpetual goes wrong machine, the cumulative effect of thrills and tattiness and especially the relentless deep-end pace of getting a new play up every week writes its own Noises Off:

Howard Attfield was another actor who was caught on the hop. He remembers, 'I was playing an inspector, I forget the name of the murder thriller, and it was a matinée day and very hot and I remember standing in the dressing-room and I was having a shave, and I thought I had all the time in the world because my first entrance wasn't until the ending of the first act. The inspector comes in, says his lines and ends the first act. So I was standing there quite happily in my boxer shorts having a shave when I heard my call, which I could not believe, and I went absolutely wild. My costume was a suit, an inspector's suit, and a sort of a trench coat and a hat. Anyway, I thought I'd best put on something, the least possible, so I put on trousers and I remember putting on shoes without socks, then I put on the trench coat, did it all up as I'm flying out the door, grabbed the hat and went charging down the stairs, saying, "I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming," and I made it on to the stage just in time, but as I went on someone in the wings said, "Shaving foam, shaving foam!" and I realized that I'd got halfway through this shave and I hadn't wiped it off. Luckily it was on the upstage side, as I was coming on from stage right. So instead of looking at the audience, I did everything looking from stage right to stage left, and the upstage bit was foam in my ears and right round my face. I delivered the line and the curtains came down and I collapsed on the floor half naked and half shaven.'

Persons in this book set themselves on fire, fall out of their costumes, get flattened by scenery, fuck up lines, props, entrances, exits, sound cues, lighting cues, scene changes, the sprinkler system. The number of actors who started their careers as assistant stage managers appears to have been part of the apprenticeship quality of rep; the number of actors who were abruptly promoted because a lead had flanicked screaming into the night feels more telling. "It wasn't till many years later that I got into the truly creative side of acting. In those days it was a question of learn the lines and don't bump into the furniture." It is a tribute to the book's scope that so many of its names are unfamiliar to me when my knowledge of older British actors is not nil; it's not just a skim of national treasures. For every Rachel Kempson, Bernard Hepton, or Fiona Shaw, there's an actor like Attfield whose handful of small parts in film and television has barely impinged on me or even one like Jean Byam who was so strictly stage-based that it would never have been possible for me to see her in anything. At the same time, thanks to its compilation from personal histories, I have been left in possession of some truly random facts concerning actors of long or recent acquaintance during their repertory careers, e.g. Alec McCowen corpsed like anything and at one point became convinced that he could telepathically cause a fellow actor to forget their lines. Richard Pasco had such reliable stage fright that the manager of the Birmingham Rep would knock him up five minutes before curtain to check whether he'd been sick yet. Clive Francis had a stammer so bad it made him the bête noire of the prompt corner at Bexhill-on-Sea. (Robin Ellis did not have a stammer, but found it a lifeline during one particularly non-stop season to play a character with one because it gave him the extra time to reach for his next line.) Bernard Cribbins does not name the production for which he was required to transport a goat—an actual goat, from a farm on the moors—by bus to the theatre, leaving unexplained the reasons it had to be a real one. Of course it was medically possible in the '60's, but it is still n-v-t-s to me that Derek Jacobi got smallpox doing panto in Birmingham. That art was produced by this theatrical system as opposed to merely peerless anecdotes absolutely deserves celebration. As a resource for writers as well as theatre historians and actors, the book is a treasure. Details about interwar digs and mid-century tea matinées would not be out of place in Angela Carter. The less farcical side of all the blowups and breakdowns is the assertion by more than one interviewee that rep provided, if not exactly a safe, then at least a survivable space for a growing actor to fail in ways that were essential to their confidence and their craft: "If you didn't become a great actor in weekly rep, at least you learnt to control your nerves. Despite all the throwing up on a Monday, one seemed to be ice cool on stage, because you knew you mustn't give anything away and you mustn't make your fellow actors look bad." But also one night at the David Garrick Theatre in the late '40's Lionel Jeffries lost hold of a lettuce leaf that sailed out into the stalls and splatted itself dressing and all onto a member of the public and that Saturday a packed house came to see if he'd do it again. Opening the book at random is almost guaranteed to yield a story of this nature. Fortunately I was not onstage at the time, and nobody cared how much I laughed.

Even for a conspiracy thriller, Defence of the Realm (1985) is an uncomfortable film. Its newsroom seems wrapped in a clingfilm of nicotine, its night scenes suffused with the surreal ultramarine that blurs dusk into dawn, its streets and offices as fox-fired with fluorescence as if faintly decaying throughout. An airbase glows as suddenly out of a darkness of fenland as science fiction. Precisely because no one can be seen in it, a window becomes a threat. It is not a sound or a secure world to inhabit and yet because it is ours, its characters walk on our own plain air of pretense, behaving as if its tips and headlines can be relied on until all at once the missed footing of a microcassette or a photocopy becomes an abyss and the most accustomed institutions nothing to hang on to after all. It came out of a decade whose mistrust of its government was proliferating through public discourse and art and felt neither safely transatlantic nor old-fashioned when I first learned of the film, twenty years ago when top-down lies about weapons of mass destruction were particularly au courant. Forty years after its release, its anxieties over the exercise of unaccountable power within a superficially democratic state haven't aged into a fantasy yet.

As a conspiracy thriller, it is not an especially twisty one, which works for rather than against its escalation from tabloid expediency to an open referendum on the British security state; it has one real feint in the juicy hit of its Profumo-style affair after which it can let itself concentrate on the unnerving, bleak, inevitable revelation of a world whose dangers spring not from the rattled skeletons of the Cold War but the actorly handshakes of the Special Relationship. We hear a bulletin on the bombing of the American embassy in Ankara before we see the titles that set the isolated scene of a car speeding down a night-misted road somewhere in the sedge flats of "Eastern England." Further overlays of current events will come to sound more like the Lincolnshire Poacher than Channel 4, a wallpaper of committee hearings and police reports pinging their transmissions among the paranoid legwork of blow-ups and coil taps. "Clapping eyes on it is one thing. Getting a copy out is another. " The flame of truth in this film is more like one of those old incandescent bulbs that take a second or two to sputter on, dust-burnt and bug-flecked. For a while it seems not just carried but incarnated by Vernon Bayliss, one of the rumpled nonpareils of 1980's Denholm Elliott—nothing but the rigs of the Thatcherite time explains what his old leftie is doing as the veteran hack of a right-wing rag like the Daily Dispatch, but it's a riveting showcase for his voice that crackles with cynicism while the rest of his face looks helplessly hurt, his disorganized air of not even having gotten to the bed he just fell out of, a couple of heel-taps from a permanently half-cut Cassandra of the Street of Shame. "Vodka and Coca-Cola! Détente in a glass." His inability to drink his ethics under the table and accept the gift-wrapped stitch-up of the Markham affair may be a professional embarrassment, but it gives him a harassed dignity that persists through his cagily tape-recorded conversations, his blatantly burgled flat, his obsessive spiraling after something worse than a scoop, the facts. "Oh, well," he snarls with such exasperated contempt that the cliché sounds like another shortwave code, "don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." It makes his successor in the threads of the conspiracy even more counterintuitive and compelling, since just the CV of his byline establishes Nick Mullen as the kind of ingeniously shameless journo who never has yet. Gabriel Byrne looks too wolfishly handsome for an ice-cream face, but he has no trouble passing himself off as a plainclothes copper in order to upstage the competition with an extra-spicy soundbite gleaned from an all-night stakeout and a literal foot in the door. His neutrally converted flat looks barely moved into, its mismatched and minimal furnishings dominated by the analog workstation of his deep-drawered desk with its card file and telephone and cork board and typewriter, a capitalist-realist joke of a work-life balance. Whatever he actually believes about the exposé he's penned with everything in it from call girls to CND, it comes an obvious second to drinks with the deputy editor and being let off puff pieces about the bingo—fast-forwarded four decades of slang, Nick might say in line with his corporatized, privatized generation that caring is cringe. "Give me a break. You know how it is. It's a bloody good story!" And yet because he's not too successfully disaffected to show concern when a mordantly ratted Vernon raises a belligerent glass to his shadow from Special Branch, in little more than the time it takes to jimmy open a filing cabinet he will find himself not merely retracing his older colleague's steps but telescoping through them, the real story coming in like a scream of turbines and terrifyingly so much less clandestine than it should have had the decency to be. Le Carré is invoked with debunking condescension, but it is just that chill of his which pervades this film whose obscured, oppressive antagonist is not a foreign power or a rogue agent or even a sinister corporation but the establishment itself, blandly willing to commit any number of atrocities to contain a scandal that goes considerably further than the death of a young offender or the indiscretions of a former chairman of the Defence Select Committee. The old scares still work when Vernon's integrity can be questioned with the reminder of his Communist youth, but the cold isn't coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain: if you can't see your breath in Whitehall, you must not be looking. Hence the warmest character on this scene is its most disposable and its antihero in ever greater danger as he makes not only the tradecraft connections of collated data, but the human ones of outrage, trust, and shame, learning to shiver as he goes, but fast enough? His faith in his own disillusion is touchingly unequal to the pitiless weirdness of the tribunal of nameless civil servants who cross-question him like judges of the underworld in triplicate before turning him loose into a night so vaporous and deserted, its traffic lights blinking robotically in the mercury sheen, it seems that in the ultimate solipsism of conspiracy Nick has become the one real person in all of London. After all, a state need not kill if it can atomize, terminating communication either way. "The only person who knew the answer to that question was Vernon."

Originating as a screenplay by Martin Stellman who already had the anti-establishment cult non-musical Quadrophenia (1979) under his belt and directed by prior documentarian David Drury, Defence of the Realm had grounds for its nervous clamminess even before the photography of Roger Deakins, who gave it a color scheme which tends even in natural light toward the blanched or crepuscular and a camera which monitors its subjects from such surreptitious telephoto angles—when it isn't jostling against them like an umbrella in a crowd—that no closed-circuit, reel-to-reel confirmation is required for it to feel unsafe for them to be captured on film at all. "Age of Technology, eh?" Nick remarks affectionately, rescuing Vernon from the poser of the portable tape recorder. "You haven't even caught up with the Industrial Revolution." Suitable to its techno-thriller aspects, the film is as mixed in its media as parapsychological sci-fi, but whatever pre-digital nostalgia the viewer may feel toward an Olympus Pearlcorder S920 or a Xerox machine should tap out at nuclear-armed F-111s. "R.A.F. Milden Heath, Home of the 14th Tac. Fighter Wing U.S. Air Force" hardly needs the geographical triangulation of Brandon and Thetford to translate it into RAF Lakenheath where two separate near-accidents involving American nukes on British soil really had, in 1956 and 1961, occurred. Only the first had been officially acknowledged at the time of the film's production and release. The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was still in full protest, the American nuclear presence a plutonium-hot, red-button issue; it was no stretch to imagine another incident kicked under the irradiated carpet at all costs. The film's more disturbing skepticism is reserved for the trustiness of its hot metal news. Its portrait of the fourth estate is not wholly unaffectionate, especially in cultural details such as the racket of a banging-out ceremony in the composing room, the collage of pin-ups in the stacks of the manila-filed morgue, or even the pained groan with which Bill Paterson's Jack Macleod observes the disposal of a cup of cold coffee: "Aw, Christ, what did that geranium ever do to you?" The Conservative sympathies of the paper, however, are flagged on introduction as its senior staff slam-dunk the character assassination of a prominent opposition MP and it is eventually no surprise to find its owner in more than tacit collusion with the faceless forces of the security services, considering his side hustle in defence contracting. "The man's into the government for millions . . . They build American bases. Can't jeopardize that, old son." It is not just the individual journalists in Defence of the Realm, but the entire concept of a free press that seems fragile, contingent, compromised. For all its triumphal, classical headline montage, the film goes out on a note of thrumming ambiguity, whether the conspiracy will perpetuate itself through its own media channels, whether everything we have seen lost will be worth the sacrifice or merely the valiant humanity of trying. These days I would be much more hostile to the magical thinking of a secret state except for all the authoritarianism. Move over, Vernon, even if both halves of your favorite beverage would try to kill me. "It's a free country. I think."

Denholm Elliott won his third consecutive BAFTA for Defence of the Realm and deserved to, stealing a film so three-dimensionally that his exit leaves the audience less twist-shocked than bereft: what a waste that he and Judi Dench never played siblings or cousins, their cat's faces and wide-set jasper eyes. Ian Bannen appears even more sparingly as Dennis Markham, but he only needs to be remembered as Jim Prideaux to trail that cold world in with him. As his PA, Greta Scacchi's Nina Beckman is self-possessed, unimpressed, and it feels like a mark of the film's maturity that she does not fall into bed with Nick when he's of much more use to her as a partner in counter-conspiracy, meeting on the red-railed Hungerford Bridge where we cannot tell if the reverse-shot pair on the concrete arches of Waterloo Bridge should be taken as tourists, commuters, more of the surveillance apparatus that feels so very little need to disguise itself. It is not faint praise that Gabriel Byrne thinks convincingly onscreen, especially when Nick gives an initial impression of cleverness rather than depth. I can respect the way he lives in the one tweed jacket down to falling asleep in his car in it. After two decades of keeping an eye out, I pounced on this film on Tubi despite its rather disappointingly scrunchy transfer and enjoyed it in much better shape on YouTube. Whatever else has dated of its technologies and mores, I have to say that a distrust of American nuclear capacities sounds healthy to me. This détente brought to you by my industrial backers at Patreon.