A Stranger's Tear

I forgot to bring my camera when I left the house to walk around the block this evening, but I saw a white hibiscus growing through a hedge and bees clustered around some brilliantly Halloweenish orange flowers. I have not had my head in the sand despite being under quite a lot of rocks this month, but I am still demoralized that an international friend's postcard could not reach me because of the intimidation theater of the tariffs. Nor am I thrilled that last week I had an unexpectedly bizarre interaction with a medical professional about Tylenol. I am much more cheered by the existence of ghost ponds and the renascent fern, not to mention the eleven-million-year-old asteroid no one knows yet where it hit. The Draconids peak on the eve of my birthday this year. Last week was still too many doctors, but I have hopes of fewer in the week to come. At least I managed for the first time on this new regimen to write about a film.

Every time I watch Heat and Dust (1983), I want to write about its beautifully patterned expectations and ironies, its women who confront or evade them, its last extraordinary melding of time done with nothing more than a window that contains one decade and reflects another while the snow-flanked mountains stand behind them both, and it seems that I am writing about Harry Hamilton-Paul.

I shouldn't be surprised. In a film much concerned with cultural codes and transgressions, he's the most liminal character, the oddest man out, the last living memory of the scandal that rocked the Civil Lines at Satipur in 1923 when British India was the jewel of the never-set Empire of which he was most definitely not a builder. He's the storyteller, partly narrating the past thread of the film from his future as a tobacco-tanned old India hand who can't resist giving the same colonial advice about water and fruit and salads that he never heeded in his youthful days as—a meaningful, veiled word—the guest of the Nawab of Khatm. His presence at diplomatic functions is ambidextrous, dinner-jacketed at a state banquet, turbaned at a palace durbar, as likely to be found on his own time in an angarkha as a tennis shirt, belting out enthusiastically amateur selections from Pagliacci and acidly losing at cards to the ladies of the zenana. His role in them is blatantly unexplained. Nickolas Grace gives him such an arch, pointed face, his eyes ironically lidded even when flat on his back in a fever of homesickness and his serious statements edged like light comedy, he's impossible to imagine as even a one-time appendage of the repressive civil service which in any case considers him to have rather disgracefully let the side down, but neither does he seem, like his secretarial antecedents of E. M. Forster or J. R. Ackerley, even pretextually employed at the court of the Nawab. The British colony pronounces the censorious last word: "No Englishman has any business living in that palace." But of course he does, if a man as brilliantly virile and vulnerable as Shashi Kapoor's Nawab wants him there. Like a kinder revision of Cyril Sahib in Autobiography of a Princess (1975), Harry admits the possibility of queerness into the double-tracked heterosexuality of the plot. Bonding over the absurdities of imperial ritual with Greta Scacchi's Olivia Rivers, he drops the courteous hairpin of complimenting the playing-fields-of-Eton looks of her assistant collector of a husband, but his cynically comfortable company offers more than a diversion from the crashing propriety incumbent on a junior officer's wife: he's the dangerous proof that a sojourn in the subcontinent doesn't have to be circumscribed by casually racist platitudes and the insular summer exodus to Simla, that she too might meet something of the less tamely glamorous, princely India under the veneer of the Raj in the reciprocal person of the Nawab, for whom she is no more the typical memsahib than Harry is anything other than "a very improper Englishman." What she cannot see in her reckless innocence is the difference in the risks they run, how much more inflammatorily her cross-cultural desires intersect with the implacable conventions of both sides of the colonial project. Harry's situation is sufficiently ambiguous that the Nawab can claim him as if with the bridal cliché that his mother has gained rather than lost a son, but Olivia's unchaperoned visits to the palace set the rumor mill grinding even when their ostensible object is her heat-stricken countryman, reading all the London-fogged Dickens he can get his hands on. No political value is set on his virtue. And yet for just a little while before the tide of empire engulfs Khatm and strands its principal players in a flat in Park Lane, a chalet in Gulmarg, the denuded ghost of the palace left like a rain-stained shrine to its ruler's deposition, the triangulation of the friendship between Olivia and Harry and their mutual importance to the Nawab makes the three of them look like a ménage across borders, the charmed space of a triad not so totally unlike the tripartite composition of their writing-directing-producing team. The appeal of a hand on a shoulder, a fumble with unfamiliar undergarments. "We've left British India. Now you're in my power, like him. I'm only joking."

The production that broke them out on the international scene, Heat and Dust was model Merchant Ivory, produced by Ismail, directed by James, and closely and imaginatively adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own 1975 Booker winner with a cast as sumptuous and astringent as its dual-layered portrait of India. As the captivating Nawab, Kapoor gets to strike evasive, reflective, funny as well as mouthwatering notes, while Christopher Cazenove's Douglas Rivers may be a dutiful empire-builder, but we meet him first weeping for his wife: Scacchi's Olivia with her blossoming, owl-boned face moves against her colonial obligations out of defiance as well as naïveté and it suits a film so attentive to the limits of female autonomy that the resolution of her predicament should lie with Madhur Jaffrey as the regally chain-smoking Begum. By dint of wrapping itself around a mystery, the 1982 thread can't help feeling like a frame story even when interwoven with deliberate, blurring touches like a municipal office suddenly faded out of a bungalow, but Julie Christie and Zakir Hussein give the affair of Anne and Inder Lal enough of its own casual chemistry that it makes a contrast, although Ratna Pathak as Ritu is just sketched as the spouse this time around; the film seems more curious about the would-be sanyasi of Charles McCaughan's Chid, whose dead-end self-actualization lightly tweaks the latter-day colonialism of cultural appropriation. Walter Lassally shoots painterly set-ups and candid camera streets with equal assurance, including the introductory shot of Olivia looking straight out through the fourth wall of the letters to her sister that started Anne off on the whole quest to retrace her great-aunt's scandalous footsteps, whose bookend is an elegantly enigmatic, portrait-like moment where record and recollection have run out, leaving only the woman herself. The fact remains of my affection for Harry, who bridges the threads of time and when faced with the turmoil of dacoits and riots and the murky intrigues of the man he loves, admits frankly, "Well, when all these kinds of things happened, I just gave up and ran away to Olivia's house and begged her to play some Schumann." Fortunately, he and his film are prolifically available on various forms of streaming and more than one region of Blu-Ray/DVD. It only took me since before the last glaciation to get around to them. This indiscretion brought to you by my improper backers at Patreon.

Nothing enlivens an afternoon like hearing from your primary care physician that actually last week you almost died, especially since it didn't feel like it at the time. Continued proof of life offered from the stoplights of rush hour. Have some links.



1. Transfixed by a dapper portrait of Yuan Meiyun, I discovered it is likely a still from her star-making, genderbending soft film 化身姑娘 (1936), apparently translated as Girl in Disguise or Tomboy. In the same decade, it would fit right into a repertory series with Viktor und Viktoria (1933) or Sylvia Scarlett (1936). To my absolute shock, it is jankily on YouTube. Subtitled it is not, but I really expected to have to wait for the 16 mm archival rediscovery.

2. Because I had occasion to recommend it this afternoon, Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen (1931) does not seem to rate in the lineage of time-slip fantasies, but for its era it is the queerest I have encountered, the awakening sense of difference of its fifteen-year-old protagonist erotically and magically mediated by Hermes in his aspect as conductor of souls and charmer of sleep, dreams figuring in this novel with the same slipperiness of time and identity that can accidentally bring a secret self like a stranger out of an unknowing stratum of the past. It's all on the slant of ancient Greek mysticism and the pollen-stain of a branch of lilac brushed across a sleeper's mouth and a lot of thinking about the different ways of liking and then there's a kiss. It was written out of a dream of the author's and it reads like one, elliptical, liminal, a spell that can be broken at a touch. I have no idea of its ideal audience—fans of Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958) and E. M. Forster's Maurice (1971)? I read it in the second year of the pandemic and kept forgetting to mention it. Whatever else, it is a novel about the queerness of time.

3. I am enjoying Phil Stong's State Fair (1932), but I really appreciated the letter from the author quoted mid-composition in the foreword: "I've finally got a novel coming in fine shape. I've done 10,000 words on it in three days and I get more enthusiastic every day . . . I hope I can hold up this time. I always write 10,000 swell words and then go to pieces."

I got up far too early to talk about far too much of my health, but I have been shot in the shoulder and eaten a bagel with chopped liver, which is at least two things the current administration would not care for. I am cleared to travel at the end of the month.

Now that it's been dislodged into the forefront of my consciousness, the phenomenon of Pirates of the Caribbean feels like the one real time in my life I was part of a megafandom and mostly what happened was the rest of the planet suddenly concurred that tall ships and chanteys and sea-change were cool. I saw Dead Man's Chest (2006) with my family because Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) had been such an unexpected swashbuckling delight, but I saw At World's End (2007) at a packed multiplex with friends who had agreed in common with much of the audience to arrive wearing as much pirate regalia as we could muster from our wardrobes, which at that time in my life meant the one rust-colored eighteenth-century shirt and my hair tied back with a black ribbon, the gold rings in my ears being a fortuitously preexisting condition. Especially since I continued not to interact with the supermassive explosion of fic unless it originated with my friendlist, that may be the most clinically fannish thing I have done in my life. I have never looked forward to a sequel in theaters before or since. I got the salt-green seventeenth-century glass onion bottle out of that first summer, as if it had been conjured off the screen into the traditional antique shop window for me to fall in love with its crusted tide. In the dog days of the second, I finished the novelette its sand-swirled, barnacle-silted draught was part of the pearl-grit for. In the span of that year, my graduate career had conclusively foundered and left me washing around in the wreckage. It had not occurred to me previously, but in their own flawed and splashier, blockbuster fashion, those two films may have been as much of a lifeline as the sea they evoked. I didn't expect to share it with an entire internet, but I am not sure the experience hurt me any, even if it has never repeated since.

From reading about this message in a bottle, I learned not only about John Craighead George whose mother's books I grew up on, but his twin conservationists of uncles whom I had known nothing about, so all things considered it carried a great deal of information in its transit from Point Barrow to Shapinsay.

The status of the yontif this year is that my mother and I made honeycakes, but it is autumn and the head of the year and we are still here, the important thing. A sweet year, a safe. L'shanah tovah, all.

Home from six days in hospital with a plan designed not to land me back there any time soon, I have been passed into the care of Dr. Hestia, who is already carrying out her duties with enthusiastic ministrations of purr. I have washed my hair for the first time in a week. I have eaten food prepared by my family. I napped like a stone in the late afternoon, which I will have needed since my regimen for the foreseeable involves a schedule of medications I cannot let slide even when some of them require me to be awake at hours I have preferred my entire life to spend unconscious. My calendar is inevitably full of further maintenance, but I am truly looking forward to an increase in conversations that have nothing to do with the monitoring of my vitals. Mostly I am marrow-tired and vague with new chemistry and glad to be home in my own clothes and drinking water I don't have to ring anyone to bring me in bed. I was not expecting and delight in the gift of a plush harpy eagle that arrived while I was away.

This afternoon I voted Miss Jessel from Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) one of my favorite ghosts on film, a tall order but a true one. A masterstroke of sound design and suggestion, she's not spectral, she's uncanny: as real as the reflection she casts on the sunlit shiver of the lake, as motionless in the heat as the bulrushes she stands so far out among, she could be walking on water, though we will learn she drowned herself in it instead. Her slight, dark-dressed figure in long shot gives no impression of a threat, nor even any particular emotion such as hunger or melancholy that would make her apparition easier to read. Her incongruity becomes its own eeriness, the noonday drabness of her presence more frightening than its disappearance between one look and the next, which is after all only characteristic of her kind, though part of the film's chill is that really it has no such rules by which a haunting may be mapped and governed, only the inexplicable facts of things that should not be. Once we have heard that she grieved sleeplessly for her rough, flaunting lover until she died of him, the governess played like a doorway of possession by Deborah Kerr can hear her sobbing, a desolate, gulping, wretchedly echoing sound that when finally traced to the schoolroom has nothing to do with the still-faced, dry-eyed imprint of Miss Jessel at her desk and yet when the governess rushes to the empty chair and touches the slate left by her own earlier lesson, it is wet with tears. Without a parapsychological conversation in sight, it gives the effect of a ghost that has stained through time in all its layers, desynched to perpetuity. The parallel sightings of Peter Wyngarde's Peter Quint with his cock-strut and his bestial snarl of a smile, always smeared through sun-mist, night-glass, steam-sweat until he can cast his unfiltered shadow from a crumbling ring of statues at last have their own rude potency, as malignantly charged as one of the more explicitly libidinous legends of Hell House, but it is his ruined lover who looks as though you could never scrape her off the air, so soaked into this patch of reality that trying to part her from the grounds of Bly would be about as efficacious as trying to exorcise an ice age. Their voices whisper like tape loops on the candlelit stairs. The children are watching. The children are watching. The children are watching. Like the uncredited radiophonics of Daphne Oram that accompany her first, summer-humming manifestation, Miss Jessel or whatever has been left of her belongs to the weirdness of time just really starting to flower in British film and TV, more Nigel Kneale than Henry James or even Truman Capote and yet she fits as exactly into the sensibilities of the Victorian Gothic as she would into the bright horror of that lakeside to this day. She was one of three images left on film by the artist and director Clytie Jessop and I doubt you could get her off the print, either. This excellence brought to you by my watching backers at Patreon.

I just had my first opportunity to shower in four nights, even without washing my hair, so I just had the same opportunity to free-associate in the shower.

I have no explanation for why I was singing the blessedly abridged setting of Kipling's "The Ladies" (1896) that I learned from the singing of John Clements in Ships with Wings (1941) except that it's been in my head ever since it displaced Cordelia's Dad's "Delia" (1992).

As a person who does think all the time about the Roman Empire, I am incapable of not associating Rosemary Sutcliff's "The Girl I Kissed at Clusium" (1954) with Sydney Carter's "Take Me Back to Byker" (1963)—as performed by Donald Swann, the only way I have ever heard it—even though Sutcliff was obviously drawing on Kipling's "On the Great Wall" (1906) with her long march and songs that run in and out of fashion with the Legions and the common ancestor of all of them anyway is almost certainly "The Girl I Left Behind Me" (17th-whatever).

Somehow I remain less over the fact that Donald Swann was the first person to record Carter's "Lord of the Dance" (1964) than the fact that he did a song cycle of Middle-Earth (1967) and an opera of Perelandra (1964).

Oh, shoot, Swann would have made a great Campion. You register the horn-rims and immediately tune out the face behind them.

Ignoring the appealingly transitive properties of Wimsey, Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter, I am not going to rewatch the episode of Granada Holmes starring Clive Francis, I am going to lie down before someone wakes me.