Myth Happens

We came prepared to take our order and run a gauntlet of seagulls to the car, but somewhat inexplicably in this recursion of the dog days we had no trouble getting a table outdoors at Belle Isle Seafood and I reduced a plate of smelts to their spines and fried tails while the sun burned down like time-lapse over the Boston skyline. The dock where the white-and-teal lobster boat ties up was piled with wire-yellow traps, a brick-pink bucket and grey plastic crates all casting long shadows. Seagulls stood like pins on the tops of the pilings. I found myself shifting like a clock to keep the swarm of reflections off the water from blinding me in one eye. Over his shrimp cocktail, the diner at the next table was carefully taking pictures of the domestic flights roaring in from the north to Logan—Delta, American Airlines, JetBlue. A cormorant stitched in and out of the harbor-swell until it came up with a fish of its own. Especially after the industrial moonscape of cylindrical white fuel tanks lining the road against a space-blue sky, the spidering vertical lift of the Chelsea Street Bridge in the red wash of stopped traffic had an unexpected cyberpunk feel. I fell slightly asleep in the last phase of Route 16. It was spatch's treat to me at the end of this lengthily medical day.

Between 1977 and 1980, Tanith Lee wrote four plays for BBC Radio 4, three of which were just commercially released for the first time as Israbel, The Silver Sky & More (2026) along with two broadcasts of short stories of hers from 2003 and 2011. Voices include Paul Darrow, Elizabeth Bell, Stephen Thorne, Stella Gonet, Mark Bonnar. I had heard one of the plays and one of the readings and never been able to track down the rest. Since she admitted to rebuilding one play out of an unsuccessful short story, I wonder if the never-realized radio treatment of Set and Isis which she mentions in this 1985 interview ever surfaced in her other fiction. Her ship manifesto for Blake's 7 is extremely on brand: "There was a joke that if you brought Avon and Servalan together you'd short-out the galaxy! So I thought let's not short-out the galaxy just yet . . . But had the series gone on I wouldn't have been able to avoid it." It is unnecessarily entertaining to me that the next thing in the same magazine is an interview with Mark Strickson.

As various historical statistics shake out from the Hokusai-wave of this election, I learned this afternoon that the last time there were no Republicans from New England in the United States Senate, there were no Republicans in New England on account of the party had not yet formed out of an antislavery coalition of Whigs and Free Soilers. It's nice to see the arc of moral irony in action.

Until such time as the exercise of democracy no longer feels like existential white knuckles, we have voted. WERS was playing Woody Guthrie to encourage its listeners toward the polls.

I am reading Dermot Turing's Enigma Traitors: The Struggle to Lose the Cipher War (2023), essentially a North Atlantic-focused history of cipher insecurity on both sides of World War II, and listening to Caroline Rose's "Yip Yip Yow" (2026), which hasn't been out of my head since I discovered it last night. I don't often have wish-fulfillment dreams, but the restoration of lost Powell and Pressburger definitely counts. So does the uncomplicated ability to watch a movie on my own time, I suppose.

Tomorrow I have a doctor's appointment in the middle of the afternoon and Hestia has one first thing in the morning. We had better both get treats.

Rabbit, rabbit! The cat-o'-lantern has extinguished itself after twenty-five hours, signifying the end of Halloween. I was slightly paranoid that some demented executive order would prevent the clocks from falling back, but the light adjusted itself correctly for the pivot of autumn and we put the extra hour toward watching Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971).

After carving our pumpkins slightly against the clock of the costumed children we could already see beginning to roam the streets, I assisted my mother in the reception of trick-or-treaters, of which it felt like we had a record number this year. They arrived in numbers anywhere from a trio to an armada. We were charmed early on by the politely spoken astronaut who took an additional candy bar for his round flannel chicken and later by the two-year-old in deely bobbers whose moms were encouraging her through her very first Halloween. The most impressive of the inflatable costumes was the cowboy astride a tyrannosaur skeleton. The market on the medieval era had obviously been cornered by the group which contained both the plague doctor and the unicorn. I wasn't on the door at the time to see the get-up of the middle-schooler who exclaimed at the sight of my mother in her black-zagged orange poncho and her black hat with the veils turned back over the brim, "She's a witch! That means she's my friend." I wore my Minoan octopus sweater from rushthatspeaks, which went over well with its black-and-orange Marine Style.

To inaugurate November, I did very little beyond taking a walk in the cooling iron sunset, talking on the phone with selkie, and making dinner with spatch out of leftover London broil and freshly twice-baked potatoes. Tomorrow returns at speed to the rounds of logistics, but it actually was a very nice Halloween.

Leo Marks, what was known about you when? When a character half an hour into "A Free Agent" (1964) suddenly produces a printed silk worked-out key, who was the joke meant for? How many viewers would even have recognized the signature tradecraft of SOE at the deep-freeze height of the Cold War? The life that you had you kept close to your vest, but you left yourself all over your art like a poem in the public domain: who were you waiting to catch your checks and bluffs? You were too good a codemaker to imagine yourself indecipherable. What would the White Rabbit have said?

Produced near the end of the short run of ITC's Espionage (1963–64), Marks' sole effort for the small screen was one of his neatest, a twice-twisted little thriller of manners with a punch line as sure as a stopped clock. It begins like a Hollywood ending, a burly man in a duffel coat and a slim-boned woman in white astrakhan embracing rapturously off the train among the snow-capped chalets of an Alpine resort—where better for spies to honeymoon than out in the cold? Three whirlwind weeks ago, Phillip and Anna Sangster (Anthony Quayle and Siân Phillips) resigned from their respective agencies in order to pull the Iron Curtain back on their romance and their governments haven't given them a moment's peace since. Did she suborn him? Did he seduce her? What service of the slightest intelligence would risk its national security on the promise of a "pact" between a pair of professional liars? They claim to have divulged no secrets, official or otherwise, no matter how gravely and fondly they address one another as "Whitehall" and "Moscow." They bet their happiness against each other in Swiss francs, American dollars, Deutsche Marks. The exquisitely international clock presented to them by the burgomaster Max (Norman Foster) bodes well for their border-jumping domesticity, but even ritually deep-sixing the packages waiting in the guesthouse with postmarks from London and East Berlin cannot ward off the double act of minders whose arrival will spoil their idyll all too soon. "Trip to Switzerland, all expenses paid? Chance of a party? Not a hope." The curt sharpshooter Peter (George Mikell) couldn't look more personally as well as ideologically opposed to the drawlingly impish Douglas (John Wood), but their cynically coaligned interests make them an even faster match than the Sangsters, trading the droll and chilling traffic of Izvestia and Stephen Potter, a double vodka and a large Scotch. "Race you back!" the Soviet agent calls merrily to the Englishman swinging himself onto the ski lift that so recently served as an open-air interrogation room, as if their cartoons of ruthlessness and camp were starting to bleed together or never that far apart to begin with. Like the looking-glass world it describes, the teleplay induces an abyss of second guesses simply from the apparent straightforwardness of its events. If the marriage is, as charged, a "put-up job," for whose benefit has it been staged? Who is colluding with whom and in whose interests? The viewer pores for clues that the characters flamboyantly pass over, a half-torn photograph, a glass of hot spilled milk, the subfusc meanings of a shaving cut or a partly packed suitcase. Somewhere in all this noise must be a signal, even if it's a heartbreaker when it comes in. Was there anything else to decrypt from this exercise in double-transposition? Perhaps not: "What else is as dirty?"

Burnination has made Swiss cheese of the record, but the '60's saw a Cambrian explosion of spies on British TV—Danger Man (1960–68), The Avengers (1961–69), The Mask of Janus (1965), The Rat Catchers (1966–67), Callan (1967–72), and so forth through the ne plus paranoia of The Prisoner (1967–68). The anthology settings of Espionage ranged unusually from the American Revolution and the Easter Rising to World War II and CND marches and tonally could fall anywhere from light comedy to splintering disillusion, but its unifying attention to the costs and limits of the human chess game tended to incline its stories toward the more somber side of its theme. With its specter of an indifferent, expedient establishment whose maneuvers against its enemies are entailed with the betrayal of its own, "A Free Agent" fits right into the downbeat tradition personified by John le Carré since the publication of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold in September 1963, but I trust that Leo Marks who wrote so painfully of having to brief agents bound for the blown circuits of the Englandspiel would have been able to arrive at the necessary depth of skepticism on his own time. Characteristically he approaches it on the slant of wisecrack; the appearance of Peter is a wicked sting at the wedding breakfast, but Douglas steps ganglingly through a second-story window to dispense the arch warning, "Whitehall doesn't love you anymore." As he sails across the room to glad-hand Anna, his former partner wearily introduces him, "I'm afraid I lied to you. MI5 do use anti-personnel devices." The next morning, Peter is taking deadpan aim at a valentine. The cleverness never dries even as the farcical badgering of the lovers ices over with tragedy. A little of it is the essential absurdism of spying which invests the most mundane items with a suspicious second life—the tape recorder in the cigarette case, the key in the wadded-up scarf, the covert significance in the commonplace phrase until the pattern recognition gets stuck in a feedback loop and shorts out. More of it is the essential Marks. Four scripts and one memoir into his catalogue, I haven't seen evidence that he could turn it off yet. It signs the teleplay even more unmistakably than a sighting of silk or a conscience, the wry motormouth in a bleak corner that produces lines like "So I gave you some doubts, and you gave me the benefit of them." Actually I am surprised he never stole one of the balder, bitterer ones for his memoir, all things considered: it is a recommendation for the Order of the Double-Cross.

As far as I can tell, the cryptographic innovation of the worked-out key, along with its successor the letter one-time pad, was identified for the public for the first time, without attribution, in the official history of M. R. D. Foot's SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France 1940–1944 (1966). Michael Powell in Million Dollar Movie (1992) remembered seeing a copy in the possession of Leo Marks during one of their meetings toward the fumbled production of Sebastian (1968): "He claimed to have access to these and other secret documents, because he was referred to by name as head of agents' codes in SOE during the war." That note of sometimes amused agnosticism features in most of his recollections of their off-and-on partnership; he paints the former codemaker as a formidable, ambivalent personality, encyclopedically versed in spies and ciphers, theatrically suggestive as to the extent of his involvement with them, one of those curious, chancy figures who thrive on dirty tricks and never settle entirely to the straight life. "He was malicious, inventive, and unshockable," Powell concludes, which could come as news to readers more familiar with Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941–1945 (1998) and its portrait of the artist as three or more panic attacks in a trenchcoat. He called him, too, as he did with Pressburger, "an ideal creative partner." They would work successfully together only this one more time. "A Free Agent" was the second of three stories directed by Powell for Espionage, part of his switch into television following the incinerating critical reception of Peeping Tom (1960); he brought Marks on with him and may have found himself directing a version of the double agent film that he recalled his erstwhile collaborator always pitching. It is not without directorial flair, tidily nipping a greeting into a marriage service and ping-ponging a negotiation like sly Morse, but it's easier for me to read the writer between its lines. Austria stood in for Switzerland in the location shooting, specifically St. Anton am Arlberg where the Powell family on a busman's holiday can be glimpsed among the extras around the ski lift. It was cleanly photographed by Geoffrey Faithfull, whom Powell might have remembered from his quota quickie days or Marks from The Girl Who Couldn't Quite (1950). Since he was seconded to the Albanian resistance straight from Cairo, I have not been able to find that Quayle in the course of his own time with SOE was ever introduced to Marks, but the latter commended him as a rare asset as both actor and agent. For the record, although not as the inventor of WOKs or the reinventor of LOPs, Marks did rate the name-check in Foot.

The worked-out key in itself is not important to "A Free Agent." It enables one character to counter another's story about silk ties with the rather echt-Marks accusation, "This sort of silk?" but so far as the plot is concerned it could be any telltale of the trade; it doesn't have to be what it is. I recognized it at once from the double-page spread of silks at the center of Between Silk and Cyanide. For all I know, Marks furnished it from his own collection. He breached no official secrets by doing so; the issuing of codes on silk rather than paper had been mentioned in books by former agents as far back as the immediate post-war. A carefully vague précis of the technique had even been presented in Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), showing each thin strip of treated silk with its pair of randomly generated transposition-keys cut away and burnt after use with the much more dangerously memorized poem-code held in reserve; it was much more relevant to the narrative there. Marks did not publicize his technical advising on that film any more than he let himself be credited for the instant classic of "The Life That I Have" (1943); he would remain similarly shadowy when he voiced the Devil for Scorsese in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), speaking from a pillar of wind-whipped fire like an deceptive God. He left no obvious tracks except for the way that he did. The fact that he talked so freely about some of them makes me all the more interested in the ones he didn't admit. The YouTube channel where I originally found this one perished less than a week later, but luckily the show hasn't lost too much quality on the Internet Archive. It goes without saying that the Region 2 DVDs are entirely out of print. It's a tight five-hander for its cast, a credit to its blast-cratered director, another piece of the puzzle from its writer who once set crosswords for The Times. Did you think you would never write a memoir, Leo? For a man who loved encryption, you could make a remarkably clear text. This job brought to you by my ideal backers at Patreon.

I don't see that I needed to start running a fever last night. I seem not to have plague and assume I would be worse if I had flu. I just ate a couple of pieces of challah with lox cream cheese, at least. Have some links.

1. Not in fact having read any Leonid Andreyev unless one counts the transitive exposure of Sjöstrom's He Who Gets Slapped (1924), I was incredibly struck by "The Alarm Bell" (1901). Anyone who knows Sona Verdi should tell her that I would read her translation of a collection of his stories stat.

2. I had never heard of the Negro League Jewishness of Oscar Levis. The line on Caribbean Sephardic descent is fascinating in and of itself.

3. Since it had been ten years since I saw Itan Tiray in the incomparably clinging Demon (2015), still the best dybbuk film in any country since Michał Waszyński, I wondered what he was doing lately. The answer aside from his pro-Palestinian activism seems to be the WWII noir Wild, Wild East (2026). I'll have to find him in something without the Holocaust under it sometime, but until then I'm in.

4. Gordon Chapman-Fox's Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan is not a Ghost Box project, but it shares their hauntological interest in failed futures and the sfnal gap between optimism and realization. It isn't satire like Scarfolk. It seems concerned with real places and time. I discovered this power-line-humming music with The Nation's Most Central Location (2023) and wished Mark Fisher had been around to review it.

5. I hadn't seen that Project Gutenberg Canada had ceased to exist as such. I read all my early Cyril Hare there. At least Faded Page still seems to be with us.

6. Speaking of Canada, if geographically enabled please tell Vancouver Island University not to pull out of its student refugee program. This is not a good time anywhere to shut the door on anyone.

7. To my surprise, the TNT equivalent of the meteor that exploded over Cape Cod Bay this spring has been revised to 0.5 kt. It was associated with no known showers or parent bodies. A neat thing to be able to study.

spatch made a point last week of ordering a nice thing from Lofty Pursuits' Public Displays of Confection, whose vintage-machined hard candies we had not had in years. We have yet to get the tin open of Ghost Tangerine Sours, but the Tupelo Honeycomb is a knockout.

P.S. Since making this post, I have been made aware of the deep-sea eco-horror game The Murmuring Depths and the new moon crater.

On the theory of making our lives a little less difficult, spatch and I have been presented by my parents with an electric kettle, which should in fact stop me needing to run the microwave like breathing. The kettle that lives on our stove had exceeded the capabilities of white vinegar and was starting to resemble a petrifying well. I was fourteen when I became intolerant to caffeine and can remember the experience of coffee and tea before they began to taste like danger signals; I never got into drinking coffee and don't miss it except in the form of ice cream, but I actually liked tea, or at least I acquired an emotional attachment from being taught to drink it by my mother and grandmother. These days it's a lot of nice cups of boiling hot water.

No one is picking the apples that edge the yard across from my parents' house. The air smells like ground-fall every time I get out of the car. I have absolutely no idea what kind they are except late-ripening, smallish and wine-red, a slight grape-bloom on their skins; not all of them are bird-eaten and their branches reach across the fence. At the point where apples are otherwise ending up in the street, I feel they should be fair game for passers-by.

This afternoon's haul from the Malden Public Library was mostly out-of-print mysteries for my mother, but I got Rumer Godden's A Fugue in Time (1945) and The Greengage Summer (1958) because I have never read them and William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust (1948) because the film amazed me. It cannot be true that the only poems I have memorized without having learned them as songs are Yeats' "The Second Coming" (1919) and Housman's "The Oracles" (1922), but those were the two that came up while driving. I assume a consequence of the degree to which it remains unrealistically exhausting to be alive.

This has really not been the birthday month I wanted. I do like the notion of using clams to seed eelgrass.

Anyway, while I was distracted by filing a claim for our stolen and damaged property, support for the non-subscription version of Microsoft Word 2021 ran out and as of this evening I am once again locked out of my own archive of intellectual property on my own computer. It contains to feel invasive and insane to me that it is even possible to brick a one-time purchase in order to force compliance with a subscription service. I had just begun to write for the first time in weeks about a movie. At this point I just want to die about it.

To the very small number whom it may concern—although statistically likelier to occur on my friendlist than many places on the internet—I am flabbergasted to report that Leo Marks' The Girl Who Couldn't Quite (1950) has been uploaded to the Internet Archive. The acting edition by which I could compare the screenplay to the playscript continues to elude me, but I am thrilled by a decent transfer from a dead-out-of-print DVD—when I watched it off the crackly free Roku, it looked like it had gone through a boot. Cloudburst (1951) is sketchier in quality, but still available for an early Marks double feature should anyone other than me want one. Both come courtesy of the alphabetically idiosyncratic collection of Paul's British Films, which so far only goes up to J, but still encompasses nice copies of The Ghost Camera (1933) and The Gaunt Stranger (1938) and Cage of Gold (1950), to name some films I watched originally under fuzzier circumstances. Nice copies of some films I have been wanting to watch, too. I hope Paul makes it to the end of the alphabet. In the meantime, good grief.

Prior to the interruption of the merlin, I had been trying to assemble some links. I leave them here before leaving the house properly for the first time in in five days. There was frost on all the sidewalks and windshields last night.

1. On closer research, Harcourt Williams was not part of the first English-language radio version of Karel Čapek's R.U.R.; that was broadcast by 2LO in May 1927 and Williams played Alquist in the November repeat. If the James Whale among the robots of the original cast is the same as the director who was more of an actor until the smash success of Journey's End, however, it's a wonderful through-line to his future world of gods and monsters.

2. Since Spotify isn't region-locked, I was able to listen to Shelagh Delaney's Catch Me Who Can (1978/2026), the rediscovered one-act adapted for radio by her daughter Charlotte after her death in 2011. It's a two-hander that widens into a quartet, counterpointing a fourteen-year-old runaway to the middle-aged maths teacher who almost literally runs across her in a park and then chipping in to their argument—immediately over her truancy, generally over the shapeless unanswerable questions of life—with an elderly bag lady and a young despatch rider who contribute everything from a spare lid to intimations of anarchy. It stars Ivy Sheehan, Toby Jones, Xavier Moras Spencer, and the iconic hat-tip of Rita Tushingham and runs half an hour with incidental music and ducks. I would say that I am accommodating to audio drama except that I still can't even read e-mail while listening.

3. Fingers crossed that Theo Rollason's Queer Edward II (2026) shows up anywhere I can see it. Jarman's screenplay-diary of the same name is one of my treasures from long-missed McIntyre and Moore's. Edward II (1991) was in fact the second film of Jarman's I ever saw, immediately on the heels of Caravaggio (1986) with rushthatspeaks in the first year of our relationship when he still lived half a country away and we saw one another at three- to six-month intervals and otherwise I would walk as far as Belmont on long nightly calls with him. This documentary is the first I am hearing of the filmmaker, but I wish I had known about them in time for Readercon; their debut short co-directed with Tabitha Carless-Frost was Out of the Peat (2025).

4. It took me a year to get back to watching the second series of Poldark (1975–77), but even at potato quality, my attention span buckled instantly at the appearance of the not yet twenty-one-year-old Kevin McNally. No rewind on an actor is ever going to be weirder than the time I accidentally chased The Legend of Hell House (1973) with Lassie Come Home (1943), but the distance from the midlife roles I learned him in is still a striking ghost-trick. His voice was so much lighter, even with the assist of the West Country accent I wouldn't have placed him by it. His face had its eyebrows to grow into, like a puppy with its paws. In movement he was instantly recognizable, the swing of his wrist in the cuff of an eighteenth-century shirt; it's a good era for him. I didn't expect him to make me think of Fuchsia Groan: but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful.

5. While I cannot volunteer to write for it, I found their letter through friends-of-friendlist and I dearly hope that thefourthvine gets their Leo Marks for Yuletide.

Before my week derailed like thirty thousand pounds of bananas, I blew my mind reading Harcourt Williams' Four Years at the Old Vic (1935).

As an actor, he's one of my elliptical favorites. He didn't get into film until his sixties and then mostly in small parts, but I have rejoiced for years every time I have caught him onscreen; he originated the role of Hebble Tyson in the original 1948 West End run of Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning and from the first time I saw him as one or another of his ineffectual or eccentric authority figures, he was no trouble to picture wishing to be alone with his own convictions. In his capacity as producer for four seasons at the Old Vic, however, he was off my radar almost completely until I looked into the claim that he effected a sea-change in the performance of Shakespeare on the British stage and the thing is that it seems to be true. His memoir is a delightful and mild-mannered grenade of ideas about theater that by virtue of history bending to follow him now look like common sense. By his own admission, when he was offered the job by Lilian Baylis in the spring of 1929, he was a peculiar choice: a forty-nine-year-old character actor with almost no professional experience directing for the stage, but the intensity and intelligence of his affection for Shakespeare made up for any shortfalls in his learning curve. He cared about the texts. He cared about communicating them to an audience. Until he turned the company over to Tyrone Guthrie in 1933, he got regularly shocked notices for stripping away as much of the received costume and business as he could afford on a perpetually straitened budget in order to engage with the plays themselves and not their pop-cultural accretion. He could do a straight, striking production of Julius Caesar or Macbeth, but he leaned more toward experiments in recontextualization that went beyond modern dress: a commedia dell'arte Taming of the Shrew, a Renaissance Antony and Cleopatra, an English masque of a Midsummer Night's Dream with incidental folk music by Cecil Sharp. He directed the five-hour coup of a then-uncommon full-text Hamlet. Inflexible on the subject of treating the verse as speech rather than affectation, he picked up the pace so much from the typically mannered style that his calling card of Romeo and Juliet was savaged by the critics as an Italianate gabble, but he never backed down on his philosophy, although he did panic about his notices to the point of trying to resign after the opening night of The Merchant of Venice, after which he began the sensible habit of saving them to read later and then just never getting around to it. He listened to his actors. Characteristically modest about his own achievements, he gives a refreshing amount of credit to all sorts of people in his memoir, from mentors and colleagues to members of the company and crew with whom he worked open-mindedly. He attributes most of his inspirations to Harley Granville-Barker, but at least manages to own the bridge-conceit of the spectacular Tempest that immortalized Leslie French. Actually the list of actors launched during his tenure reads like one of those supergroups in reverse; John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson may have been the most legendary of the men, but Martita Hunt was the darling of his leading ladies and he had the sense to poach Peggy Ashcroft after seeing her with Paul Robeson. Later additions to the company included Marius Goring, Valentine Dyall, Judith Furse, plus the return of Edith Evans and John Laurie. The Old Vic was where Michael Powell first saw and set his sights on Roger Livesey. When Richardson got a brutal sore throat during the run of Othello, Alastair Sim stepped in. Williams himself took the occasional part, like the distrait Charles VI in Henry V which he would reprise on film for Olivier; offstage he was a memorable character in his own right, a permanently disheveled vegetarian who as far as anyone could tell lived off wheat germ and cheese sandwiches and his nerves, cf. Eric Phillips:

In the late summer of 1929 a new producer strode into the rehearsal room of the Old Vic where the company were assembled for the first rehearsal of 'Romeo and Juliet'. Under one arm he carried a script of the play, under the other a wholesale-size tin of a well-known tonic beverage. He was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck, with sleeves rolled back above the elbows, and a pair of old flannel trousers. His untidy hair literally stood on end and his eyes shone with fanatical enthusiasm [. . .] I looked at the tin of tonic food which Harcourt Williams had presumably brought with him to soothe his nerves, and I wondered at the moment whether it was his nerves or ours which needed soothing.

or Ralph Richardson:

Harcourt Williams was our director and our mentor; everybody who worked with Harcourt Williams remembers him with great affection. Somehow he had the faculty for getting the best out of everybody. How he did it, I don't know. It was a kind of secret magnetism. He never bullied, he never worried you, he found out what you could do best and brought the two bests together. He himself was a terrible bundle of nerves. He was always eating Bemax in the stalls and rushing up and down and pulling his hair; but he made us calm, he took all the calmness out of himself. A very unselfish and delightful fellow.

or Harcourt Williams:

In spite of all difficulties the first performance on Saturday, September 14th, went without a hitch. At least so it was reported to me, for I saw nothing of it. Remembering a dictum of Granville-Barker's that a producer can do nothing on the first night and had much better stop away, I spent the evening turning out a cupboard in my office. It was a dirty job, but it kept me busy until I had to turn out for the critic of a Sunday paper who had to write his notice in the interval in order to get it in to his paper in time. If I recollect it was not a particularly flattering review, and I felt that as he had used my very pen he might have been more merciful, but no doubt the distracted individual with grubby hands meant nothing to him!

He had been a conscientious objector during World War I, although he mentions it only in the passing of a reproach from Lilian Baylis over his attempted resignation; he may have been as self-deprecating as the next memoirist, but he wouldn't have done the theater he did without a seriously stubborn core. He introduced Shaw into the repertoire of the Old Vic by writing directly to the author, much as he got advice once from John Masefield on the technical business of a shipwreck for The Tempest. He introduced Sheridan and Goldsmith and Molière. He staged a Knight of the Burning Pestle that I would like to borrow the time machine for, now that you ask. He wrote skits for the annual Birthday Night and was thrilled by the reactions of London council school students to the special matinées. His request that the audience not strike matches during the performance suggests that he would have thrown a rod over cellphones. For the very last production of his last season, he yielded to the temptation of playing—successfully—Prospero. I can't find that he directed further. He didn't break his actor's staff; he did stage work until close to the end of his life and left the late, weird record on film by which I worked my way back to him, inspired by his overproof quotations in Brighton Rock (1947); and I had read so much about the Old Vic under Guthrie, but the groundwork for all that iconoclasm does look like Williams who tilted at every tradition he could find except the one where Shakespeare mattered. I might love him just for the fact that he made Ralph Richardson who shied from romantic, heroic roles as badly as Julian Fleming play Prince Hal and Henry and live with having been a hit. He encloses samples of his wife's rehearsal notes in his book and a candid snap of himself being walked off his feet in the Malverns by George Bernard Shaw. I still wish I'd seen him in Christopher Fry.