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One half of the picture ain't listed in your tunnel vision
I am stupidly tired. I have been saying I feel as though I've scraped down through the bottom of the normal fatigue and discovered new strata of exhaustion and I don't appreciate it. I am hoping it's transient as opposed to significant. Have some books.
1. I am not sorry to have read it, but I do not prefer James Kennaway's The Mind Benders (1963) to Michael Relph and Basil Dearden's The Mind Benders (1963). It's a solid novel and follows the same essential contours as the film, sometimes as closely as the specifics of expression or blocking, but the differences which can be as minor as the phrasing of lines or as substantial as the existence of scenes add up to everyone becoming much more complicated in the page-to-screen transfer. This is so much not my usual experience with adaptations, even in cases where I prefer the film or TV version—the only other example that's coming to mind right now is Dan Simmons' The Terror (2007) vs. AMC's The Terror (2018), which is extremely unfair to Kennaway—that I would love to know more about the writing of the screenplay, but the biographically informative foreword by Paul Gallagher tells me mostly that Kennaway had been working on the project since the '50's when he first started hearing about CIA-funded American and Canadian research into what was nicely not referred to as brainwashing in the grant proposals and the novel was technically published as a tie-in. Comparing the two does neatly illuminate the ways in which information can be rearranged from an omniscient, bluntly conversational narrator to the necessarily more objective third person of looks or gestures or dialogue exchanged where the audience has to interpret for themselves; it's also interesting to me to see just how much dialogue can be stripped out of a scene while still conveying the necessary emotional effect. I acknowledge that the very ending of the novel, otherwise known as the one place I think it does have an edge on the movie, would have been hard to pull off on film without Rod Serling. I am now even more curious about the novel of Tunes of Glory (1956).
2. On the other hand, Cornell Woolrich's Phantom Lady (1942) fixes all the problems I had with Joan Harrison and Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady (1944) to the point where I would like to reach through time and gently inquire of the screenwriter what was wrong with faithfully transferring a third act that matched the steeliness and intelligence of the first two and an almost epilogue of a reveal that strengthened the unanswerable randomness of noir rather than dispersing it into anticlimax. Truly, the novel's showdown with the murderer would have been a hell of a thing to see played in the smashing shadows of the bartender-stalking or the basement jazz scene; it would have worked from the perspective of the audience, too. At no point would I have begun to feel that the heroine was being edged out of her own movie by an unnecessarily bad case of cinematic psychiatry even for the '40's. I still love the first two acts of the film, which are currently streaming along with the rest of it on the Criterion Channel. Just please ignore everything I said about the unusual agency of the protagonist in my original review. I had seen much less noir at that point in my life.
3. I don't believe a film exists of Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy (1951). It would have been impossible in any case to make a faithful one at the time. It's an overstatement to call the book a queer romance, although the most important thing in its protagonist's life turns out to be a queer relationship—set on either side of the disastrous Allied retreat from Burma in the spring of 1942, it's much more of a war novel combined with a character study and both are relatively harrowing. Captain Anthony Kent is young, fair, married, and newly in charge of a company of the British Army tasked with holding off the Japanese advance on Rangoon. We do not meet him at his best, drinking too much as he dutifully sweats out a schoolboyish letter to the wife he hardly ever thinks of anymore; we will soon find that he falls just as short of his professional expectations, even without the committing of war crimes. I said he was the protagonist, I didn't say he was a hero. Early in the campaign, Kent performs an act of damn-fool bravery because he's afraid of the responsibility of delegating it to anyone else; later on, a contemptible act simply because he's afraid. His problem isn't even his capacity for betrayal per se so much as his willingness to collude in the pretense that it didn't happen, swinging between self-knowledge and self-deception at the worst moments for each. Why am I writing about this novel, which was critically acclaimed on publication and nearly vanished from the literary record after its author suffered a highly publicized obscenity trial over his second novel and abandoned writing in favor of running a restaurant with his long-term partner? The most redeeming and the most sympathetic aspect of Kent is the thing about which he feels much more shame than point-blank murder: his ability to accept and return the love of his batman Anson.
The novel is as oblique as any of Mary Renault's contemporaries about the physical relationship between the two men, leaving the reader to gauge its progression from a deniable battlefield embrace to an unambiguously sexual first night by the degree to which Kent feels bad about it. After the former, "his own mind was chaotic with remorse and fear at what he had done, and with the pleasure and relief he felt at having done it . . . He closed his eyes and excluded everything from his mind except the peace of lying in the darkness with someone for whom at that moment he could almost feel love." The latter leaves him much more fatalistic: "Nothing mattered now, he thought, as he lay back and slid his arm between the pillow and Anson's shoulder, watching the inside of the net glow faintly as he drew deeply on his cigarette, nothing at all. He had committed the unforgivable sin and now there was nothing to be done except not to be found out." The fear of blackmail or exposure haunts every stage of their affair until it is almost no surprise that it finally manifests in the malevolent person of Goodwin, a former mate of Anson's whose jeering at Kent for a "gutless nancy" may have its own component of jealousy. But it's only haunted from Kent's side. Gregory Woods in the foreword finds the quiet, reflective, actually rather hard-headed Anson too good to be true, but I'm not sure why: I find nothing unbelievable in his acceptance of either his sexuality in general or his attachment to this particular man, beloved and compromised. Thinking over the moment when the slow burn of physical awareness flashed over into the admission of sexual possibility, Anson concludes that "it was wrong of course and disapproved of by the vast majority of people, but then so were many other things . . . it must be terrible to have to twist and complicate everything in your mind so as to exclude any chances of happiness." It's so refreshing to be inside his head instead of Kent's, brief respites from the acid smog of internalized homophobia. "I don't really understand why you think like this," he tells his lover bluntly, "but I suppose we're different." Himself, he's here, he's queer, and he's used to it.
The part of the novel that interests me most comes in its final third, when the exodus of British, Indian, and Burmese forces and civilians is already underway. Stationed first in Maymyo and then in Mandalay, Kent and Anson have continued their relationship under the militarily proper cover of a batman at his officer's beck and call every hour of the day, though Kent's customary paranoia insists that they sleep in different rooms, just in case. He's still trapped in his honor-shame spiral, feeling himself as isolated from his fellow officers "as though he and they lived in different worlds, theirs wonderfully carefree, peopled by brave men who did not beg for mercy from the Japanese at the slightest pain, and sleep with their batmen." Nevertheless, his escalating failure to reduce his feelings for Anson to a situational, disposable, purely physical affair culminates in his decision, seriously ill with jaundice and under doctor's orders to be taken by train from Tisaw to Myitkyina and evacuated by plane with the rest of the worst wounded, to walk out of Burma instead so as not to be separated from Anson. "[O]nce I'm gone you'll be at everyone's beck and call, you'll probably be grabbed up to help form a rear-guard or something equally bloody. I've had a look at the map and I might be able to do ten miles a day, maybe more, I can't say. The Chindwin is about two hundred miles from here, once we get into the hills we need never be caught." Then he berates himself for his selfishness in binding his lover to his sickly snail-crawling self when the other, able-bodied man might have a better chance of survival on his own, but it's done. Anson won't leave him and, for reasons he is finally beginning to acknowledge are not strictly self-preserving, he can't make himself send Anson away.
It's a dreadful journey. For the first half of it, Kent is fragile, fretful, often delirious and stubborn beyond his own belief; the second blurs into a dreamlike maze of terror and beauty and boredom and privation in which he imagines he can feel
death, walking brokenly out of the land along every track, walking into India with them, scattering his gifts as he went as though they were too heavy for him to carry, cholera and exhaustion, typhoid and smallpox, suppurating wounds and malaria, the double stroke of women big with child who lay down and died while they looked toward the violet hills for help, dark-eyed in agony. And behind death came death with a scourge in his hand, the split of small bombs and the overwrought stammering of machine-guns, blazing towns and villages, the unanswered inhuman sounds of men and women who died alone, asking only a small gift, a cup of water. He shuddered, death had been left to sleep the night in the village, they must hurry, and as he turned away he saw again the black and gold snake twisting and coiling while its pall of dust drifted away.
They burn by day, freeze by night, and are too tired to do more than lie in one another's arms where they drop at the end of the day's march, but with inevitable, terrible poignancy it is the one time in the entire novel when Kent forgets to be afraid of what his love for Anson means—what other people will think of him, what he is expected to think of himself, what might happen if the two of them are caught. They are shy of other refugees they meet on the road, but only because these meetings are an interruption of this private, charmed space. "Their hardships and the months they had spent together, hardly out of each other's sight, had bound them by ties far stronger than either of them understood, and they had reached a stage of intimacy when the presence of other people made them feel strange and awkward." I have no reason to believe Le Guin read or knew of Baxter, but I thought of Genly and Therem on the Gobrin Ice in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). The closer their journey's end, the more Kent knows he should be relieved and cheered and the less he feels like it. And for once he's right to fear: they reach the safety of Imphal where they are reabsorbed at once into the machinery of army and empire which recognizes one man as an officer and orders him straight to hospital and glances over another as a private soldier and shunts him off to the rest camp and it is equally inevitable and terrible that Kent reminded of the masculine, heteronormative codes of his world which he has neither the heart to fake nor the courage to refuse will ask Anson to break with him for good. Only when it's ending can he admit out loud that what they had between them was "utterly different" from the "filthy joke" of his previous images of homosexuality or the carefully discounted fooling around of boys at school. The return of the exhausted nurse on her night rounds means they can't even kiss goodbye. "I have forgotten to tell him something, but it's too late now." As the foreword correctly observes, Kent with all his moral confusion makes for a strikingly double-edged protagonist and the novel around him maintains this duality straight down the line to the ending, of which there are two, one for the original British publication, one for the American edition a year later: one is hopeless, the other hopeful, but both are ironic and curiously suspended and I have no idea which the author considered definitive, if either. I know which one I would like to believe in, but I also wrote an anti-ghost poem for Therem Harth rem ir Estraven and I want to smack a lot of people upside the head in The Charioteer (1953).
So you should not read this novel if what you are up for these days is more in the line of smut and fluff, but I bought it because I had never heard of it and it looked interesting and now I am hoping Valancourt reprints The Image and the Search (1953), because even if it ended Baxter's literary career, I suspect on the available evidence it was good. This one certainly is. Assume a healthy handful of content warnings for violence including sexual, the aforementioned acid smog, and a curate's egg of the kind of racism that the text knows to condemn—there is an entire other novel inside this one about Helen Dean, the Anglo-Indian nurse with whom Kent has an ambivalent, dubiously consensual relationship in the course of trying to reassert his heterosexuality and who ultimately emerges as one of its bravest and most honest characters, not that any of the British soldiers busily engaged in booking it out of Burma would notice—cheek by jowl with the kind of which the text doesn't even seem to be aware, mostly centered on the Japanese but occasionally spilling over to the Burmese and Indian characters. For the record, while I am not given to understand that Look Down in Mercy is otherwise autobiographical, Baxter did fight with the British Army in Burma and retreat with them into India and return with the Fourteenth, "Forgotten" Army as aide-de-camp to Lieutenant-General William Slim; and he was queer. I would also like to think he was more like Anson.
1. I am not sorry to have read it, but I do not prefer James Kennaway's The Mind Benders (1963) to Michael Relph and Basil Dearden's The Mind Benders (1963). It's a solid novel and follows the same essential contours as the film, sometimes as closely as the specifics of expression or blocking, but the differences which can be as minor as the phrasing of lines or as substantial as the existence of scenes add up to everyone becoming much more complicated in the page-to-screen transfer. This is so much not my usual experience with adaptations, even in cases where I prefer the film or TV version—the only other example that's coming to mind right now is Dan Simmons' The Terror (2007) vs. AMC's The Terror (2018), which is extremely unfair to Kennaway—that I would love to know more about the writing of the screenplay, but the biographically informative foreword by Paul Gallagher tells me mostly that Kennaway had been working on the project since the '50's when he first started hearing about CIA-funded American and Canadian research into what was nicely not referred to as brainwashing in the grant proposals and the novel was technically published as a tie-in. Comparing the two does neatly illuminate the ways in which information can be rearranged from an omniscient, bluntly conversational narrator to the necessarily more objective third person of looks or gestures or dialogue exchanged where the audience has to interpret for themselves; it's also interesting to me to see just how much dialogue can be stripped out of a scene while still conveying the necessary emotional effect. I acknowledge that the very ending of the novel, otherwise known as the one place I think it does have an edge on the movie, would have been hard to pull off on film without Rod Serling. I am now even more curious about the novel of Tunes of Glory (1956).
2. On the other hand, Cornell Woolrich's Phantom Lady (1942) fixes all the problems I had with Joan Harrison and Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady (1944) to the point where I would like to reach through time and gently inquire of the screenwriter what was wrong with faithfully transferring a third act that matched the steeliness and intelligence of the first two and an almost epilogue of a reveal that strengthened the unanswerable randomness of noir rather than dispersing it into anticlimax. Truly, the novel's showdown with the murderer would have been a hell of a thing to see played in the smashing shadows of the bartender-stalking or the basement jazz scene; it would have worked from the perspective of the audience, too. At no point would I have begun to feel that the heroine was being edged out of her own movie by an unnecessarily bad case of cinematic psychiatry even for the '40's. I still love the first two acts of the film, which are currently streaming along with the rest of it on the Criterion Channel. Just please ignore everything I said about the unusual agency of the protagonist in my original review. I had seen much less noir at that point in my life.
3. I don't believe a film exists of Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy (1951). It would have been impossible in any case to make a faithful one at the time. It's an overstatement to call the book a queer romance, although the most important thing in its protagonist's life turns out to be a queer relationship—set on either side of the disastrous Allied retreat from Burma in the spring of 1942, it's much more of a war novel combined with a character study and both are relatively harrowing. Captain Anthony Kent is young, fair, married, and newly in charge of a company of the British Army tasked with holding off the Japanese advance on Rangoon. We do not meet him at his best, drinking too much as he dutifully sweats out a schoolboyish letter to the wife he hardly ever thinks of anymore; we will soon find that he falls just as short of his professional expectations, even without the committing of war crimes. I said he was the protagonist, I didn't say he was a hero. Early in the campaign, Kent performs an act of damn-fool bravery because he's afraid of the responsibility of delegating it to anyone else; later on, a contemptible act simply because he's afraid. His problem isn't even his capacity for betrayal per se so much as his willingness to collude in the pretense that it didn't happen, swinging between self-knowledge and self-deception at the worst moments for each. Why am I writing about this novel, which was critically acclaimed on publication and nearly vanished from the literary record after its author suffered a highly publicized obscenity trial over his second novel and abandoned writing in favor of running a restaurant with his long-term partner? The most redeeming and the most sympathetic aspect of Kent is the thing about which he feels much more shame than point-blank murder: his ability to accept and return the love of his batman Anson.
The novel is as oblique as any of Mary Renault's contemporaries about the physical relationship between the two men, leaving the reader to gauge its progression from a deniable battlefield embrace to an unambiguously sexual first night by the degree to which Kent feels bad about it. After the former, "his own mind was chaotic with remorse and fear at what he had done, and with the pleasure and relief he felt at having done it . . . He closed his eyes and excluded everything from his mind except the peace of lying in the darkness with someone for whom at that moment he could almost feel love." The latter leaves him much more fatalistic: "Nothing mattered now, he thought, as he lay back and slid his arm between the pillow and Anson's shoulder, watching the inside of the net glow faintly as he drew deeply on his cigarette, nothing at all. He had committed the unforgivable sin and now there was nothing to be done except not to be found out." The fear of blackmail or exposure haunts every stage of their affair until it is almost no surprise that it finally manifests in the malevolent person of Goodwin, a former mate of Anson's whose jeering at Kent for a "gutless nancy" may have its own component of jealousy. But it's only haunted from Kent's side. Gregory Woods in the foreword finds the quiet, reflective, actually rather hard-headed Anson too good to be true, but I'm not sure why: I find nothing unbelievable in his acceptance of either his sexuality in general or his attachment to this particular man, beloved and compromised. Thinking over the moment when the slow burn of physical awareness flashed over into the admission of sexual possibility, Anson concludes that "it was wrong of course and disapproved of by the vast majority of people, but then so were many other things . . . it must be terrible to have to twist and complicate everything in your mind so as to exclude any chances of happiness." It's so refreshing to be inside his head instead of Kent's, brief respites from the acid smog of internalized homophobia. "I don't really understand why you think like this," he tells his lover bluntly, "but I suppose we're different." Himself, he's here, he's queer, and he's used to it.
The part of the novel that interests me most comes in its final third, when the exodus of British, Indian, and Burmese forces and civilians is already underway. Stationed first in Maymyo and then in Mandalay, Kent and Anson have continued their relationship under the militarily proper cover of a batman at his officer's beck and call every hour of the day, though Kent's customary paranoia insists that they sleep in different rooms, just in case. He's still trapped in his honor-shame spiral, feeling himself as isolated from his fellow officers "as though he and they lived in different worlds, theirs wonderfully carefree, peopled by brave men who did not beg for mercy from the Japanese at the slightest pain, and sleep with their batmen." Nevertheless, his escalating failure to reduce his feelings for Anson to a situational, disposable, purely physical affair culminates in his decision, seriously ill with jaundice and under doctor's orders to be taken by train from Tisaw to Myitkyina and evacuated by plane with the rest of the worst wounded, to walk out of Burma instead so as not to be separated from Anson. "[O]nce I'm gone you'll be at everyone's beck and call, you'll probably be grabbed up to help form a rear-guard or something equally bloody. I've had a look at the map and I might be able to do ten miles a day, maybe more, I can't say. The Chindwin is about two hundred miles from here, once we get into the hills we need never be caught." Then he berates himself for his selfishness in binding his lover to his sickly snail-crawling self when the other, able-bodied man might have a better chance of survival on his own, but it's done. Anson won't leave him and, for reasons he is finally beginning to acknowledge are not strictly self-preserving, he can't make himself send Anson away.
It's a dreadful journey. For the first half of it, Kent is fragile, fretful, often delirious and stubborn beyond his own belief; the second blurs into a dreamlike maze of terror and beauty and boredom and privation in which he imagines he can feel
death, walking brokenly out of the land along every track, walking into India with them, scattering his gifts as he went as though they were too heavy for him to carry, cholera and exhaustion, typhoid and smallpox, suppurating wounds and malaria, the double stroke of women big with child who lay down and died while they looked toward the violet hills for help, dark-eyed in agony. And behind death came death with a scourge in his hand, the split of small bombs and the overwrought stammering of machine-guns, blazing towns and villages, the unanswered inhuman sounds of men and women who died alone, asking only a small gift, a cup of water. He shuddered, death had been left to sleep the night in the village, they must hurry, and as he turned away he saw again the black and gold snake twisting and coiling while its pall of dust drifted away.
They burn by day, freeze by night, and are too tired to do more than lie in one another's arms where they drop at the end of the day's march, but with inevitable, terrible poignancy it is the one time in the entire novel when Kent forgets to be afraid of what his love for Anson means—what other people will think of him, what he is expected to think of himself, what might happen if the two of them are caught. They are shy of other refugees they meet on the road, but only because these meetings are an interruption of this private, charmed space. "Their hardships and the months they had spent together, hardly out of each other's sight, had bound them by ties far stronger than either of them understood, and they had reached a stage of intimacy when the presence of other people made them feel strange and awkward." I have no reason to believe Le Guin read or knew of Baxter, but I thought of Genly and Therem on the Gobrin Ice in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). The closer their journey's end, the more Kent knows he should be relieved and cheered and the less he feels like it. And for once he's right to fear: they reach the safety of Imphal where they are reabsorbed at once into the machinery of army and empire which recognizes one man as an officer and orders him straight to hospital and glances over another as a private soldier and shunts him off to the rest camp and it is equally inevitable and terrible that Kent reminded of the masculine, heteronormative codes of his world which he has neither the heart to fake nor the courage to refuse will ask Anson to break with him for good. Only when it's ending can he admit out loud that what they had between them was "utterly different" from the "filthy joke" of his previous images of homosexuality or the carefully discounted fooling around of boys at school. The return of the exhausted nurse on her night rounds means they can't even kiss goodbye. "I have forgotten to tell him something, but it's too late now." As the foreword correctly observes, Kent with all his moral confusion makes for a strikingly double-edged protagonist and the novel around him maintains this duality straight down the line to the ending, of which there are two, one for the original British publication, one for the American edition a year later: one is hopeless, the other hopeful, but both are ironic and curiously suspended and I have no idea which the author considered definitive, if either. I know which one I would like to believe in, but I also wrote an anti-ghost poem for Therem Harth rem ir Estraven and I want to smack a lot of people upside the head in The Charioteer (1953).
So you should not read this novel if what you are up for these days is more in the line of smut and fluff, but I bought it because I had never heard of it and it looked interesting and now I am hoping Valancourt reprints The Image and the Search (1953), because even if it ended Baxter's literary career, I suspect on the available evidence it was good. This one certainly is. Assume a healthy handful of content warnings for violence including sexual, the aforementioned acid smog, and a curate's egg of the kind of racism that the text knows to condemn—there is an entire other novel inside this one about Helen Dean, the Anglo-Indian nurse with whom Kent has an ambivalent, dubiously consensual relationship in the course of trying to reassert his heterosexuality and who ultimately emerges as one of its bravest and most honest characters, not that any of the British soldiers busily engaged in booking it out of Burma would notice—cheek by jowl with the kind of which the text doesn't even seem to be aware, mostly centered on the Japanese but occasionally spilling over to the Burmese and Indian characters. For the record, while I am not given to understand that Look Down in Mercy is otherwise autobiographical, Baxter did fight with the British Army in Burma and retreat with them into India and return with the Fourteenth, "Forgotten" Army as aide-de-camp to Lieutenant-General William Slim; and he was queer. I would also like to think he was more like Anson.
no subject
That feels almost like creating folklore and I'm delighted.