And deep in the heart there's a rose that a glimmer keeps guiding

[sovay]

Philosophically Maxwell Anderson's The Eve of St. Mark (1942) is one of those debates between the preservation of liberty and the preservation of the individual in which the individual is left at the post on account of wartime, which means that the only suspense of its concluding arguments between a heavily attrited group of fractious, malaria-racked American GIs no longer officially stationed on a small island of the Philippines in the spring of 1942 is the language in which they argue for or against holding the line for their retreating comrades instead of falling back to more assured safety, but I like its handling of its supernatural element. The title follows the tradition—the play takes its epigraph from Keats—of foretelling the dead of the coming year with the twist that a maiden may see and converse specifically with her doomed lover. "Has to be a virgin or she won't see anything?" – "That's right." – "The legend has naturally fallen into disrepute." Thus the half-dreamed, half-hallucinated conversation between the hero and his sweetheart in the middle of her Midwestern night and his feverish Pacific noon indicates to the audience the outcome of the soldiers' decision to stay, which dramatically is left suspended by engagement with the enemy and then an inconclusive radio broadcast and some fragments of a letter handed on to the heroine from her lover who has been listed as missing in action following the Japanese capture of his island. Despite seriously trying, they did not manage to consummate their relationship before he was shipped out. "I didn't know—but the empty days and nights / have taught me now how if you've missed your love / there's nothing to put in its place." The play never spells the link out; the hero is the only person in possession of all the relevant knowledge and he never puts it together, which means that it floats for the audience to realize where the patriotism is poetically spoon-fed. "Some nights I try to think myself clear out of this place, and round the world to you, and once or twice I seemed to be there in your room, but I'm never quite sure I found you." His parents retain the faith in his survival which his sweetheart cannot share and cannot explain why, only the sense of her painfully brief, blank-verse visitation: "They made a decision that meant they wouldn't come home." Perusal of James Agee plus the AFI Catalog confirms that not only did the sexual explanation get stripped out by the PCA, the 1944 film obviates the certain sacrifice of the soldiers, at which point I don't know what's left of the story that couldn't have been any other recruiting film of brave boys in some branch of the armed forces. I appreciate abstractly that it preserves some percentage of Michael O'Shea's stage performance that got him signed by 20th Century Fox and as it added Vincent Price and Harry Morgan the odds are better than not that I'll watch it if it ever comes around on TCM, but frankly it could just not and we'll all survive. The original London production included Sergeant John Sweet in the supporting part of Private Francis Marion, the other literary double of Marion "See Here, Private" Hargrove: it brought him to the attention of Powell and Pressburger for A Canterbury Tale (1944). For that, we could talk time machine.

Comments

[sovay]

I am more and more wishing/hoping that you can see La Chimera

I would really like to! Its currently available avenues are really not options for me. If it comes to the Somerville, I will mask and see it.

But wow, yeah, if you take out both the certainty of death and the references to unconsummated love, you're left with a mass of ????

The allusion of the title only works if the conditions are met for a spectral visitation! The conditions are met for a spectral visitation only if the girl is virgin and her lover is going to die! Any ambiguity on either of these points—especially his survival—forecloses the magic! And the magic is the thing that makes the play interesting. If she can see him and he can come home to her, it's just sentimentally incoherent.

Uh, yeah? That's... every day in a war?

Yeah.

I thought to look at Manny Farber after writing this post and his review of the film includes a detail which suggests that it may have missed the point of the play across the board:

"Also, in the process of the voting, one of them who has already cast his vote vehemently argues for retreating, but when his vote is read it turns out he has voted to stay. His argument for retreating has to do with his dissatisfaction with the prewar poverty he had lived through. Then the picture has someone cow him by saying he wasn't the only one who suffered during the depression, which is supposed to be an answer."

No such scene exists in the play except for the vote which is taken at the agreement of Private Quizz West, the hero, who feels they should try to hold the island for as long as possible, and Private Shevlin, ensemble player, who estimates they have just enough time to take an outrigger canoe to the fallback point before the Japanese arrive. All six of the survivors have been a unit since boot camp. Shevlin has always been something of the contrarian of the squad—always something sarcastic to say and he's been the most consistently skeptical of their chances since their posting to the tiny, rocky island militarily designated H 23. He's the strongest voice against staying. He doesn't make his argument from the school of hard knocks, however: he just thinks they'll all die (and he's right). No one argues him out of his position with the oppression Olympics, either; the sole speech made in the course of the voting comes from the often philosophical Private Marion and it's great because it is a catalogue of all the reasons to leave finishing up with his vote to stay, which he can't justify and doesn't expect anyone else to follow. "Because man is not a reasonable creature. Because I'm essentially a fool like those rutting ancestors of mine. —And, you know, I want to sink those God damn Jap boats. I want to sink all of them. I only hope you have more sense than I have. Here's my vote." To Quizz's surprise when he counts the votes, they're unanimous. "What's the matter with that?" Shevlin asks as everyone looks at him. After all the rhetoric and poetry, the moment of decision works because it isn't belabored; it doesn't beome a contest of ideologies and maybe Shevlin just needed to say how much he didn't want to do something he already knew he would. That kind of reality grounds the supernatural in the play and mitigates some of the patriotic sentiment in the same way that the casual swearing and skirt-chasing emphasize that the soldiers of The Eve of St. Mark aren't plaster saints, which has nothing to do with their heroism. The Breen office, unfortunately, inclined toward plaster saints and eradicating nuance wherever possible. It did not make for better drama and neither it sounds like did this change.

[asakiyume]

What you describe of the play seems much more like what war heroism looks like--a kind of dogged, irrational determination. There's something so real, and therefore precious and poignant, in it.

[sovay]

There's something so real, and therefore precious and poignant, in it.

When the play is firing on all cylinders, I can see why Life ran a feature on it. And when it's not, I've seen worse.