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Pilgrimage, private life, mortality
On a theory, I believe, of sustaining me on literature, my parents very unexpectedly presented me with my own copy of Leslie Howard's Trivial Fond Records (ed. Ronald Howard, 1982), which seems to have shipped from the UK as if the international post just worked.
Well, here we are, the 29th of July, 1940. What have we done with all the years since 1918? Armistice night in Piccadilly Circus is so vivid in the memory, it seems like last Wednesday week. What did happen to all those years – and what have we done with them? It seems we are back where we began. Anyway, there it is on the calendar, July 1940, and this war has been on for eleven months. And I am in London speaking these words, and when I am finished talking to you I shall go out of this building, past sandbags and bayonets, into streets of medieval blackness. As I hunt for the two pin-points of light that represent a taxi it will be about two a.m. here, which is nine in the evening your time, and I shan't be able to resist a thought of the dazzling glare which at that moment is lighting the sky above New York's Great White Way. I daresay there isn't an Englishman alive who is more familiar than I with Broadway at nine o'clock on a summer's evening.
Well, here we are, the 29th of July, 1940. What have we done with all the years since 1918? Armistice night in Piccadilly Circus is so vivid in the memory, it seems like last Wednesday week. What did happen to all those years – and what have we done with them? It seems we are back where we began. Anyway, there it is on the calendar, July 1940, and this war has been on for eleven months. And I am in London speaking these words, and when I am finished talking to you I shall go out of this building, past sandbags and bayonets, into streets of medieval blackness. As I hunt for the two pin-points of light that represent a taxi it will be about two a.m. here, which is nine in the evening your time, and I shan't be able to resist a thought of the dazzling glare which at that moment is lighting the sky above New York's Great White Way. I daresay there isn't an Englishman alive who is more familiar than I with Broadway at nine o'clock on a summer's evening.
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I was amazed. The bookseller claimed it would take until March, but it arrived just in time for the storm.
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It is! And there are photographs in it I had never seen.
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What have we done with all the years since 1945?
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**Food and shelter does also help, though.
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It lives up to it!
Food and shelter does also help, though.
(It's true. That part is tougher than books.)
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No recordings survive of any of the broadcasts that I have been able to find. He sounds like himself all through.
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It truly is! I was not expecting it.
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It's amazing how the international post just *works* sometimes, isn't it? It's almost as though it's supposed to function reasonably well. *coughs* I've just had a holiday card turn up, sent from a dear friend in England, over a week after I'd given it up as lost in the transatlantic void. The transatlantic... swirl? Hmm.
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I recommend it highly. It's a selection of Leslie's published and unpublished nonfiction from memoir-like pieces of the 1920's through his wartime broadcasts right before his death in 1943. He writes wonderfully and he thinks. He was known for it; it was an unusual part of his screen persona; it was part of his life. It makes him a pleasure to read even when there should have been so much more of him, onscreen and off.
I've just had a holiday card turn up, sent from a dear friend in England, over a week after I'd given it up as lost in the transatlantic void. The transatlantic... swirl? Hmm.
I'm glad it arrived! At this point anything international feels like an absolute crapshoot.
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Thank you! It would have been an astonishing gift whenever it arrived.
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I hope they don't shoot us.
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Thank you! It is! It is an incredible object to have and it makes me want to read even more of Leslie's broadcasts. Estel Eforgan excerpts a few more in Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2010/13), but if I wanted to read the complete collection I'd need access to the BBC archives, which feels even less in the cards than a weekend at the BFI.
I hope they don't shoot us.
Well, yes.
*hugs*
There is one real fuck you, history moment in this book and it's at the beginning of the broadcast I quoted:
"All the letters I receive from my friends in America exhibit a very touching concern for the safety and welfare of the inhabitants of these islands. My good friends out there write rather as if I were an amiable lunatic who had insisted, for no very good reason, on feeding the lions from inside instead of outside the cage. Reading between the lines I suspect that they do not ever expect to see me alive again, and occasionally I find myself wondering if they are right. But only occasionally, and then without any conviction, for I do not honestly believe that Hitler will prevent me from some day stepping off the transcontinental plane at the Los Angeles airport just as if nothing had happened at all – apart from a sort of unpleasant dream."
It would have been more than an unpleasant dream and Leslie in 1940 would have known that; Eforgan is meticulous in documenting how openly anti-Nazi he was before it was patriotic to be so, or reputationally safe for someone who could be identified as Jewish and partly foreign at that. But I wish very much that he had been right.