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I cannot feel it, the veil of black, a fine spray of white paint
It is always a beautiful day to yell at God, but while you are waiting to take a number for that extremely lengthy line, you might as well stand with Minnesota. Maine, too. I had thoughts about Stolpersteine and Fugitive Slave Acts, but in terms of coherent expression I spent most of my day reacting to the wave of something like scented detergent or dryer sheets that rolled out of the heating system around nine in the morning and stopped me sleeping or particularly breathing well.
I have been re-reading my second edition of Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2010/13) which remains a wealth of otherwise inaccessible information with a close eye to the complex interplay of his biography and screen persona. I still disagree frequently with her criticism, but the detail of her research does things like offer a potential reconciliation between the family stories that Leslie was shell-shocked out of the First World War and the absence of his name from any records of active service in France: toward the end of his short stint as a second lieutenant with the Northamptonshire Yeomanry in the spring of 1916, his regiment was billeted with various divisions at Harponville, Ypres, and Arras, where it would have been possible to be officially non-combatant and still, in the immortal words of Frederic Manning, shelled to shit. Leslie himself never claimed to have seen combat, confiding in one of his broadcasts in 1940, "I am willing to let you figure out the degree of my senility by telling you that during most of the last war I was a very junior officer in a cavalry regiment. However, long before I got anywhere near the battlefront, everybody had settled down into trenches, and as horses are practically useless in trenches I found myself near Divisional Headquarters, pretty bored but pretty safe." His daughter records in her memoir A Quite Remarkable Father (1959) that his violent nightmares which could wake anyone within earshot were understood by his family to be connected to his war. She does not seem to have wondered the same about his self-admitted knack for dissociation or his rare but explosive losses of temper. Eforgan follows her in attributing his conviction of heart trouble to hypochondria; it occurred to me that pre-DSM, a person who regularly woke himself shouting and dreaded traveling alone, especially by train in case he shouted his fellow passengers awake with him, could be forgiven the common confusion of a panic for a heart attack. I found Leslie Ruth Dale-Harris née Howard through some cross-checks on Eforgan and the interstitial material contributed by Ronald Howard to Trivial Fond Records (1982) and her portrait of her father is fascinatingly the most fragile of the three, especially since much of what she regards affectionately as his eccentricities and his foibles looks very little out of the ordinary to me, e.g. a capacity for effortless, spellbinding charm right up until his social meter ran out and he had to leave his own party to fall asleep. A droll sense of humor on his own time, a steel-trap comfort with last-minute rewrites and improvisations, and he couldn't tell a formal joke to save his life without cracking himself up over it or lie without self-conscious same. Fifteen years after his death, his daughter still seems amazed that her famously disorganized father, the same nervous mess who had forgotten the ring at his own wedding and needed reminding of everything from call times to the necessity of food, a regular Menakhem-Mendl of the British film industry if she had just acknowledged his Jewishness—like his non-monogamy, it is elided with mid-century tact—threw himself so obstinately and intently into the war effort even when it ran him directly against the prejudices and proscriptions of the Ministry of Information and the BBC. He doesn't just start to look his age in the last years of his life, he looks recklessly burning himself to make his films and his broadcasts and his tours and his connections that Eforgan documents with the Free French and SOE. About a month into the Blitz, he noted with characteristic self-deprecation that after his London flat took a direct hit, "I decided to heed the exhortation of the popular song and 'get out of town'. In fact, I got out of town with a quite undignified haste, arguing to myself that one can prepare a film for production just as well in the country." He continued to travel weekly into London for work until his final tour for the British Council in 1943 and I don't know what he dreamed for any of it. R.I.P. ADH2*2, three cocktails put him literally on the floor.
I seem unable to think about movies except in this secondhand fashion, but I wrote another fill (AO3) for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
threesentenceficathon. This year it's a lot of noir.
I have been re-reading my second edition of Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2010/13) which remains a wealth of otherwise inaccessible information with a close eye to the complex interplay of his biography and screen persona. I still disagree frequently with her criticism, but the detail of her research does things like offer a potential reconciliation between the family stories that Leslie was shell-shocked out of the First World War and the absence of his name from any records of active service in France: toward the end of his short stint as a second lieutenant with the Northamptonshire Yeomanry in the spring of 1916, his regiment was billeted with various divisions at Harponville, Ypres, and Arras, where it would have been possible to be officially non-combatant and still, in the immortal words of Frederic Manning, shelled to shit. Leslie himself never claimed to have seen combat, confiding in one of his broadcasts in 1940, "I am willing to let you figure out the degree of my senility by telling you that during most of the last war I was a very junior officer in a cavalry regiment. However, long before I got anywhere near the battlefront, everybody had settled down into trenches, and as horses are practically useless in trenches I found myself near Divisional Headquarters, pretty bored but pretty safe." His daughter records in her memoir A Quite Remarkable Father (1959) that his violent nightmares which could wake anyone within earshot were understood by his family to be connected to his war. She does not seem to have wondered the same about his self-admitted knack for dissociation or his rare but explosive losses of temper. Eforgan follows her in attributing his conviction of heart trouble to hypochondria; it occurred to me that pre-DSM, a person who regularly woke himself shouting and dreaded traveling alone, especially by train in case he shouted his fellow passengers awake with him, could be forgiven the common confusion of a panic for a heart attack. I found Leslie Ruth Dale-Harris née Howard through some cross-checks on Eforgan and the interstitial material contributed by Ronald Howard to Trivial Fond Records (1982) and her portrait of her father is fascinatingly the most fragile of the three, especially since much of what she regards affectionately as his eccentricities and his foibles looks very little out of the ordinary to me, e.g. a capacity for effortless, spellbinding charm right up until his social meter ran out and he had to leave his own party to fall asleep. A droll sense of humor on his own time, a steel-trap comfort with last-minute rewrites and improvisations, and he couldn't tell a formal joke to save his life without cracking himself up over it or lie without self-conscious same. Fifteen years after his death, his daughter still seems amazed that her famously disorganized father, the same nervous mess who had forgotten the ring at his own wedding and needed reminding of everything from call times to the necessity of food, a regular Menakhem-Mendl of the British film industry if she had just acknowledged his Jewishness—like his non-monogamy, it is elided with mid-century tact—threw himself so obstinately and intently into the war effort even when it ran him directly against the prejudices and proscriptions of the Ministry of Information and the BBC. He doesn't just start to look his age in the last years of his life, he looks recklessly burning himself to make his films and his broadcasts and his tours and his connections that Eforgan documents with the Free French and SOE. About a month into the Blitz, he noted with characteristic self-deprecation that after his London flat took a direct hit, "I decided to heed the exhortation of the popular song and 'get out of town'. In fact, I got out of town with a quite undignified haste, arguing to myself that one can prepare a film for production just as well in the country." He continued to travel weekly into London for work until his final tour for the British Council in 1943 and I don't know what he dreamed for any of it. R.I.P. ADH2*2, three cocktails put him literally on the floor.
I seem unable to think about movies except in this secondhand fashion, but I wrote another fill (AO3) for
threesentenceficathon. This year it's a lot of noir.
no subject
He took more psychic damage than he let on. I knew before Eforgan that he had spent part of his childhood in his father's fin-de-siècle Vienna—almost half of it, from the ages of five to ten—but I had not understood that his return to London was so traumatizing, when all of a sudden the Steiner children of whom Leslie was the oldest were expected to transform themselves overnight from excitable little foreigners into model English schoolchildren. Their surname was Anglicized; starting with Leslie, some of them later dropped it entirely. He would claim to have forgotten all of his German which he was punished for speaking, although something faintly un-English lingered in his voice at least into his twenties and he was punished for it in school, too. He absorbed all the correct manners and attitudes and received in return bad marks in everything except, ironically, modern languages. He never tried for a university education; he went straight from a clerk in a bank to the war to the stage. As a parent, he hated to send his children to school and in fact his daughter seems to have avoided much of a formal education even if he lost the battle on public school for his son. (Both of his children remember him as a doting, playful, unselfconsciously affectionate parent, whose efforts to protect them from the bruising of the world were regarded sometimes fondly, sometimes patronizingly as they grew up. They had been back and forth from America to Britain since their own childhoods, but never as dislocatingly as their father. They considered themselves comfortably English; they had never had to learn it.) He had a code-switcher's gift for accents and voices. In very nearly the last public appearance of his life, he startled the assembled press by referring to himself, when he had just been described as the ideal portrait of an Englishman, as Hungarian. His father had been born in Szigetvár. His mother's mixed-assimilated family had objected dramatically to their marriage, which suggests to me a little of the return of the repressed, especially since Ferdinand Steiner went to the trouble of securing the ceremony at the West London Synagogue when Lilian Blumberg had been raised carefully Anglican. Leslie himself would not have counted as halakhically Jewish, which made no difference to the identifiably Jewish communities in which he was embedded as a child or some of the remarks that Eforgan collects from his contemporaries in British film: "I suppose that by origin he was Jewish-Roumanian; but in manner he was very English [. . .] We didn't think of him as Jewish, but then we didn't bother about that at all." As far as I can tell, like Pressburger he tapped more into the mysticism of England than anything else, and he seems content for his children to have defaulted to cultural Christianity, but he famously changed an antisemitic detail in the original novel into a shout-out to Daniel Mendoza in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934). He made Pimpernel Smith (1941). It was one of the first things I knew about him, that his quintessential Englishness was so flawless because it needed to be. He played with it in his films. Some element of outsiderness, some element of masks, it could feel like an inside joke or it could just have been important. Frankly, getting himself shell-shocked even on the periphery of WWI is one of the most archetypally British things he could have done.
[edit] I had forgotten while leaving this comment that he actually did a pre-Code war film in Hollywood. The film itself is kind of a mess and Howard is desperately vulnerable and unmasked in it. I remember noticing at the time. A different kind of channeling for that role, perhaps.