Who will be your book this season?

I felt so awful last night that I went to bed before nine o'clock and effectively stayed that way until after noon. I still feel uncannily flattened, but a week past my day trip to NecronomiCon Providence, I seem not to have COVID-19. I dreamed of a dilapidated belt of the city where the old brown-brick buildings looked irregularly carved from carnelian while the people inside their jewelry richness went about their ordinary, gig-tired lives. When I was asleep, I read it as an infection. Awake, it might just have been a metaphor.

Aside from my amateur interest in representations of atomic science, it fascinates me to have found John Clements in Norman King's The Shadow of Doubt (1955) because I know so little of his stage work and the role fits so well into his screen persona: if he hadn't functionally bowed out of film after the '40's, nothing would have been more natural than to see him as a particularly mid-century take on one of the compromised men of his pre-war stardom, ironically and not imperviously brazening out the brand of their reputations. "Before I reformed I was a dangerous revolutionary. I've got my press-cuttings to prove it." As the struck-off scientist whose outing by anonymous letter shoves him suddenly back under the burning glass of public opinion, Arthur Ross may even be a harder sell than some of his predecessors, since he did very much breach the Official Secrets Act and offered no defense for it at his trial, maintaining only his ignorance that the former student to whom he abruptly unburdened himself of his classified research had been tapped by the Soviets to pass it on. He called science a goal without national boundaries. If he couldn't be proven a calculated traitor, at the very least he looked like a dangerous fool. "I talked when I shouldn't have talked. Nothing could alter that." He's in too well-made a play to leave the question of his loyalties and motives indefinitely open, but there's just as much and perhaps more successful drama in his exclusion from the field he still thinks in, a middle-aged menial clerk eating his heart out over the latest scientific journals at the public library, though you wouldn't know it from the cast-iron crust of his jokes about capitalism. Going sharply to pieces straight from the light comedy would have been another early Clements specialty, too. I find the ending a little facile, but not the payoff of the mystery about Ross, which is incredibly—a compliment, it's human—stupid. Poking at the rest of Clements' first season as actor-manager of the Saville Theatre, I found that he had an arrangement with ITV to stage and then film a repertory of classic plays, some of which even survive. Presumably as a new play, The Shadow of Doubt was left out of this scheme; it was televised three years later by the BBC with an almost entirely different cast and is missing from the archives into the bargain. I am not going to get closer than the production stills in the September 1955 Theatre World and the ease with which I can hear Clements saying dryly, "I'll let you into a secret—unofficial this time; they never did. Two and two can make precisely what you want them to make. I used to know a proof of that when I was at school. We forget all the valuable things."

From reading the same volume of collected plays, I discovered R. C. Sherriff's The Long Sunset (1955) which would impress me more as Roman Arthuriana if it didn't turn into such an imperial lament; from Audrey Williamson's Contemporary Theatre 1953–1956 (1956) I got a pointer to Charles Morgan's The Burning Glass (1954), which does nothing philosophically or sfnally new with weapons of mass destruction and then throws a take on forbidden knowledge into the last act that should have been the entire play. In conclusion I am in a rough patch for watching movies, but apparently not for reading things I'll never see.

And throwing punches like we throw the stones to the bottom of riverbeds

Amid all the nonsense, I can honestly say that the week started with something nice: the arrival of cards from Yoon Ha Lee and theseatheseatheopensea, one decorated with a green-tailed mercat from New Orleans, the other actually two letters, three postcards, and a handful of heartening stickers all in the same envelope. I had to visit the post office to retrieve the latter, but it had made it to my local post office in the first place, a significant improvement on the last try.

spatch and I cooked dinner together for the first time in ages. It seems extremely credible that I had not eaten a steak all year. We seared it with black pepper and nutmeg and served it with grits and cheese and made rice krispie treats as a rewarding afterthought of dessert. Hestia inspected delicately from her perch on the cardboard box that used to contain peaches and has become her preferred dining room plinth. We used to ward her brother off from plates with the palisade of an arm over which he would crane with inexorable politeness.

Not only does Ugo Betti's The Burnt Flower-Bed (1952) seem never to have been filmed even in its original Italian, its English-language premiere at the Arts Theatre in 1955 didn't even get a photo call in Theatre World, which in the last twenty-four hours I had become spoiled for. Its political drama resolves at the last minute in one of those galvanizing symbols for which I may just not have been Christian enough, but I am still susceptible to stories which assert the importance of meeting the future to make a difference in it, whether it can be believed in or not.