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God would never have put us here to suffer for a race of fiends like that to come after us
There is an astonishing moment in Berkeley Square (1933), the most recent of the Leslie Howard movies I was watching last night. It comes late in the film, which has been up to that point a slightly stagy adaptation of a nonetheless thoughtful play about time travel: by living obsessively in his ancestral house in Berkeley Square, studying the diaries of his eighteenth-century namesake and cataloguing the details of all their daily lives, the bookish, withdrawn, past-longing Peter Standish of 1933 has managed to haunt himself back into the past of his own family, slipping into the body of his double across a century and a half while the displaced Peter Standish of 1784 crashes around the twentieth century, probably thinking himself mad or damned—1933 Peter doesn't care, because he believes he's translated himself back to a fragile, vanished world of aristocracy and grace and he'll live out the rest of his life in the time to which he truly belongs. Of course it doesn't work out that way. He knows the broad script he's supposed to stick to, but not the details, not the habits of the time or the in-jokes of his family; he gets the slang all wrong and can only pass off so much as the mistakes of a new-minted American in post-Revolution England. At first it's comical, with twinges of embarrassment for Peter who's trying so hard and so badly fumbling his dream; then it becomes nightmarish, as he realizes the past is a real place with horseshit in the streets and casual cruelties of society and only the most cautious ideas about bathing. Worse, everywhere he goes, people sense something wrong in him—they perceive him as something uncanny, almost like a ghost himself. Nearly a demon. No one wants to meet his eyes. And then finally the girl who loves him—the wrong Pettigrew sister, the one 1784 Peter isn't supposed to have looked at twice—makes him tell her the truth; forces him to raise his eyes to hers, to hold her gaze. "The veil is thin for you," he says: as it was for him, peering into the past.
And the film wrenches. I don't know what I was expecting as the camera cuts from a two-shot in profile to the actress' widening, transfixing eyes, but it wasn't a montage, as modern and shocking as nothing else in this plot: all but commanding him, "I must see!" she's hit full in the face with the future, speed and industry and warfare—gas-masks, cannon-fire, skyscrapers, white-dazzled Broadway, bootleggers and G-men, ocean liners, traffic jams, spinning and dollying and blurring in and out of one another—a rocket-flash of the twentieth century's Peter, white-faced and stricken in a foxhole with shells exploding all around him. I have no idea who directed it. (TCM proposes Slavko Vorkapić, who co-wrote and directed The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra (1927) with Robert Florey, the short film from the Alloy Orchestra's Wild and Weird that really bowled me over in February. It did have great montages.) It doesn't look a bit like the rest of the cinematography. It smashes the viewer as joltingly as it does Heather Angel's Helen Pettigrew and then it's over, dissolving back into soft-focus and fierce despairing embraces, the eternal hopelessness of loving across a break in time. But for a moment she's stunned by it. It's real horror. And it's a very strange inclusion in a film which is otherwise a kind of elaboration on "Miniver Cheevy," undermining 1933 Peter's gauzy ideas about the romance of the past—he's disgusted with modernity, but it's not restored by the script as a best of all possible worlds. It's still a scary, hurtling, mechanized place. There's just nowhere else he can go. That's a lot more disturbing in afterthought than I thought Hollywood time-and-again romances were supposed to get.
Lovecraft adored the film; he saw it four times in theaters, as was the only way possible in 1934. It was a flawed masterpiece for him—he thought especially that the story failed to take into account the effects of eighteenth-century Peter's sojourn in the present, handwaving it as a dream or drunkenness when Lovecraft thought the man should really have been traumatized, having no benefit of his present-day counterpart's knowledge—"But with all its defects the thing gave me an uncanny wallop. When I revisited it I saw it through twice—& I shall probably go again on its next return. It is the most weirdly perfect embodiment of my own moods & pseudo-memories that I have ever seen—for all my life I have felt as if I might wake up out of this dream of an idiotic Victorian age & an insane Jazz age into the reality of 1760 or 1770 or 1780 . . . the age of the white steeples & fanlighted doorways of the ancient hill, & of the long-s'd books of the old dark attic trunk-room at 454 Angell St. God Save the King!" I find it fascinating he felt like that. There's no escaping into the past of Berkeley Square. (Perhaps that was part of the resonance: it hit me only this afternoon that Peter Standish of 1933 is left in a position similar to many of Lovecraft's protagonists, stranded between too much knowledge and too little agency. The past is lost to him and the present is empty. "Not in my time, not in yours, but in God's" doesn't help much on the human scale.) We winnow the bits we like out of stories. I read of Innsmouth and I'm envious. He wrote "The Shadow Out of Time."
So there's my relationship with H. P. Lovecraft: I would have horrified him personally, but we could have gone to the cinema together. He would have agreed with the montage: "Devils! Demons! Not men!" We'd have stayed for the second feature so long as I said nothing about gills and scales.
And the film wrenches. I don't know what I was expecting as the camera cuts from a two-shot in profile to the actress' widening, transfixing eyes, but it wasn't a montage, as modern and shocking as nothing else in this plot: all but commanding him, "I must see!" she's hit full in the face with the future, speed and industry and warfare—gas-masks, cannon-fire, skyscrapers, white-dazzled Broadway, bootleggers and G-men, ocean liners, traffic jams, spinning and dollying and blurring in and out of one another—a rocket-flash of the twentieth century's Peter, white-faced and stricken in a foxhole with shells exploding all around him. I have no idea who directed it. (TCM proposes Slavko Vorkapić, who co-wrote and directed The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra (1927) with Robert Florey, the short film from the Alloy Orchestra's Wild and Weird that really bowled me over in February. It did have great montages.) It doesn't look a bit like the rest of the cinematography. It smashes the viewer as joltingly as it does Heather Angel's Helen Pettigrew and then it's over, dissolving back into soft-focus and fierce despairing embraces, the eternal hopelessness of loving across a break in time. But for a moment she's stunned by it. It's real horror. And it's a very strange inclusion in a film which is otherwise a kind of elaboration on "Miniver Cheevy," undermining 1933 Peter's gauzy ideas about the romance of the past—he's disgusted with modernity, but it's not restored by the script as a best of all possible worlds. It's still a scary, hurtling, mechanized place. There's just nowhere else he can go. That's a lot more disturbing in afterthought than I thought Hollywood time-and-again romances were supposed to get.
Lovecraft adored the film; he saw it four times in theaters, as was the only way possible in 1934. It was a flawed masterpiece for him—he thought especially that the story failed to take into account the effects of eighteenth-century Peter's sojourn in the present, handwaving it as a dream or drunkenness when Lovecraft thought the man should really have been traumatized, having no benefit of his present-day counterpart's knowledge—"But with all its defects the thing gave me an uncanny wallop. When I revisited it I saw it through twice—& I shall probably go again on its next return. It is the most weirdly perfect embodiment of my own moods & pseudo-memories that I have ever seen—for all my life I have felt as if I might wake up out of this dream of an idiotic Victorian age & an insane Jazz age into the reality of 1760 or 1770 or 1780 . . . the age of the white steeples & fanlighted doorways of the ancient hill, & of the long-s'd books of the old dark attic trunk-room at 454 Angell St. God Save the King!" I find it fascinating he felt like that. There's no escaping into the past of Berkeley Square. (Perhaps that was part of the resonance: it hit me only this afternoon that Peter Standish of 1933 is left in a position similar to many of Lovecraft's protagonists, stranded between too much knowledge and too little agency. The past is lost to him and the present is empty. "Not in my time, not in yours, but in God's" doesn't help much on the human scale.) We winnow the bits we like out of stories. I read of Innsmouth and I'm envious. He wrote "The Shadow Out of Time."
So there's my relationship with H. P. Lovecraft: I would have horrified him personally, but we could have gone to the cinema together. He would have agreed with the montage: "Devils! Demons! Not men!" We'd have stayed for the second feature so long as I said nothing about gills and scales.
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Panel! Turing's Snow White; Lovecraft's Berkeley Square; Wittgenstein's Copacabana?
Nine
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I really want Wittgenstein to have seen The Gang's All Here (1943). In the absence of proof he didn't, I shall imagine him in the front row with his neck craned back and a cold pork pie on his knee, soaking up his peripheral vision with the lady in the tutti-frutti hat.
Right: so if I'm going to pitch it to Readercon, what's the panel here? Intellectual figures and their spare time? The influence of cinema on other, not traditionally associated fields? At the moment, we've just got a genre.