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And one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words
There was no jackhammering today, only carpentry and buzz saws, so I slept nearly eight hours. (The jackhammers started just as I began this post, which was surprisingly thoughtful of them.) Last night's dreams were a mix of dental nightmares and a complex plot in which I was being slowly poisoned so that my body could be used for components in some kind of mechanical interface. My fingernails had turned a kind of solid hematite black and each time it felt heavier and heavier to breathe, but there was no reversing what had been done. I wanted to kill myself in some way that would render me unfit for the intended purpose, but I think I woke up first. I have no idea where that came from.
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strange_selkie sent me an excellent obituary for Leslie Howard.
What he was doing, not quite in the services, was morale and propaganda work, touring and lecturing in neutral Portugal and Spain where his anti-Nazi films were popular and his public appearances enthusiastically received, which considering that Spain at the time was Franco's has always impressed me. This next sentence will fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories if I'm not careful, because the last time I checked, the attack on BOAC Flight 777-A was something historians were still arguing about. Here are the data: on its regular return flight from Lisbon to Bristol, on June 1, 1943, the Douglas DC-3 Ibis was shot down by Luftwaffe pilots over the Bay of Biscay. There were no survivors. Here things start to get strange. Howard's son Ronald always believed it was an assassination. It is quite true that the Nazi government, specifically Joseph Goebbels, hated Leslie Howard—in his radio broadcasts, his filmmaking, his fundraising, the actor was eloquently and tirelessly and effectively anti-Nazi, and the fact of his Jewishness only worsened the sting. William Joyce, the most famous "Lord Haw-Haw" of Germany Calling, is supposed to have promised Howard's execution as soon as Germany successfully conquered Britain. Whether Goebbels had him on a hit list or not, it seems to be a fact that he took out an exultant headline in Der Angriff when the news of Howard's death broke. (He called him "Pimpernel Howard," as if he really were the resistance hero of Pimpernel Smith (1941), the ostensibly dreamy archaeologist spiriting Jews and dissidents out from under the noses of the Third Reich. I love that movie. Someday I will even see it in a format that is not terrible library VHS.) The commander of the eight Junkers Ju 88s that shot down Flight 777-A always maintained it was an accident: they mistook the unarmed, camouflage-painted civilian aircraft for a military one and only realized their error once the damage was done. And now we are into the conspiracy warren, where we find theories like the one that Howard and his stout, cigar-smoking manager were mistaken for Winston Churchill and his tall, wiry bodyguard, or were courageously doubling for them, or that Howard's goodwill-touring presence in the Iberian Peninsula was itself, Pimpernel-like, only a cover for the intelligence activities which resulted in his untimely death; seriously, there are books about it. There are documentaries. It's a case where I do not really expect the truth to be known; I'm not sure enough information exists anymore to be certain. Personally I don't find it unbelievable that Howard had intelligence connections, since at this point the number of actors or writers or other artistic figures who worked for the SOE in WWII is starting to get ridiculous. (Christopher Lee! We were just talking about you!) I'm less convinced of the targeted assassination somehow, although I suppose I could just be underestimating the power of art. Either way, he was fifty years old and he had a face like an angular cat and I would have loved to see the movies he made after the war, in which I am not alone. I missed his yahrzeit this year. I suppose this paragraph will have to do.
strange_selkie sent me an excellent obituary for Leslie Howard.What he was doing, not quite in the services, was morale and propaganda work, touring and lecturing in neutral Portugal and Spain where his anti-Nazi films were popular and his public appearances enthusiastically received, which considering that Spain at the time was Franco's has always impressed me. This next sentence will fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories if I'm not careful, because the last time I checked, the attack on BOAC Flight 777-A was something historians were still arguing about. Here are the data: on its regular return flight from Lisbon to Bristol, on June 1, 1943, the Douglas DC-3 Ibis was shot down by Luftwaffe pilots over the Bay of Biscay. There were no survivors. Here things start to get strange. Howard's son Ronald always believed it was an assassination. It is quite true that the Nazi government, specifically Joseph Goebbels, hated Leslie Howard—in his radio broadcasts, his filmmaking, his fundraising, the actor was eloquently and tirelessly and effectively anti-Nazi, and the fact of his Jewishness only worsened the sting. William Joyce, the most famous "Lord Haw-Haw" of Germany Calling, is supposed to have promised Howard's execution as soon as Germany successfully conquered Britain. Whether Goebbels had him on a hit list or not, it seems to be a fact that he took out an exultant headline in Der Angriff when the news of Howard's death broke. (He called him "Pimpernel Howard," as if he really were the resistance hero of Pimpernel Smith (1941), the ostensibly dreamy archaeologist spiriting Jews and dissidents out from under the noses of the Third Reich. I love that movie. Someday I will even see it in a format that is not terrible library VHS.) The commander of the eight Junkers Ju 88s that shot down Flight 777-A always maintained it was an accident: they mistook the unarmed, camouflage-painted civilian aircraft for a military one and only realized their error once the damage was done. And now we are into the conspiracy warren, where we find theories like the one that Howard and his stout, cigar-smoking manager were mistaken for Winston Churchill and his tall, wiry bodyguard, or were courageously doubling for them, or that Howard's goodwill-touring presence in the Iberian Peninsula was itself, Pimpernel-like, only a cover for the intelligence activities which resulted in his untimely death; seriously, there are books about it. There are documentaries. It's a case where I do not really expect the truth to be known; I'm not sure enough information exists anymore to be certain. Personally I don't find it unbelievable that Howard had intelligence connections, since at this point the number of actors or writers or other artistic figures who worked for the SOE in WWII is starting to get ridiculous. (Christopher Lee! We were just talking about you!) I'm less convinced of the targeted assassination somehow, although I suppose I could just be underestimating the power of art. Either way, he was fifty years old and he had a face like an angular cat and I would have loved to see the movies he made after the war, in which I am not alone. I missed his yahrzeit this year. I suppose this paragraph will have to do.
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Leslie Howard is magnificent. His wartime films are fascinating—The First of the Few is a perfectly decent biopic, but Pimpernel Smith is an amazing, numinous reworking of The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Gentle Sex is a clear propaganda effort, but it's also a historically valuable, straight-up feminist film. His son collected a number of his essays and broadcasts under the title Trivial Fond Records in 1982—I've been looking for it for years. I don't have a Tumblr, but I'd subscribe to Leslie Howard Forever if I did.