BB & De Beauvoir

Bernard Levin gives an in-depth and intellectual précis of the book on the back cover.

The nob end.

Best Book Cover Ever?

Yes.

Oh God! I love the font (looks like a Letraset Transfer one), the wood cuts, the little spine illustration and the title. If I ever write a book, I want to call it this, just - well, just because.

Minging London

The New Mayhew was originally published in Punch during the 50s as a satirical update of London Labour and the London Poor, the great Victorian work by the magazine's co-founder Henry Mayhew.  Travel writer Alex Atkinson and Britain's greatest cartoonist Ronald Searle teamed up to present a series of vignettes of the least glamorous corners of contemporary London life: "the dim, pastel tragedies that are daily being enacted, in this century, between Holloway and Streatham".  Atkinson's pen portraits are written in the heavy Victorian style of the original, lending a peculiar grandeur to their subjects, while Searle's illustrations are both grotesque and, often, incredibly poignant.

The pieces were collected together in a Penguin paperback in 1962 (the year of Atkinson's sudden, untimely death), which is as fascinating a document of 1950s London as you're likely to find.

Sheer Shire

Oh, Shire, how I love you. Fantastic author name; I'm presuming Camp is short for Campanologist.

More Ancient Mysteries for Kids

Stone Me!

The ubiquitous Ms. Marianne Stone as secretary Miss Grogan in the under-rated Hammer psychological thriller, 'Hysteria' (1965).

Friday Night Film: Reflections In A Golden Eye

Torrid melodramas set in the southern states of America were all the rage in the fifties and sixties, with Hollywood churning out about one a week (note: check this statistic). The ingredients were pretty much always the same: neurotics and lunatics rub each other up the wrong way until tragedy strikes or an unpalatable truth is wrenched into the open.  I’m fascinated by them, especially as, for the most part, contemporary audiences weren’t particularly bothered about them and I wonder why Hollywood persisted with the form.

Case in point: ‘Reflections In A Golden Eye’. Top director, stellar cast, high drama, massive flop. Based on the book by Carson McCullers, ‘Reflections’ is prefaced with a simple quotation from the novel:  ‘there is a fort in the south where a few years ago a murder took place'.

Brando busts a nut.

Taylor boozes.

Things aren't going well.

Private Williams waits and watches, sees fat nude arse.

Anacleto. He's flamboyant.

The story concerns a bizarre love hexagon, a heptagon if you include the horse. Major Pendleton (Marlon Brando) is a tightly wound, vain, humourless instructor at a military academy and barracks. His stroppy wife, Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor – shouty, as usual), is having an affair with his colleague, Major Langdon. Major Langdon’s wife is permanently on the edge of mental collapse (her baby died, so she cut off her own nipples with a pair of pruning shears), so their Filipino houseboy, Anacleto, tries to keep her occupied by camping it up, painting golden peacocks and prancing around doing ballet and singing to her. 

An enlisted man, Private Williams, has become obsessed with Leonora, and breaks into the house every night to watch her sleep and rummage in her drawers and fondle her flimsies. Pendleton has noticed Williams hanging around and assumes that Williams is interested in him, and this unleashes his previously repressed homosexuality. That’s a hell of a synopsis, and I didn’t even mention the horse, Firebird - Leonora loves it, Private Williams looks after it (and rides around on in the nude) and Pendleton nearly beats it to death for throwing him (Leonora gets her own back by thrashing her husband with a riding crop in the middle of a cocktail party).

Not actually what is meant by the term 'bareback riding'.

Brando bursts in.

'Well, I declare'

Kinicker sniffer nicked sniffing.

It’s a pretty breathless hour and a half and, by the outrageously over the top end of it, two of the characters are dead, one has run away and one is ruined and on their way to jail. It’s a little too serious to be high camp, but it is certainly hysterically overwrought. I really like it particularly as, unlike a lot of films in this vein, there are very few big speeches and expository declamations, so a certain ambiguity is retained. It’s a very ambiguous film in general, and that makes it so much more interesting.

Brando hears I called him a 'waster'.

Remorse.

Self-disgust.

There’s an awful lot going on in this film, and every moment is charged with meaning, but it’s Brando who really stands out for me. His tight-jawed, ramrod straight (in some ways, anyway) performance isn’t exactly ‘normal’ in leading man terms, but is extremely well observed and extremely skilful – the aftermath of his fall from Firebird where he goes from abject, sickening terror to crazed anger, for instance, or the scene where he restlessly waits for Private Williams to come into his bedroom (not knowing he’s actually heading for Leonora’s) and suddenly realises his hair is a mess and tries to sort it out  – and it’s strange to think that he was third choice for the role after Montgomery Clift (who died) and Lee Marvin (who refused it). Brando was a funny bloke, and a bit of a waster, but, when he’s on form, he’s fantastic.   

Finally, director John Huston (all over the place quality wise in the sixties and seventies, and an incorrigible game changer) originally suffused every scene with an eerie golden glow. It looks great, but audiences didn’t like it, so a standard version was put out for audiences to dislike instead. The screenshots, of course, are from the version Huston originally intended to be seen. It’s a neat, odd little touch that further recommends this off kilter mini masterpiece to aficionados of the slightly bizarre. That’s you, by the way.  

I Can't Forget

Amazing performance from Barbara (the chanteuse name of Monique Serf, 1930 - 1997) on a song called 'Tu Ne Te Souviendras Pas' ('You Will Not Remember'), one of those sardonic, cynical, heartbreaking ballads of resignation the French do so well. The performance is so simple, yet her angular head movements, bird like features and dark eyes show the desperation behind her odd smile. Haunting.

Totally Menzel

Adolph Menzel (1815-1905) was one of the best known artists in 19th century Germany, hugely popular in his country for his patriotic propaganda paintings. These don't look very interesting to the eyes a contemporary viewer but a brief trawl through his catalogue reveals another quite different set of works.

Rather than the grandiose history paintings, these are small scale works, still lives and interiors with a gnomic meditative quality. The simple subjects carry no political baggage or obvious message, and allow the viewer to find their own meaning within the ambiguity, or not as the case may be.


Unmade Bed, 1845

The drawing Unmade Bed could be an illustration for M.R.James' Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad with the contorted sheets about to animate "a face of crumpled linen."


Still Life with Small Penis and Skeleton - sex and death, a classic combination



Studio Wall

The paintings of dimly lit anatomical plaster casts and wax moulds hanging on his studio walls recall one of my favourite scenes from Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, the interior of their Jewish rescuer Isak Jacobi's house with it's walls covered in puppets, weird ephemera and uncertain shapes. The rooms are lit by feeble oil lamps, a ghostly light which encourages the tired evening mind to sense unease among the body parts and dark shadows.



Studio Wall, 1872 (more sex and death?)



Rat in the Gutter



Partial Self-Portrait as an Amish



Dead Soldiers

He did venture beyond Berlin on occasional artistic assignments, some of which were to document the destruction of the Franco-Prussian War, which he did with a forensic eye and an attention to gruesome detail to rival Goya's Disasters of War.



More Dead Soldiers



Dead General

Menzel was an odd fellow, sociable but detached from his peers. He never married. His outsider status may have been due to the fact that he was only 4 feet 6 inches tall with a larger than average size head. Gnomic and gnomish - I like that.

Ancient Mysteries for Kids

First published in 1958.  You'll no doubt be stunned to learn that this edition dates from the early 70s.  The description on the back is probably the most enticing I've ever read.

Essentially it's a child's guide to becoming an ill-fated M R James character.  The book's full title is Looking and Finding and Collecting and Reading and Investigating and Much Else.  Which I'm sure you'll agree is a pretty neat summation of what we do here at Mounds and Circles.  Especially the "Much Else" bit.

The Right Honourable Gentleman

009: Tom Driberg

The extraordinary Tom Driberg, friend of Aleister Crowley, Evelyn Waugh, Ronnie Kray, Mick Jagger and Guy Burgess, MP, Soviet spy, blow job expert (he claimed his GP said he needed the potassium) and incorrigible rogue. 

Charlie Bubbles

 ‘Charlie Bubbles’ has been described as a ‘film about nothing’. In actual fact, it’s a film about lots of things; it just doesn’t present a straightforward, dramatic arc for the viewer to passively enjoy. That sounds rather earnest, but the film itself is funny and free-wheeling, it’s just inconclusive, and the dividing lines between fantasy and reality are unclear. 

The story is fairly easy to summarise: Charlie Bubbles is a hugely successful Northern writer who now lives in London: he is rich, popular and increasingly disconnected. He travels through the night to visit his son and ex-wife in Derbyshire, but feels out of place there, too. Eventually, he finds a novel way to effect an escape.

The summary doesn’t do justice to the real joy of the film, the collection of funny, sad, surreal incidents studded throughout the narrative that stick in the brain: the comical food fight (evidently enjoyed by the actors), and the aftermath, in which Charlie and his friend Smokey Pickles walk down Regent Street covered in cream and spaghetti; the strange encounter at the Services with Charlie’s old flame (Yootha Joyce) and her weird entourage, including a creepy lifelike doll; the sexual encounter with his secretary which appears to be wishful thinking; Charlie gluing his ex-wife’s ‘best eyelashes’ onto his son’s face to create a serviceable moustache and, of course, the ending, which is simply a fantastic solution to an oblique and episodic story.

Charlie is played by Albert Finney, who also directs (for the first and last time). Finney has a splendidly lugubrious face and his performance is low key to the point of somnolence.  A common motif is Charlie in the midst of other people, barely speaking, hardly there. He is at his most animated whilst locked away in his office, communicating with his housekeeper, manservant, secretary and best friend through an intercom as he watches them move around the house on a sophisticated close circuit television system.

Charlie is bored and unresponsive to the point of clinical depression, jaded and permanently tired, and some of these characteristics seem latent in his son, Jack. Jack is football mad but, taken to Old Trafford to see a game, soon becomes distracted and starts drawing on the window (they are in a Director’s box, completely cut off from the rest of the crowd). Later on he disappears and makes his own way home, although by train rather than hot air balloon. Jack also has Charlie’s mordant sense of humour; when a besieging reporter (Alf Roberts from ‘Coronation Street’) asks ‘Mrs Bubbles, how old is your son?’ he quickly replies ‘35’ and wryly says to his Mum (Billie Whitelaw) ‘Your life’s not your own, is it?’.  

The script is by Shelagh Delaney and clearly incorporates both her and Finney’s personal experiences of ‘transcending’ their working class upbringings (they were both born in Salford) through great success in the arts, joining a newly established meritocracy of stars, a group of people whose early lives had not led them to expect fame, wealth or success, but whose obvious talents emerged during the kitchen sink zeitgeist and propelled them into a strange, alien world of long lunches with accountants, awards ceremonies, big houses and staff (interestingly, Charlie’s housekeeper sees him as an upstart, and clearly thinks of herself as his social superior) .

‘Charlie Bubbles’ encapsulates the contradiction of the artist who is fuelled by their humble origins, but, because of their success, is no longer in touch with the wellspring of their talent. Socially, of course, he will always be nouveau riche, a working class lad made good (his misbehaviour is expected, for instance, and, as long as he pays for it, accepted). Back home, there’s a different issue: life in Salford goes on, and he no longer has any relevance there.

There’s a sequence where he drives his gold convertible Rolls Royce around a desolate piece of waste ground while his secretary (Liza Minelli) takes photographs of raw looking working men and a scruffy marching band. Charlie has become a tourist in his hometown, and the people he grew up with are now strangers (his secretary asks him ‘where do your parents live?’ and he responds ‘oh, somewhere ‘round here’). The people of Salford recognise him, they read his books (or watch the films based on the books). They are proud of him, not for his work, but for having escaped; they obviously have no real understanding of what he really does, how different his life is now. In a piquant episode, a waiter in a hotel asks Charlie: ‘do you just do the writing now, or do you still work?’

In the end, Charlie finds an unattended hot air balloon, climbs into it, loosens the ropes and floats away into the ether. It's a temporary solution to his problems, but provides some much needed respite. What is clear is that Charlie will come down to Earth eventually, and it will almost certainly be a difficult landing.