Gotham Diary:
Preincarnation
9 October 2013
Here’s something that we couldn’t do when I was little: watch a forty year-old television program. The history of the invention and development of broadcast television is a murky affair involving many small steps, some of them backwards, but the forty-year measure cuts right through that: a show of that age, when I was ten (1958), would have had to be made at the end of World War I. Not on!
But forty years ago from 2013 is no big deal; lots and lots of shows are older than that. Somewhere in my library, I’ve got a collection of old-time Saturday-morning kiddies’ shows, some of which, I’m quite sure, date back to 1953 and beyond — sixty years!
On the not-so-great side of remarkability: many of the actors in the show that I watched yesterday, the BBC adaptation of Dorothy Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club — many of them have died, some, like the star, Ian Carmichael (1920-2010), not too long ago and at great old age. A little memento mori with your TV entertainment!
One of the actors who is still with us is Phyllida Law (1932- ). Law has made a number of pictures in a late career, most of them also featuring one or the other of her daughters, Emma or Sophie Thompson. But I had never seen her in her halcyon days — which is, of course, to say that, when I saw Unpleasantness on Masterpiece Theatre all those decades ago, I didn’t know that the actress playing Marjorie Phelps, a well-born bohemian artist who lives on a houseboat in the Thames, was enjoying her halcyon days, nor that she had a fourteen year-old daughter at home who would grow up to look almost exactly like her. The resemblance I would rate at 95%. Everything about Law is somewhat lighter. Her voice is not so deep, and her manner is slightly but markedly more coquettish. Emma Thompson, of whom I’ve seen a lot over the years, has a weightier, more serious presence. I doubt that she could scamper through an ingénue’s antics as blithely as her mother, the more natural comedian. But I’m quibbling over the 5% that distinguishes the two women. From the standpoint of a film viewer, Emma Thompson is a reincarnation of Phyllida Law, not her daughter. Discovering this in the train of watching The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is a way of standing reincarnation on its head. Law becomes the preincarnation of Thompson. I am quite sure that I have never seen anything like it.
When Masterpiece Theatre began showing the Peter Wimsey mysteries, I knew of Dorothy Sayers as the Penguin translator of Dante. Indeed, she still is, decades after her death in 1957. The Penguin edition would be my favorite, if only it included the Italian text. That would make it perfect. Sayers’s notes and commentaries are stupendously rich, not at all what you get when a great poet has a go at the classic. The translation, by the same token, is relative weak, suffering from a lack of poetic flow; Sayers manages to sound “medieval,” but not at all like Dante. By why worry about being “like” Dante if you could have Dante himself, right there on the facing page!
(I’ve just discovered that you can buy an MP3 version of a Folkways Recording of the first eight cantos of Inferno, recorded in 1956 by a professor Enrico de Negri. It sounds great, but then, when it comes to Italian, I could listen to anyone with a nice voice read the telephone directory. I have to figure out how to get it onto an iPod.)
I remember that it was surprising that an Oxford don, specializing in Dante, would write murder mysteries on the side. We were so innocent in those days! Not too many lustrums ago, I re-read The Nine Tailors, which is all about churchbells and how they can kill you if you’re tied up in the belfry while changes are rung. Sayers’s mysteries are always satisfying, her crimes engagingly ghastly; but the real draw is the fairy tale that they weave out of the rays of Britain’s sunset. Lord Peter Wimsey, younger brother of the Duke of Denver, a genuine grandee, is, as his name betrays, too good to be true. An amateur sleuth with resources adequate to almost any demand, including an impromptu Atlantic crossing (Clouds of Witness), Peter comes kitted out with a valet, Bunter, who is nothing less than a full-bodied counter-argument to Wodehouse’s Jeeves. Together, the two men served in the ghastly trenches at Paschendaele and elsewhere, but now, ten or so years later, they helplessly and endearingly preserve the assymetrical relationship of master and manservant. This is where Sayers’ imagination seems most fanciful. Between them, Wimsey and Bunter appear to share an esprit de corps that requires Bunter to keep Wimsey looking and feeling band-box fresh at all times. I have a hard time believing in a relationship quite so winningly straightforward. The Wimsey romances are anything but timeless, and that is their great charm. They’re historical novels that happen to have been written in the same time period.
Back in the Seventies, I was hugely taken by the resemblance between Ian Carmichael and my adored uncle John. It was a blunt blow to discover that John and my aunt, Ann, were not keen to see any such thing. Now, of course I can understand why. Peter Wimsey’s effervescence has an undeniably fey quality, and there are moments here and there when his remarks seem fatuous. He is, moreover, an English aristocrat, something that my doggedly Yankee relatives would never approve. I see now that, simply by being reminded of my uncle by the actor, I was betraying the fact that I did not understand my family very well, while at the same time indulging in the wishful dream that their actuality were rather different.