Morning Read: Padding
¶ In Moby-Dick, a wearying, garrulous chapter about dining opportunities aboard the Pequod. Melville’s stab at jocular whimsy sails right by me. The sketch of the “Dough-Boy” who waits table — “naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse” — is rather nasty.
¶ While Don Quixote continues to rave pentitentially in the forests, offstage, the previously interrupted Cardenio concludes his tale of jilted passion to the priest and the barber, who reappeared in the last chapter and are now trying to coax Quixote back to his home. This egregious wad of padding can’t, therefore, be justified by having Quixote hear it. My quibble would have elicited a snort from Cervantes.
¶ In Squillions, Coward makes his first “real” movie, The Scoundrel, and seems all set to make lots more. (In fact, he would appear in only three pictures before 1950, after which point he was a character actor who more or less appeared as himself.) Lynne Fontanne writes to praise the film — “most original”; “YOU superb” — and then takes it all back. A letter from Coward to Alexander Woollcott makes me hope that this correspondence will be collected separately and in toto.
Darling Acky-wacky-wocky-weeza-peeza —
It was ever ever so nice to get your absolutely ripping letter all about your jolly doings and the fun you are having which, although liable to bore the fuck out of anyone less fond of you than I am, really gave me a nostalgic longing to see your pretty face again and nuzzle my head on your shoulder like I always do.
¶ Writing about “Churchill in 1940,” AN Wilson is almost transfigured by the attempt to cram the novel that got away into one short chapter. How one should have liked to make Churchill up!
Yet the battle was one of honour. However incapacitating it is today for the British to live with the mythology of 1940, however much it holds them in the past, it is understandable why they cling to it. There was a genuine glory and a dignity to the story of the old hero returning to slay some dragons before, bloodied and weakened, he and his Victorian world sank into the regions of twilight.