The Death of the Heart (1938)

I’m really not sure what to make of this novel by Elizabeth Bowen. Her novel-of-manners approach fits and puts her in line with other writers such as Edith Wharton or Muriel Spark—just a little acerbic and cynical, with a fine finicky approach to sentences and word choice, along with a commitment to ambiguity and allusion. The story involves 16-year-old Portia Quayne, who moves to London to live with her half-brother Thomas after her mother dies—not Thomas’s, it is the father who they have in common. It’s a fractured family—17 years separate Thomas and Portia in age and Thomas never thought much of Portia’s mother after their father took up with her as a widower, after the death of Thomas’s mother. Thomas is married to Anna, a shallow socialite who controls everyone around her as much as she can. As the novel opens Anna is telling her unusual friend St. Quentin, a novelist who seems to be gay, how upset she is at what she found in Portia’s diary. Reading other people’s diaries this way tells us most of what we need to know about Anna. An example of Bowen’s somewhat exasperating ambiguity is that we never learn what Anna read in the diary. We can imagine, of course, but I think that gives us too much latitude. Because Portia is still too young to know herself yet, it’s hard to think what she might put in her diary. Portia is obviously a romantic victim waiting to happen, and soon enough there’s a man trying to take advantage of her, or something. Eddie is 23, works in Thomas’s marketing firm, and is a friend of Anna’s. We learn he has made a pass at Anna, and later this is some suggestion (more ambiguity) that they are having an affair. I enjoyed this novel all the way—again, Bowen is a very good writer—but I’m not entirely sure where it went. There are some great characters here, notably a clan at the seaside where Portia is sent to live with Anna’s former governess while Thomas and Anna vacation in Europe. Not taking Portia with them is another telling detail in a tale full of them. Bowen also had a reputation, like Edith Wharton, for writing ghost stories. Pursuing more of them is likely my next step with Bowen. I’ve already read one, though it didn’t make much impression. But I’m more curious about her now. As Bowens go in that realm, Marjorie is still the one to beat.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Holiday (1938)

USA, 95 minutes

Director: George Cukor

Writers: Donald Ogden Stewart, Sidney Buchman, Philip Barry

Photography: Franz Planer

Music: Sidney Cutner

Editors: Al Clark, Otto Meyer

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Doris Nolan, Edward Everett Horton, Lew Ayres, Henry Kolker, Binnie Barnes, Henry Daniell

Annals of screwball comedy: Holiday came out four months after Bringing Up Baby in 1938. They make interesting companion pieces—one obvious stop for double-feature programmers. Both have Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in starring roles with visible chemistry. Sometimes I think Grant brings all the chemistry necessary for anyone he played with because Hepburn is more of a peculiar and specific figure, as the mid-Atlantic accent attests (though it's true Grant sports the accent too). These two movies are distinguished more by the sensibilities of their directors. Bringing Up Baby is a Howard Hawks picture and shot through with his dry cynicism, all romance dialed way down for the sake of clarifying the absurdity, whereas Holiday, directed by George Cukor, is much closer to romantic comedy than screwball comedy perhaps because Cukor, a certain Hollywood titan on Andrew Sarris's "far side of paradise" (Gaslight, My Fair Lady, The Philadelphia Story, etc., etc.), was more of a romantic than a screwball.

To be sure, both the screwball and much of the romantic elements are the weakest parts of Holiday, the better to focus on its quiet confidence in asserting self-fulfillment as our greatest aspiration over making a lot of money. It is completely audacious in its own way, particularly given its home in the Great Depression when making money was a natural concern for most and getting rich easy seemed like an obvious solution, if you could make it happen. In that way Holiday is more of a bohemian movie at its core, about the pursuit of freedom, self-expression, and happiness. It's a little corny for these sophisticates, a little painfully sincere, but it has a lot to do with what makes this strange gem work.

Jezebel (1938)

USA, 104 minutes

Director: William Wyler

Writers: Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel, John Huston, Owen Davis, Robert Buckner, Louis F. Edelman

Photography: Ernest Haller

Music: Max Steiner

Editor: Warren Low

Cast: Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, George Brent, Donald Crisp, Fay Bainter, Margaret Lindsay, Richard Cromwell, Spring Byington, Matthew "Stymie" Beard, Theresa Harris

Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone With the Wind was published in 1936, became an immediate sensation, and has basically remained so since. I haven't read it myself but it has never been out of print in nearly 100 years. Even so, it was practically overshadowed by the movie version three years later, a sort of massive 1-2 knockout punch only seen in the annals of media culture perhaps once a decade (compare the Beatles owning the Billboard top 5 for one week in 1964 ... the Beatles have also never gone out of print). Word is that Bette Davis was given the lead in Jezebel as compensation for not getting the Scarlett O'Hara role. Indeed, sympathy may have run so deep it accounts for her Best Actress Oscar for this picture too, although Davis was plainly one of the best players of her generation, and well-liked, with 10 nominations and two wins for Best Actress between 1934 and 1944. Jezebel, based on a play that was successful in 1933, similarly goes down South for a good old slavery times story—this one set in 1850s Louisiana during a yellow fever epidemic, with racial tensions of a different kind, abolitionist, as thick in the air as 2020.

Davis is Julie Marsden, a Scarlett-like—and/or Scarlett-lite, depending on your feelings about GWTW—spoiled daughter of wealth. If Scarlett wears black to shock everyone at a dance, Julie wears scarlet. It works out pretty much the same. Julie's on-again off-again beau is Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda, young and on the rise but already with a ramrod up his spine) and the script sends the couple spinning. Julie seems to have a habit of going too far and then seeking atonement and Davis captains up her gyrations with quivering conviction. She's easy to hate in a sort of delicious way. At a key point in the movie, Julie's Aunt Belle says she reminds her "of a woman called Jezebel, who did evil in the sight of God." Jezebel, you may recall, is a biblical Phoenician character, the wife of Ahab and a general no-goodnik infatuated with power, and a woman besides. Aunt Belle is not wrong here but I will say Julie's road to redemption is far more compelling than Scarlett O'Hara's.

"Up Under the Roof" (1938)

I wanted to think a little about duds in short story collections. Somehow they are inevitable. I've never seen a collection without at least one. In fact, any collection with only a few is generally a very good one. I've never figured out if that's the law of averages, or a matter of my mood from story to story (or day to day), or something about commercial factors. Perhaps some stories are so good they make their neighbors look bad. To be clear, I wouldn't call this story by Manly Wade Wellman and his ridiculous name and Southern heritage a dud, but I wouldn't call it a horror story either. It comes from an early '90s collection (itself a compilation of three earlier collections) edited by Dennis Etchison, Masters of Darkness, which is somehow itself a big dud. Etchison the story writer is a separate issue. I'll be getting to him in time. But Etchison the editor seems to come with some baggage, maybe? It's not laziness. The premise is that the story choices are made by the writers themselves. This seems like a pretty good idea at first. Writers were even at liberty to revise or undo edits they didn't like in earlier publication of the stories if they wanted. As usual, I had hopes for overlooked gems but then was reminded who writers are, or what the publishing industry is, as many of their picks turn out to be tales they had a hard time selling in the first place, or didn't sell, for whatever reasons. Writers, at least by this evidence, are not very good at making these selections. Ray Bradbury's "The Dead Man," for example, could well be the worst Bradbury story I've ever read, and I'm a fan. There must be an art to editing anthologies after all!

At any rate, as I say, I would not call Wellman's "Up Under the Roof" a dud—it's pretty good, aching with a surprising sincerity and candid details given from a child's point of view in memory. But it feels much more like an anecdote from a memoir. Indeed, Wellman's afterword confirms that it's basically a recounting of real-life incidents. It's about a 12-year-old boy confronting his fear of living in a haunted house. It's an unusual situation in the first place in that he is the only kid in a home setting among adults who berate and ridicule him regularly. They want to have grownup conversations and can't tolerate his childishness. It's summer. He's forced to be by himself a lot. At night he hears strange noises from the space in the house under the roof above his bed. He finally banishes his anxiety by forcing himself to enter the space. After seeing for himself there is nothing there the noises cease. This story almost moves past memoir and into self-help, reminding me of good advice I once got about recurring nightmares, a kind of lucid dreaming trick. In these dreams, confronting and literally attacking the sources of distress often ends them for good. My brand of nightmare at the time tended to be mocking, taunting bullies and the remedy was literally to scream back at them and punch them in the face if I had to. Not recommended for waking life, of course. The violent scenes woke me promptly and the nightmares then tended to end.

So I completely approve of this kid and I like him too, and I liked the lesson and message and most things about the story, aside from the pinched Southern setting, which is only because I don't like the pinched Old South. Wellman is fine at establishing it. "Up Under the Roof" considerably softens my take on Wellman who has not otherwise impressed me much yet, though he is a "Master of Darkness" and has a story in The Dark Descent too and I will likely be seeing more of him. This story appeared originally in the venerable Weird Tales, which surprised me a little as it's much more preachy than weird. On the other hand, the creature the boy imagines from the noises does reasonably suit the weird mode, a kind of giant creeping sloshing amoeba. Honestly, for me, the self-help tone is refreshing. The reality of the noises is never shrunk from—indeed, Wellman insists on it—but the point of the story is dealing with fear. Could be helpful to some!

Complete Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
Read story online.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

USA, 102 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde
Photography: Russell Metty
Music: Roy Webb
Editor: George Hively
Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald, May Robson, Fritz Feld, Ward Bond

I have never adored this movie the way I think I should, the way people do. Watching it recently I noted all the impressive points again: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, director Howard Hawks, a leopard (make that two leopards), the Tin Pan Alley standard "I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby," and screwball comedy itself for crying out loud, that early contribution of sound, a fast-talking freewheeling way to indulge slapstick and improv while letting studio stars play loose and wild as they can. Screwball comedy usually depends on the charisma of its principles. Fortunately for Bringing Up Baby Hepburn and Grant have a considerable amount of that.

Grant always tended to be generally better at comedy, his affable sophisticated persona a little clownish yet somehow more everyman and vulnerable, uniquely suited to baffling sinister problems, such as he encounters here or in North by Northwest or in another screwball comedy by Hawks, the 1952 Monkey Business. Hepburn by contrast was more suited to the intensities of big theatrical drama and sometimes seems overwhelmed by—but always game for—the nonsense unspooling here. Among other things, almost all of Mary Tyler Moore (both 20something and 30something Mary) can be seen in her performance here. The result is often high-spirited, spurred by a joyful feel to the production (the Hawks brand, let's call it, as it's also a main feature of The Big Sleep). But Bringing Up Baby also lapses into flat aimless patches where it becomes merely a 1930s picture. It's a star vehicle first and mainly, and Hawks keeps those stars in front of the cameras as much as possible. It obviously doesn't matter what they do or don't do once there.

"The Use of Force" (1938)

Read story by William Carlos Williams online.

William Carlos Williams is someone I know better as a poet. But he was also a doctor, a pediatrician, and wrote short stories. This very short story, the last in the collection edited by Robert Penn Warren, is about four printed pages, and it often feels terse and abrupt. It's told first-person by a doctor who has been called to examine a sick girl in her home. The story takes place during a diphtheria outbreak, which is the concern of all present, including the girl. But she refuses to cooperate. She's afraid she's seriously sick and irrationally believes if she's not diagnosed she can't be sick, or won't have to endure treatments, or something. The family is poor and they've preferred to believe the girl's story that nothing is wrong. But they know better now and have finally called the doctor. I'm not a parent, but the scene reminds me of what can happen in veterinarian offices. The patients are there for their own good but there's no way to explain that to them. At some point, the use of force may be required. It's always a tricky moment. That's why it's the title of this story. In this case the doctor needs to examine the girl's throat and she refuses to open her mouth. We all know there are ways to force a person's mouth open. It can be done but it requires effort. There's a moment in the contest—say, sticking with what I know, getting a cat actually out of the box in the vet's office—when you realize you are violently imposing your own will on another with brute advantage, and it's momentarily a little sickening. This story is about that moment exactly. Any faults of the parents, any innate goodness of the physician—even the fact that the girl turns out indeed to have diphtheria—do little to eliminate the unpleasantness of the violence we witness. A reader on the Goodreads site (Jenna) captures the essence of this story very well: "Upon first reading this, the doctor seems like he's trying to diagnose a stubborn child with Diphtheria. The second time reading this it seems comparable to a rape. Seriously." This story is as strangely powerful as any of Williams's poetry. Remarkable.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

"Flight" (1938)

Read story by John Steinbeck online.

John Steinbeck's story involves a lot of elements familiar to his work, including a setting in Monterey, California, and a poor Hispanic family, living and working on a farm, eking out an existence. The father is dead and there are three children. The oldest is Pepe, at 19, who seems friendly and open and is described as lazy. He loves the switchblade knife his mother gave him as a keepsake of his father. In the story, she sends him to town for supplies, but when he returns he is in trouble. A confrontation occurred and he has killed someone. Now he must flee into the mountains. But he is ill-prepared for the flight, as the story now veers into man vs. nature business for most of its bulk, good stuff if not much new. It quickly becomes apparent this is going to be a doomed enterprise. There's little social commentary beyond the basic premise of the family's impoverishment. The story supplies concrete details of the trail, the escape, and what happens, as Pepe begins to lose everything piece by piece: the knife, the horse, his hat, the rifle he brought with him, and finally water. He's not prepared for any of it and his end is a sad one, but Steinbeck doesn't spend much time on that. He was a natural storyteller, able to move his narratives with physical description, and this story is a fine example. It's rarely surprising but always vivid and engaging, the kind of thing Jack London was also good at, including making its social points in quietly effective ways. Pepe's troubles have little to do with his ethnicity, but it's also obvious his ethnicity never makes anything easier. Early in the story we learn how his father died, and we meet his younger sister and brother, who are 12 and 14, and it's hard to see rosy futures for any of them, but that is never dwelt on. We are simply privy to this one terrible episode in their lives, reminiscent of the scene in a song by Neil Young, "Powderfinger." It's sad and terrible but feels eternal, like a biblical parable. Your heart can't help but go out to the good nature and stupidity of this typical 19-year-old, who believes he is an adult but is not. So it goes. This is a good one.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine