Try to Tell the Story Read online

  “I want to see it again,” I told my aunt Trill.

  “You've just seen it,” she said. “You know what happens. It won't be any different next time.”

  “I just want to stay there,” I said.

  “There?”

  I nodded at the screen, but I meant the valley where they rode and the community of the men. It was a place I longed to be, in the picture, a part of it.

  She told me I could come again, with Mum or Dad, but I would not budge. At last, she agreed. She had shopping to do. I could see the film again and she would be back in time so that as the film ended I was to be in the lobby waiting for her. She stood and left me there.

  Films then were in “continuous performance.” People were leaving and arriving and the girl with the tray of ice cream and drinks was standing in her spotlight. Then I felt another light brush across my face. It was an usherette's torch. It was Sally!

  “Where've you been?” I called out.

  “I got a job,” she said—the woman of the world. “So, you like this one?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I'm seeing it again!”

  “Know how many times I've seen it?” she asked. “Thirty-one. No, I tell a lie, it's thirty-two.”

  I was amazed.

  “Why do you like it, then?” she asked.

  “Matthew,” I said, like a team supporter.

  “But don't you like Dunson, too?”

  “Well,” I said.

  “Come on,” said Sally, “they're alike.”

  “Not really.”

  “They're so alike it hurts them to look at each other,” she said. “Anyway, you all right here, on your own?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “OK, sprout. If you need me, you just whistle. You know how to whistle?”

  16

  What did Sally mean about Dunson and Garth being hardly able to look at each other ? I saw the film, and I had found the Red River on maps, so I had an inkling of “where” it happened. I had a favorite book, a history of the Wild West, in which a strange ghost boy took a couple of living boys on a tour of great moments in Western history I imagined myself as part of the trail crew in that dawn before Dunson set off, with Wayne riding down from the ranch house in the early light and saying, “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt.” I said, “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt,” over and over again, and I suppose I was working on an American accent.

  At Rosemead, there was an elocution class so that we might all lose that lazy South London accent (the way I talked in the streets and in the bombed houses) that sounds like a whine and drops its g‘s. So I had thought about voice and speaking “properly.” It was the first suggestion I ever had that you could alter your own voice. “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt,” as if Missouri were right around the corner and not a thousand miles away. There was the soft stress on the name. People in films, I found, used names more often than people in life, and in my England hardly a real name was used. Everyone had diminutive nicknames, knocking them down to size. “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matthew.” You could go that way, by formal, or biblical, names. And not using the name “Garth” confers responsibility—after all, Matthew will, literally, take the herd away from Dunson. “Take ‘em,” as if it were going to be no great problem, or nothing that men like these would ever rate as a problem. “Take ‘em,” as in ride along with them. Just show them the way.

  And the peaceful, half-sleepy way in which Wayne spoke. Wayne was an extraordinary actor, working at his craft while the world had no inkling of its existence— “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt,” as if all the huge effort and turmoil of the journey were like a dream, and just as smooth. And as if Dunson were in no mood to wake the cattle too soon—let the great rousing cries follow him.

  I won't say the line again, but you may smile to learn that I have a son called Mathew Moreover, I have English children and American children, and they both feel that I speak with a peculiar accent. But I was raised in a generation of mid-Atlantic voices, from Cary Grant and Bob Hope to Alistair Cooke, and already in the late ‘40s I had found Cooke's exquisite Letter from America on BBC radio, a steady report in which love or skepticism never got quite the upper hand. (That show began in 1946, but it only took on Letter from America as its title in 1950.) What else does love need to be so loyal? How did Cooke seem so gentle, so wise, and so wry unless it was because of his adopted regimen: England and America mixed and offsetting, like Scotch on the rocks? I had heard the poetic English voice—it was Olivier as Henry V, royal language— but I loved the easy conversational tone (the way Jimmy Stewart talked to Harvey, refusing to be astonished that a rabbit might be a good listener). I loved the declaratory English voice, but I loved even more the American surmise that is still working things out. To this day, the English self-confidence is repugnant to me, and it is shamed by the quiet American examination of doubt.

  The first day I arrived in America (in 1973) there had been a flood in Maine, a summer flood. It was on the evening news and the Boston reporter, all quickfire and soft soap, had lined up an elderly Maine fellow to see if he had ever seen anything like this before. “Well, Mr. Parsons,” he said. “I understand you've lived all your life in Maine.” And the old-timer said, “Not yet.”

  In recent years a great deal of what I have done has been a matter of wondering whether I write English or American—or whether I need to be an actor to do either convincingly. And I still wonder whether “Not yet” was wicked old Herb Parsons putting his finger in Boston's eye, or a ninety-year-old too polite to say what a damn stupid question that was.

  In British films, the people talked as if they wanted to cram every last word in even if it was a love story and they were Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. There was an edge of desperation or hysteria in their Home Counties voices (as if passion might rip apart enunciation) and these lovers were recorded as if they were in wooden boxes. The sound in American films, the voice, was different. We could go into a chapter of technical stuff here, but in America they recorded talk as if it were discourse happening inside your own head—or between people in bed. People knew how to talk quietly, listening for the wind in the background or the sound of the cattle or the money grazing.

  HIM: You really don't know who I am?

  HER: You told me your name, Mr. Parsons. I'm awfully ignorant. I guess you caught on to that. You know, I bet I've heard your name a million times.

  HIM: But you really like me, though, even though you don't know who I am?

  HER: Oh, I surely do. You've been wonderful. Gee, without you, I don't know what I would have done. Here I was with a toothache, and I don't know many people.

  HIM: I know too many people. I guess we're both lonely. You want to know what I was going to do tonight, before I ruined my best Sunday clothes?

  HER: I bet they're not your best Sunday clothes. You've probably got a lot of clothes.

  HIM: No, I was just joking. I was on my way to the Western Manhattan Warehouse, in search of my youth. You see, my mother died, a long time ago. Well, her things were put in storage out west. There wasn't any other place for them. I thought I'd send for them now. Tonight I was going to take a look at them. A sort of sentimental journey. I run a couple of newspapers. What do you do?

  HER: Me?

  HIM: Hmm. How old did you say you were?

  HER: Oh, I didn't say.

  HIM: I didn't think you did. If you had I wouldn't have asked you again, because I'd have remembered. How old?

  HER: Twenty-two in August.

  HIM: That's a ripe old age. What do you do?

  HER: Oh, I work at Seligman's. I'm in charge of the sheet music.

  HIM: That what you want to do?

  HER: No, I wanted to be a singer, I guess. That is, I didn't. My mother did.

  HIM: What happened to the singing?

  HER: Well, Mother always thought—she always talked about grand opera for me. Imagine! Anyway, my voice isn't that kind. It's just as well, you know what mothers are like.

  HIM:
Yes.

  “Take me out to the Western Manhattan Warehouse, Matt.” It doesn't matter yet if you don't know where that dialogue is from—and I'll tell you later and tell you now that I made one change in the text to make a game out of it. But that's American talk, it's very natural seeming, yet it aspires to the whole picture and the entire inside deal in a lovely casual way that is free from underlining note. It's as if in a free country and a visual medium people were effortlessly revealing of themselves without being boastful or conscious of being in a story. It's movie talk, by which I mean that it has been recorded very “intimately,” and in a mutual agreement by which each party consents to help open the other one up. When Elizabeth Taylor looks into the room where Montgomery Clift is alone shooting pool in A Place in the Sun, and she sees the tail end of his private trick shot, she says, “Wow!” and that's all it needs to put the oiled key in his shy lock. She might as well have put her hand in his pants, or his in hers.

  This is not necessarily the way people talk in life. It's the kind of talk that befits a dream based on the hope for love. I always liked it in movies as much as the close-ups, the panoramas, and the music that ran from one to the other like a river, like Red River. It's a hint of what is to come-like the way I'm asking you to read—that I fell in love with intimate fluency just as I began to lose the hope of it.

  17

  THERE CAME A CHRISTMAS when my father asked me if I wanted to put on a show. I was about ten. What he was thinking of was that we'd present a play for the family get-together at Christmas, in the afternoon after the big Christmas meal. We'd learn lines and wear costumes and act it out. Of course, I agreed. It seemed like destiny. He suggested we do something from Macbeth. He read the opening of the play to me, the scene where Macbeth meets the three witches and they predict what will happen. I would be Macbeth, and he would be all the witches rolled into one. He did this for me. He thought of it. He worked it out. Do you see how much I loved him?

  At the time, it was also justified as something to help my elocution class, and what it revealed was that I had early signs of a stammer. It was suggested that recitation would help. I hardly noticed the stammer yet, and only thought what tremendous fun to be Macbeth. Dad typed out the text we'd use and I think it was a skillful adaptation of Shakespeare. When we began to learn our lines, I found I could take them in very fast, even if some of the words had to be explained to me. We rehearsed at weekends, and Dad told me how to stand up straight and tall as Macbeth because he was a warrior, but how the man was afraid of the witches just because what they suggested was so close to his heart.

  I don't think our “play” lasted more than ten minutes. I wore a tartan kilt, a white shirt, and a tam-o’-shanter, and I had a fire poker as my sword. Dad wore a filthy old shawl and generally overdid the disgustingness of the witches as best he could. He reveled in the ingredients that the witches used to make a stew, and he had several dubious bits of stuff to toss in his cauldron. I think the cauldron was a coal scuttle.

  It was an immense success. We both knew our lines, and delivered a performance that easily satisfied those members of the family who managed to stay awake. I don't believe I stammered at all, but I know I came out of the experience anxious to be an actor. People clapped and called for more, and I remember the shining smile on Dad's face, the fun and the pleasure. I felt as close to the family as I was supposed to feel because of Christmas. And in my way I had succumbed to the witches and their promise of some sultry, dangerous ambition beng fulfilled.

  I was doing well at Rosemead, though I hated it and dodged it. One September when school started again I was pushed ahead by two forms, not one, and so I was with older children. And the school began talking to my mother. They explained that the Education Act allowed for public schools—the grand places esteemed in Tom Brown's Schooldays and such—and offered a few places to scholarship boys, promising students who could not otherwise afford the fees. The school closest to us where this was possible was Dulwich College. Were my parents interested in my going there?

  Maybe the question was posed by Miss Plumridge, the head of Rosemead, because the school had already detected my dislike of regular attendance. And whereas Rosemead was small and friendly, Dulwich was vast and procedural. It took in two hundred new boys every year, and there would be bullying, et cetera. I had seen a film of Tom Brown's Schooldays (where younger boys were roasted in front of an open fire) as well as another picture, The Guinea Pig, in which the baby-faced Richard Atten-borough pretended to be a boy of humble origins sent to a grand public school, a place called Saintbury (he was twenty-six, but playing half that age!). He was very unhappy there. He was teased and bullied and ragged and humiliated and in general the film made its school look like a prison. But Dulwich was a great opportunity, and Rosemead thought I was able. The talk went on over my head, I suppose. As well it might. In advance, I could not have understood the daunting system in Dulwich or the challenge. But I had to go to school somewhere. It was the law.

  I never thought to say to anyone that if education was the person's decision to take responsibility for the task themselves and to follow it through as long as life lasted, then I was settled. I did not like to be taught what to know. I wanted to find it out for myself. I had started to read and was raiding adult-book shelves and library resources to pursue that. With my pocket money I bought paperback books—Penguins. And I was more or less of the opinion that if you found something in one book you did not understand then you looked it up in another book. I might have said—though I'm sure I lacked the wit then—that I was being taught so much by what things looked like on film. Of course, many things in film are invented— designed and made—but even then they represent what someone thinks. And when it came to a film like The Third Man, there was ruined Vienna—a place I had no chance of ever seeing, and one that has grown in my mind ever since, so that one day it became a place where I could find Musil, Mahler, and Schiele (and the way Schiele, decades in advance, had guessed the size of the eyes and the look on the faces in the pictures from concentration camps).

  I did as I was told. I worked hard at Rosemead at things I found too easy like spelling, learning tables, the dates of kings, places on the map, and so on. (As far as I recall, “science” did not exist.) The things that made me linger far longer, and which interested me more, were questions like, Why does Harry Lime nod at Holly Martins, as if giving Holly permission to shoot him? Are they friends or enemies?

  I read the newspapers and I knew the names of places-Berlin and Korea, Malaya and India, Palestine and Israel— where there was trouble, or action, but I had no way of reconciling the real India with The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. That seemed impossible. I saw a little man in a white suit and spectacles in a cinema newsreel, pushing his hand at a camera; it was Harry Truman, and he'd won, which was a surprise. I saw similar pictures of bombs exploding, pretty puffball bombs that were just for practice. Twelve twelves were a hundred and forty-four—i before e, except after c, hence the spelling of deceive. My dad is terrific. My dad is a mystery. Multiple-choice questions are always the hardest.

  And then one day at Rosemead, I was called into the teachers’ lunchroom. It was a smoke-filled room; maybe they were playing cards—canasta, the game my mum liked? And Miss Plumridge said to me, “You have been accepted at Dulwich. We are all very proud of you.” There was another boy in the same class—Roderick Blackburn— who was accepted too. But we weren't friends. Of course, none of the girls were up for Dulwich. It was boys only. And that seemed about as uneducational as anything could be. I came home and told my mum but it turned out she knew already, and I could see that she was worried.

  Mum took me on a visit to Dulwich. It was enormous, like a great palace in its own park. It had playing fields that stretched on forever. And the buildings were buildings from old-fashioned adventure films—the school had been founded in 1619. When the boys ended a class, they were like ants scurrying to their next assignment. They wore uniforms: black jackets, l
ong gray trousers. When we went to the school commissariat, we discovered that the white shirts were with separate, detached, and starched collars, and a fresh collar was required every day. You had a front stud and a back stud and cuff links and I wondered if eight years at Dulwich—or whatever the sentence—would be enough to learn how to tie your tie and put on your collar with just human fingers as tools.

  “Are you scared?” asked Sally when we got back from the clothes shopping. She was smoking a cigarette. Sometimes it was frightening the way she had grown up.

  “I am,” I said.

  “Hard luck, I can't be there with you,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

  “I can pretend.”

  “They might not like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just pretending I'm here.” She blew a pretty smoke ring and we watched it shimmy across the space between us.

  “Well, you are here—I mean here.” I meant at home. But she just looked at me as if wondering when it would all sink in.

  “I may not go,” I told her.

  “Got to go somewere,” she said.

  “Boys don't talk to you there,” I said. I had heard that older boys royally ignored the new bugs.

  “You'll make friends,” she said. “Bound to. That's what boys do.”

  “What about girls?”

  She thought for a moment and said, “Oh, it doesn't matter with girls.” And she paused. “Have you heard the school song?”