Wars of nerves

Although he’s no longer the Laureate Andrew Motion has marked Remembrance Day this year with a very public poem, ‘An Equal Voice‘, which used ‘found lines’ about shellshock and post traumatic stress to bring this particular (and distinctively distressing) experience to mind, shared to some degree by all survivors of war. As he wrote in the introduction:

This is a “found” poem, a stitching together of the voices of shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of sources, from the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in roughly chronological order. There’s a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in there, but most are from unknown soldiers.

As he acknowledges he has also drawn on Ben Shephard’s history of military psychiatry, A War of Nerves, and the title is taken from a quote from Shephard’s book:

“We hear more from doctors than patients. However hard he tries, the historian cannot even the account, cannot give the patients an equal voice, because most of them chose not to recount their experiences.”

Oddly, Shephard’s response was that the poem was plagiarism, which surprised me, coming from the author of a fine (and undeservedly, out of print) book. It’s not. But perhaps the history of the objet trouve hasn’t yet collided with the history of the military.

The whole poem is technically quite interesting – 6 fourteen line stanzas. I’ve reproduced the first one here and recommend reading the whole thing, which was published last Saturday in the Guardian Review and builds, memorably, towards a conclusion.

From An Equal Voice

War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble.

Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust

reports, blueprints one day and the next –

with the help of a broken-down motor car

and a few gallons of petrol – marching men

with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes,

horses straining and plunging at the guns,

little clay-pits opening beneath each step,

and piles of bloody clothes and leggings

outside the canvas door of a field hospital.

At the end of the week there is no telling

whether you spent Tuesday going over

the specifications for a possible laundry

or skirting the edges of hell in an automobile.

The picture is from Canadian Content, and shows soldiers cooking a Xmas goose at the front in 1914. It is used with thanks.

The secret of ‘The Red Shoes’

The Red Shoes isn’t the best of Powell and Pressburger’s movies – that title would come down to a duel between A Matter of Life and Death and Colonel Blimp. But it was certainly the most profitable, and also the most influential.

In Pressburger’s biography there are accounts by both men of why the film was so successful.

Powell put it down to timing; it caught the change in the post-war mood:

I think the real reason The Red Shoes was such a success was that we had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and for that, and now that the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for Art.

Pressburger, with less of eye to a good aphorism, thought that audiences were able to understand the sense of the whole film – in a way that critics were not:

Michael and I have made several good films, among them several better films than The Red Shoes. Why then is The Red Shoes by far the best known film that we have made? Those who try to see it with magnifying glasses (like most critics) see only the rough, the crude, the immature bits (especially the last sequence between Vicky and Julian in her dressing room). But audiences understand better; they inhale mechanically the air of the whole thing and find something disturbing, something mysterious, almost – dare I say – religious, something which they feel must be true, without having been told what.

Famously, the film inspired Gene Kelly to make An American in Paris. And it inspired others, too. In 1988, I produced for Channel 4 a series called Comment, which filled with opinion pieces the short gap between the end of the news and the start of the soap at 8pm. It was usually recorded in the studio, but I had a small budget for location filming. Through his publisher, a then very frail Michael Powell agreed to record a Comment, and we drove to his house in the Cotswolds to film him. He had prepared soup for the crew; his wife, the film editor Thelma Schoenmaker, kept an eye on him to make sure he didn’t tire himself.

I’d worked with the same crew before, on other shoots. Afterwards, the sound recordist was quite emotional. When he’d seen the name “Michael Powell” on the call sheet, he said, he hadn’t imagined for a moment that it would be the film director. It’s quite a common name. But seeing The Red Shoes as a youngster had made him want to go into film and television production.

The picture at the top of the post is from the blog Verdou, which has a fine long post on many aspects of The Red Shoes.

My cat made her ‘last hated journey’

I wrote earlier this year about my ageing cat. Today she made her last journey to the vet’s. At least she had ‘another living summer’ before she died.

Photo by Peter Curry

‘You haven’t changed at all’

‘A man who had not seen Herr K. for a long time greeted him with the words:

“You haven’t changed at all.”

“Oh!”, sais Herr K., and turned pale.’

(From Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Herr Keuner).