Winston Graham’s non-Poldark fiction: from film noir to opera

Publicity shot for Marnie (Tippi Hedron, Sean Connery)

Friends and readers,

I’ve embarked on a study of Graham’s writing beyond his Poldark and Cornish historical fiction, with a view to perhaps writing a literary biography of this author. While my emphasis will be on the Poldark series (12 novels and a couple of short stories) and Graham’s deep drawing on his 30 years of life in Cornwall, I feel that since the man wrote 27 other books, including stage and screen-plays, a non-fiction history of the Armada as it hit Cornwall in the 16th century, travel writing (about Cornwall), life writing, not to omit scattered pieces in magazines (about gardening, poetry on a cat, about Cornwall from a historical point of view), I ought to look at some of this. I’ve read the travel- and life-writing, a few of the historical novels (set in Manchester where he grew up, Cordelia; Grove of Eagles, Elizabethan Cornwall; The Forgotten Story, set in Cornwall on the sea, 1898; on his art and craft), but am woefully lacking on the mystery-thriller-suspense books. He not only wrote 27 such books, but several were seen as good material for a movie, and two made into films today highly respected: The Walking Stick and Marnie.

Publicity shot for Walking Stick (Samantha Eggar and David Hemmings)

I chose books from his mid-career which won prizes or he has been especially commended for, or I’ve come across essays praising them: The Little Walls (1955); Greek Fire (1957, in the opening recalling Greene’s The Third Man); The Tumbled House (1959, very revealing of Graham for its attack on how privacy of authors is not respected, the son seeking to vindicate his father who turns out to have been plagiarizing); Marnie (1961, in its use of sexual sickness in the character at the center resembling Nabokov’s Lolita and because of those who’ve studied it with subtlety worth reading so one can read these studies); The Walking Stick (1967, deeply about disability). I remember read/skimming Take My Life (1967, novelization of a playscript). I’ve just begun After the Act (1965) because it’s about a man who murders his older wife and then lives intensely to feel guilt for his actions and then find that after all he loves his wife far more truly thad the young woman who has tried to take her place. My last will be Angel, Pearl and Little God (1970, Marlon Brando was among those approached when a movie was in the planning). I probably should push myself to read Strangers Meeting and Night Journey (for the sake of the titles, and what I’ve read about them, but have no copy of the first); and know Graham spent a lot of time on The Green Flash (1986). There are a few interesting looking stories in The Japanese Girl (1971) .

These are not cheerful books. They often end implicitly or explicitly bleakly. Yes unlike today’s blood thrillers, there in attempt in several (The Little Walls, The Tumbled House) to reason an excuse for why the characters take their lives, self-destruct, and to look for a stoic acceptance philosophically, but in final scene after final scene, doubt as to what happened is sown, our chief character is about to be arrested. I can see thoughtful police procedurals made from some of those I’ve now read, with their repeated uses of treachery, or film noir. I’ve watched a couple of embarrassingly dated movies made from his earlier books: Night Without Stars (1950); Fortune is a Woman (1953), mildly film noir

Take My life (the earliest movie made from his books, 1947)

There is a truly excellent study of Marnie by Tony Lee Moral: The Making of Marnie (2005). Moral argues that Hitchcock’s film may be watched as a feminist expose of the way sexuality was then and is today conducted. I can see the film could be interpreted this way much more if the original screenplay (by Evan Hunter) had been used: Hunter wrote a rape scene (the husband rapes the wife — a not uncommon motif in Graham’s books) which condemned Sean Connery’s character in no uncertain terms, but Jay Presson Allen (a woman) professed herself wholly unbothered and also (as is done by some readers of Graham’s novels) said she did not consider what happened a rape! Marnie is terrified, angry, resists, and the curtain is pulled down — these are books meant for middle brow readers – but when the next chapter opens there is no doubt that Marnie hated every minute of what had happened (there is doubt about Elizabeth Poldark and as with the rape scene of the princess daughter in Downton Abbey in the first season’s suggestions that after all Mary wanted this though she said no …)

The fascination of the material is that Evan Hunter, an intelligent sensitive writer of screenplay objected strenuously to the rape and said if Mark rapes Marnie, his character will be so debased and the act so ugly, he can’t come back from it. Given Marnie’s vulnerability to this powerful rich man who can put her in jail and her terror, if Mark loved hre he would abstain. As (my allusion) Randolph Henry Ashe does for Ellen for years in the backstory of A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Evan Hunter wrote a screenplay in which Mark is patient, does not rape Marnie but they begin to understand one another — at least he does her (a father figure is the most charitable interpretation as Mr Knightley is for Emma, Rhett Butler is for Scarlett). It’s a very plausible humane reaction and could be used to justify describe the objections to Ross raping Elizabeth — which are ceaseless even now. Hitchcock wouldn’t listen and simply fired Hunter. Hitchcock justified his use of rape off-tape: he kept all tapes off when he directed some of the scenes And there is this horrifying statement someone remembered: he wanted a close up of the actresses face as “Mark sticks it in her” (in the fiction). This is not the only such statement from Hitchcock.

I cannot say I like this material however I may get caught up in the psychological conflicts of the characters, and suspenseful scenes (he seems to favor robbery of antiques, archaic jewelry and furniture): the style is “hard-boiled,” totally without poetry (beauty, leisure) of language. As a rule I usually couldn’t care less about working out clues, or who killed whom for what. How can anyone can regard some of the more recent entries which unlike LeCarre do not have a serious political critique? Graham differs in managing to make us care for his characters. but beyond that the whole genres endorses hierarchy, punitive responses to people in desperate trouble with no opportunity to rise and take others with them, admire glamor, celebrity, luxurious hide-away places. Graham uses these but in his finest fictions these fall away.

As Wayne Booth in his Rhetoric of Fiction also argued (long ago), the genre is more than implicitly misogynist: women are unfaithful, deceitful, men exist to conquer them and anything else that gets in their way. Graham (and LeCarre and others) modify this, but when you see a full-blown version of this in Marnie and her terrible sick mother (who either had men just like this when her husband is out fighting a war, or supports herself as a prostitute and gets her own child out of bed to do it, and also strangles a newborn who is born out of wedlock), I am surprised any woman can read this aggressive male material. In the last couple of decades women have been writing it by putting females in the male roles and exposing ugly crimes against women, but the underlying endorsement and even sympathy for the present competitive cruel order remains.

From Lyn Gardner on Sean O’Connor’s close adaptation as a staged play of Marnie: But for all his stylistic flourishes, O’Connor – like Hitchcock before him – never really gets inside either Marnie’s frozen heart or her strange, forced marriage to Mark Rutland, the boss from whom she steals and who then traps her like a wounded animal [as Warleggan traps Elizabeth]. Just as most of the attempts to explain Marnie’s behaviour look ludicrously simplistic to a modern audience — the workings of the subconscious are infinitely more understood than they were 40 years ago – so the failure to explore Rutland’s equally bizarre behaviour and motives in marrying Marnie create a hollow centre … Gardner says Sean O’Connor belongs to kitchen-sink angry young man school

What can I say about this mass of writing. Their strength is in Graham’s gift for psychological complexity of some of the characters; his evocation of a place or milieu; his and the reader’s occasional deep bonding with the vulnerable, powerless, disabled, economically distressed. I have been noting some similarities of themes, character types, uses of a triangular love, with the Poldark books; most can be explained away as a trope of formulaic of generic fiction except for this kind of thing: at the core of several or a crucial incident is marital rape.

Robin Wood made the most interesting remarks (he wrote a book on Hitchcock’s films): Wood says Hitchcock ignores much else in the book and concentrates on sexual and emotional problems of men and women. Marnie’s rape scene, for Wood, offered “one of the purest treatments of sexual intercourse the cinema has given us; pure in its feeling for sexual tenderness. Yet what we see is virtually a rape. To the man it is an expression of tenderness, solicitude, responsibility; to the woman, an experience so desolating that after it she attempts suicide. Our response depends on our being made to share the responses of both characters at once.” A gender faultline all right.

This is not a common theme — the first cited is usually Galsworthy’s Man of Property (Solmes rapes his wife). What to make of it, I’m not sure: the feel in Graham is not voyeuristic misogyny (except in the case of Hitchcock’s famous film of 1965), but an awareness of women’s powerlessness, compassion for some of the raped women (though none submit more than once, and certainly not night after night as with Morwenna in The Four Swans); lack of class status and gender leads characters to be treated or behave in Graham’s books at times like hunted animals.

I also find in Graham an almost obsessive depiction of a husband or wife drawn to love for someone outside their marriage and this might have personal resonances, especially when the deserted character is disabled (he has numbers of disabled characters). In Marnie, the woman who played the crazed (sick) mother, Louise Latham said it was a challenge for her to act because (seeing the “terrible mother” sympathetically which no one else may have) “’it made you wonder why this terrible relationship occurred [between mother and daughter] and what was the cause of all this pain and anger.’ Latham began investigating the role by the coldness, fear and isolation and defensiveness that existed inside Bernice Edgar” (p. 62). Well this coldness, isolation, defensiveness is found in Valentine of the Poldark books, who grows up to become a psychologically cruel man who exploits a sexually vulnerable mentally disabled girl (Bella), but we learn (eventually) is a deeply lonely man who buys himself an orangutan for company, to have as a loving friend:

Photo of an orangutan (empathy for non-human animals seen throughout Graham’s writing)

How has this happened? during Valentine’s childhood his legal father George had been so suspicious Valentine is Ross’s biological son that he withdrew all love (from The Four Swans on) , Elizabeth his mother dies in The Angry Tide. In the 2015 films of the new Poldark, Elizabeth is cold to her baby, Valentine; not so in Graham’s book or first 1977 series — she favors Geoffrey Charles but she does not neglect her baby (script by Alexander Baron). But for years Ross refuses any acknowledgement and this comes to a disastrous final scene in Bella (Poldark 12, the last) where Ross is made to realize his profound error. The hero in Walking Stick is a similarly perverted man taking advantage of a lame girl. Perhaps all this is material comes from an underside of dark thought and feeling of the author’s encouraged by the misogynistic spy-thriller/mystery suspense genre?

This is a touching still from the film

Conversely and in quite a different spirit, some of Graham’s later short stories are touching and sweet: as when in one of his last Graham meets Demelza, or her spirit, and she is still grieving for the loss of Julia and Jeremy.

I blinked. In spite of the moon it was becoming very dark. I looked back, and in place of the house there was only some may trees, a pond, and the bubbling stream.
“It is very dark,” I said to her. “We’ll have to go careful because of the rough ground.”
She did not reply. I looked round and she was not there. Where she had been were waving grasses and some bracken and hart’s-tongue fern.
I was suddenly very lonely. But the pressure of her hand in mine, the pressure of her fingers, was still warm.

On the gathering night
From the faint harmony of an errant dream
I woke and found the moon’s quiet light
Quiet in the gathering night
Echoing its theme.

Then in the early dawn
Sadness was mine and the desire to stay
Lest the rich theme so young new born
Fading in early dawn
Wither away.

Now in the clamorous noon
Nothing is left me but an empty husk
Yet do I wait and hope for soon
Gone is the clamorous noon
Welcome the dusk
— from “Demelza”

An opera might seem a stretch in another direction: Nico Muly’s world premiere of Marnie, as an opera. The talk about the opera does not broach its central issues, only the symptoms and circumstances surrounding them. And the emphasis again on the deceitful woman. Let us remember that it was okay for Trump to be a fraud, but Hillary Clinton could not get past the accusation she is dishonest.

Sasha Cook, said to be the mezzo-soprano for the role at the Metrpolitan opera (2017)

I’m glad I have only two left on my list and will then return to the 12 comparatively sunny Poldark books. However, one must remember that the same man wrote in these two different genres and all the cross-overs in the two kinds of fiction there are to be found.

Ellen