Poldark 7, Betrayal of the group; or a Higher Fidelity of the Heart: 3 versions

” … to give way to them is to conform to rules set down by the evil-minded … Ross to Jinny upon her saying she will quit because social talk has accused her of sexual infidelity to Jim with Ross (Graham’s Demelza, Bk 1, Ch 14)

“Who is given a second chance?” (Verity to Blamey, Wheeler script, 1975)

“Poverty doesn’t offend me, nor does aspiration. But you are mistaken of you think greed and exploitation are the marks of a gentleman” (Ross to George, Horsfield Script, 2015)

Verity (Norma Streader) assuring Blamey she will now elope with him as they both have been tested for years (Wheeler script, 1975 Poldark 7)

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) defending herself for having helped Verity to choose her own life (well-acted but fudged words in Horsfield’s script, 2015 Poldark 7)

Dear friends and readers,

This week our preface must go beyond the usual dual caveats: the blog assumes the reader has seen the whole of the 1975 mini-series and knows the first 4 Poldark books pretty well (Ross Poldark, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark, Warleggan) and at least read all 12; I think highly of the books and write as a film and 18th century scholar out of an interest in comparative film adaptation (intertextuality is the fashionable term) and depictions of the 18th century in historical fiction and film.

At the close of the BBC Episode 7, Aiden Turner as Ross deeply hurt and puzzled by how Demelza has behaved to him (Horsfield’s script and reading)

Many US readers this week may have viewed the “finale” of the PBS Poldark series. They will have seen a smushed-up version of the last two episodes of the Horsfield series which cover the second half of Demelza. This time not only were 7 minutes cut from each episode which considering the brevity of most of the scenes and dialogue in this new Poldark until the 4th and 6th and this 7th episode (they are longer, which helps account for the superiority of these episodes), means a good deal; but the necessary re-arrangement this causes (the way movies make coherent is careful juxtapositions of scenes) is greater as they had to marginalize the first climax. This was done by (for example) cutting bits (I imagine the rhythms) of the painful close of Horsfield’s Episode 7 where (as in Graham’s book) Ross tells Demelza in hard unforgiving tones if she is going to be unhappy because the Poldark family is now estranged due to her interference on behalf of Verity, then she is going to be unhappy for a long time. Already foreshortened, the Mark-Keren-Enys story was reduced and scenes from Verity and Blamey’s continuing relationship by letters and joyous union.
Such as it is, it is in my view a testament to the strength of second half of Graham’s Demelza and Horsfield’s fidelity to those aspects of Demelza tracing an increase of disparate thoughts and feeling between Ross and Demelza, that the first hour of the finale remained compelling. For those who saw this version and want to read an intelligent detailed reaction to it, I recommend Anibundel’s No Infidelity Goes Unpunished. See also my comments explaining some queries she had in her blog (on diseases, the customary rights to scavenge, &c)

That Anibundel interpreted the material this way comes from her reliance on the 2015 Poldark which obscures a more complicated thoughtful questioning of the mores of the 20th century through the presentation of a version of the 18th: Graham suggests to his reader that there is a higher fidelity than obedience to law (in the book seen to be product of upper class interests), and (this is where his choice of the 1780s and 90s pro-revolution, radical and romantic period comes in) group customs and demands which are often perverse and counterproductive: Verity is allegorically named: she speaks and sees complicated truths from the time we meet her, which paradoxically weakens her against those who would use, control, and dominate her, but does not make her any the less deeply right. Verity has the right to choose her own life, the right not to be exploited to the point of non-fulfillment of her own if it hurts no one else. As did Ross in marrying Demelza who, like Verity, threw off an oppressive restricting family. And their decisions will not and do not hurt anyone else: the only hurt Verity inflicts is on Francis’s male ego. Ross’s decision is felt to undermine the ontological status of the upper class but as the characters in reality think of their own narrow interest, finally (in the book) the real hurt inflicted is on Elizabeth who had herself made the first of two bad husband choices. Ross tells her at one point that she dislikes anyone to say the honest truth: she does because she fears the risk following this entails.

This idea of truth to an authentic existence underlies Shelley’s and Byron’s poetry, much of the thought of the philosophes and political radicals like Thomas Paine: what? if slavery has been the law for centuries, that does not make it right. Truth to what’s in your heart is simpler and voiced by Blake. A conflict between group demands and the heart’s deeper impulses may be found in Cowper, Austen (as long as the heart is educated to be ethical), especially strongly in Crabbe (whose poetry Austen loved). If you find yourself punished by the powerful you hurt when you do this (as Ross does by George Warleggan), that is the price of the ticket you have chosen (as James Baldwin famously put it). You can of course choose wealth and position; that is George’s choice; there is a price to be paid there too.

I concede this idea is just about altogether lost in the soft way Verity’s escape is presented in Episode 7 of the 1975 film, and is overtly contradicted in Horsfield’s script, but will maintain it actuates the 1975 depiction (Episode 8) of the scavenger riots that evolves when (in the book) under the pressure of madness, depression, a desire to strike out against an unjust order, Julia’s death, motivates Wheeler’s Ross to awaken Jud to tell him to tell everyone there is a wreck and flotsam and jetsam for all on the beach, and then disappear. But that is for next week.

This blog is just on Episode and like last week’s begins with the book and then moves on to each film adaptation, with the aim of the comparison to show the different readings of the films. Honesty though compels me to say the 1975 film is better art, more thoughtful and consistent, worked out carefully at all points. I find the perspectives Horsfield invented (making Keren a slut, Enys a weak fool) and her adherence to group conformity as wisdom in life harder to take. She allows George Warleggan, a ruthless capitalist, liar, to utter conformist axioms we are supposed to think right.

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Graham’s Demelza:

Book 3, the matter covered in both Episodes 7 begins in July 1789. We have just experienced Demelza’s abrasive experiences at the ball; seen Enys and Keren’s love-making over his medical books at night, heard Nicholas and George Warleggan vow to destroy the Carnemore Copper Company because Sanson exposed and their business interests threatened.

Chapter 1: Verity’s escape: the child wants her to read to him; she slips away; comic scene of Jud in church contains real protest against the hypocrisies of these ceremonies. Chapter 2: Home to discover Verity’s note; Francis’s rage and blaming Ross, Elizabeth’s demurral (you have no proof, could have been Demelza); George Warleggan turns up to gift Geoffrey Charles, woo Elizabeth and successfully pressure and bribe Francis into telling.Warleggan comes to bribe him with a gift of 1200 pounds (forgiving one debt and cash for the other) Francis truly thinking that Ross had been gobetween again, betrayed Ross by telling Warleggan the names of the men in Ross’s new company. . It was Francis’s information that allowed this. Francis is frantic to keep believing this and then at the close Demelza coming over to tell it was she, precipates his rage — against himself too

Chapter 3 Andrew and Verity home together to joy at last. Chapter 4: Mark home early (how he is respected by young boy and fellows); goes to Enys’s house and realizes that a sexual liaison going on between Enys and Keren; comes back to house, Keren arrives; he confronts her and in an ensuing struggle, they fight by a window, she hangs out to escape him, and he strangles her. It could be an accident, but he wants to kill her, to blot her out because she has not loved him, and there is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello, with poignant imagery about her as vulnerable.

Chapter 5: Ross’s dreams of smelting, wakened by found body of Keren; Enys distraught; he loved Keren by this time, he feels guilt at his betrayal of his status in the community (that is what he used he feels); Ross to goes to the Daniels to offer Paul his boat for Mark’s getaway but no one must know (Vigus mentioned). He does not want to see Mark hanged; again the idea is the sentence is disproportionate. (Readers have felt this repeat murder of an unfaithful wife is misogynistic on Graham’s part.) Chapter 6: Nampara: Elizabeth to Ross telling him note that Verity is gone, implying Ross knows; Enys’s desperate visit to Demelza seeking solace, validation from Demelza; Ross brings in Mark and Paul.

Chapter 7: Near confrontation: Mark wants to kill Enys; a trap Mark says; not so Ross replies and helps Mark hide, the coming of McNeil; don’t underestimate McNeil Ross tells Demelza. He is an agent of the state, he is there to stop smugglers and execute the state’s justice. Chapter 8: a powerful scene of escape through tide: “Heavy windless rain set in as night fell. ” So Ross due to fidelity to a friend a second disobedience to law by helping Mark Daniel to escape the law when he murders his adulterous wife, Karen.

Chapter 9: McNeil and Ross’s dialogue with McNeil’s friendly warning: the law is a twisty thing and if you get caught, you will not get loose. McNeil though sympathetic to Ross; Ross goes to Sir John Trevaunce to sound him out on keeping Carnemore Copper going (he doesn’t give in), gets nowhere, Trevaunce inveighing against “that man Fox” (he is a Tory, unsympathetic to Ross).

Chapter 10: Demelza’s conscience leads her to go confess to Francis who throws her out; all Ross’s partners desert him as they get their letters calling in loans, they are not bankrupted but could be, and several forced to pay up owed loans, and it comes to Ross the only one not there who knew was Francis (name not mentioned). Chapter 11: Ross home and bitter with loss; Demelza confesses; he goes cold with rage at her betrayal; he does not want to hurt her (“you’ll get cold”); what has she done, she tries to sleep (scene of estrangement in bed) and he does not even try

Book 4: Christmas Eve 1789. Chapter 1: Verity’s letter to Demelza: her happiness and gratitude, now has the life to live she wanted to and could. Family and business, politics and gender are utterly intertwined in the world — seen in Forgotten Story and Cordelia (the mysteries are far more fantastic romance than the historical novels). Demelza did it.

A bleak Christmas ensues ….

For a more detailed exposition with themes worked out see Demelza, A Cornish world mirroring our own.

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The 1975, Episode 7: series of variations on the conflicts of sexual passion with family obligation, driving ambition and personal desires with morality. Scene arrangements juxtapose Keren’s infidelity to George Warleggan’s treachery and then to Francis’s betrayal of Ross. Verity stays to nurse Geoffrey Charles first (she does not in the book so 1975 film making her more exemplary). In 1975 film Francis betrays the Carnemore Copper Company before he learns of Verity’s flight so Demelza’s act made less consequential than book or 2015 film.

The paratexts: the alluring musical theme and the sun glinting on that mine tower, the starving striking men gathered; as in 2105 we see Ross on horseback riding; crashing waves and music.

POV is us, immersion in walking up the hill of a rocky town on a seacoast. Now inside, in a small house Verity is getting her things ready with Blamey; he shows bottle of liquor he keeps in a cupboard, it’s the legacy for the next tenants of this house. She’s not got her bags; she assures him she can slip off by herself from Trenwith. She wants to say goodbye especially to Geoffrey Charles whom she has bonded with. He worries somehow she’s not going to come back; why go back at all, their new house is ready. He “let’s go direct to Falmouth, the devil with your wardrobe.” She seems fearless and says she has no hesitations or doubts but rather regards herself as “the most fortunate woman. Who else is given a second chance as she has been?” He: “Please my dear be careful.”

Enys trying to explain to Ross and Jinny what happened

Ross telling grieving Jinny when she is ready to return to Nampara for salary and help, ignore rumors, he says

Switch to a neat hovel and a hand putting a sheet over face of dead Jim Carter. Ross sitting to the side of Jinny, says “it’s been months since we bought him out.” Why did he die? Enys says “the poor fellow lost will to live,” and Ross tells Ginny there’s a place for her at Nampara and not to let herself be guided by fear of crowd pressure.

Demelza warning Keren, moralizing, Keren says it’s easy for Demelza who lives in comfortable house with educated man

A scene of Demelza giving Keren presents. Keren tells Demelz a bit of her history; she joined company to get away from father who didn’t give her a minute’s peace since she became 10; sexual abuse is what’s implied. Demelza says now we both be wed to good men, and Keren laughs and insists on differences of lifestyle and man. “I’m alone shivering in that hovel” and Demelza lives a comfortable life with a respected man. Keren becomes critical of Mark and then when Demelza says there is gossip about her, Keren sarcastic “About me, oooh how exciting.” The parallel here is Keren’s lack of loyalty and appreciation of Mark with George Warleggan’s ruthless desire to undermine Francis Poldark and take from him Elizabeth and Geoffrey Charles — though undermining his pride in himself. Keren is pitied but the sense is she is wrong.

Enys leaves Geoffrey Charles in Verity’s hands

Elizabeth utterly self-absorbed, though frantically worried about child

Then Verity comes in to Trenwith and feels that is something wrong. Elizabeth emerges with an accusation: “where have you been? its Geoffrey” who has “the morbid sore throat” (diptheria) The doctor is now Enys (Choake dismissed for bette man) assumes Verity will do it all. Enys “the chld will need constant attention; he needs Verity” Enys dosen’t trust Elizabeth; illness is most contagious — we have foreshadowing of how Francis will get it. Blamey’s vigil the next day and Verity does not come. The camera on Verity caring for Geoffrey Charles; the note to Blamey. Blamey’s deep distress and anger, and he resorts to breaking things on the table.

Clive Francis as shamed Francis, grateful to Verity, Enys

Trenwith: Francis has genuine decency in him (as does Keren) and comes forth from Geoffrey Charles’s bedroom: “I feel so helpless,” and attempts to talk to Elizabeth for the first time in a long while, but George Warleggan intrudes. Elizabeth tells Warleggan stay, what they were saying was of no importance. Elizabeth insists Francis sees George alone. She is blind to what George is, and Francis is not.

Ralph Bates as Warleggan holding out 600 pounds, and Francis cannot resist

George gives Francis 600 pounds,” to which Francis says “I don’t want payment” George says this is to make up what Samson cheated Francis of.” Francis knows better, irritated by the man’s adeptness in social hypocrisies and piety. All George did was prompt Francis into betraying cousin, “an act he finds damnably hard to live with” and he goes out the door. Elizabeth says to Verity she will tend the child herself and Francs will help. Verity: “had you only said this yesterday.” Elizabeth all selfishness; unlike book Francis betrayed Ross well before Verity eloped.

Our knowledge of Francis’s treachery and his guilt then comes before the board meeting, the others not coming because found out and pressured by Warleggan. Credit to be stopped and mortgages called in unless they abandon the business at once. They insinuate it was Francis. Ross insists on proof “my cousin played Judas.”

At the mine, Mark hears unsavoury insinuations about Enys and Keren; Mark hears, go savage, breaks down the level and is buried by rocks. He is almost killed. A wound in his head. They tell Mark to go home.

Long scene between Enys and Keren as lovers: moving intimate scene

Camera on Enys house and then Keren in his bed; the two in bed. Camera switches to Mark in the empty house and sees empty bed. Night passes and now it’s morning and Enys is waking with an empty space beside his bed, Keren readying herself to leave. She says she must leave Mark and this place and soon and go back to Bristol. Enys does not love her; Enys says he felt that way was 6 months ago, now he cannot bear to lose her. He does love her but he cannot leave his patients and practice. He says he will find a way, trust me, we shall be together, now she doesn’t mind however long.

Powerful theatrical scene

She goes out and we see her from Marks’ vantage. Very powerful camera work as we watch her gayly strolling, then she feels a presence, it’s him. His shadow overcasts her and there is expressionistic TV The gestures are slow and symbolic as he strangles her. The camera show her splayed out among the rocks, her lovely clothes blowing up from wind.

Same morning: Ross and Demelza eating breakfast. He tells her Carnemore Copper Company is dead. She is naive enough really to have thought George meant to be a friend. Ross says it may have been Francis. Silence. MacNeil comes into the house with his soldiers. Donald Douglas plays an important new character who emerges in the last part of Demelza and is important in Jeremy Poldark. He stands for the state and he and Ross will come to direct odds in a number of larger issues: his troop detailed to stamp out smuggling and collect excise. He stands for law not morality; he is an agent of the state and later works for Warleggan. In the book and 1975 film he and Ross are men who recognize one another as equals and talk as if friends, two intelligent men.

Enys distraught on shore

Now he’s here to say Mistress Daniel is dead. The camera switches to Demelza, Ross looking at body. Enys rushes down from his nearyby tower, he is distraught. Now at Nampara: Demelza pouring wine, handing it to Dwight Enys. Dwight: “twas my fault.” I don’t think so” Ginny’s lack of any sympathy for this woman who was not loyal to the working man. Dwight feels shamed and wants to leave; Ross says you must not — there is a powerful pasage in the book expressing this moment. Ross: “How can you not continue to leave here; you think you can make your peace by leaving.” You cannot. You will not solve anything by leaving.”

Trenwith: Elizabeth feeding Geoffrey Charles; Francis says they must tell Verity that the child is better. She will be so happy. “Where is she?” he’s not seen her all morning. Elizabeth gives him the letter from Verity, Elizabeth reads, Francis intensely hurt, and the stream of talk becomes Verity in voice-over to her climbing hill to Blamey.

Free at last

She is with Blamey. A moving scene. So sometimes breaking away is right.

Francis incensed, and Demelza astonished to discover how she is despised, and that he did betray Ross

A painful scene where Demelza comes to Francis to tell him she helped Verity not Ross; he derides and snubs her: “I refuse to discuss the affairs of my sister with the likes of you.” Demelza: “I came to try and make friends” Demelza explains that she and Ross are ruined if Carnemore Company fails, and we see another motive for Francis’s having betrayed Ross: jealousy. Francis “Now that he is ruined perhaps he will understand what I have had to endure of later ….” We see his jealousy and envy of Ross’s position, character, it’s far more than Elizabeth that motivates him. Demelza sees he is the betrayer: “So it was you.”

Demelza for once fires up, defending what she did for Verity, why she went to Francis, but before Ross can react, Mark at window and is let in:

Ross now advising Mark

Nampara: she tells Ross what Francis said: “so what did you expect, hmmm” The 1975 film entirely skips Ross’s blaming Demelza, and presents Ross as sympathetic to Verity but would not have helped as his loyalty is to family first. Ginny serves a meal, and Mark there at the window. How they all feel for him. He hid in water of Wheal Grace; the plan to help him escape by Ross’s boat. Mark saw load of copper in Wheal Grace. MacNeil and men at door and they hide him from MacNeil. MacNeil sees the blood and wet by the window. Here as in the book we do have wife-murder in effect condoned. Othello is never condoned.

We conclude out on that wild seashore: Ross is leading Daniel down to a small boat by the Nampara cove, pushes the boat in and they see soldiers running up on beach. Ross does nto desert but helps Mark get afloat, then he runs. In final moment Ross is being shot at directly by MacNeil’s orders. Close ups back and forth of MacNeil’s and then Ross’s face. A final far shot of Mark rowing out to the Atlantic for his life and Ross fleeing to the house. Very powerful.

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See continuation in comments: 2015 Episode 7; concluding remarks on the three versions.

Ellen

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Winston Graham: the writer of the Poldark novels; A Forgotten Story

1968 Pan Books edition

Dear friends and readers,

[A great disappointment today: the first class of Poldark Novels In Context I was cancelled [see comments]. I decided we should forge ahead and begin reading Ross Poldark for next week (see pages schedule for 1st third of Ross Poldark). I also sent my students the lecture notes I had made up — a sort of informal essay on the life of Winston Graham as background for reading the first three Poldark novels. I had asked them to read A Forgotten Story (also published as The Wreck of the Grey Cat) for today too, but it seems some people didn’t realize they must buy it online as a book. So here in a clear readable version for my students (and anyone else interested) is Winston Graham: the writer of the Poldark novels & A Forgotten Story (or class lecture notes 1)]:

As to my lecture notes, please first read the blurb on the syllabus on line. Here is Graham’s Poldark novels in context, life, career, Cornwall, something of his stance towards historical fiction; A Forgotten Story.

Ross Poldark is said to have sold over 5 million copies; it’s been reprinted 27 times. Graham’s books were from 1945 to the 1990 a selection in the American book of the month club. You can find older copies of his books in used booksales in libraries. he is read in France: the first three Poldark novels are available in French translations; all 12 Poldark novels are in print and available in English on the French and Italian equivalents of Amazon. Books rarely sell this way and they are today rarely kept in print unless they are selling.

So why do I call Graham neglected? Until very recently his historical fiction has been ignored by the literary establishment, academics, respectable people. There is no handbook, no companion, he’s not always even mentioned in surveys of 20th century historical fiction. One reason for this has been the fall in respectability of historical fiction in the early 20th century. That’s changing: over the ten weeks I’ll have 4 recent good articles to share with you listed on syllabus) on topics of interest, one by me, Liberty in the Poldark novels, an important theme in the books. These are all recently written. Before that all academic and more intelligent articles about him were about his mysteries. In the 1970s there were brief articles comparing his novels to the mini-series. But nowadays popular books are studied in classrooms and colleges; and then the 2nd film expensive well-done adaptation has been in the works for a couple of years, and the first was a tremendous hit and best-seller in DVD version.

2015 British edition

You’ll note Warleggan, the fourth novel is part of my blurb. I would be stumbling over my feet if I did not over the course of the next 10 weeks include that in our purview. I originally wanted to go for 4 books but was told that was too much and I admit one should spend 3 weeks on a novel. The first three are however part of a quartet, 4 books which come to feel utterly intertwined once you finish them – all four reflect their era of 1945-53, post WW2, proto-feminist, reacting to this great traumatic war and a renewal of the social contract in the UK and US too – -later 1940s. Graham felt at the end of book 4, he’d done and he did not return to the series for 20 years. Another reason I’ll be telling what happens in that last book and will devote the last half-hour of the course to it, is the way the film adaptations are rightly done, is to bring in material found in Warleggan into the earliest episodes of the films; the new series has done it again.

What happens, as you’ll see as you read, is early on in Ross Poldark we meet Elizabeth Chynoweth whom Ross loved and was engaged to before he joined the British army and went to America; he and she were engaged (which in the era means they probably had some form of sex), and he expected her to wait for him after he returned – from the American revolution, a bit much as after all no one could know when it would end. She didn’t wait partly because he was reported dead. Ross Poldark is the story of a revenant – a man returned like some ghost from the past, to a present utterly unprepared for him, in some ways hostile to his reappearance and needs. Charles Poldark, Ross’s uncle who was the oldest son of the previous generation has taken over property left to Ross by his father, Joshua. His son, by primogeniture, the oldest son of the oldest son, is the heir. We also hear of a character who becomes Ross’s prime enemy and is the villain-protagonist, the contrasting character of all four books to Ross: George Warleggan.

But this pair of characters, even Elizabeth do not dominate Ross Poldark, Francis is paired with Elizabeth, and George Warleggan becomes active in Jeremy Poldark. They were filled out more later, came alive complete with back-stories in Warleggan. In other words Graham’s characters emerge slowly, organically, naturally but to explain to a film audience who do not read the books what is happening at first, the full context, the back story as it were, the adapters right away take material from Warleggan. The first films also made Elizabeth a far more negative character. So I will also tell of these back stories as we go along. I hope you’ll like the books so well you’ll go on to the fourth this summer.

I’ve suggested a wonderful book on Cornwall which I’ll bring in next time – Graham’s Poldark’s Cornwall filled with photos – by Graham telling of his connections with this place If you go to the authorized website, newly revamped you’ll see all the titles of his available mysteries. Other books for Cornwall that are good reads are Daphne DuMaurier’s Enchanted Cornwall and Vanishing Cornwall.

The Forgotten Story is one of his better known mysteries (several got prizes, David Hemmings was in the film adaptation of his powerful Walking Stick), some are rooted in the Spanish civil war, politically relevant. I choose FS because it’s set in Cornwall, has a theme about historical fiction, was written at the same time as Ross Poldark. One might say Graham gave birth to twins. FS is the darker side of RP. Graham is dramatizing some problems when you try to write accurate historical fiction in FS.

Let us turn to Winston Graham’s life: Three perspective can help us through:

One and two: when he began to make a lot of money, the year Marnie was a film sensation in the US (1962, it caused some scandal) in 1962, he said “I am the most successful unknown novelist in England,” and his identification strong with the underdog, with working class people, his experiences growing up a usable past, an area of history where he could present the social contract as he sees it between peoples, different classes, as it’s practised and as it’s betrayed.

A third, from Poldark’s Cornwall is his relationship with this southwestern county. As he says rightly in Poldark’s Cornwall, the idea that historical fiction is disqualified from respect because it’s filled with the presence of an author is rubbish: all great books are. They are lamps and mirrors: lamps filled with the author’s soul, mirrors of the time they are made in.

He was born in 1908 and grew up in Manchester, the city most identified with a huge growth in population and the industrial revolution in England over the later 18th into the early 19th century. In the 19th century a place where working men and women fought hard for reform – including the right to representation. Some of his family members were long lived and he lasted until 2003, still writing. He never did anything but write for a living. He experienced the pre-WW1 world; arguably our modern world emerges from WW1. He was not himself of working class background; by his generation genteel middle middle class, his family grew rich from pharmaceuticals – it began with his grandfather as a grocer and chemist (in the UK that means you own a drugstore).

A central character in Demelza (the 2nd Poldark novel) is Dwight Enys, a doctor, the name that of an old Cornish mining family, his profession growing out of Graham’s identification with quack, amateur, well-meaning and recent so-called scientific medicine. The firm was D. Mawdsley and Co, which eventually manufactured drugs and medicinal compounds. Never grew to be Big Pharma partly because his father died and the kind of business acumen his grandfather had had was no longer there. This is perhaps reflected in the conflicted tragic Francis Poldark. The Manchester era of his life is commemorated in Cornelia, his one historical novel not set in Cornwall but Manchester 19th century. Published 1949, it surprised people by how widely it sold. He became a book-of-the-month club author with it. People are continually surprised by how liked his books are – one of our essays, Nickianne Moody’s is about this.

He was expected to go to Manchester grammar school, but had contracted meningitis at the age of seven and, because of continuing ill health, went instead to a small select Longsight grammar school, which was nearer his home. They lived in a genteel neighborhood, Victoria Park, but of course as a boy he spent time in Manchester proper too. A lot of his time was at home since he was educated mostly at home. He did not go to a British public school (these are private schools for the upper classes), and he did not become part of upper class coteries – so he was an outsider to an establishment which could have bought, written about, pushed his books. he was a sensitive reading boy but very able to make friends.

After his father had had a stroke at the age of fifty-four, the family moved to Perranporth, in Cornwall – it was cheaper. That county, with its isolation and dark overtones, was to provide the setting and inspiration for much of Graham’s writing. He was very close to his mother to whom he dictated his first story at the age of five. She, even when widowed, determined to subsidize him until he succeeded. Like Anthony Trollope it was a long apprenticeship – he was not paid much for his early books, but they got in print and in those days could get reviews. He met and married his wife, Jean, in Cornwall who ran a lodging house which enabled him to keep writing. So imagine a long period of more or less isolated writing for him in his 20s to 30s, reading, then the experience of WW2 which was shattering for all in the UK, and it transformed the feel of his fiction, its nerve. his first financial successes seem to have begun at the close of WW2: Take My Life, The Little Walls, Marnie and The Walking Stick for books set in the present (taking his writing career to the 1960s), all thrillers, psychologically astute, and Ross Poldark with the three further historical books by 1953.

So the first theme: he called himself “the most successful unknown writer in the UK – and US too.” He signed a contract with Hitchcock so his name would not appear on the films adapted– $50,000. He married a local girl; she became lame in one of her legs early on, suffered asthma – so did not connect up – she had a stroke in her early 50s. She carried a walking stick. There is terrific snobbery among academics and the elite in the UK – he didn’t network into these groups; the prestigious prize as a selling tool first emerged in the 1970s. It probably hurt his reputation that he was a book-of-the-month club seller. The Poldark books were seen as regional romances.

A second perspective: individuals he tells life stories of in his autobiography (The Memoirs of a Private Man) are people badly hurt by social, economic, and political arrangements, whom he feels for; as he reveals the history of his family, we see socially and politically active people from the early 19th century on. Again his grandfather. The men in his family were trade unionists part of the Chartist movement, early Labor people. In the first chapter of his autobiography he tells of the house maid in his childhood, Evelyn: her parents had been forced to marry because mother pregnant, father a miner died young from poisonous fumes, mother of malnutrition and peritonitis; she endured a long hard life first as servant and then a seamstress, she did marry, then worked as day cleaning woman, with a single son, later in a vast department store, where the management deprived of her pension late in life because the company was able to prove she had a break in service: “I hope whoever was responsible for that decision rots in hell.” We might say she was the real upstairs-downstairs servant (see Margaret Powell’s Below Stairs), the real clerk in Mr Selfridge. Over the course of his Memoirs we meet people like her as typical and Graham’s hero identifies with the working man; in the first four books, Ross Poldark is a kind of Jacobin – a revolutionary typical of the time 1780s to 90s, our revolutionary era too.

The third; a deep sense of land- and seascape are central to his vision, deep time past,. Graham distinguishes three periods in Cornwall.

First period living in Cornwall with his mother and brother, 1925, so age 15 through the 1930s, the WW2 and the early years of his marriage. This is the era out of which our books comes.

A second era in Cornwall as summer people : Graham had moved his family to southern France for privacy, to escape taxes, but at the end of the year he missed Britain so strongly he moved back to Sussex (near London and as a literary man of letters he needed to be in contact) but spent long summers in Cornwall, bathing, swimming, walking.

The third era is the last return just before and during the films – nostalgia he calls it. In 1969 there was a proposal to film his books; he claims to have re-started the Poldarks well before 1975 when the first super-successful series aired. No one was to know it was be a success; it was ridiculed and derided by the snarky British press who only became silent after a few weeks. Not only love but accuracy; that’s where our course’s themes about early industrial capitalism, smuggling, banking, riots, medicine at the time, women’s position, comes in: he writes on Poldark’s Cornwall “I do not know how near to the truth of life in the 18th century these novels are; all I know is they are as near to the truth as I can make them.” He read extensively in texts written at the time everywhere – not just novels and memoirs, but hard records, chronicles, tax returns, court cases, about prisons.

On the later Poldark novels (5-12):

In 1969 he had been absent from Cornwall for nearly 20 years, and Associated British Pictures proposed to film the four books as a kind of GWTW in Cornwall. There was an extended visit, the film did not come off, but Graham was deeply prompted to return imaginatively, and began The Black Moon – the 5th Poldark book, returning not only to the era, but to these specific characters. He said it was like “breaking some sound barrier,” a gouging struggle to get back, and he did it, and then wrote The Four Swans (Poldark 6) and The Angry Tide (Poldark 7). It’s a trio that mirrors the 1970s, post 1960s, Vietnam, now feminist, more realistic, deeply delving the issues of local politics and patronage, the French revolution’s effect on the British; written between 1973-77. Books 5-7 wee used for the second year of the old Poldark series and I’ve no doubt they would form the basis of a second new season for the new series – 2016.

The success of the mini-series made the BBC hungry to do more but Graham had too much integrity and deep attachment to his characters and themes and would not allow other people’s stories to be formed around them. It took time but eventually he wrote another quartet, 1981-1990: issues of The Stranger from the Sea, Loving Cup, Miller’s Dance, The Twisted Sword are post-colonialism, imperialism; piracy; he dramatizes the peninsula war in Spain and Portugal during the Napoleonic era (a genuine kind of Vietnam); these are anti-war books, the last closely following the battle at Waterloo (The Twisted Sword) and we have disabled characters too. These end with the same sort of depth of nothing is concluded as Warleggan (end of first four) and The Angry Tide (end of next trio).

There was a film adaptation of just Stranger from the Sea, in an American movie-house style – cut the post-colonial politics (so delete Spain and Portugal and an important part of the book), make it just 2 hours. It failed for reasons beyond the gutting of the book’s central themes.

So no attempt was made to film books 9-12. A twelfth Poldark novel did come very late 2003; Bella, a very late child of Ross and Demelza, did finally provide closure; now we have a deeply troubled hero bonding with an orangutan. Animal rights. During these years of 1970s to 2003 he rewrote some of his earlier mystery thrillers, and wrote Poldark’s Cornwall and the autobiography.

He was very lucky in being the second son, born much later than the first, to a woman who had sufficient private income to support them both. She could, however, have been intolerant and bowed not only to the norms then and now, but the ridicule heaped on her son for “doing nothing.” He was fortunate in one relative: his father’s younger sister, an unmarried woman, persuaded him not to leave his ms in the drawer, to type it, and then she bound it lovingly in two boards and it was sent to Ward and Lock (publishers of Trollope volumes in the early 20th century). The writing industry or literary marketplace at the time included many small publishers to whom an author could send manuscripts; if and when, an author was accepted, the contract was simplicity itself. He had actually stockpiled novels (novels he had written and not sent out) and was able to keep up attention to himself by sending along a novel quickly after the first to be published, and one after that. He was reviewed in big dailies and locally. Again his big break began around the time WW2 ended.

Next time I’ll talk about his views on historical fiction before embarking on Ross Poldark. For now I’ll suggest that Graham he shows in his autobiography Poldark’s Cornwall and of course his fictions he’s interested in the mystery of the mind, the exploration of motives and deeds that lie rooted in the past and produce the conflicts, doubts, hesitations, and eccentricities of the present, a deep interest in the psychological underpinnings of his characters. His characters are compelling: beset by moral dilemmas, beset by fears, guilts, cover ups, do apparently bizarre things supposedly out of character. Do not do the logical or the rational and as a result often find themselves in complicated and incriminating circumstances that reveal the underpinnings, contradictions, values of the society they live in.

I want to talk about Cornwall’s history as mining place – made up of payable rising ground – tiny originally rural population going back to neolithic era one of the first industrial capitalist places, changed character of world with its creation of mining, trading and later export of mined minerals and techniques. And as a mythic place – Daphne DuMaurier books come out of this. Graham is far more realistic.

He’s also fascinated by how little we can know for sure about the past – paradoxically. Which takes us to The Forgotten Story.

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The Forgotten Story

Oxford Bodley Head 1964 edition

The novel is also available as The Wreck of the Grey Cat, published by Doubleday (1958).

It is a complicated story to summarize. Here’s one bare-bones attempt.

Anthony is a young boy (11) whose mother (Charlotte) has died and his father gone to live in Canada, and he is sent to Falmouth to live with his mother’s sister’s husband, Joe Veal, who runs an eatery and drinking tavern. His mother’s sister (Christine) has also died. Anthony is welcomed and treated kindly by his cousin, Patricia Veal Harris, and taken in by Joe and his second wife, Madge, the ex-cook. Most of the novel is seen through Anthony’s point of view, rather like To Kill a Mockingbird. Gradually Anthony discovers Patricia is married and has left her husband, Tom Harris, because she was made to feel alien in Tom’s upper class environment, uncomfortable. One thread of the novel is about Tom’s attempt to persuade Patricia to come back to live with him; she is going out with a sailor Ned Pawlyn. At one point a riot ensued in her father’s drinking tavern, brought on by a fight between these two men. For a second time Patricia testifies truthfully in court: the first occurred before the novel begins: there was a riot and her father wanted to see it blamed on a Dutch sailor; but she says this is not so (and puts her father’s business license at risk), and the second time it was not Tom’s fault (again her father’s lawyers tried to blame the son-in-law in order to deflect attention from the way the tavern itself is managed). Both times she is reviled by various people for not lying; her father dies — he is clearly ill and failing, and she loves him, but he cuts her off with just 500 pounds. Joe Veal was a selfish, mean man; his first act upon meeting Anthony was to take from Anthony all the money Anthony had from his mother. His will is spiteful; he leaves his brother Perry something derisory. Thus ends the first book.

The second is discovery: we learn of a back story behind this front one at the tavern — we gradually suspect that Joe was poisoned to death slowly by Madge (as was Patricia’s mother).We see that no one but Patricia shows any concern or interest in Anthony for real. Tom Harris, in order to persuade Anthony to help him discover the truth of what’s been happening as well as regain Patricia pretends more concern than he feels and enlists Anthony’s help. Anthony discovers a previous will and Madge, a psychologically twisted woman, seeks to see that Anthony dies. Patricia must take a job; it’s almost impossible to find a good paying one, but she manages a teacher in a schoo; that means she must leave Anthony behind. Madge’s accomplice is Joe’s ne’er-do-well brother< Perry, an interesting character, an apparent loser with a conscience – a type in Graham's historical novels. Perry knows her poisoning propensities and she and he concoct a story that Anthony's father wants him to come to Canada; they will take him by boat to Bristol. She hopes Anthony will drown in an "accident." Anthony has very bad dreams in this book; some of them are real things he sees.

The last third, Epilogue, is about the shipwreck itself, the inspiration or beginning of the book in its prologue. It's a powerful rendition of an attempt to save a boat in this Falmouth harbor during a high storm. It is saved, but Perry slips overboard, now terrified of Madge and not willing to keep murdering people. We meet and read what a fictionalized the reporter who wrote the newspaper story said, hear of the coming trial of Madge, and what happens to Tom and Patricia and finally Anthony.

The inspiration for the book comes from a real shipwreck off the coast of Cornwall in 1897 found in a newspaper; Graham loved the tall ships and (as I said about his life), he was a coast guard in WW2 in Cornwall; although Cornwall was not bombed, the sea was fearful place during WW2 (the German planes with bombs came that way). The interest of the book is in the characters, their complicated psychology. the book manifests some obsessions or patterns we see in the Poldark books: At one point Tom Harris rapes Patricia (marital rape), partly out of revenge, partly anger, partly to conquer her.

One theme is the ambiguity of all records. I quote on article on Graham’s mystery novels by Gina MacDonald:

In the prologue to The Forgotten Story Graham describes those who would reconstruct real events from newspaper accounts as “like paleontologists trying to reconstruct an extinct animal,” never certain because of the deceptive nature of appearances, the multiplicity of details that add up to truth but that can also suggest a number of other possibilities. Thus, throughout Graham’s canon, men must deal with the disparity of facts and interpretations, and must wade through seeming truths that are at odds with their instinctive feelings. Invariably they must examine a number of contradictory hypotheses before finding a combination that rings true, and even then they have doubts until the final proof is in

Here are my lecture notes — what I would have said to prompt discussion.

It shows very well some of what’s most admired by people who know this side of his work well and it has themes and moods and devices like those of the Poldark novels – including a marital rape, complicated sexual relationships between people after marriage, Cornwall itself, the sea, a love of older type boats (all gone by the time WW1), of the coast line and cliffs how dangerous – just where Graham spent much of his WW2 – as a coastguard there. Remember the Nazis came over the channel with their bombs nightly, not to Cornwall but the sea was their path.

It falls into three parts the way many of his books do, with prologue as in Ross Poldark,, pp 1-6 (pages from Oxford Bodley Head book). Book 1, pp. 7-122 – the coming of Anthony to the household and it ends on the death (killing we later learn of Joe and reading of the apparent last will of Joe Veal (Chapter 1-16). Book 2, Chs 1-24 – pp 122-97, the unraveling of the story so we begin to understand what has been happening out of sight. Epilogue, pp. 198–224, where it’s not altogether clear what was resolved – we do not know that Mrs Veal was found guilty; she might get off, Anthony does not know he is set to go to Australia. He lies sleeping as the novel closes.

Here’s how it opens, pp 1-2. It’s a questioning of historical fiction itself at the same time as he enacts it. In this brief prologue Graham writes that it was novel written just before the first Poldark (Ross Poldark) and during some dark days in WW2 and he says it reflects the dark state of mind he felt at the public revelations of what the state of the UK had been doing, the concentration camps, the reality of what the war had been. He opens by describing those who would reconstruct real events from newspaper accounts as “like paleontologists trying to reconstruct an extinct animal,” never certain because of the deceptive nature of appearances, the multiplicity of details that add up to truth but that can also suggest a number of other possibilities.

Did they like it? What did you like about it? Was it intriguing? What is dark about it? What is hopeful? Disturbing. What did you think of the way Patricia Veal was treated by the town? About her efforts to find remunerative work and there is none for women of middle class background at all at the time. What did you think about Tom Harris? The class conflicts?

A Forgotten Story is a historical fiction set in Cornwall, centered on Anthony Veal, an orphan boy where we meet marginalized people making a living off an inn on the coast of Cornwall at the turn of the century; how Patricia Harris (nee Veal), the daughter attempts to flee a marriage where she has married above her and finds life constraining and painful.

What’s powerful is how the characters do not fall into preconceived categories of good and bad – except for the murderess and even she is psychoanalysed. The father, Joe, whom the daughter loves and whose death changes the whole world for everyone living with him, is a mean selfish, narrow man who is almost responsible for his own death: he won’t pay a doctor to take care of him and wouldn’t for his wife, the heroine’s mother, Charlotte – had he done so he might have discovered the woman who is the cook, and who he marries as a second wife because it’s easy for him as his housekeeper (like Ross Poldark) poisoned her to death, is poisoning him, and probably poisoned members of her family when she was younger. Madge turns out to be murderess at its center (she has spent a life poisoning people) who has been able to murder Joe Veal partly because he is so secretive and a miser, incapable it seems of loving anyone himself; and now she has taken over the louche cowardly but not totally unredeemable uncle, who had been brought into the plot into order to accomplish it. His great act is to kill himself lest he be dragged into killing more people with the Until near the end of the book it seems as if we are in a more straight historical novel about the psychological social troubles of a set of local people.

We do not know this until the very close to story’s end since it is told by a young boy, old enough to understand on a prime level what’s happening and the amorality or morality of a given event. The effect is part of the power: the naif perspective. We have to figure events out. We do see things he does not see. After the riot, Tom Harris rapes Patricia and we experience this from Tom’s point of videw. We see how people do not interest themselves in this boy at all; he is not being sent to school; he is at risk. In the Bristol ship Madge locks Anthony into a room below deck on a sinking ship in order to drown him. The use of a child narrator gives the word its intensity: he is not only innocent, but a good and well-meaning adolescent (aged 11), older than the children of Lee’s story and also (more recently Emma Donoghue’s The Room); nonetheless, the device works to deflect the reader from the central tabooed content in various ways and see what’s happening through normative eyes and a mind continually trying to give an upbeat presentation of events.

I found the sequences towards the end of his dreams very effective – because they are not dreams, the body is really dug up, and because Freudian style they explain to him what is happening, pp 90-91, 102-13. Powerful descriptive abilities, p 190. Powerful analysis of people: Mrs Madge Veal is actually a commonplace woman, not a monster Perry, p 194-195. The scenes in the tavern, the singing (dark songs), the play-acting all attractive (in Demelza a group of players comes to the village).

A Forgotten Story begins with a wreck on the coast of Cornwall, and returns to the scene at the end, resembling DuMaurier’s Cousin Rachel and Trollope’s Eye for an Eye, which both begin in terribly disturbed moments: in all three cases the novel is the explanation in the form of a story. It gives the piece a gothic framing.

Norma Streader as Verity with Clive Francis as Francis Poldark when we first meet them: the expression on her face is appropriate to Patricia’s very often (1975-76 Poldark series)

Beyond the redolent use of Cornwall, I was attracted to the uncle who runs a genially transgressive bar, and to heroine, a type very like say Elinor Dashwood, the well-meaning but self-possessed and vulnerable young woman (played in the mini-series by Angarah Rees), a kind of Verity Poldark.

When Patricia flees her persistent husband, Tom who with a boyfriend, Ned Pawlyn (who later offers to flee to Australia so they can live as man-and-wife without being known), starts the quarrel in the bar which appears to lead to her father’s death, she has no means of supporting herself decently. This is 1898 and the only professions open to a young woman still are wife or teacher. She takes a position as a strict girls’ school — we are in a mild version of Jane Eyre too. The telling gripping incident of the story is a marital rape scene, which I’m coming to see as an obsession, a highly unusual one.

Tom rescues Patricia from the bar quarrel and to assert his rights over her, rapes her. Grahame returns to this unusual motif again and again: arguably Ross Poldark rapes Elizabeth Warleggan (as she is soon to become in Warleggan). In The Four Swans Graham presents Elizabeth’s cousin, Morwenna Chynoweth, coerced into marriage with a man who (in effect) rapes her nightly. Yet Patricia gives testimony on his behalf in a courtroom which reveals her liaison with Ned, she is ostracized and there’s a scene of public humiliation.

The dislike and resentment and discomfort of being with people above you is part of why she wants to stay away from him; he is too powerful for her. Tom Harris does not realize he’s arrogant, he does not realize he is privileged, and cannot see it – she flees this because it makes her feel bad about herself.

All the while she is of course in her heart a virtuous heroine. We are to re-define what we mean by virtuous and it does not mean strict sexual fidelity although in fact Patricia never has sex with another man, a decent merchant marine sailor, but not because it’s forbidden, but because she does not love him enough to go off with him to Australia as a partner, though he would provide an escape from her bad situation once her father dies and spitefully leaves her nothing.

Graham chose to return to the end of the Victorian period to be able to show this paradigm, only Graham de-constructs the framing social circumstances and shows us how unfair they are. Tom Harris no longer has the right to demand Patricia back. In 1891 it had become no longer accepted since a famous court case for a husband to try to wrest his wife back to live with him. But he feels he ought to. The sense in the fiction is that this is wrong. This is at least one place where a woman should have real liberty. She is nagged by her (murderous we find) aunt to return to Tom using the conventional argument, she should. She is shamed by her community when she does not return to him. That this motif is returned to ceaselessly shows its centrality for controlling women in this set of social structures, and that it’s at a great price to her. Another Poldark motif is the courtroom where a character unexpectedly tells the truth out of a stubborn integrity which truth hurts her – in the case Patricia Harris.

The ending shows Tom Harris who has all along been an ambivalent figure (he appears to be exploiting the boy to pressure Patricia) into a hero of integrity. He rescues Antony and brings Patricia back from the school. We discover that Tom has been responsible for her getting her job: he had the connections and respect by his family and position as a lawyer. Unlike Ned, he can take Patricia somewhere as his wife; they can afford to provide a home for Anthony.

But the way he wins her is more interesting than this, or the way it’s presented. The presentation of Patricia’s choice to return to Tom does not mean all is forgiven — and as in Marnie. It’s left ambiguous.

How do they come to this decision. the woman is married to the man and so she obeys the social convention, goes with it. So it’s about family life and convention and how they operate. Tom’s upper class status is what gets her the job in as a school mistress; as a lawyer he has access to the police who then come and dig up Joe’s grave to discover that he was poisoned.

After a while the books all do spin around the same concerns, and for me at least are gripping. I find I can’t put them down easily each time I start one up again. I get intensely emotionally involved.
The Forgotten story is all that happened which does not appear in history and what really mattered – how little can come out in records that matters. We don’t learn what really prompted events in records. Swept under the rug, swept away as the storm which sweeps away Uncle Perry, the uncle who colluded with the aunt, swept away as Uncle Joe, the father whose real vulnerability we are never permitted to delve. Why he married Madge? what happened to Patricia’s mother?

The fiction remains conventional: Graham treats this decision not as a violation of feeling and he presents the woman’s choice with tact and sympathy. It reminds me of Demelza central heroine of the Poldark books who also finds security, peace, respect from the community by doing the conventional thing – the obedient and going for promotion as we’ll see. Angharad Rees played both parts – in both films: Demelza and Patricia. I can see Norma Streader who played Verity in 1975=6 as Patricia too.

The Forgotten Story, has an unhappily apt title, which paradoxically point to one reason it may still be in a collection with Marnie and Greek Fire, as it was made into mini-series in 1983 by then respected actors which appears to have flopped if the complete lack of information in IMDB and on line stills are any indication. Nonetheless, The Forgotten Story, is also one of the few pre-1950s novels, novels before the Poldark series, Graham himself chose to reprint.

It’s one of three the non-Poldark novels put into print before this latest film adaptation of 2015: Winston Graham: Marnie, Greek Fire, and The Forgotten Story. Marnie is a highly unusual psychological study of a disturbed young woman which was travestied by Hitchcock into a film about a hateful mother, controlling husband and thieving woman (it made a lot of money); Greek Fire, very typical for Graham’s generation of writers, a novel about the overthrow of a socialist movement in Greece, 1948.

Ellen

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