Unexpected fresh outlook on Winston Graham’s Poldark & Non-Poldark novels: through allusion, ironies, female POVs

Warleggan, the original or first 1953 cover — in line with the first covers for Ross Poldark and Demelza (we gaze through the windows of imagination into the Cornish landscape & seas)

The Black Moon, the original 1973 cover

Study of allusions (or intertextuality), uses of dramatic and plot-design irony, female POVs, working class allegiances yield a new kind of reading of Graham’s books

My readers, I hope, have not begun to give up hope on my projected book on Winston Graham — not that anyone should care but me. Well, I’m still working on it. Since last in mid-July I outlined very sketchily a new approach to this book I’ve decided I must take (The Poldark World: A Matter of Genre), I am ever working on it, sometimes more slowly and for entertainment, as it were living with the characters in Poldark (participating in the detailed discussions of these 12 books which go on on a face-book page called Poldark Book Discussions; watching the two series, one every few nights with occasional breaks), and sometimes more progressively, consistently and as study. Before the fall term ended I read two written during the first quartet of Poldarks:

Night Without Stars, 1950
Fortune is a Woman, 1952

Night Without Stars, 1950, the original or first cover

Like so many of Graham’s novels, Night Without Stars features a disabled person, this time seriously disabled, the hero, a man blind for a long period after his war-time service; it also (unfortunately kept secondary) includes a telling story of the nearly destroyed life of a French woman during the war

Still I must admit I couldn’t understand why or how Graham could take time out from the Poldark world to write these since they seemed to me so faded, at moments so cliched, without strong vivid characters (especially Fortune is a Woman), inferior to all Graham’s historical fiction (I much admired The Forgotten Story, 1945, set in 1898 Cornwall; Cordelia, 1948, set in the 19th century with a female point of view). One must conclude writing in this male genre was compulsive to him. Even stranger to me, both were adapted into commercial cinema movies, with Night Without Stars presented so weakly, and Fortune is a Woman downright embarrassing to watch. The first movie adaptation of a Graham novel, Take My Life, 1947, had been turned into a memorable film noir.

But once term started to slacken off (early November) I’ve been steadily reading these or what I call his mid-career non-Poldark books, the ones written during the 20 year interval after Warleggan and before The Angry Tide. I’ve not yet finished this phase of his writing career, but have read for the first time, begun to study, or re-read and/or read some background books for

The Little Walls, published 1955 (the only one of Graham’s books to win a prestigious prize)
The Sleeping Partner, 1956 (a movie was made, just awful)

An attractive stark cover for the first edition: the appeal in the letters

Greek Fire, 1957 (remarkable use of the internecine politics of the era)
The Tumbled House, 1959 (very fine, impressive)

The Portuguese cover for Marnie: a rare one to suggest the actual content of the book with some discrimination

Marnie, 1961 (the notorious but nowadays much admired and influential Hitchcock film, 1963)
The Grove of Eagles, 1963 (but begun 5 years before, worked on for a long time), set in Cornwall
After the Act, 1965
The Walking Stick, 1967 (one of Graham’s best non-Poldark novels, & made into an intelligent movie)

A still from the movie, Walking Stick, suggesting Graham’s derisory description of it as a kind of Elvira Madrigan is false — this flat just off the docks is one of the central settings of the movie

I skipped Night Journey, 1966, having read it the 1941 version, which I found had something of the power of the amoral “entertainments” of Graham Greene during the war (say The Ministry of Fear); at the time I immediately went to on to compare this WW2 book with this shorter, 1966 revision and found the later one commercialized, slicker, so much lost by the streamlining and updating, “modernizing.”

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I stepped back, and have now reread my various blogs on the earliest novels (1930s), and the World War Two ones (you may find them by clicking on the tag Winston Graham, or using the search engine for the blog). I have three to go: a final suspense book for this period, Angell, Pearl and Little God, 1970 (I have read it and found it powerful – I can here imagine a strong movie); a 1971 book of varied short stories, gathered under the title The Japanese Girl (some gothics, one ghostly; one historical fiction, one rather nasty O. Henry type story among them), and the non-fiction 1972 history, The Spanish Armadas (once again it’s a matter of Cornwall, this time the battle during the late Elizabethan period). But I thought first I would use this blog (as I have others) as a way of thinking about, seeing some patterns in this group that interest me.

Cordelia, from the 1960s Bodley Head edition of 12 of Graham’s novels — most covers for this novel are anachronistic (the characters are given mid-20th century clothes, or they are much sentimentalized doll-like visions of a picturesque 19th century set)

I’ve been paying attention to which books have a female POV: thus far:

1938 Giant’s Chair (rural Wales), Mary Seymour, 3rd person
1939 Keys of Chance, Norah Faulkner, 3rd person
1945 Forgotten Story (1898 Cornwall): young boy moves into older cousin Patricia Veal Harris, back and forth, 3rd person
1949 Cordelia, Cordelia Blake Fergusson (19th century fiction Manchester), 3rd person
1963 Marnie – Marnie Elmer, genuine first person point of view* (with intermittent breaks and movement into omniscience, for Mark’s point of view
1967 Walking Stick, Deborah Dainton, who is lame genuine first person point of view*
1998, Ugly Sister, Emma Spry, maimed on one side of her face, genuine first person point of view*, historical fiction, 19th century Cornwall

So just two in this mid-career sub-set.

In this mid-career sub-set, though, several take place in and around the Mediterranean world or have long sequences which occur on one of the islands, all of which show much knowledge of these areas. Greek Fire practically maps Athens and parts of Greece for the reader. Water ways are ever important in Graham’s fictions

More interesting as art:  several use irony centrally. In Marnie, the POV may be Marnie (except when the author has changed allegiances to Mark) but there is perpetually an ironic distance between the author and his character, one only implied and not without sympathy. This ironic distance is even stronger but less obvious in After the Act, where Morris Scott’s self-loving view of himself is even less shared by the author; arguably, he is an unredeemable shit. In The Walking Stick it takes us most of the novel to realize the heroine has been lured into a web of lies, and most of what she believes of this working class deprived man she falls in love with is not true; he is a self-pitying utterly conscienceless criminal. The character see himself positively (as does the sexually promiscuous wife murderer of After the Fall) as perhaps does Stephen Carrington in the Poldarks

Last, four have remarkable central uses of allusions to other books or films that I found wholly unexpected, and lifted the Graham book into another realm of meaning. He had used literary, art and even music allusions interestingly before (Strangers Meeting, Merciless Ladies) but not so intertextually.

Richard Chamberlain and Eileen Atkins, said to have been the best actors in the central roles of Lady’s Not for Burning

Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning is important in The Tumbled House (one of the superior suspense novels, indirectly highly autobiographical)

Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey tells us how Marnie is intended to be understand as about an angry working class girl, to fit into the literature of the period about exploited downtrodden (not that Marnie will allow that) working class lives

A.L. Rowse’s Tudor Cornwall is simply the central source for Grove of Eagles (despite much research into documents too)

Jean Anouilh’s Waltz of the Toreadors (a bitter farce about man wanting to murder his aging inconvenient wife turned into a tasteless movie with Peter Sellers) for a frame for After the Act (one-third of the way in this “hero” murders his nagging embarrassing wife and the rest of the novel is his remorse and ultimately the ironic showing of him getting away with this in a kind of triumph because his work makes so much money for others — a personal nightmare, self-flagellation?)

Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (called by WG in the novel “a strange somber classic” with the narrator a woman writing three remarkable paragraphs about the movie); and Shaw’s Doctor’s Dilemma for the remarkable Walking Stick (another superior book, WG said it sold more than any other or made him more money). A cornucopia of allusions to Browning, Shakespeare, Donne

Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading and then watching the really fine 1987 TV film adaptation of The Lady’s Not for Burning, featuring Kenneth Branagh, Cherie Lunge, a very young Susannah Harker (impeccable in her part), and thinking about the parallels between what is said in it about human life and relationships and what is found in The Tumbled House; also how it can be related to other of Graham’s fictions. I just loved the movie and scripts (both stage-play and screenplay are by Fry).

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But this blog has gone on long enough.  I’ll end by recording I’m about to embark on the same study of A Taste of Honey (play, 1961 movie by Tony Richardson) for Marnie. Also relevant the French film Tony Lee Moral discussed: Sundays and Cybele (about a child deprived of parents, or a home life taken up by a mentally troubled man after WW2). I find all movies made after Hitchcock mentioned by Lee, of which I’ve now tried three, are mesmerized by the core paradigm Hitchcock pulled out of it, which resembles the core paradigms of most Hitchcock movies so are more or less worthless — not Sean O’Connor’s play but I cannot reach the text. I’ve a good book on Delaney and will return to Margaret Foster’s fiction of this era, and Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (about two working class [one “in service” for a while] lives).

I mean to go on to do the same for Waltz of the Toreadors (which I saw at age 13 with my father watching too and commenting on what was then Channel 13 in NYC — a remarkable production) and After the Act, which to my mind anticipates Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. I must re-watched Wild Strawberries and I’ve obtained a copy of Shaw’s Doctor’s Dilemma and will rent the movie (yes there was a movie made). Graham is much interested in doctor’s dilemmas in his work, most notably through his beloved Dwight Enys. My heart has warmed towards Luke Norris: I’ve come to love the way he does the part in the New Poldark.

This promotional shot of Luke Norris as Dwight Enys in the 4th season emphasizes his beauty — but he is more often seen seriously about doctoring, and troubled over how little he can do, aware he must not dominate his patients, he is their advisor, not their boss.

So here’s where I am, just before the Winter Solstice in 2019.

Ellen

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Poldark: The Fifth Season: Episodes 5-8: an open-ended ending

Nampara and the sea

All we know is this moment, and this moment, Ross, we are alive! We are. We are. The past is over, gone. What is to come doesn’t exist yet. That’s tomorrow! It’s only now that can ever be, at any one moment. And at this moment, now, we are alive — and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask — concluding passage spoken by Demelza in Graham’s Angry Tide is divided up, re-paraphrased to be more sentimental and spoken by Ross and Demelza in tandem as concluding passage in 8 but for Ross’s promise to return

Friends and readers,

The ending of the eighth episode of this (last?) fifth season is carefully structured so that its last scenes (and words) are those the eighth Poldark book, The Stranger from the Sea implicitly rehearses at its opening as the remembered ending of the 7th book, The Angry Tide. In case we don’t see this (Debbie Horsfield has to keep in mind the viewership may not have read the first seven books upon which the five seasons of the new Poldark are based), she underlines a projected intent with a (overdone) reiteration by Ross that he promises Demelza he will return. The music surges, his figure is seen walking into the distance rhythmically like some god or force as she watches from the cliff.

Ross’s (Aiden Turner) last words to Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson): “I swear to you, my love, I will return ….”

In this second half of the season once Despard (Vincent Reagan) is hanged, the love stories that Horsfield has developed out of Graham’s material and her additions take over what subjective space and matter there is and are more or less concluded: Cecily Hanson (Lily Dodsworth-Evans) attempts to elope to Jamaica with Geoffrey Charles (Freddie Wise) and is thwarted by her father. Morwenna (Ellise Chappell) cannot resist stalking the small child John Conan, causes emotional havoc for herself and Drake (Harry Richardson) and almost lands Drake in prison once again, except that the harridan old woman, Lady Whitworth (Rebecca Front) softens, after which we are expected to believe Morwenna goes home cured, ready to have sex with Drake. (What does one thing have to do with another? She was not avoiding sex because she was in love with this child — it was her memories of harrowing sadistic sex that froze her.)

Tess (Sofia Oxenham) functions like the femme fatale of spy thrillers (more on this in the comments) except she is a thug: she heads a band of thieves stealing precious ore from Ross’s mine, she lures Sam (Tom York) turned stupid once again, away from the good pious Rosina (Amelia Clarkson), and has an affair with Ross who himself uses her for his plot to undermine the French conspiracy to invade England.

Side stories suggested briefly: Caroline’s (Gabriella Wilde) maternal instincts are aroused when Mowenna’s baby is born and, like Morwenna with Drake, almost miraculously, she is ready once again to have sex and a child with Dwight (Luke Norris). A much better scene is the one where she thinks of how she can approach someone powerful to protect Dwight from whatever he is doing (he also keeps her in the dark)

Sam and Rosina are a convincing pair until the silly Tess material intervenes and then they given but one scene together — it is effective their making up

Caroline is given gravitas in her dress and behavior in the last parts of the fifth season — mostly during the trial and aftermath

I say what subjective matter there is because in the last two episodes of the season, the script is that of the spy-mystery thriller action-adventure melodrama so typical of serials on most TV channels in the last few years. The trajectory is that Ross (at first to save his own life when he is captured by a French traitor-revolutionary) pretends to join in on a French conspiracy to invade England; he is gathering information so that he can send it to William Wickham, and thus restore the respect he had enjoyed from this man before he became involved with Despard. He hides this motive and this aim from everyone so that he appears to have distanced himself and become another man, mean, cold, sexually unfaithful.

We are then treated (inbetween bouts of sentimental stories) antic twists and turns to as each of the characters who care so much for Ross and are so worried about him and put-off by his behavior themselves go through a trajectory of super-anguish, super-heroism, anger, and so on to match his, all presenting their inner souls in melodramatic (over-done) gestures. Time is taken out for Cecily and Geoffrey Charles to attempt two elopements, an absurd attempt of George to marry Cecily to spite his step-son (deterred by the step-son suggesting Cecily could be pregnant so George would have another illegitimate child), Ross and Demelza to hide the lovers who are nonetheless snatched away, he beaten within an inch of his life, she deciding she would rather not marry anyway, but for a moment feeling for him.

The reviews made fun of much of this, either implying or saying outright all was preposterous, outrageous improbability. Why should (for example) Meceron (Tim Dutton) and Hanson (Peter Sullivan) come to Cornwall to confide in George Warleggan (Jack Farthing) and his uncle (Pip Torrens) as their own means of revenging themselves on Ross. What should they revenge themselves on him for anyway? George Warleggan as a character is turned into convenient never-ending engine of spite against Ross until the last moment. (In the later books he dislikes Ross intensely but he has other interests.)

Geoffrey Charles and Cecily parting — they are the romance couple of the season

Everything culminates in Ross’s plan to have his friends (Drake, Sam, Zacky Martin [Tristan Sturrock]) set off fireworks to warn people (who we are told) of the invasion just as it starts (which it never seems to). He has told Dwight the truth since Dwight (whose character is utterly travestied) threatens to end the friendship unless Ross explains himself and Dwight is involved somehow or other. Since all our male friends are enlisted for this spectacle we have Morwenna and Rosina and Caroline (reminding me of Kitty in the 1950s Gunsmoke while Matt is out endangering his life) at home worrying. One of them even says “Be careful” in that usual way. At the last minute finally Demelza is told (off-stage so we have to guess) that Ross has all along been behaving as a mole-spy, having an affair with Tess as part of this cover-up.

So what does she do but rush back to Nampara to throw herself into the very danger from the French working there, which danger Ross purported to be protecting her from. A wholly improbable duel emerges because she then pretends to want to have sexual intercourse with the French leader in front of Ross to humiliate him. How far can we go? But along comes an unexpected deus ex machina: George, who turns up with a conscience and a gun to stop the dueling; he cannot bear to betray his country. (Everyone who is a major character must have some good qualities.) And (like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes) wakes everyone up to what is supposed reality.

Ross with sword — no cuckold he —

The program is now ready to swing back — in effect to erase all that has happened for 8 episodes. Geoffrey Charles (his name is never shortened), while bitterly disappointed, turns from grief to studying and training to be a soldier; he can certainly ardently love someone else – as he does in The Stranger from the Sea. Morwenna and Drake now have that baby, Loveday (with the strange name explained) we learn is growing up when we finally hear of her in Stranger from the Sea; Tess exposed, there is nothing left for Rosina and Sam but to marry as they are when the new book opens.

A self-reflexive touch was to bring Robin Ellis back as the Judge Halse who will put Merceron and Hanson away for a long time so we get Aidan Turner and Ellis shaking hands just about near the end. Poldark lives on you see – then we learn Demelza, now completely reconciled to Ross’s lying (and behavior) is pregnant again (accounting for Isabelle-Rose whom we will meet in Stranger from the Sea).

Some of these scenes could have been moving, and for fleeting moments are (Harry Richardson manages it) were it not that they are given such brief mostly unprepared for scenes and embedded in spy-thriller nonsense. I found Ross and Demelza’s last scene ludicrously overdone because of the reiterated “I will return.” If you turn off the sound, the actors are effective. By the time of Stranger in the Sea Ross has been away for months, in London and in Portugal and Spain, working for reform, and now a quiet agent-spy for George Canning. He returns to Demelza, presented as preferring Cornwall, one-third of the way into the book.

Far shot of George taking leave of Trenwith and the staff with dignity

Close up of him looking round once more at this place he had so coveted

One exception is the curiously moving silent pantomime moment given slow ritual play seen at a distance when George leaves Trenwith – which has been left abandoned when Stranger in the Sea starts again. The actor did pull it off, for a moment the last hour of this fifth season was lifted from its concluding morass of absurdities.

Ross takes out time to shame Tess (who Demelza says she feels sorry for but is smugly looking on) — the ejected bad woman

In the last two episodes especially of the fifth season we have the embarrassing spectacle of a intelligent and thoughtful woman script-writer and “creator” (the writer is the linchpin person of these costume dramas on British TV) leading a team of capable people to make a travesty out of fine somewhat seriously intended historical fiction. I presume it’s the drive for high ratings and in a gut level way her own lack of sympathy for costume drama and liberal-left politics. It saddens and dismays me to see this. She does update: Ross is “disappeared” by Hanson and Merceron at the opening of the 8th episode (like any rebel in contemporary fascist dictatorships)

Despard on the scaffold just before he begins to speak

Catherine watching from below

What is valuable in this fifth season (though represented through the lens of hostile conservative historians) is the presentation of the Despard story. I assume many more people will now have heard of this man than have done for many a decade. At the close of the fifth and sixth episodes time and dignity are afford the trial, testimonies and killing of Despard. He is allowed to give part of his speech at the time. Debbie Horsfield has read her history and the names of the men murdered alongside Despard are there and accurate.

Catherine Despard (Kerri McLean) was a pro-active intelligent woman who did all she could to publish what was cruelly inflicted on her husband and others in the prisons and to obtain a pardon for him after the guilty verdict. I was glad to see though Horsfield seemed to feel she needed to knit Catherine into the love stories so she has Dwight falling in love with Kitty (again a repeat — he fell in love with Keren Daniels, also another man’s wife Caroline reminds him) there was no sign of this woman having a romance with Dwight. Indeed in the story he is made to testify that Despard was mad and not responsible for his actions, the slur the newspapers placed on Despard’s actions, which survived into the 19th century histories of the incident.

Costumes, setting, music: Looking back over the five years I’d say one of the strongest elements has been a combining use of music and landscape to mesmerize the viewer, to create a continual mood which draws upon the place (Cornish landscape, seascape, minescape) and the projection of passion in the actors. When a sequence or scene is given some time, it’s been especially effective, but even when the scenes are swiftly and endlessly switched back and forth, the music offers a continuity that binds the experience together. The costumes blended in, did not call attention to themselves except when the character was in an occasion.

This last season a decision was made to dress Eleanor Tomlinson in an emerald green pelisse and matching squarish hat; the effect was to emphasize her height, and make her look mannish; since several times she is put on horseback, riding to some rescue, I suppose this was an attempt to make her into a female hero but found it grating, alienating. I have read comments by her which suggest how much she loves the Demelza of Graham’s books. Before this role I loved the way she embodied characters; here she has been made to alternate between a calculating hardened shrew and a woman whose understanding of love is a demand her lover prove it.

A rare unforced thoughtful moment for Tomlinson as Demelza

All along I have suggested that making Aidan Turner into a central over-sexualized fetish undermined the sometimes effective ensemble nature of the story, and what I suggest what Graham’s general aim: to provide a picture of an earlier time and place with his hero as an effective if self-contained and private presence within a group.

I was interested to notice that the ending of the second season of the first Poldark season (1975, Warleggan) where we see Ross (Ellis) and Demelza (Angharad Rees) walking on the beach as he prepares to return to the army and she to wait for him in Cornwall was in effect revived. Also an utter departure from Graham’s book

If the series does return, my hope would be that Debbie Horsfield returns to her literal closeness to the books in the first and third seasons. I think the problem for me all along has been Debbie Horsfield’s lack of sympathy with some of Graham’s central conceptions so that her stories while variations on Graham’s stories Horsfield, lack or are the reverse of his outlook. This year she dropped Graham just about altogether except his method (the choice of a minor historical figure, costume drama itself). At core what I have liked all these years is the transfer of the matter of Graham’s Poldark into these videos, realized through effective acting, dramaturgy, the whole experience of film. The anticipatory hints suggest more frustration. In lieu of Portugal and Spain as the secondary setting, and the colonialist war of the era (called the Peninsular war) at the opening of The Stranger from the Sea we might find ourselves in Paris, France, near Napoleon (better known), with Ross as Canning’s spy and Dwight as Ross’s sidekick, spending time investigating psychological “medicine” in a nearby sanitarium.

Demelza, Caroline, Dwight

Hail and farewell.

The two Rosses

Ellen

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Poldark: The Fifth season, Episodes 1-4: an evaluative review

One of several competing portraits of Edward Marcus Despard (wikipedia offers a barebones outline of the man’s life)

Promotional parallel shot of Aidan Turner as the somewhat aging Ross Poldark, and Vincent Regan as Despard in his last 4 years (Season 5)

Friends and readers,

I had not written until now on the fifth season of Debbie Horsfield’s Poldark because I’m in several minds about it. Having watched the whole season twice, and now going through carefully each episode Sunday by Sunday I know had this been the first group of serial drama episodes I saw I would never have gone on to read Winston Graham’s Poldark novels. I first read the first four quartet (Ross Poldark, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark and Warleggan, written 1945-53, and set between 1783 and 1793) after watching the first four episodes of the 1975-76 Poldark (scripted by Jack Pullman, mostly directed by Christopher Barry).

I learned later Winston Graham detested Pullman’s adaptation of Ross Poldark (Pullman departed radically in linchpin scenes), but I found myself having a deep affinity with them, and unexpectedly, as the series was itself ceaselessly disdained as romance costume drama [for women], and I assumed the books would be perhaps a cut above what was called “bodice rippers” (historical fiction except for a very few writers had fallen to a debased level in the early part of the 20th century), fell in love with them. They seemed to me fine historical fiction with something serious to say to readers barely out of, recovering from the devastation of World War Two.

Horsfield seems to have made the decision to fill the ten year interval between the ending of the first trilogy of Graham’s Poldark novels (The Black Moon, The Four Swans, The Angry Tide, written & published 1974-77/8, set 1794-99), and the beginning of the second The Stranger from the Sea, The Miller’s Dance, The Loving Cup, written & published 1982-4-84, set 1811-15) — not from the fragments of details about the intervening years found in the later five books, but by inventing a story whose source and treatment resembles that of Graham.

In my paper on the use of documentation in Graham’s historical and suspense fiction I demonstrated Graham had a penchant for choosing the minor real figures of history who were just and decent men scapegoated (using law and state terror and legal violence) by or part of a reactionary establishment but often meaning to do good or not wholly bad men. His deepest sympathy was for the humane rebel, the Che Guevara type combined with the elegance of Gainsborough historical romance males that his own hero, Ross Poldark, represents. To have picked a man like Edward Marcus Despard speaks very well of her, we must give her the credit of calling attention to this man to a wider audience than ever reads non-fiction about the French revolution, the analogous upheaval in the UK in the 1790s for reform (prompting the reign of state terror by Pitt and his state machinery).

As the promotional photo for the series suggests, in real life Despard was such another as Ross Poldark in Jeremy Poldark where we see him come near to hanging and/or transportation because his very real illegal activities leading a huge group of local ordinary desperate people to remove and use for themselves the flotsam and jetsam of two wrecks from a violent storm were used by his enemies (and the local state apparatus) to make an example of him to deter people from combining to demand a far better life and share in the good things of the earth than they had ever had. Apparently Despard was part of a revolutionary group whose deepest aims were to radically alter, overthrow (if you will) the oligarchical and unjust orders of the 18th century European gov’ts, but he was not guilty of what he was accused of. He was rather a political enlightenment Anglo-Irish Protestant around whom revolutionary people swirled, and was potentially willing to lead a rebellion if one could succeed — with say the help of the French in Ireland.

Promotional shot of Kerri McLean who plays Catherine (Kitty) in this fifth season of Poldark –

She also brings to the viewer’s attention other people who lived during this ten-year interval and whose life history also has much to say to us today. Joseph Merceron, a corrupt Godfather boss of Bethnal Green (or Spitalfields, as a blog about this older area of London calls it), a Trump type colluding with Pitt’s gov’t to spy on and help imprison, transport, execute anyone who wanted to change the status quo. James Hadfield, a pathetic religious fanatic, crazed by his life and experience, who tried to kill George III (Andrew Gower, fresh from his brilliant complex portrayal of Prince Charles Edward Stuart makes the few moments we glimpse this man memorable).

Catherine Despard, about whom records are sparse, come from just the period of her (probable) marriage to Despard, life with him, continual remarkable unusual pro-active activities on his behalf, including publicizing the horrific conditions in the prison he was thrown in for two years (Coldbath Fields), showing herself (probably a Creole, daughter to a freed African woman living in Nicaragua, herself alas the owner of enslaved Africans) to be better educated than many European women, until the time of his execution, whereupon she disappears from public records. It is thought she took her and Despard’s children to Ireland in an effort to appeal to the consciences of his Anglo-Irish protestant family. No picture survives

Geoffrey Charles (Freddie Wise) and Cecily Hanson (Lily Dodsworth-Evans), the only conventionally romantic couple in the season ….

Catherine is interestingly accurately likened to the wholly fictional Cecily Hanson, daughter of Ralph Hanson (Peter Sullivan). Catherine was an educated woman who understood how to negotiate with upper class people and could hold her own in political salons (it takes Demelza many years to learn this). Cecily shows self-esteem and agency in her choosing to engage herself to Geoffrey Charles, and then when (in a later episode), she finds he is beaten senseless by her father’s thugs and cannot begin to hold onto their relationship, give him up. A feel of poignancy hovers around Geoffrey Charles, as the orphaned son of Francis and Elizabeth Poldark.

Hanson’s name harks back to a real brutal plantation owner from the Caribbean, Hanbury, a composite figure (such men did make money producing natural wood for mahogany found in mosquito-infested places), who Hanson attempts to coerce into an advantageous marriage with the sadly-reduced but still cruel and amoral widower George Warleggan (Jack Farthing sustains the difficult part of a man hallucinating from grief and guilt, rescued from heinous treatment by Dwight Enys, Luke Norris in the familiar Graham conception).

I’ve discovered Debbie Horsfield’s William Wickham was an under secretary of state, working for Castlereagh in 1802, the supervisor of a group of spies (see Conor’s Life and Times). (There was another William Wickham, official in the foreign office during Canning’s time — and given Graham’s respect for Canning and in the later novels make his Ross an reporter-spy-negotiator for Canning — so to use the name could leave room for a return to the 8th novel, Stranger from the Sea, which there are various signs in even the first four episodes of this series Horsfield and the film-makers, crew and actors would be willing to do. She’d conflate the two figures.)

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Promotional shots push viewers to liken Demelza to Tess and Demelza in this series is presented as seeing herself in Tess

So with all this important history for interested intelligent viewers to explore, which can also be linked back to Graham Winston’s own novelistic achievements and politics, what can be the cause of my dismay? 1) that Debbie Horsfield’s interpretation of Despard is that of the authorities and establishment of the later 19th century which stigmatized and degraded Despard into a “nut,” a deluded naive upper class male who courted his own destruction. Nothing could be further from the truth, but in scene after scene we have Ross and Demelza and Catherine stopping a foolish man from following the obviously provocative antics of envious revolutionary thugs; 2) that freed from any text, Horsfield abandons the middle-of-the-road perspective of Graham on the revolution (his stance might be likened to the Girondists) continually to condemn any rebellion as coming from envy and dense stupidity, actuated by spite. She turned Graham’s Keren Daniels (who had some cause for discontent) into a dense promiscuous thug; now she invents such another in the character of Tess (Sofia Oxenham). I also cannot stand the way she re-interprets Demelza to be an pro-actively distrustful wife.

It is painful for me to consider (as I do) that Debbie Horsfield might be accurate: there are scenes of Demelza showing hurt, anger and resentment at Ross’s cold distrust of her in the second half of Jeremy Poldark and after her love affair with Richard Armitage. Similarly in Graham’s suspense novels post-World War Two, and later Poldark novels Graham evidences a great conservatism. That’s why I am in several minds. I may have been misreading Graham for all these years.

I face the reality that my love of many film adaptations derives from my love of the source book and the original conceptions of the key characters. I have no doubt that Debbie Horsfield’s conception of Demelza as frequently vexed with Ross, dominating when she can (masculine in her approach — as made visible in her mannish outfits), pro-active on behalf of the material needs of her family makes sense prudentially. It might appeal to non-romantic women in the 2nd decade of the 21st century that Horsfield introduced the idea that Ross regards Demelza as his savior, and he repeats this ad nauseam in season 5. Demelza likens herself to Catherine Despard (Eleanor Tomlinson must follow the script she is given) by asserting she too “entrapped” a man whose kitchen she also was (this is a startling travesty of what happened in Graham’s Ross Poldark, Jack Pullman’s adaptation and also Horsfield’s own Episode 4 in the 2015 Poldark). I can only assert and ask those who have read the books if I am correct: Graham’s Demelza is the underdog, a different kind of misfit from Ross, having given her ego, her very soul into her relationship with Ross; like him, finding deepest pleasure in disinterested activities and quiet solitude. What is so appealing about their relationship is they never bicker, are unself-conscious about their deep compatible character geniality.

Now that she is freed of Graham’s texts, I feel Horsfield travesties all Graham major women characters, but Verity, who is dropped, perhaps with relief? (Several of the students I taught Graham’s novel, Ross Poldark to, maintained she was a female Ross as understood in that humanely idealistic book, figures who found peace in solitude.) Graham’s Morwenna loathed the child Whitworth impregnated her with; Horsfield’s is turned into a sentimental fanatic, trailing around abjectly after the boy child, barely protected by the vulnerable (because low-class) Drake (Harry Richardson). She is made to behave as self-destructively and more than half-mad as Horsfield makes George Warleggan in his grief for Elizabeth. Debbie Horsfield is more comfortable or wants exaggerated emotional states: in the later novels we are told George grieved, felt guilty, remembered ever after all Elizabeth’s finer qualities, but he did not go mad: Jack Farthing’s acting carries it off as would Elisse Chappell were I not embarrassed for her — perhaps some viewers will be embarrassed for George:

I found irritating Morwenna and Rosina being turned into tenderly loving schoolmistresses — back to the patriarchy. Caroline (the now anorexic-looking Gabrielle Wilder) reminds me of the medieval statue of Barbara, always with lamp except she carries around a deliberately chosen fat dog. She is now resentful and jealous of Catherine whom Dwight does seem drawn to. Even he is travestied, becoming belligerently aggressive toward Ross in order to pressure Ross into giving up his loyalty to Despard (as imprudent). Dwight’s complete lack of this kind of emotional blackmail has escaped Debbie Horsfield (or she is glad to shed him of a characteristic generosity and inability to pressure others many would despise him for). OTOH, as in the books he shows himself to be his own man; he has his professional conscience and follows it despite his wife’s upper class prejudices and ignorance.

Dwight helping George by taking him to his wife’s grave: he utters an idea which is a play on a sentiment that Graham ends The Angry Tide with: all we have is that we are alive here today and that is what we must make what we can of

I find the relentless pace of these four episodes and constant switching back and forth of the scenes destructive of any development of conversation or thought. Many of the recap blogs wax snarky over this. Debbie Horsfield does trust her viewer to have the patience to see small moments develop slowly. We cannot dwell in the relationship of Ross and Demelza when it is deeply companionable because the scenes are so rushed and embedded in distractions (juxtaposition, switching back and forth):

The look on Eleanor Tomlinson’s face here suggests to me she has read Graham’s books, and some of her comments show how much she has invested in Graham’s heroine ….

I realize the larger content, the actual thrust of episodes is so often sheerly repetitive of the first seven books and earlier seasons. Again Ross is saving countless victim- miners and their children from death in an avalanche. Again he risks all his estate and fortune, this time to save the miners from unemployment. At least in Graham’s books, he does this to begin a business for himself, because he is guilty over Francis’s death and wants to control Elizabeth, make her dependent on him.

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Opening of episode 1: gradually we focus in on Ross out in his boat, and watch him come into shore

A few elements to praise:

I wish there were more moments in the four hours that derive from Graham’s Poldark books or conceptions, which the reader of Graham’s novels, someone who has read some 18th century history and knows the importance of the French revolution and the Enlightenment to a modern way of life today, and the lover of thoughtful period costume drama is left alone in peace to enjoy. Examples: At the opening of the first episode this season we see Ross out in a boat fishing by himself quietly. He is taking a needed break. George at first leaving Trenwith to rot; then his beginning to see Elizabeth and returning to Trenwith to find her is touching. I thought the conception of George’s half-craziness and coldness towards his son well done by Farthing, though he is blackened since in the books he did pay for Geoffrey Charles’s education as far as Geoffrey Charles asked for. The depiction of less major characters too — that Morwenna will have a hard time coping with sexuality is at first presented with sensitivity as is Demelza’s attempt to win over the workers.

Episode 2 has much that is persuasive and interesting politically — as a historical film (the way the first four seasons presented mining, farming and other realities of the era). The 1790s was a period of severe repression — unfairly because the English protesters were out for reform, but Pitt and the wealthy were frightened by what had happened in France. And they did frame people, and use just such printed circulating pamphlets. The gov’t did have surveillance techniques. Despard was far smarter than she presents him, he was impulsive and used to using violence; all characteristics praised and honored by the establishment of this era — very like Nelson (who he was friends with, worked with in the Caribbean) in some ways, only more controlled.

Episode 3: There is an anticipation of a sixth season in the behavior of the children: the young Clowance looking yearningly over the fence at Trenwith. We will find her there in the first phase of The Stranger from the Sea. Sam and Rosina slowly getting together over Bible-reading. Valentine ever alone wandering, picked up by the kindly Ross (who we see is his father from visual resemblance).

Ross watched by spies, enemies ….

In this interim plot-design, we are shown how slowly Hanson and Merceron in London draw a noose of inference and suspicion around both Despard and Ross, to accuse them of treason. This was done in the 1790s and people were tried, imprisoned, hung — 10 famously got off partly by the brilliant defense, Godwin’s publication of a treatise on equity and justice, and the reality the population was deeply against this repression. Of course our characters use Tess as their mole and encourage her to get at the head of gangs to destroy houses and people (highly anachronistic the idea any mob of men would automatically obey a woman). A noose of inference and suspicion is gradually being unfolded around Ross, ever oblivious in her desire to help his friend, bring about meaningful reform, love his wife and children …

Harry Richardson as Drake Carne attempting to care for a mentally distressed young woman delivers a pitch perfect performance; his behavior a parallel to Dwight Enys in the fiction; Luke Norris has his character as far sterner, but then he does not love the people he is treating.

Epitomizing shot

The linking together of the neglected Valentine with the once abused Morwenna is valuable symbolically.

I’ll conclude with my finding that several of the heroes of Graham’s suspense novels involve themselves politically, usually on the left, and act in ethical ways against their own interest, endangering their lives. In one I have been studying, Greek Fire, a depiction of the US-UK ruthless intervention in Greek politics in the 1940s and 50s to destroy social democracy — it result in years of dictatorship, but then Papandreos took power by election and a social democracy for years emerged — Graham’s hero is characterized in ways that recall Ross. Greek Fire was written not long after Warleggan. Here is one typical characterization: a friend wants the hero to give up his ethics, morality, efforts: and the man says here you are “pushing on, never letting up, … why do you not accept life as it is instead of trying to worry it with your teeth all the time, like a terrier with a bone. Is this not Ross too?

Ellen

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Outlander and Poldark: Late Night Musings

Jenny Fraser Murray (Laura Donnelly) unwrapping books from Paris, looking forward to reading them (Outlander 2:8, “Fox’s Lair,”adapted from Dragonfly in Amber)

Francis Poldark (Kyle Soller) turning from harvest festival to see Ross and Demelza have come to join him, his family and tenants (Poldark 2:3, adapted from Jeremy Poldark)

one must distrust the almost-the-same … the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences — Primo Levi, The Periodical Table

Sometimes earlier (just after supper), but mostly very late in the evenings, my last two waking hours I please myself by re-watching the Outlander and Poldark series, re-experiencing the seasons, first through fourth thus far, episode by episode, until I’ve got to the end and then (after a break where I may turn to another serial drama of the period drama from great-book type), start again.  The more I watch them, the more I find I love them both.  I see more, notice more. (This is true of all good movie watching for me.) I also re-read the books, as well as re-listen to them read aloud, and peruse small pieces of the texts as the mood takes me. It has become that it does not matter if the videos differ from the books in literal content or themes: after all the two kinds of art are strongly different in means and probably effect.

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One difference between the two series is Poldark has several heroes, several heroines and creates a crowded world which extends to highly varied detail, while Outlander is centered on the central hero-heroine pair with all others circling around them and the history that accrues is what is needed to tell their stories. You can see this repeated in structure after structure of all the episodes.

Claire (Caitriona Balfe) arrived in Scotland once more drops all over-luxurious elegant outfits to become her workaday self — I just love her here, the expression on her face especially

We returned to heal in the peace of the Scottish Highlands. Jamie’s sister, Jenny, and her husband, Ian, had had another baby while we were in Paris. Their welcome and the daily routines of Lallybroch worked like a tonic on our battered souls. We hoped we had done enough to stop the war. We began planning our future, but as a very prescient Scot once observed, the best laid schemes of mice and men.

I have not bonded enough with the filmic Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) as yet. (Demelza in the book is quite different: I bonded with her long ago.)  Neither actress who has played the part (I refer also to Angharad Rees) was allowed an over-voice, and Tomlinson is a figure in a vast pictorial landscape, not the voice which imagines or makes it (as  Claire and Balfe function in Outlander).

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) seen from middle distance, walking along, the scene lasts a minute perhaps, and we ask ourselves, is she thinking of the pregnancy she cannot get herself to tell Ross about as yet … she is hurt, but silent … and as usual the moment is interrupted …

Another difference is the first, Poldark, is more serious about history, and with more real detail woven incontinually, real historical figures, real places thoroughly mapped, real events, including the weather, and as the series progresses more and more authentic (often minor individuals). It is strongly sincerely political; leftist-liberal in outlook throughout, though conservative in its attitude towards males (there are no homosexuals as central characters, no lesbians, this is heterosexuality presented as universal or normative with other kinds of sexuality seen as lacks, or “not normal”)

The center of the Poldark books is not a romance between two or even four people: the center of the Outlander books is. Gabaldon provides as much history as you need to understand the characters’ relationships, not much more.

Outlander is fundamentally a woman’s historical romance, with stretches conforming to what is found typically (as to issues and metaphors) what is found in women’s novels (contemporary ones too). More idealization of love relationships; more fantasy (it’s a time-traveling tale!); it’s arguably after the introduction of Lord John Grey an ambivalent LBGTQ series, but equally arguably homophobic with all the women presented as (thus far) conventionally heterosexual. By comparison, DuMaurier’s historical romances (which I think were influential, especially the House on the Hill, with its back-and-forth from the 20th to the 14th century) are genuinely gender questioning, with sexuality fluid.

Horsfield does like to shoot Aidan Turner from angles and in lighting that make him look far larger than he is, as a symbolically magnificent figure

Horsfield changes the Poldark matter to be centrally pro-community so what in the books one often has to flee for liberty (and in the 1970s series) becomes the individual’s safety, salvation, comfort in the new series. She is also far more sympathetic to capitalism, but alas also far more melodramatic and tends to dwell on individuals as causes of what happens rather than larger groups of people and climate, and history, which is what is found in Graham.

Ronald Moore (the central linchpin force and decider for Outlander, the series) has interjected much action-adventure, a male outlook repeatedly, and this kind of thing replaces the more lengthy home-building and other very female concerns with Jamie’s story as central (sometimes even marginalizing Claire) so that fathers-and-sons (-or daughters) becomes a predominant pattern rather than mothers-daughters. It is true that Roger is a second narrator for the books.

Sam Heughan as Jamie, first seen in Episode 2 of the first season at Lallybroch.

There’s a perceptive essay on both series compared in James Leggott, Katherine Byrne and Julie Anne Taddeo’s Conflicting Masculinities, comparing the two series: Gemma Goodman and Rachel Moseley (“Television Costume Drama & the Eroticized Regionalized [Male] Body: Poldark & Outlander“)  find they undermine traditional masculinity traits, emphasize an ideal norm for men as tender, loving, and susceptible of sensitive emotions and thoughts, the male body is under siege, his body as contested territory (symbolic of the ravages of capitalism, colonialization) with the women emerging as strong active figures.

One problem with this essay is it omits the second male(s) in both series, especially Dwight Enys and Francis Poldark in Poldark, and Frank Randall and Roger Wakefield Mackenzie on Outlander. Francis and Frank are tragic figures, with Frank becoming a ghost-revenant figure, and Dwight taking on a strongly womanly role (as a type he is found in Graham’s suspense novels, the refreshing non-heroic heroes here and there). In some moods I much prefer Dwight to Ross (and he is in the last story Graham ever told where he is about to be introduced by a still grieving (for Jeremy) Demelza.

I do love the Francis character in the book, and the way the first actor played him (Clive Francis is a Joe Orton figure); and I feel for Frank in the book (where there are love-making scenes with Claire that are deeply involving) and the series (Tobias Menzies is superb). It is a loss not to be compensated for when Frank Randall/Black Jack Randall literally die by the third book — as the deaths of Francis, and Elizabeth are part of what makes the last 5 Poldark books much weaker.

Tobias Menzies as Frank being told the story of her time with Jamie (Season 2, Episode 2, “Through a Glass Darkly): he is an astonishingly flexible actor whose Black Jack Randall seems another presence altogether — he too participates in making patriarchy central as he is a deeper parent to Brianna than Claire in the series (not so much the book).

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One result from both is I turn to writing about their matter in some way, blogs, papers, even teaching. Outlander has now led me to promise a paper on Culloden as a primary example of experiencing a crossroads of life moment; I am re-energized for my project of a book (whether published or not) on Winston Graham, and (however slowly) I’ve read two more (Little Walls and Sleeping Partner) and begun a third (Greek Fire) of his contemporary male-centered suspense books written between the first quartet of the Poldarks (1-4) and the first trilogy (5-7). I look forward to the fifth and sixth seasons of Outlander and am so sad to have to accept that Horsfield and Company will not go on to adapt to video the concluding 5 books.

I read other books too — for the Poldarks more books on Cornwall, Philip Paynton, other historical fictions set in Cornwall (the Virginia Woolf-like China Court by Rumer Godden). I will take with me on a coming trip Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief. For Outlander, books on Scotland, by Scots writers, Naomi Mitchison’s Nine Lives by Jenni Calder, Maggie Craig’s The Women of the ’45.

I’d like to come up with a better explanation for the combined effects of books and film adaptations in the historical fiction & romance kind than I’ve done before. On the criss-crossing, intertextualities between the a book as source and video as transformed process. For example when you read a text and the narrator tells you about a character talking to him, the language focuses us on that character most of the time; visualize the scene in a video and the narrator is equally likely to rivet our attention on a silent character there as actor, so the tone and interaction of the scene is differently understood.

How and why such texts and films can infuse our very beings so that each small thing a given character we’ve invested a lot in does delights or absorbs us.

Dwight Enys (Luke Norris) spotted by Caroline (POV) caring for people (Poldark, still 2:3)

Young Fergus (Romann Berrux) insisting on the promise he would accompany Jamie & Claire everywhere (Outlander, still 2:8)

Ellen

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A Matter of Genre: Winston Graham’s Poldark novels: working outline for a book

Waterfalls in Cornwall

Friends,

I sometimes use my blogs for thinking out a paper, a class, a book, and that’s what I’m doing here.

How to account for the quality and vision of the once again famous Poldark novels would be the goal of this book.

Lacking the lifeblood of most literary (and other kinds of) biographies, the cooperation of the family members and a rich cache of private letters by Graham, I propose to raise the status and make the quality of the Poldark series taken as a whole understandable by

Part One: Three chapters: a study of the author as we find him in all his published works and what I have been able to reach in libraries and online:

Chapter One: the story of his life as he tells it

Chapter Two:  genre analysis, first the bloody death kind, and then Chapter Three, of historical fiction as inflected by regional romance.

Chapter Four. A gender fault-line is responsible for the distinct distance between these kinds, as well as the region they are set in. Cornish gothic links them. Lately I find his use of the gothic one of the more interesting elements in his historical fiction; it links this group of works to historical fictions by popular and masterly writers (Gabaldon to Mantel) ….

Part Two: Four chapters: we turn to the twelve Poldark novels. Class and status; marriage and sexual politics; economic and social politics and circumstances ….

Part Three: Two chapters:  Graham’s legacy is as much in the historical film adaptations he encouraged as in any of his books. Film noir and costume drama.

A coda will return us to Graham, and how a post-modern approach to all his writing (including scattered non-fiction and short tales) can enable a different perspective, and bring out unexpected pleasures (not susceptible of genre or biographical analysis) in some of his short and repressed fictions (which embarrassed him).

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Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) and Ross (Aidan Turner) Poldark — from Season 1

Once again (for a second time) a BBC serial drama called simply Poldark crossing more than year and adapting the first seven books of the series has had a phenomenal success, and has placed the name of the author of the source of popular money-making film before the public: Winston Graham. I say yet another because arguably at least three times before, film adaptations of other of Graham’s books have startled the public into attention: 1947 a film noir, Take My Life; 1964, a still remembered Hitchcock psychological drama, Marnie; and 1971, an unusual crime suspense story focusing on disability, The Walking Stick. The books have rarely gone out of print (or not at all — especially the first seven); and there are readers who profess to like some of the murder suspense contemporary mysteries.

One problem is there is a seeming uncrossable disconnect between Graham’s contemporary murder fiction (there usually is a murder in these, often of an evil woman) and his sixteen or so historical fictions (all but one set in Cornwall). I found analogous patterns and paradigms across both sets of books, similar character types – like marital and justified rapes of women.

I don’t say some of these suspense are not interesting and a few are good – the question is what lies behind the compulsion for these because many are pulp or so thin that the genre takes over. There is a very genuine interest in an immediate time and place, in technologies, the arts and contemporary issues in the decade each of them are written.

Much of his historical fiction is however truly fine (not all).

If nothing else, the film and radio and TV adaptations show the appeal of his matter to better writers, readers, film-makers and the public at large, not to omit those who seek to make money.

From the Walking Stick (1971): Deborah Dainton (Samantha Eggar) and Leigh Hartley (David Hemmings).

I’ve now read most of Graham’s historical fiction; I have eleven or twelve of the non-Poldarks to go (as I consider I have read quite adequately enough Marnie, Groves of Eagles, and Angel Pearl and Little God), some of the stories in the one book of short stories, Japanese Girl (with some scattered ones sent me by attachment), one history Spanish Armada(s), which I didn’t finish. Sigh.

In the case of rewrites, I have looked at all of them and found them mostly decidedly inferior to the first version (even if here and there are some good improvements, concision, new wit).

There are 4 short tales I’ve read (“Meeting Demelza,” “Christmas at Nampara,” “Vive le Roi,” “At the Chateau Lartrec”) that I liked and remember these for their gothic spirit; “The Japanese Girl” I can remember nothing of; “The Medici Earring” I unfortunately remember (because it’s a mean nasty story worthy O Henry), so I’ve read and remember 5 with a bunch to go – not that many and they are not long

I regard Poldark’s Cornwall as a Poldark book, and a couple of Poldark short tales (above cited).

I must read very carefully and create a chronology as best I can from his private memoir and oeuvre (including the radio and stage plays, scripts

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Winston Graham in 1945

This where I’m at. I am in the middle of Sleeping Partner just now and it confounds me how Graham could turn to writing this thin mechanical fiction after having achieved Warleggan. It has to be an inner compulsion that makes him write in this male-centered narrowly formulaic misogynistic genre. He returned to this compulsion (money-making was part of his rationale) after the astounding success of the two 1970s BBC seasons of Poldark and a remarkably book like The Angry Tide.

I am carrying on because I like the Poldark books enough, am interested in historical fiction and romance, in the sub-genre of Cornish or regional romance, am interested in film adaptation and it seems to me Winston Graham is an author whose work ought to be taken into account as a whole, made some sense of. I’ve done so much and it’s hard to let go?

I admit one impulse in my first curiosity was when I discovered Winston Graham is never mentioned even in common surveys of good 20th century historical fiction nor suspense/thriller/mystery books. I have yet to come across his name or his books in any of these. He does get a chapter of analysis of the Poldark books in books on Cornwall, and on costume-drama period film serial adaptation. But in these cases it is not that he or his presence is felt to compelling, or anything in his art, but that the texts themselves or videos belong to a social phenomenon of the 20th and 21st century the editor of the volume felt worth while exploring.

Ellen

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Poldark at the Smithsonian

First editions — 1945 and 1946 bookjacket cover illustrations
Friends and readers,

Last night I was one in a sold-out auditorium in the Smithsonian Ripley Center come to listen to Julie Anne Taddeo speak interestingly and entertainingly on the “World of Poldark: Historical Realities and Fantasies of Georgian England.” I write this blog to share with readers some of what she said.

Her encompassing thesis was that “Poldark engages us with history and contemporary issues.” In a room filled with many people who themselves felt a personal connection with the Poldark matter she told of how when she was a girl she’d watch the Sunday night line-up of period drama on PBS Masterpiece Theater with her mother. Poldark aired at 7 pm, and inspired an active following: people went to Cornwall, they named their children after favored characters; it “fueled their fantasy life.” She came to the books after watching the films, and since for an entrance exam in high school when she wrote about Poldark she won a scholarship, she can say it influenced her life crucially.

Robin Ellis from the first hour of the 1975 series, episode 6, as Ross Poldark accosting Elizabeth Chynoweth as his betrothed

Angharad Rees from the third part, 1975, episode 6, as Demelza, defying Ross’s attempt to cast her as a pathetic dependent on him after they have had sexual intercourse

A “cult” had developed around the show, which could be felt when in 1996 an attempt to film the eighth book, The Stranger from the Sea, using other actors, failed, partly the result of the vigorous protest from fans. (I add that the two hour show under strong American influence also de-politicized the book, omitted all mention of its Peninsular war context so was very weak.)

Julie suggested that the terms of the re-selling of the books as TV drama in 2015 can be seen in the first trailer to the first season, which she played: very sexy, sensual images abound, hard-driving rock music against a gritty background. They spent hugely and were after a younger audience than they assumed had watched the first time round. It turns out that the audience for this iteration has been “quite diverse.” Yes the actors were made to become “hunks” by going to the gym, a female-homoerotic gaze was prioritized. Unlike naked women, this photographing of near naked men enhanced their authority. It is easy to poke fun at aspects of the films; they are inevitably inaccurate. She defended the show, and then quoted Graham’s axiom like statement: “The past has no existence beyond through what our minds can give it.”

For myself I find this still of Aidan Turner astride a horse (from the first episode of the first season), the camera shooting from below at an angle, makes him look magnificent

This of Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza with her dog from the same first hour seems to me vibrant and touching

She then moved on to the multiple contexts embedded in and surrounding the books and films. First the 1940s: she felt there had not been much written about the later 18th century. I’m not sure this is so (the Enlightenment was a popular topic among philosophical scholars and historians; the influence of and the French revolution as a topic has never ceased to fascinate), but I agree with her that this show is one of the first in large social media to show us history from below, the lives of ordinary lower class people, workers and miners. Winston Graham was, as Julie suggested, “a pioneer” in including varied classes of people in his historical romance texts. He said (I add as usual self-deprecatingly) he did not begin with the idea of writing a series of novels, but just one with “a gloomy beginning” and “happy ending.” But there was something far more in the structure of this conception that resonated deeply and he carried on with these books.

She then covered the period of writing (1945-2002) and how the novels reflect the eras in which they were written and the eras written about. Her interpretations here differed from mine. She feels that in the first quartet Graham is showing the UK needs to redefine its empire, face its loss, and he was suggesting bridges to ameliorate life by. In the first trilogy that followed (1970s) he was mirroring the mining crises (these actually occurred in the 1980s and so influence Graham’s second trilogy) and the rebellious spirit of the era. She quoted a long interesting speech from one of Alistair Cooke’s introductions to the episodes. Cooke’s words suggest that Cornwall for the viewer was perceived as almost a different country, separate from the rest of England, an arcane older culture, a wild landscape, while the reality was Cornwall was where there was much industrial innovation. Naming other well-known artists fascinated by the place she cited Matthew Arnold, D.H. Lawrence (who lived there too), famously Daphne DuMaurier. (I’ll add Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy.)  The music in these serial dramas is intensely important and Julie played the themes we hear at the beginning of each hour in the recent adaptation. (The theme music for the previous one was alluring too. These paratexts of images and music are often crucial for many of these dramas, setting off the hour from the rest of TV experience.)

A still from the paratexts of the first season: Aidan Turner as Ross astride his horse on the cliffs

A still from the paratexts of the second season: we hear Eleanor Tomlinson’s singing a song Demelza sang in the program, POV hers

The recent series was accused of Disneyfying: much is of course left out: the severe poverty of most of the population, their short lives, hard work (including children), political corruption. She felt this was unfair — the series is not meant to be a serious history text and does present the time as accurately as a program intended to please (and instruct) a large audience can. In the books (and films) we see how unjust is the criminal justice system (a “bloody code” of hard punishment was central); the rotten borough procedures and how George buys himself a seat by buying huge parts of the borough. We see young men unfairly imprisoned, hung, die from “prison fever.”

Jim Carter’s (Stuart Doughty) death from typhus & gangrene caught in prison — he poached (1975, Part 4)

Sam Carne (Tom York) framed and near hanged and rescued at the last moment, not in the book (Fourth season of the 2015 series)

Many aspects of Georgian England are put before us: its diseases, the class structure, the new ruthless capitalist behavior. Ross says aristocrats treat their animals better than their servants. She quoted another critic on how through capitalism, the hierarchical system (ambition) and new industries that money was made in Cornwall, and she suggested in the series (and books) we see a conflict between old aristocratic norms (decadent, a life lived for pleasure) and a new work ethic for a growing middle class, which Ross’s work makes him belong to and shore up. Ross in the new series is presented as a man of the people, somber amid his workers with them as the leader of a band of brothers. She suggested the (I’ll add radical) methodism explored in the novels is felt in the new dramatization of Demelza’s brothers (it was there in the depiction of Sam in the older series). She liked the sympathy the new series showed for George Warleggan as an ambitious man and felt for his need to conform to new upper class norms in order to elevate himself.  She saw Ross as simply a kind of Whig, deprived (because of the laws and customs of primogeniture), at first influenced by (involved in) the nearby French revolution, then leaving the Cornish world, to participate in Parliamentary debates. Travel is on horse, by the mail coach (you could use a boat); London is far away from Cornwall so Ross begins to leave his Cornish and egalitarian nexus behind.

The Demelza story she likened to Richardson’s Pamela: female servants were vulnerable to harassment (I’ll add rape, pregnancy, dismissal) and a wish fulfillment fantasy still allures. We watch Demelza teach herself slowly to dress, dance, behave like, become a lady. Caroline marries down, defying her uncle’s pressure for her to marry wealthy gentry. These, she suggested are fairy stories, and cited Charles Fox’s marrying his mistress, Elizabeth Armistead as a rare instance of a man marrying beneath his rank a woman he has made his mistress. Another case I can think of is Henry Fielding marrying his housekeeper after his first wife died. Fielding was jeered at by his rival, Samuel Richardson (he also wrote Clarissa) as in the recent series Dr Choake and George Warleggan jeer at Ross.

Morwenna (Ellise Chappell) shows continually that she is suffering from abuse (2015, Season 3, Episode 8)

But the new series has its own themes too, and she felt that these historical fictions show Graham to have been “an instinctive feminist.” There is the story of the coerced marriage of Morwenna and how her husband is a sadistic rapist she cannot escape until he dies. We see Verity fight and nearly lose her right “to choose” (to have) “her own life.” Julie sees Agatha as showing us the fate of the spinster, old, worn, powerless. Elizabeth’s story is of a woman with few options. How could she have accused Ross of rape? She would be regarded as an unreliable witness and her reputation destroyed. She is driven to take a dangerous drug to bring on early parturition to soothe her husband’s infuriated pride and dies of this. I agree with Julie’s statement that Graham dealt with psychological trauma inflicted on women with real sensitivity.

Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) pretending to be a Mrs Tabb come to a doctor for a drug to bring on early parturition, told it is dangerous (1978, Part 13, Episode 3)

Julie dealt with a few separate topics too, ones that are central to the books and films. For example, the precariousness of life and its dangerous pleasures. She showed how in the new series the pleasure gardens in London are realized. It is not specified that syphilis was a spreading and grim disease. I agree with her that the major characters sympathized with by Graham all dislike London (a kind of Babylon) and its false sophistications. She showed stills of Tomlinson as Demelza, Turner as Ross, Luke Norris as Dwight looking grim in London. Dwight is a sincere and earnestly hard-working doctor who would rather be in Cornwall.

She (rightly I felt) went on about Dwight as a “cutting edge” physician; Choake is a quack, Dwight well educated for his time where some scientific knowledge was beginning to be understood. She showed illustrations from the era (an apothecary dying), and said that resuscitation was practiced from an earlier age. Sickness abounds in Graham’s books. We have characters dying of diptheria (morbid sore throat); Hugh Armistead probably dies of meningitis; Dwight and Caroline’s baby dies of a congenital heart defect. This is transferred into the new series and reinforced. When Dwight is captured and witnesses horrible treatment, atrocities, torture, he is traumatized: she felt this reflects our own era where military men are abused by too many tours. I can vouch for themes drawn from medicine as common across Graham’s work.

Other strengths:  we see men comforting one another in the new series. There is little comic relief (that has been noticed again and again and that the earlier series had more comedy), but the Poldark books are mostly not light or comic; there is much death, grief, characters who could be better happier people are twisted and self-destruct from their background, upbringing, childhood (Francis Poldark, Valentine Warleggan). Ross and Demelza’s relationship is not an idyllic romance, but a real marital struggle with discord, misunderstanding and love.

She ended by asking why does Poldark matter endure: most of the books have never fallen out of print; we’ve now had two successful TV series 40 years apart. Is it the timeless themes? The heroine moves from waif to lady. The renegade hero becomes a strong pillar of his community. Other of the stories strike chords in us too. Then she quoted Graham again musing that when he dies and goes to heaven, he hopes St Peter will let him in even if he has been responsible for crowding Cornwall with tourists and summer people in caravans.

Photo of Winston Graham with his dog, Garrick

I enjoyed her talk very much. I plug on reading through the whole of his oeuvre insofar as I can reach it and time permits — in the midst of teaching, reading with others online, other projects that draw me on — I live but once and I am fading in some ways now, losing abilities by the month, my able time growing shorter. I am even now listening to Oliver Hembrough reading aloud Ross Poldark (on CDs) while in my car — so as to make more time for myself and books. I have the first seven Poldark novels on such audio CDs, and will go through these this way, and then read the last five over again. Alone as I am, with the obstacles I face (I’ve outlined some of these in the notes to my recent paper), no connections or contacts, little money for travel (and less appetite and ability), I sometimes despair of actually writing a book before I grow too old to do it.

Nevertheless, when I hear a talk like this and find myself returning to Poldark’s Cornwall and re-reading Graham’s words, I am drawn to the man who wrote the historical fiction and those of his books set in Cornwall, and am re-energized with enthusiasm, courage, and hope. I have thought of a good title, at long last too: A Matter of Genre: The Life and Writing of Winston Graham.  There’s my angle in a nutshell.

Ellen

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Factual Fictions & Fictional Facts

Scenes from the recent Poldark series, with the accent on historical accuracy

Dear friends and readers,

My last blog was partly prompted by my reading through in chronological order Winston Graham’s contemporary suspense and Poldark and historical fiction and non-fiction books; I write again quickly because I’ve just put onto academia.edu, my third essay delivered at an 18th century conference on the Poldark books. The first at an EC/ASECS (East Central subdivision) at Penn State College (2011) whose theme was “liberty,” is called “‘I have the right to choose my own life’:” Liberty in the Poldark novels, and I put it prettily on my website, where you can see the titles of the other papers, and a more plain  copy at academia.edu.

Norma Streader as Verity asking Robin Ellis as Ross to provide a place for her to get to know Captain Blamey so she can decide whether to marry him or not ….

The second at an ASECS conference in Los Angeles (2015) that (appropriately perhaps) made film making and film adaptations a central concern:  “Poldark Re-booted, Forty Years On.”

An emphasis on community

For my third I discerned five phases or perspectives. a shifting genuinely liberal humane point of view politically, shaping Graham’s Poldark novels.

“After the Jump:” Winston Graham’s Uses of Documented Facts and Silences.

Contemporary playing cards

I had originally intended to call it “The Poldark Novels: a quietly passionate blend of precise accuracy with imaginative romancing.” Maybe I should have stayed with this, but it’s not the topic I actually wrote on.  I wrote on Graham’s different uses of fictional facts.

The cloak that Ross buys Demelza in the 2015 adaptation

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To explain:  At the recent ASECS (American Society, 18th Century Studies) held in Denver, Colorado (a convention hotel downtown), I was one of seven people scheduled to give papers on two panels on “Factual Fictions,” one on early Thursday morning, and the other late Friday afternoon, a session I was to chair.  Both panels organized by Martin Lansverk, president of NWSECS (Northwest subdivision). In the event, in this “subgroup” as I may call it, there were five papers, three on the morning I gave mine, and two on the late afternoon I was panel chair. I have a copy of a sixth paper (a good one), and I put it in the comments. I can offer the gist of the other two papers that Thursday morning: Lee Kahan (“Edgeworth’s ‘Lion Hunters:’ Defining Character in an ‘Age of Scandal'”) traced a shift in attitudes towards what was regarded as accurate personality portrayal. In newspapers supposedly captured real people’s characters by surface portrayal, external scandal, and events; the novel was recognized as different and superior by its endowing characters with depth, subjectivity, interior motives. A gender fault-line can be seen as novelists were then often women and women it was felt were “attuned to intimate understanding.”

Maria Edgeworth by John Downman (1807)

Martin Lansverk (“Laughter and Truth-telling in Jane Austen”) found a pattern of development in Austen’s uses of humor and comedy in her books which parallel emergent and developing theories of humor and comedy in the 18th century. He described what kind of laughter we find in Austen’s novels and what kind of humor and wit is practiced in good and bad characters in the different novels. In brief, honest laughter is a sign of an ethical character; where fake laughter shows amorality (brutal laughter comes in here as well as crude ridicule). He also found a continuum which in Austen and others moves from gentle teasing and silent (sometimes ironic) smiles (Elinor Dashwood) to nervous release (Mrs Palmer) to hard aggressive mockery (bullying and sneering).

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood (walking alongside Edward Ferrars, 2008 S&S scripted Andrew Davies)

For the two papers on Friday afternoon I can offer a bit more detail because I am myself so engaged by the artistic work of John Gilpin. Tom Hothem (“Natural Fictions: Landscape Aesthetics and the Spatial Imagination”) turned out to be a beautiful meditation on Gilpin’s moral philosophy as made manifest in his idealized picturesque drawings, watercolors and illustrations. Gilpin was reaching for topographical archetypes as truths within all landscapes. Gilpin used aesthetic rules he found in novels (like that of Fielding), his autobiographical experience and apprehension of what he imagined as well as saw. His vision took the “best materials” in order to take “possession of the heart.” The trajectory of thought here leads to modern environmentalism and conceptions underlying urban renewal planning. He showed a number of slides of landscapes, parks, built houses, which (in effect) took us to architects in Italy, England and the US — Olmstead comes out of such schools of thought.

William Gilpin, Matlock from Views of Derbyshire (alluded to in Austen’s P&P)

Jacob Crane (“‘The Algerines are Coming!’ Fakes News, Islamophobia, and Early American Journalism”) revealed newspaper sensationalism and demonization of Muslims in North Africa, actuated by understandable fears of being captured and enslaved by pirates in the waters off the shores of the US. He offered the history of real border and trade conflicts and crises becoming in public media reports of fantastic barbarity. At one point it was claimed that Benjamin Franklin had been captured and enslaved. Again we glimpsed a liminal space (which can’t easily be checked) where fact and fiction were used as arguments and rationales by colonists, emigrants; Jacob quoted specific reports by captains and others, some true or partly true and some faked.

Anne Vallayer-Costa, White Soup Tureen

I will be writing more about this ASECS, one for my Austen reveries, a paper on Walter Scott from a session on the Jacobite uprising; on Andrew Davies’ adaptation of Northanger Abbey; on the theater as a career for actors, and scene painters, and the presidential address by Melissa Hyde on professional woman painters of the 18th century (including two almost unknown women, Marianne Loir and a Mlle or Madame Lusuler), and two here, further on film adaptations of texts written or set it the 18th century (Poldark, Outlander, The Favourite, Games of Thrones, Banished) and landscape gardening, Gilpin to Frank Lloyd Wright

Marked up page of Gilpin book

Ellen

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Aisling Walsh’s An Inspector Calls & Anna Symons’s Mrs Wilson, with cherished memories of J.B. Priestley

Sophie Rundle as Eva Smith/Daisy Renton/Mrs Birling/Alice Grey (from Walsh’s 2015 An Inspector Calls)

Ruth Wilson as Alison Wilson, a fictionalization of the deceit of a male “patriot” of four women and the families he biologically fathered

Dear friends,

Over the past week I’ve been lucky enough to watch the kind of “thriller & suspense or crime and/or detective novel,” which turns on its head the older hero-centered often misogynistic genre into a satisfying dramatization and examination of disquieting destructive values and norms in many societies. One example, I just loved two weeks ago now, was In a Better World.

Billed as a “thriller,” this Danish film, written and directed by Suzanne Bier, tells the story of a sensitive dedicated Swedish physician, Anton, whose wife has left him after he had an affair with another woman, and whose son is the type of boy who is susceptible to cruel bullying in schools. Elias is rescued not by the school authorities (who like those in real life I’ve encountered) refuse to recognize and stop the cruelty but another boy, Christian, angry at his father because his father was unable to save his mother from dying of cancer and was even relieved when she did die after a long period of mutual suffering. It’s an exploration of sadism in adult political life in Africa. It is when such stories are discussed in this way that we realize the formula for carrying along a mass audience is there merely as a vehicle.

Mikael Persbrandt trying to explain to his son why not to respond to bigoted violence with more violence is an act of desperately needed courage

The film struck me because I am just now reading and studying a group of these formulaic books by Winston Graham, which keep to the misogynistic outward plot-design so that the vulnerable woman is seen as the evil person whom the other characters have to root out (Take My Life) or the self-destructive bewildered victim of a crook who used the resistance movement in France for his own profitable exploitation and sexual predatory habits, and whom an essentially good hero (in this version, crippled himself by war) is right to stalk and pressure until she sees that giving herself over to him will bring her protection (Night Without Stars). Both were made into film noir movies. I am looking for a way to discuss them that brings out this hidden backstory. And sometimes I despair when I see how the generic surface is still presented as valid and tedious as the puzzle-unraveling is when speeded up, made terrifyingly violent sells widely.

So I am gratified when I see “all is not lost,” and the books and films which win worthy prizes, a better and/or female audience (not the same thing) are becoming as common. I am not saying anything many people have not observed before me.

In 1997 Marion Frank wrote a good essay called “The Transformation of a Genre — the Feminist Mystery Novel (printed in Feminist Contributions to the Literary Canon, Setting Standards of Taste, ed. Susan Faulkner [NY: Edwin Meller Press, 1997]) where she traces not just the feminization of the central hero but a transformation of the values and the kinds of stories such material uses: Frank moves from Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night, woman-centered and mildly feminist while upholding the hierarchical and patriarchal establishment to Joan Smith’s genuine feminist, then radical (not just liberal) humanist detective novels (A Masculine Ending to What Men Say).

Joan Smith

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For tonight I want to compare Aisling’s Walsh’s 2015 adaptation of J.B. Priestley’s “classic” everyone-did-it play, An Inspector Calls to the 1954 adaptation, famously starring Alistair Sim, so pitch perfect as the sinister and menacing Inspector Goole (in Priestley’s the name resonates as ghoul) that the 1954 film still has a following, and can be bought as a blu-ray:

and a re-boot has been successful

Pray forgive the conventional frozen promotional shot from the 2015 re-boot

I was reminded of J. B. Priestley early last week when someone on one of my listservs asked if anyone had seen the Walsh TV movie (now streaming on Amazon Prime)? A wonderful humanistic man of letters, novelist, radio host and commentator, playwright, erased by the media after World War Two because he would not give up his membership in the communist party and remained overtly a committed socialist. He was probably actually much better liked than Churchill during the war (Orwell just about says):

But he has been disappeared (like Mike Leigh’s recent movie, Peterloo) lest we have any encouragement for social decency in our media. A few years ago I went to a book history conference where a man gave a paper demonstrating that no communist after the mid-1930s was ever given a prestigious European prize. If you were not a communist openly, but were a socialist and known to be so, your book was suspect from the start. You’d be lucky to be in the short list and don’t expect a movie.

As an 18 year old girl I cherished two novels by him, The Good Companions and Angel Pavement. I sill have the old-fashioned hardbacks in my library which I read nearly half a century ago. At the time I was contemplating returning to college full-time and remember reading a history of English literature by Priestley, which I took out of the library. It stirred and spurred me on; his novels gave me courage and cheer – now I realize how the picaro novel is not one where compassion is the key note, but irony (Sarah Fielding’s David Simple never does find a friend). In later years (when I got to college) I realized Priestley was sneered at, called middle brow, and if I persisted in citing this allegiance of mine I’d be seen as showing I was not part of the knowing cultural world. A little far more candid and non-snobbish talk that day led me to watch Walsh’s rendition on my laptop that night and a kind friend sent me a copy of Helen Edmundson’s adaptation in 1954 and I watched that. I also remembered Walsh was centrally the creator of Maudie, a film about a disabled uneducated man and equally vulnerable woman artist.

So what is made central in the Walsh re-boot:

The conventional barely glimpsed back-story of a dubious unchaste working class girl becomes the central meat of the dish — the reason for having so many identities is she is trying to protect herself again and again, as each time she tries to conform and yet ask for decent usage (wages, respect, courtesy, kindness, a place to stay, companionship) she is used, dropped and sinks lower.

You can find a bit of the storyline in the wikipedia article on the 1954 version. Basically each member of the Birling family was responsible for ostracizing, firing, using and erasing Eva Smith; the worst moment is her humiliation before the smug mother supposedly running a charitable organization.

And in the 1954 film, much closer to Priestley (by Guy Hamilton as director and Edmundson as writer), we do see our heroine Eva Smith/Daisy Renton/Mrs Birling/Alice Grey but only in swift short takes and the focus of the scenes is not on her. Indeed in some of them she emerges as stereotypically a “tramp” or loose woman. But there is little going outside the room so we rely mostly on words to learn of the outside world. The kinds of arguments made are in cliches about responsibility. I feel that it is less believable these people would be guilty — their interactions are far less lethal, the family structure presented as far more conventionally okay.

Watch the 2015 immediately afterwards, and you see there were many more scenes with Sophie Rundle as central presence, scenes of her alone, scenes of her interacting with others, many giving her real gravitas, intelligence, and depth of feeling. What’s more the family is now made bitterly internecine and due to the inspector’s prompting presence are led to truly enter intimately into and expose their corrosive relationships. I’d call Walsh’s film feminist, Marxist, egalitarian, coming down to a human level in its demands, and really turning the “crime” genre inside out, while the 1954 one is Marxist and sentimental, still respecting the hierarchy and pious family “healing” at the end.

Grim

In 1954 Sims as the inspector vanishes and it really does seem as if he’s a ghost of Christmas whatever come to be therapeutic for this family. In 2015 David Thewlis as the inspector is not a ghost; as in Priestley’s he is lead in by the maid, and then let out. In the film we then see him watch (from afar Sophie) walking by the sea, then writing in her diary, and finally drinking the detergent; she is then seen whisked along a hospital corridor to an emergency room with a tube is put down her mouth and stomach (painful) as they try to save her. At the last he is sitting by her dead body at the end. IN both the family is then phoned and then told a girl has died and an inspector is coming.

The question in the 2015 is who is Goole? he is not ghoul as in 1954. Are we to take him as possibly some relative? some spirit conjured up against the capitalist male hegemonic order — almost magical realism rather than the female gothic.

Promotional shot of Soller and Pirrie as the Birlings still cheerful

I was much moved by the second film and not at all for real by the first. I do find Kyle Soller as great actor, and am drawn to Chloe Pirrie in all the roles I’ve ever seen her in.

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I encourage my readers also to watch, not to miss, Mrs Wilson on PBS, one of the more recent of these modern feminist humane “thrillers” — two hours last night (Sunday, 3/31/19) and another hour next week. There are of course the exegeses which try to stay on the surface, but the content so clearly calls out for the “backstory” to be told since the “thriller’s structure is now the emotional exposure by the women or the man’s grown children step-by-step of the male liar at the center. As Mike Hale of the NYTimes writes:

Alexander Wilson lived an improbable, deceitful, destructive but undeniably intriguing life. An author of popular spy novels and a British secret agent himself in World War II, he married four women from the 1920s through the 50s without bothering to divorce any of them. He managed to keep his four families mostly secret from each other during his lifetime, and his children (and many grandchildren) only got to know one another more than 40 years after he died …

Ruth Wilson of “Luther” and “The Affair” is the granddaughter of Alec’s third wife, Alison, and she plays her victimized, mystified grandmother in “Mrs. Wilson,” of which she’s also an executive producer.

So rather than the historical adventure or romance it might have been in an earlier era, “Mrs. Wilson” is an interrogation of history, a feminist critique of mid-20th-century British society, a mystery and, least satisfyingly, a character study. The strangeness of the story, and Ruth Wilson’s characteristic intensity, pull us along. But Alison and Alec, and their motivations, never seem to come completely into focus. The series feels caught between fiction and real life, as if the writers (Anna Symon and Tim Crook) and the director (Richard Laxton) were unwilling to fully dramatize a history that’s still murky, partly hidden in the files of the British Foreign Office.

Iain Glen

It could be said that perhaps the new feminist turn as gone too far in making the male an utter shit — I’m only 2/3s through though. One of the intriguing aspects is how the program makes mince meat of all this talk of patriotism and how keeping secrets for the gov’t is a noble patriotic occupation. Iain Glen the male lead often plays this sort of on the surface enigmatic male in female gothics — he was this kind of character in a recent re-do of a LeFanu novel, Wyvern Mysteries, which partly imitate the plot-design of Jane Eyre, except now there is real empathy for the mad wife chained in the attic. Keeley Hawes is getting old, alas, and Fiona Shaw even older … but are very good in their parts.

Keeley Hawes as Mary, drawn to be Wilson’s second wife

Fiona Shaw as Coleman (a sort of M)

Ruth Wilson ever since I saw her in Small Island, and then Jane Eyre, and now recently in an HD screening of an Ibsen play (Hedda Gabler, with Kyle Soller as the husband) remains one of my favorite actresses. I have never seen her in a film or a role where I didn’t bond with her.

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How to conclude? Don’t give up. Hang in there. Ripeness is all. Despite the horrors being perpetrated in the US by the heads of the federal gov’t, and sustained by its reactionary minority senate and judges in the public realm, there are still a large percentage of people from whom good can come, and who can make effective socially critical art from what Julian Symons (in Bloody Murder) rightly calls an inferior genre-game, which is still frequently obtuse to its own potentials.

A photo taken yesterday (3/31/19), the height of the flowering tree April bloom by my daughter, Izzy, as she walked along the tidal basin — we had the day before (3/30/19) endured more than 3 hours of driving on highways and DC streets to see and hear the Folger spring concert, an oasis of lovely, moving, fun, intelligently and passionately lovingly performed Elizabethan music and song

Ellen

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2018 Poldark, the fourth season: Four Swans through Angry Tide

Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark brooding (near the opening, early still after the prologue)

Elinor Tomlinson as Demelza Poldark (near opening &c), singing, troubled

All we know is this moment, and this moment, Ross, we are alive! We are. We are. The past is over, gone. What is to come doesn’t exist yet. That’s tomorrow! It’s only now that can ever be, at any one moment. And at this moment, now, we are alive — and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask … Demelza to Ross (last page of The Angry Tide).

Dear friends and readers,

A second Winston Graham blog-review in a row! Beyond Poldark, Graham is the author/source of the misbegotten Hitchcock movie, Sean O’Connor play and now perverse opera Marnie. This time, mostly due to the excellence of the two source novels, Poldark novel 6, The Four Swans (A novel of Cornwall, 1796-97), and Poldark novel 7, The Angry Tide (ditto, 1798-99 is listening), the film adaptation is well worth the watching and thinking about. I declare myself (as loud as I can, in the hope someone with power to realize Poldark novels 8-12, might hear me), I’d love to see the same cast or another (as the Netflix series The Crown has done) film Stranger from the Sea, Miller’s Dance, Loving Cup, Twisted Sword and Bella [misnamed by an editor, ought to be Valentine], 1810-20 as further serial drama seasons for Poldark. Begin two years from now ….

NB: I have eschewed summaries (except to compare the older series in the comments) and concentrated on the realization of the novels as 2018 TV serial drama.

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Turner as Ross eloquent and bitter does bring out the central economic power issues

Elise Chappell as Morwenna grieving over the coming hanging of Drake — a very French revolution scene because of the bars …

Episodes 1 & 2 are much changed from the last part of Graham’s Four Swans. Prologue: Ross standing on the beaching is having bad dreams about Demelza and Hugh Armitage. Story (Episode 1): What had been a politically meaningful series of violent thievery because the people are starving (Corn laws keeping the price of bread very high), and Bassett’s demand for scapegoats, with which Ross feels forced to cooperate, becomes a highly personal melodramatic story involving Morwenna and Whitworth since Horsfield replaces the people in the book rounded up (with one poignant man hung) with the two Carne brothers and Zacky Martin’s son. It’s out of character for gentle religious Sam and the now withdrawn depressed Drake to be in a riot, but now Horsfield can make Ross central hero: he’s off to Bassett’s to try to get them off, and failing, comes to the hanging, where his impassioned speech on their behalf improbably reprieves them. Nothing like last minute reprieves from scaffolds. I was moved by Zacky Martin’s grief for his son. The general primary scenes in the book and in the old series – at Lord Dunstable’s house and Bassetts — become secondary, brief. Horsfield also builds up the romance scenes between the three couples with very explicit dialogue. I liked the conversations between Ross and Demelza over the course of the hour as they work out their estrangement; some of this from the book.

Horsfield’s way of making Ross’s now agreeing finally to become an MP to prevent such personal injustice (the result of many such episodes in previous seasons) gives the new series a kind of unity and simplifying single thrust forward it didn’t have in the first series. In the book Ross’s refusals come out of subtler psychological reasons in complicated circumstances.

Episode 2 again Horsfield turns a realistic depiction of the way the world then worked into a personalized heroic drama. As Ross is dragged into replacing Armitage (now dying) in the election against Warleggan, we dwell on Ross’s complicated psychic life: Horsfield sets up juxtapositions between the elections and Armitage dying with Demelza supposed to love him but reluctant to be seen by his side. So the story is now Ross in public succeeding without having bribed anyone or even run a campaign — while Warleggan is intimidating, threatening and bribing people (to no avail finally). One side effect is Dwight becomes more central as presiding physician. In the book and first series Armitage was allowed to die slowly and only after Demelza is seen grieving separately, and Ross seen devastated and embittered by her grief for another, that the new election starts and The Angry Tide starts. Conversations between Demelza and Ross oddly didactic in all 3 iterations (book, 1970s series, this new one) but he came out of them the finer soul.

Ciara Charteris as Emma Tregirls watching the wrestling match

Tom York as Sam badly hurt

Secondary stories: Sam loses to the lout Harry partly because at the end of the fight Harry insinuates that Emma has gone to bed with Harry. A little later Emma says she had not; Sam’s heart was not in this violence in the first place — he is a believing gentle methodist. The true plangent note was struck by bringing in Drake’s distress for Morwenna: she still holds out against the bully Whitworth. Caroline’s finding herself pregnant and making a joke out of how she doesn’t want this baby. Horsfield shows no feel for this couple – in the original an earnest sincere man coupled with an incompatible “gay” lady; in the 1970s an earnest hard-working physician engaged with his patients married to a frivolous aristocrat who wants to spend her life socializing — the whole thing rings false, coy, with Luke Norris as Dwight embarrassing.

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Ross reading letters in London

Max Bennett as Monk Adderley emerging from darkness

Episodes 3 & 4: After the death of Hugh Armitage in the previous, and Ross’s agreeing to run and his win, he goes to Parliament in London. He and she talk of a different life for both, with her remaining in in Cornwall in charge and taking care, while he goes to London to argue ferociously in parliament on behalf of good causes. Exchange of letters using over-voice contains good feeling. Recess and everyone comes home – Ross and Whitworth in the conversation that opens Graham’s Angry Tide: Ross tells Whitworth to give his curate Odgers what he should get and he’ll help him — thematically effective underlining. In Cornwall Warleggan to the fore with his throwing a large party to make the right connections in which we meet the insinuating Adderley who insults Ross out of instinctive envy (I took you for a down-and-out troubadour). Whitworth visiting Pearce learns of embezzlement, tells Warleggan and his uncle so hypocrisy of the most sordid type, and underhanded dealings can ruin the good banker, Pascoe. Meanwhile well-meant mine venture flooded because supports not well-built (in book Sam allowed to be hero, but Horsfield will not allow anyone but Ross to be chief rescuer)

A Madonna-like moment

Esme Coy as Rowella selling herself

Private life themes: Rebecca Front as Lady Whitworth, the harsh mother-in-law, her snobbery, Whitworth indignant at Morwenna refusing him sex (coerced marriage seen rightly as rape), seeks out Rowella now she has not had a child. Horsfield’s further ill-conceived changes flattening and making senseless subtle characters: Demelza now she bickers with Ross (made resentful, she wants to go to London, the feel is of an estranged couple who from far away love one another but close by end up in much awkward uncomfortable talk); Elizabeth exults in George’s amorality (she made unlikable) while George made one note villain (life seems lived to get back at Ross). Verity’s good feeling visit; Geoffrey Charles now grown made naive. Caroline having given birth Dwight confronted with baby fatally ill unwilling to tell her as she clings absurdly to her indifference (all the while never putting the baby down). But when baby dies (a moving scene), she is all funereal and must to London with Ross to get over it. Excruciating painful scenes drenched in melancholy: Emma tells Sam she must marry elsewhere; the attempt to put Mowenna in asylum. Meanwhile Demelza has engineered a marriage between Drake and Rosina.

Beautiful and effective shots throughout, suggestive psychology, casual effective landscapes, but scenes move too quickly, are too brief for us to appreciate them, and to make effective the amount of action and rich nuances of feeling piled in.

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Episodes 5 & 6: I thought 5 very good except in those places where Horsfield, it seems to me perversely, alters the story or characters. Many of the minor characters were very effective in this episode (Rebecca Strong as the woman bully &c).

Luke Norris as Dwight: his best moments are when his character is acting as physician

London scenes: On the whole well acted, powerful atmosphere in London, corrupt parties, the pressure, and the political skein of given-and-take between Ross and Falmouth throughout, and Ross’s friendship with Bassett especially. Adderley effective. We are to find it natural that Caroline would enjoy his company? Gabriella Wilde is so painfully thin — she wears nothing low cut; they know it would be distressing to see the edges of her bones come out. I cringe when Enys cringes. Ross’s meeting with Pitt effective; yes Pitt had plans for pensions for the poor and helping them help themselves and in the book Ross does protest against just helping enslaved people and not the working poor. He does (again) seem to me to be sitting on the wrong side of the benches The Tories were in power and he is there as a member for a Tory patron, Lord Falmouth, very well acted by James Wilby. She adds scene between Elizabeth and Ross over Geoffrey Charles to once again make Ross the hero: this time he is saving the boy from bad company, from being beat up by them, but of course these are peccadilloes he just needs to outgrow. We should be glad that he is not characterized as going after girls aggressively as another “boys will be boys.” In the book Elizabeth stays away from Ross lest she rouse George’s jealousy. Elizabeth is taking a great chance, and Ross himself regards her warily as strongly self-centered. He has no need to remind her that she can try to misrepresent the date of her parturition.

Amelia Clarkson as Rosina Hoblyn

Harry Richardson as Drake the morning he is to wed Rosina

Cornwall: A powerful moment when Dwight’s baby dies & he grieves, Horsfield gives Aidan Turner as Ross some lines remembering the death of his daughter. Ross at first just uses the word daughter, and Dwight assumes he means Clowance: Dwight may have forgotten Julia, but Ross has not and Turner renders the lines and memory very touching. I would have liked to have the script so I could have exactly the lines. Neither film adaptation has dared to present the Morwenna-Rowella relationship or Rowella’s story truly candidly: Rowella is presented as poisonously promiscuous, reminding us of a snake; Whitworth is a sadistic rapist; his son is a horror from birth (just another just like him). The film-makers are afraid of this material: they dare to present Drake as depressed but that’s as far as it goes; he is fierce (as Harry Richardson is not) and in the first series (Kevin McNally) he was as obsessive as any character in Proust. The scenes leading up to and the murder of Whitworth powerful (these in the book and first series) juxtaposed to invented happy scenes of Rosina and Drake (these are Horsfield’s invention; in the book he remains reluctant.

So then what does the writer do: she has Demelza, Demelza (!) inform Drake just before he is about to wed Rosina that morning that Whitworth is dead and Morwenna supposedly free. That’s the last thing she would do. She has engineered this marriage, done everything to bring it about. In the book he hears from someone else and runs off to help Morwenna live again (he loves her truly and it is partly unselfish to rescue her) and Demelza is desolated because she and all and he agree if he had wed Rosina, he would have been true to his vows. In this episode he asks Demelza why did she tell him? Good question. She has ruined a possible happiness. She says he would not have forgiven her. Clearly untrue and anyway whom is she thinking of here? I like that Rosina as a character is built up, and that Sam is beginning to flex towards conventional aggression against bullies in order to help his brother. Sam and Drake’s relationship is beautifully done — as it was in the first series.

The story of Warleggan’s Machiavellian near-bankruptcy of Pascoe’s bank, Demelza’s actions to help prevent this, the yielding of Basset to make a consortium appealed to me — and it’s done close to the book. I like the actor, Hope, who plays Harris very much and bringing in his daughter and her ne’er do well husband economically stranged by the Warleggans is effective.

Richard Hope as the ever patient, decent, reasonable appealing Pascoe — more idealized in this series than the book or first series

Aidan Turner must be kept before us as the hero in every episode, and each young male needs to be seen nearly naked in the water — so we’ve Ross several times, Drake once and Dwight who for a moment seemed to be killing himself by hanging on the surface of the water.

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Episodes 7 & 8: At moments as a pair unbearably moving. Best when closest to the book. It truly gets the emotional pain of what is happening across up close and intensely. I felt the way I do when I read the book. Oddly I especially admired how the film-makers got across how Caroline can be regarded as irritating — she is so into London culture and so comfortable in it that while at first both Demelza and Dwight seem to be glad of her knowhow, when they realize how hollow this social life is, she becomes the alien to them, someone who could approve of duels. Again Dwight and Caroline talking through the dog. Here the angrier and more individualized Demelza is more fitting; Angharad Rees was just too sweet. Turner as Ross and the actor playing Adderley were pitch perfect: Turner is very good at steely ferocity. The Morwenna plot has been done far more strongly all along and here hits a core of anguish the equivalent of the book. This the photography was fitting — the scene of the duel was beautiful — blacks and whites. Elizabeth in the book is not complacent but as Horsfield has made her so, now that she is shaken out of it, her desperation becomes more effective. I liked the use of darkness, the way the rooms were angled. I don’t know if others recognized Adrian Lukis as Sir John Mitford: he was Wickham so long ago in the 1995 P&P.

Ross and Demelza beginning their time in London so well

Demelza not sure how to react but right away seeing that something is wrong with the way Adderley is speaking to her

First just 7 Three powerful striking stories: how Demelza and Ross’s time in London begins so well when they are alone but once in society, she is taken advantage of by a vicious male egged on by Warleggan. Ross’s manhood is threatened when Demelza does not reject Adderley thoroughly: she is not attracted to him, she even quickly sees and feels what a shit he is, but does not know how to put him off.. The one element left out is that part of this is her low status: this is a deeply hierarchical society and in the book Angry Tide the point is made that many of the people in London despise Demelza and the men regard her as simply probably available. That’s what she can’t handle. further (as in the novel Demelza at her first ball) Ross refuses to give her any help; he refuses to recognize or cannot see she needs help or why. they really dwelt on this far more than 1970s where none of this really came up (as it did in th 1975 first season adaptation of Demelza) The photography was superb. Did others notice how the screen sparkled as the dawn came and then turned into the park where the duel occurs?

Horsfield then tied this story to the other two. By simple means of juxtaposition: we move from Ross-Demelza to Morwenna-Drake and just before the crisis of the duel, Morwenna turns up at Drake’s forge and tells him her inner torment after years of violation, of martial sadistic rape. She is a bit too pathetic in her encounters with the mother-in-law because Horsfield has been so unwilling to make her hate the children she has born by this monster, has been unwilling to make John Conan a chip of the vicious block. If you feel like me, I wanted more of the Morwenna-Drake story in this episode but Horsfield chooses to give more room to Dwight-Caroline’s troubles.

There too there is this softening. Why cannot she allow Dwight to be stronger (as he is in the book) and just sick of London society openly and anxious to get back to his patients, a real chasm of understanding between him and Carolin: they are not truly compatible

Jill Townsend as pregnant Elizabeth with Valentine just before Geoffrey Charles makes his fatal passing comment (1975 BBC Poldark, episode 13, scripted Martin Worth)

The third story of Elizabeth’s pregnancy at first binding the two together but the glue there being so thin that a passing remark by Geoffrey Charles that Valentine looks like Ross just overturns all and George goes back to hatred. This cannnot be an easy task for Jack Farthing: basically he presents the man as cold steel, far more icy than Adderley — who in the book is a narcissistic cold sociopath. We are not really given any reason for Elizabeth to like this guy except that she likes being rich lady in society. This is tied sharply into the duel: as soon as Ross can go out he marches to Warleggan who throws the coins in his face. Thwarted by the local JP (played splendidly by Adrian Lukas — once Wickham in 1995) and the customs of acceptance of duelling, George has again not been able to destroy Ross.. but he will destroy Elizabeth as we see her pacing in the darkened room at the end of the episode.

Jack Farthing as George exposing his hatred and making a fool of himself before Sir Christopher

Episode 8: For this one I also rewatched the 13th episode of the second season of the 1978 Poldark for contrast or comparison. The older show works under the disadvantage of far less time so far less is dramatized in detail, but what is there is in mood much closer to the book, especially the bleak ending.

Far shot for duel (1975)

Heida Reed as Elizabeth seeking the doctor to help her

I found the insistence on Morwenna’s being somehow “ill” or weak by the additions grating. In the book she just appears on the horizon, and Drake runs to her, and says, have you come home? and she is taken into his arms as he takes her heavy bag in which she is hauling all her worldly possessions. Yes she goes to Trenwith, lured by the still obtuse Elizabeth and in the 2018 scene she does finally hold out, declare that Warleggan has no idea what kind of person Drake is — and that augurs well. At no point in the book is the phrase: “you are safe now’ repeatedly. Well thud, thud, thud. She doesn’t want to be safe; she is not safe with Drake in the sense he has no money, no power, no status, but she is herself, gets her identity and inviolabilty of her body back. That’s the point. Not that Drake is so sweet but that the perpetrator, the predator, Whitworth is out of her life for good.

Jane Wymark and Kevin McNally as Morwenna and Drake (1975 BBC, both series include the eloquent speech by Drake about the nature of love in marriage)

I had forgotten how much better Judy Geeson was at the part of Caroline — far more like the “gay lady” of restoration drama. She understand duelling and defends it; she also is sexually interested in Ross as he is in her and they discuss going to be with one another — and coolly decide against it. This is not the coy character all drippy over children or not that Horsfield invents, and Dwight in the 1970s one is attached genuinely to his patients and that is his identity. Again Luke Norris is made just to “icky.”

Judy Geeson as a convincing Caroline (1975 series)

The book ends with Ross saying that Death is Intolerable and it shapes all of our reality, our feelings, and Demelza replying, just about yes except that one has to accept, live with it, and realize this here, now, is all we’ve got and we’ve got to make what we can of it. I should say that Angharad Rees is herself too sweet as she utters those words and in my view Elinor Tomlinson could have projected the acceptance of hard compromise much better – she has now and again over the course of these 8 episode

Robin Ellis as a desolate Ross (1975) leaning over to kiss Elizabeth now dead (1975)

And ending on their wedding shifts the emotional temperature too much. At the end of the book George is still in a rage though at the universe now (in which he includes his children) — I liked the stance Jack Farthing manages of dignified regret and acceptance but it’s a soft Warleggan.

The new opening too emphasized Elizabeth as the “problem” or her and Ross’s love as causing much of what happened. That striking flashback at the opener and bringing back Kyle Soller for the occasion. The book and the 1970s version made the statement that life itself is hard.

So however briefer the earlier version is the stronger truer one to life. Why he and Demelza need to go on about about Hugh Armitage in this 2018 version is beyond me — they don’t in the book except the suggestive hints earlier that in killing Adderly he was killing Armitage and there is a distrust of Demelza (which vanishes in 2018) — but then she has accepted his continuing deep affection for Elizabeth. In the 1970s version we do get an intimate moment of him kissing the dead woman in her bed. Why not have that if you are softening — it’s not in the book. Again and again Horsfield turns to personalities as causing our difficult lives. Graham is wider and better than that and so was Martin Worth (who wrote the scripts for the last 4 episodes of the 1977-78 series)

The last shot: George given dignity of grief in front of Elizabeth’s grave

That said, Aidan Turner, Jack Farthing, Heida Reed and Elinor Tomlinson play their complicated roles well. Turner has grasped the essentials of Ross’s character — only softened. Elise Chapell probaby had the hardest roles. I thought Aidan Turner pitch perfect in what he had to do.He had to provide a kind of coda of stability and he managed that — though Jack Farthing got the last shot.

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To conclude, I worry to think that next year we are in for a fifth season where the present script-writer, Debbie Horsfield will be free to invent what she likes between the ending of Angry Tide (1799) and opening of Stranger from the Sea (1810). Horsfield is said to be writing X number of episodes about what happened between The Angry Tide, which ends 1799 and The Stranger from the Sea (novel 8), which begins 1810 and ends 1811. It is true once Graham’s Poldark fiction comes alive again, half-way through Stranger from the Sea when Ross and Demelza re-unite in Cornwall (as an MP he has spent the last half-year in London), over the course of Poldark novels 8, 9 and 10 (9 is Miller’s Dance, 10, Loving Cup) some of what occurred in-between is remembered and told. I speculate these brief fragments of flashback will provide hints for Horsfield to work with. OTOH, Horsfield may ignore or distort them completely. The son, Andrew Graham, has given full permission to invent stories (something Winston Graham refused to do in 1979).

Garstin Cox, Kynance Cove, Cornwall by Moonlight …

What you must do, gentle reader, is read the books (see my “‘I have the right to choose my own life:’ Liberty in the Poldark Novels” and then see the earlier serial drama (see my Poldark Rebooted, 40 years on) I regret to say that shorter and much less expensively done, the concluding episodes of the 1977-78 Poldark (Episodes 10-13) are finally more satisfying not so much because in general they were truer to the books, but because when they did differ (as all films must) the decisions made produced subtler truer-to-life drama with more effective political and feminist thought.

Not that I did not enjoy this season: it was like the last three uneven, but it had much merit, strong merit, was ethically better probably than 9/10s of what you might find on your TV or cinemas — and moving, entertaining, absorbing, beautiful, humanly strong with its visual and sound impact working on our imaginations — all those good things.

Ellen

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Graham’s Marnie now a Met HD opera

Isabel Leonard and Christopher Maltland as Marnie and Mark Rutland on their honeymoon

Friends and readers,

I regret to have to tell you that this beautifully-sung, acted, and orchestrated Marnie is as repulsive a misogynistic story as I’ve come across in a while — and with Trump as president that’s going some. Ann Midgette of the Washington Post opined the work has a “hollow center” and offers no substantial understanding for why Marnie behaves the way she does (continually changing her very identity as she moves from outrageous theft to outrageous theft), why Mark Rutland responds to seeing she is a ruthless thief and liar by marrying her and then proceeding to win her over by almost raping her.

Not so: at the center of the opera, its “terrifying” back story is a slattern prostitute of a mother who (without an excuse offered) has rows of military men into her flat while her husband is nobly risking his life in battle, and when she becomes pregnant and has the baby, maneuvers her young daughter, into believing she killed the “bonny boy” when it was she. Each time we meet this woman she is snarling, spiteful, and a downright hater of her daughter. It’s known that a recurrent figure in many of Hitchcock’s films is the “terrible mother.” In Graham there is pity and economic explanation for Marnie’s mother’s behavior (abysmally poor, frightened at the same of ostracizing of her from others), and even Hitchcock condescends to have his Mark (Sean Connery) explain the apparently sweet Marnie (Tippi Hendrin) as someone seeking refuge. At least Marnie’s mother’s outward acts are in Graham’s text, Mark’s mother in Graham is not the scheming capitalist she is here. Mrs Rutland nags her son about his business failing all the while she is ruining it in order to buy it out from under him. In Graham, Mark’s mother is dead and it is his father and sister he must persuade to accept Marnie.

Denyce Graves as Marnie’s mother (not otherwise identified in this production) — smoking away & sinister in her wheelchair

Perhaps the most dismaying element of all was how blatant this is. The relentlessly cheerful announcer brought up the “evil mothers” as if it were a joke, and then the two actresses opined that this didn’t matter. No one said it’s just entertainment for the great hype of these interviews is how serious and important the operas are. It is the equivalent of how in Hitchcock’s movie Marnie is repeatedly called a liar and all ads about the character in this movie call her a liar as if this lying were a moral sin of gargantuan magnitude. Worst of all really the lack of any explanation for the actions of the three central characters (Marnie, Make, and Marnie’s mother): we are left with a simplistic crude Freudianism “feel.” That the critics have latched onto this time — they all seem to feel Hitchcock somehow “explained” this — he is at least suggestive, nuanced and detailed in his presentation.

Probably the accusation of hollowness comes from how in this production, like Sean O’Connor and Hitchcock before him (a psychological play focusing on sex, class, money of play, Marnie, London, 1982; and a 1964 Hitchcock psychoanalytic film respectively) Muhly never gets inside Marnie’s mind (certainly not the harridan mother). There is no credible explanation for this crazed re-dressing of herself every few months, this dangerous stealing of the whole of a company’s capital. So Marnie in all three iterations emerges as a clothes-changing frigid manipulative domineering bitch. Since Mark has been directed to be far sweeter to Marnie than Sean Connery, indeed to be loving, kind, well-meaning, once we get past the unexplained impulse on his part to marry her (when all despise her as an employee so beneath him), we feel for Mark at least. Again Muhly goes one step further in an absurd direction: astonishingly, Muhly does not allow Mark to rape Marnie. This is to rob the book of hard trauma. In several of his books Graham adheres to the idea that marital traumatic rape is good for the women — yes afterwards it seems they were longing for the man to overcome them. Graham has his men rape women for their own good (!) in some of the suspense novels (The Forgotten Story is one); a few of these men are forgiven for killing the woman when the woman commits adultery (presented as an understandable reaction). They are allowed to love two women (that’s Ross Poldark’s case in Warleggan). In Hitchcock’s case we have documentary evidence to show Hitchcock delighted in voyeurism and insisted the camera stay on Hedron’s face as Connery bears down on her. Hedron as Marnie flees (as in the book and film) but instead of leaping into a pool , in this opera she tries to kill herself by swallowing a bottle of pills. Red light suggests blood, and we move on.

Here they were reminiscent of the TV serial drama, Madmen.

I was further dismayed by the ignoring (as did Hitchcock before him) of Graham’s attack on capitalist soul-less offices — the production chose a very fat man to play Strut and he played the part as a gross narrow bully but beyond that nothing explicit. The 1950s was simply characterized as filled with men in suits sitting at desks or crowding in on women; the women were trussed up in offices sitting behind desks; at parties, they looked uncomfortable and absurd in their overdone gowns and big hair or French twists. In this production Terry Rutland (Lestyn Davies) does not develop a slow true understanding of like people with Marnie (which in the novel is at least interesting). In Hitchcock Terry Rutland works to ruin Marnie’s reputation, and she is innocent of his enterprises; here she works with him in deceit and corruption. Lastly, there is no landscape to speak of and Marnie’s one good relationship, with her horse Forio is not presented as the healthy experience it is, nor is she close or intimate with her horses’ feelings. In the book Graham may be remembering the incident in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina where a horse’s life is sacrificed to a race and much sexual innuendo floats about. In the opera and in Hitchcock the horse-riding, racing and shooting of the horse is simply an acting out of a crude suggested (never detailed) Freudian-style analysis about sex: Marnie enjoys riding roughshod over Mark so she rides roughshod over her horse.

The book can go at length into an analysis; when Mark is hurt trying to stop the death of the horse, we can see a relationship develop between him and Marnie. We do feel for Marnie as an inexplicably sick person: she is a Humbert Humbert, except she is the victim, hoist with her own petard. Blackmailed into marriage, raped, then trapped, and finally found out by one of her previous bosses who comes to one of Mrs Rutland’s fancy garden parties and put into jail. In the book she seems almost relieved, and with a sort of reconciliation happening, it seems when she emerges, she may try for a sane relationship with Mark. In Hitchcock’s movie at the end she is pathetically grateful to Mark (as masterful Connery): the seething liar becomes a remorseful dependent. By contrast, in the opera she suddenly sings “I’m free” — of what? her mother who she has learnt in the previous scene died, so pat along comes the mid-wife-housekeeper, paid companion, Lucy, to tell Marnie her mother became a prostitute in the war and when she found herself pregnant out of wedlock smothered her “bonny boy.” Because Marnie has confessed he own crimes and understands her mother’s, she is not free of what happened or her past. She has just suggested to Mark she could like him when she gets out.

As in the book Marnie agrees to go to a psychiatrist (as part of a bargain with Mark): here as elsewhere she is surrounded by “other selves” — to the side we see her mother in a slip in red light

I did ask people near me what they thought of it. Most audience members are very reticent but as with (to be fair) other modern or non-traditional productions, I saw faces made. One woman said the piece was “repulsive.” Lynn Gardner of The Guardian thought that Graham’s novel seduced Sean O’Connor because he saw it as “gritty parable of repressiveness in which sex, class, money and manners are central motivators.” Many years after the initial movie Richard Brody is now cured of his Hitchcock mania. Midgette thinks Muhly too eager a collaborator elsewhere, to glad to have a commission; the music, says James Jordan of The Observer is forgettable. As if he needed to explain his opera more, during one of the interviews Muhly told the “host” how each of his characters corresponds to a particular motif by a particular instrument. The music was meant to be emotionally expressive.What I noticed is Terry Rutland is a counter-tenor, and (unless I’m mistaken), Muhly and Michael Mayer are gay men and wonder if as homosexual men they were drawn to this hideous parable of narrow wretched heterosexuality in a desperate environment. I did like some of the costumes, especially Marnie’s later wardrobe — and I find that 1950s costumes are associated with a gay sensibility.

This was perhaps her last outfit and it and the cream one just before are appealing; she is on the stage after a London performance with Tippi Hendren (who played Marnie in Hitchcock’s film and was sexually harassed by him)

I fear it did nothing to increase anyone’s understanding of the tragic way women experience sex and motherhood in our society. It did not endorse male violence and macho maleness the way Hitchcock did. In his study, The making of Marnie, Tony Lee Moral quotes Winston Graham’s son to the effect that his father was not a feminist despite his father’s assertions he naturally was. In a letter to Hitchcock in that volume it does seem as if in general across his books Winston Graham meant to create sympathy for women who have a “raw” deal in our society, are forced to submit, endure much and enjoy little. He said he based this story of the mother on a maid he and his wife had had years before and a story he read in a newspaper about another working class women. Maybe he intended to break through the repressive sexual miseries of the eras (1950s); instead (what he never mentions) because he was improving his technical prowess in using the new amoral ironies found at the time in the suspense novel, he happened upon an imitation in reverse of Nabokov’s hypocritical Lolita, and his adapters have not known what to do with the result.

One caveat: is the opera based on Graham’s book as claimed or Hitchcock’s movie (with a little help from Sean O’Connor’s play)? Asked about how they came to choose the book, the script writer and director said they saw in the movie such astonishing fodder for an opera. Is the opera then based on the movie, asked the interviewer. The answer was if they had tried to get their permission to use the material from the film company or individuals involved, they would never have gotten past the squabbles that would ensue. So the answer is they cannot say they got their opera from the movie, only that their permission stems from the book. As they were talking and a few others interviewed talked, it seemed some of the people had read the book. I believe Muhly did. But the opera is equally influenced by Hitchcock and for all one can tell it’s Hitchcock’s misogynistic and voyeuristic outlook that was a deciding factor. Hard to say.

One last angle: still and whatever the relationship between original source and this opera, surely, all three adaptations should shed more light on Graham as the writer of the Poldark novels, or on other of his suspense books than they do. I find little connection between the early Cornwall successes (The Giant’s Chair, The Dangerous Pawn) and the World War Two tales (No Exit),  and Graham’s book, but there is continuity with The Forgotten Story, The Merciless Ladies, and with some of the hard bleak later film noir books (especially Angell, Pearl and Little God), and with some of Graham’s more memorable vicious ruthless and emotionally twisted characters across his oeuvre (Mark Adderly, Valentine Poldark). Some of my friends have declared Graham’s books misogynistic because of the books’ sympathy with male rapists and murderers; I find a qualified feminism because there is much sympathy with women victimized by the society as a whole and with particular vulnerable males. It is an anomaly to see that Winston Graham could not extend understanding to Marnie’s mother — or that this brutal material found at the core of many a society (what to do with unwanted babies and with women who won’t submit or retreat before the hegemonic patriarchal order) proved too much for Graham here.

Ellen

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