Category: Literature

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Fancy Pencils/Coloring Books: Radio Vs. Television, Round Two

Well, “I ‘aven’t patience.” For indifferent rehashings, that is. Last night I watched the premiere of the long-promised and (at least by me) highly anticipated made-for-television adaptation of H. G. Wells’s comic novel The History of Mr. Polly (1910), a radio dramatization starring Boris Karloff I discussed previously. I have often wondered whether it might not be better to leave it to our minds to color our books or whether the pencils our fancy (or imagination) supplies while listening are perhaps too dull or small in number to do the coloring when not guided by the hand of experience.

Unlike Anthony Pelissier’s 1948 black-and-white screen adaptation starring John Mills, this Mr. Polly was shot in the rich polychromes of a Welsh summer—emerald, sunset gold, and sea blue. Not that Mr. Polly ever ventured into Wales; but Gillies MacKinnon’s picture was made here on location (which led me to create the above collage, the first lines of the novel covered by a Welsh shopfront as I saw it in an excellent state of preservation at the National History Museum at St. Fagans).

Perhaps, the pages were splashed with rather too much color. After all, Mr. Polly’s life is not at all a fancy or brilliant one. When first we meet him, he is middle-aged, dyspeptic, and so thoroughly dissatisfied with his middle-class existence as to contemplate suicide. The misery of his life (or, rather, the monochrome way in which Mr. Polly sees it) does not come across strongly in Adrian Hodges’s retelling of Wells’s story. Unlike the earlier movie adaptation, it even skips the famous opening scene, in which Mr. Polly, sitting on a metaphorical “stile between two threadbare-looking fields” and referring to his situation as a “Beastly Silly Wheeze of a hole!”

This new Mr. Polly is full of holes; and unlike the earlier adaptation, from which it frequently borrows, it tries to fill them synopsizing the character’s early life. Such skimming of pages (handled, in a quaint fashion, by resorting to title cards like “Three Years Later”) leaves us less with a sense of depth than with a feeling of being dragged across the surface without ever getting inside the man.

After all, as Wells put it, “Wonderful things must have been going on inside Mr. Polly,” his inner workings suggesting a “badly managed industrial city during a period of depression; agitators, acts of violence, strikes, [. . .] and the thunder of tumbrils. . . .” However well-chosen the leading man, the look on Lee Evans’s suitably “dull and yellowish” face, rarely shown in close up, cannot convey this turmoil; and his lines, substituting for the novel’s opening, are comparatively prosaic.

Mr. Polly is looking more like Miss Potter; even his adversary, the villainous Jim, is looking pale, Wells’s characters drowning in pools of green. Radio adaptations do not suffer from such an excess of paint. Without being vulgar, they can take you “inside” a character like Mr. Polly, giving you a tour of his mind, his heart, and his bowels. They can preserve much of the original text without feeling compelled to translate them into images. They are more likely to succeed in being literate or liberating instead of literal or unfaithful. That is, they are less likely to be burdened by authenticity and claims of infidelity by not having to show us anything as it imagined (rather than imaged) in the text.

It is the listener’s responsibility to fill in the blanks with images supplied by formers readings, by travel and experience. To be sure, phony accents can be misleading; but radio adaptations (depending on the richness of the listener’s empirical knowledge of the world and prior literary excursions) are more likely to be generic than false. It is for these reasons that I’d rather listen to the soft-spoken Mr. Karloff, who, on 17 October 1948, gave voice to Mr. Polly’s complaints in the NBC University Theater production of Wells’s comic tale of discontent.

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Now on the Air: Charles Dickens, E. F. Benson, and Daphne du Maurier

Well, this is one for the minisodes generation: my weekend’s literary line-up, the CliffsNotes edition. Radio, like television and the movies, has often been accused of serving condensed milk from prize-winning cash cows grazing in the public domain, of chopping up the meat of literature into bite-sized morsels for ready consumption. There’s still plenty of that going on, even though far more than chopping and condensing is involved in the process of adaptation, an art of translation too often dismissed as mere hackwork.

I’ve been scanning the Radio Times for dramatic radio series now or soon playing on BBC Radio 4. As usual, I am woefully late to catch up. Since BBC radio programs are available online for seven days after their original broadcast, I’ve only got a few hours to take in the second and final instalment of the Classic Serial “Down and Out in Paris and London,” based on the autobiographical writings of George Orwell. I missed the first part; but the second one promises to take me to London in the 1920s, with a young Orwell as guide.

Also about to be removed from the archives are the first chapters of Mapp and Lucia, a serial based on E. F. Benson’s 1931 novel, which contains this peculiar exchange about mastering the difficulty of being hard of hearing:

“Mrs. Antrobus’s got a wonderful new apparatus. Not an ear-trumpet at all. She just bites on a small leather pad, and hears everything perfectly. Then she takes it out of her mouth and answers you, and puts it back again to listen.” 

“No!” said Lucia excitedly. “All wet?” 

“Quite dry. Just between her teeth. No wetter anyhow than a pen you put in your mouth, I assure you.”

Then there is Dickens Confidential, a series of six plays fictionalizing the life of the author in his “role of a campaigning newspaper editor.”

Upcoming this weekend is the first of a two-part adaptation of My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (whose “Birds,” migrated to the wireless, I observed here a while ago). The motion picture version of du Maurier’s 1951 thriller was subsequently soundstaged in the Lux Radio Theater and broadcast on 7 September 1953. The author’s 100th birthday is being celebrated this year. She is currently the subject of several radio documentaries in which the settings of her stories are revisited in today’s Cornwall (to which I devoted a few posts last year).

That’s what I’ve got earmarked for the weekend. Time now to trade in the gems of literature for the gams of Betty Grable, whose Pin Up Girl I’m screening tonight. “Don’t Carry Tales Out of School,” indeed.

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"What monstrous place is this?": Hardy, Holmes, and the Secrets of Stonehenge

I’ve returned from my weekend excursion to Sussex, England, which took us to the market town of Chichester. Considering that Patricia Routledge will soon perform there in two short plays by Alan Bennett, I would not mind a return visit. Even the local cinema can boast a distinguished cast of supporting players, Kenneth Branagh and Maggie Smith being among its vice presidents. The hilarious For Your Consideration aside, we only got to dunk our heads into Darren Aronofsky’s murky Fountain, which might as well have been scored by Yanni for all its new-aged bubbleheadedness.

On to things more solid—and more intriguing to boot. Yesterday, on our drive home to Wales, we made a little detour to Stonehenge where, dodging hordes of tourists, I managed to take the above picture. The sun was just breaking through the clouds on that cold March afternoon, as I, along with dozens of sightseers, walked round the fabled circle. Some of the mighty bluestones were transported here from Mynydd Preseli, Welsh hills lying 240 miles to the west. By whom? And why? Which fallen heroes or forgotten deities were being commemorated or worshipped here?

Perhaps, the legendary Sherlock Holmes was able to solve these mysteries, when, on 19 March 1945, he tackled the “Secret of Stonehenge” as one of radio’s New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, Dr. Watson has long been silent about this particular case, transcription disks proving fragile by comparison to the stones from which such popular fictions are being ground by the sheer force of ingenuity and imagination.

As Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles reminded me, those rocks are not silent, even though it might take rather more effort these days to hear them amid travelers’ prattle or the traffic on the road. No matter how muffled the motors might be by the wind or how muted the multitudes by the audio tour guides they press to their ears, the place looks less than serene.

How different it must have been for Tess when she and Angel Clare, running from the law under cover of night “almost struck themselves against” this “heathen temple” in the “open loneliness and black solitude” in which it once stood, unfenced and unguarded:

“What monstrous place is this?” said Angel. 

“It hums,” said she. “Hearken!” 

He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be of solid stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found that what he had come in contact with was a colossal rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew her breath fearfully, and Angel, perplexed, said— 

“What can it be?”

While Clare would no doubt be able to recognize this “Temple of the Winds” today, well signposted as it is, the surrounding landscape has changed considerably, as has its soundscape. Currently, plans are under way to remove or conceal two of the roads leading to and past the site, in an effort once again to place Stonehenge in a grassland setting, free from present-day visual and aural distractions. However grateful I am for the roads that led us to this place, its secrets and solitude should not be sacrificed on the altar of convenience.

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Lance Sieveking, “The Man with the Flower in His Mouth”

Let me be the first to admit my ignorance. The world being largely ignorant of me, I simply cannot depend on anyone else to do so. That said, I might as well turn the keeping of this journal (complicated as it was today by internet-disrupting hailstorms) into occasions to pick up a little something rather than disperse whatever scraps of knowledge I may already lay claim to after years of study (or intellectual loafing).

One such occasion might be the birthday of British radio and television pioneer Lancelot Sieveking, born, as the Internet Movie Database informed me, on this day, 19 March, back in 1896. Sure, I had come across his name during my research for Etherized Victorians; but, concentrating my efforts on American radio dramatics, I had conveniently overlooked Sieveking’s accomplishments. Even the folks over at the Database have yet to catch up with this man of all media; at least, his death (back in 1972) has thus far escaped them.

It is no overstatement to say that the author of The Stuff of Radio (1934) is a neglected figure today; his name has most recently been dropped in connection to Disney’s first entry in the Chronicles of Narnia series. Narnia author C. S. Lewis had approved of Sieveking’s radio dramatization but dismissed the idea of a film adaptation. During the first season of BBC2 television’s Oxford English Dictionary challenge Balderdash and Piffle, there was some debate about the origin of the phrase “back to square one,” which was argued to lie in an eight-squared drawing meant to assist BBC radio’s football commentators back in 1927. That design, as it turns out, was Sieveking’s.

Fellow BBC radio drama producer Val Gielgud had this to say about the “not altogether fortunate” Sieveking: “He was perhaps over much influenced during his most impressionable years by G. K. Chesterton, and by the theory of that master of paradox that because some things were better looked at inside out or upside down such a viewpoint should invariably be adopted. Talented and imaginative beyond the ordinary, his eyes gazing towards distant horizons, he was liable to neglect what lay immediately before his feet.”

In other words, Sieveking was an audio-visionary, a trier of radiogenic techniques at whom actors and colleagues would “gaze with a certain dumb bewilderment” as he “exhorted them to play ‘in a deep-green mood,’ or spoke with fluent enthusiasm of ‘playing the dramatic-control panel, as one plays an organ.'” There was not much use for such an one in radio. As Gielgud put it, even British radio broadcasting, “provided him with no laboratory in which experiments could be carried out.”

In 1930, when radio drama was still in its protracted infancy (despite earlier trials-by-air like the aforementioned “Comedy of Danger”), Sieveking found a “laboratory” in the still newer medium of television. He collaborated with Gielgud in bringing to British television “The Man with the Flower in His Mouth.” An adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s short play L’uomo dal fiore in bocca (1923), it aired on 14 July 1930.

Little remains today of Sieveking’s work in sound and images, aside from its blueprints—long-out-of-print scripts and theories. Now, I live in a town with a five-million-volume copyright library (which celebrated its 100th anniversary today); but for a snippet of sound, you might as well saunter over to tvdawn, where you may hear Sieveking’s spoken introduction to “The Man.”

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“Being Served”: Mr. Humphries, Mr. Dickens, and Me

Well, we’re “free”—all of us. John Inman, the outrageously queer men’s wear salesclerk Wilberforce Clayborne Humphries of Britcom fame, is free of all bodily cares after taking the inside leg of the grim reaper today at age 71. Mr. Dickens, whose words have long been spread somewhat too freely in the public domain, is currently being made free with in a new stage adaptation of Great Expectations, the world premiere of which I attended last night. And I? After having been Internet-free for yet another ten days (four weeks and counting so far this year), I am at liberty at last to go on about Mr. Humphries, Mr. Dickens, and myself . . . sharing the miseries of not Being Served well.

“I’m free!” That, of course was Mr. Humphries’s catchphrase, a phrase to catch his drift with. And while he wasn’t, really trapped as he found himself in that ultra-conservative world of the Grace Brothers emporium—oh, brother, the disgrace of Empire!—watching him sure felt liberating to those who shared his lot. Particular, prickly, and peculiar, Mr. Humphries came across as a none-too-distant cousin of Franklin Pangborn, the Queen of Paramount. You know, the kind of character you are free to laugh at, if only to remain in the chokehold of the stereotypes that brought him into being.

For anyone who, like me, grew up with an anxiety of being deemed abnormal, an anxiety that, to be endured, was best (that is, most safely) wrapped in the cloak of flamboyancy, Mr. Humphries was at once a model and a monster—a grotesque mask you felt inclined to pick up mainly because you lacked the fiber and fortitude to tear down the structure responsible for its manufacture and marketing. No, the likes of Mr. Humphries are never free. Mr. Inman, at least, got to celebrate his coming out, however late in life, by publicizing his “gay wedding,” thereby to dismantle what is the most insidious of all secrets . . . the open one.

Mr. Humphries is a thoroughly Dickensian character: a mores-reflecting surface that is buffed up to speak and account for the unspeakable and unaccountable: a caricature that sanitizes as it unsexes. In the Dickensian universe—which is no larger than a Victorian middle-class closet, a repository of so many readily retrievable garments—it is the figure of Pip that best demonstrates the pitfalls of trading one’s identity for a dangled, ready-made mask—a substitution of which its creator had made a trade. Pip is as much a mask of melodrama as it is an unmasking of its workings and limitations.

Pip’s struggle and ultimate inability of coming into his own become apparent in Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Dickens’s story, in which the episodes of Pip’s life are staged with a minimalism that divests the melodrama of its thrills and offers nothing in their stead, a creative “zilch” for which “existential void” is a mere euphemism. A set of loudspeakers is filling in as a Greek chorus, robbing Pip of the only authority he enjoyed—the privilege to relate the tale in which he found yet failed to find himself.

The silhouettes of characters traversing the stage in front of a white screen suggest what is clear from the start of this production: that none of the figures in the play are treated as living individuals, an impression enhanced by the doublings of most of the eight cast members. The avoidance of overt reflexive gestures—a director in search of his characters, perhaps—render altogether lifeless what might have generated some energy as a Brechtian comment on the world Dickens inhabited and peopled, a world whose masks and conventions we have not quite managed to drop, as much as we delight in making a spectacle of it.

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Dr. Mabuse, Terrorist

Now that Hannibal is rising again and even The Shadow is being cast anew in another attempt at translating radio’s invisible terrors to the big screen, I wonder how long it will take for Hollywood to rediscover Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, a pulp character combining the ruthlessness and intelligence of the former with the mental powers and omnipresence of the latter. In this age of urban terrorism and surveillance, of cynicism and weaponized paranoia, Mabuse would be just the figure to capture the Zeitgeist. A few days ago, I re-encountered him in the 4 ½ hour, two-part silent thriller Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) and its masterful talkie sequel Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933).

His genre-defying Testament having been banned by the Nazis, who read it as a comment on their hate-mongering and fear-founded regime, Lang later returned to West Germany to direct an Orwellean update titled Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse (1960), which then metastasized into a spy and crime movie franchise akin to the lurid and hugely popular Edgar Wallace chillers that lured German teenagers, my father among them, to the movie houses.

I was about five years old when I first heard his name, by which time Mabuse had long ended his box-office reign of terror (sporadic resurfacings in movies and audio books notwithstanding). It was during a walk around the neighborhood of the bleak industrial satellite of a town I was obliged to call home, when my father pointed out a walled-in plot of ground and told me, with an air of mystery escaping his breath (which in later years would merely reek of distilled disillusionment), that that was the garden of Dr. Mabuse.

Ma-boo-ze. Now, there was no ready image of this figure in the inventory of my mind; but those three syllables alone were so rich in romance and intrigue that I could not wait to be lifted up to see just what was lurking behind that unassuming row of bricks and mortar.

Gnomes. A whole colony of them. Common enough in the horticulture of the petit bourgeois, these forms took on a magical, even sinister aspect. Had they been ordinary folks—small children, perhaps—petrified into subhumanity, the playthings of a scientist or some such latter-day sorcerer? Later, it occurred to me that my father might have confused the place with the Island of Dr. Moreau or the secluded playground of Dr. Cyclops, whose very different experiments I still associate with the mobsterism of Mabuse.

At any rate, I don’t even recall the story Papa had made up in an effort to make a dull walk in dispiriting surroundings seem like an adventure (eventually fading superheroic powers for which I loved him). All I remember is that, from that day on—until we finally moved to the alternate dread of middle-class suburbia—I always insisted on seeing those garden features whenever we passed that wall; and long before I spotted him on television, Mabuse was a prominent if indistinct figure in the imaginary landscape of the mind—which is precisely where he roamed after losing his own.

Based on a serialized magazine story by Norbert Jacques—as the documentary extras on the DVD release of the 1922 film will tell you—Mabuse continued to terrorize the world long after he had been locked up as a seemingly harmless imbecile. In the silent film, he is a man of many disguises; in the sequel, he inhabits the bodies of whomever he chooses as executors of his will. He was modernity’s first indiscriminal, a proto-fascist who sought to force the multitude into submission or blow them to bits, if necessary.

Operating his ministry of fear by giving orders both telephonically and telepathically, the all-seeing, all-knowing Mabuse was a shape-shifting Big Brother, The Thing with a method and a masterplan. His terrorist network is an ideal setup for an open-ended series of thrillers that can withstand the death of its central characters and the departure of its leads. Will Mabuse return? Or has he altogether demolished our shelters of fiction, free now to menace the streets of metropolis, the hallways of big business, and the corridors of political power? Perhaps, we all are gnomes in the penal complex of his walled-in garden.

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Having Legs: The Calm After the Storm

Well, I don’t know whether hard luck can be said to have them. Legs, I mean; but this one sure lingers. So, just in case you were wondering: the violent storm mentioned in my previous post caused greater problems than the alluded to runaway trash can. I have been without phone and internet ever since and am typing these lines while sipping tea at a wireless cafe, repairs (or, at any rate, inspection and assessment of the problem) being scheduled for next week. Until the service is restored, I am biding my time watching old movies, reading even older books while broadcastellan—not designed for hurried oneliners from a cell phone or anything requiring a rushed update—remains dormant. I bet I am missing this more than any of you. . . .

My comparatively trivial “affliction” is well expressed in these lines by Walter Scott, whose Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer (1815) I picked up to while away the hours:

Here was a country gentleman, whose most estimable quality seemed his perfect good nature, secretly fretting himself and murmuring against others for causes which, compared with any real evil in life, must weigh like dust in the balance. But such is the equal distribution of Providence. To those who lie out of the road of great afflictions, are assigned petty vexations, which answer all the purpose of disturbing their serenity [. . .].

The legs on display here, by the way, belong to Claudette Colbert; I spotted them some time ago when flicking through an issue of the British Picture Post from December 1938. Ah, the joys of lagging behind the times . . .

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Please, Mr. Memory: Concussion on The Thirty-Nine Steps

I felt torn last night. Torn between The Falcon’s Brother (in which George Sanders passes the thriller franchise to sibling Tom Conway) and John Buchan: Master of Suspense, a television documentary about the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Quandaries like these are peculiar to life in a single-TV household. Considering that I am going on a New Year’s trip to Glasgow (where Buchan grew up) and just saw a dramatization of his classic spy novel in London, I decided in favor of the latter. Not that the documentary (part of BBC Four’s Adventures for Boys season) did much to clear the muddle my mind, at work under the influence of Patrick Barlow’s stage adaptation, has made of the Steps, one of those books everyone claims to know but few ever read, let alone without preconceptions.

Now, I have read Buchan’s 1915 novel (available online here); and, like most readers who come to it by way of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 adaptation, I was astonished at the film’s brazenfaced infidelity. I was disappointed, as well. Missing was the wit that Hitchcock and writer Charles Bennett brought to the original by reworking it in the screwball comedy tradition. It Happened One Flight, they might as well have called what amounts to conclusive proof that tying a male hero to a dame (absent in Buchan’s story) does not have to slow down a fast-paced chase. Infusing sex appeal rather than sentimentality, Hitchcock’s cinematic update created a new adversary for the already much-beleaguered hero, Richard Hannay, who finds that a lot can go wrong in the effort to do right.

Barlow’s dramatization, by comparison, aims at demonstrating that a lot can go right in the effort to do wrong. When I read that John Buchan’s “The 39 Steps” was playing at London’s Criterion Theatre (where it can bee seen until April 2007), I had reason to expect an update of the novel, rather than a recreation of the film, however farcical the treatment (as reviews and poster art suggested).

As it turns out, Buchan’s novel has little to do with the nightly frivolities at the Criterion. The attribution to Buchan in the title of Barlow’s play (based on an “original concept” by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon) seems to be part of an elaborate practical joke—a set-up in which spectators gladly take the fall since they are being coddled by travesty into assuming themselves superior to the material, whatever its source. Being tongue-in-cheek is a convenient escape, a laughing away of what could—and perhaps ought to—have been an engagement or confrontation with Buchan’s story, a tale of espionage and persecution anxities so relevant in this age of terror and so-called anti-terrorism.

Aside from the material of which John Buchan’s “The 39 Steps” makes light, the main attraction of the play lies in its being performed by a cast of only four actors, who dare to take on well over a hundred characters. With a small supply of basic props, those nimble four are shown in the ludicrous struggle to recreate the screenplay as realized by Hitchcock (who, in one of the many inspired moments of silliness, makes a cameo appearance in silhouette). This minimalist-absurdist approach to adaptation was not entirely a novelty act to me, having previously attended a production of The Importance of Being Earnest acted out by a cast of two.

Overly familiar as well felt the play’s reflexivity, its awareness of and delight in the improbability of being equal either to Buchan’s spy story or Hitchcock’s screwball caper. Many self-conscious remakes operate in this manner, escaping the challenge of finding the new in the old by making a mockery of the attempt at renewal and a mess of what is presumably so outmoded that it deserves nothing more than a send-up.

There is enjoyment in seeing things go awry, no doubt; and John Buchan’s “The 39 Steps” rewards theatergoers for their knowledge of the Hitchcock version (one of three film adaptations of the story). Cineastes will appreciate the effort that went into finding ways of making it almost work, whereas those who read and respect Buchan may regret how much is being squandered by ignoring his paradigm. After all, his thrills, too, depend on the pleasure derived from seeing things go awfully wrong, albeit with far higher stakes for the protagonist and his world.

Calling the play John Buchan’s The 39 Steps obscures the fact that the first motion picture adaptation was already a comic revision of Buchan’s rip-roaring yarn. Going after Buchan, Hitchcock managed to be fresh (both new and irreverent) without losing sight of the hunter-on the-run formula that would serve him so well, without neglecting the task of dusting off this decades-old story for action-seeking motion picture audiences. Forgoing thrills, sentiment, and politics alike, Barlow is strictly after laughs.

That said, the bungled dramatization is a chuckles-filled joyride for those who take pleasure in playing fast and loose with supposed literary classics. I gladly go along, provided I can still pride myself in being able to tell a sly impostor from the real thing. Instead, the theatrical experience has given me somewhat of a concussion, leaving me in a state of confusion that neither the aforementioned documentary nor the numerous American radio dramatizations (by the Lux Radio Theater and the Mercury Players, for instance) are likely to clear up. Was Richard Hannay a South African, a Canadian, or a Scotsman? Was he driven by the impulse to save a crumbling empire, to counter boredom, or to clear his name? Come to think of it: just who built The Thirty-Nine Steps, an unstable architectural composite of which now arises before my mind’s eye?

Even Mr. Memory won’t be of much assistance to me, I suspect. Besides, he is . . . but you know the story.

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Riot Study: Hunting Catholics with Barnaby Rudge

Well, I would have been reading and writing today, had I not been caught up in upgrading my Blogger account and messing with my “classic” template while trying to take advantage of a few new features. With the exception of added labels, I ended up keeping things as they were, but I will probably tinker with the design over the weekend. Meanwhile, I just got back from the theater (an all-male production of Taming of the Shrew, which I am reviewing shortly). To remind all those of us blogging or shopping or hopping about town that it might be a “far, far better thing” to pick up one of his volumes, young Mr. Dickens has been installed here to usher in the festive season of fireside reading.

It is undoubtedly due to that sentimental ghost story A Christmas Carol and its countless re- or disincarnations that Dickens is so closely associated with December, the darkest month of the year, cheered, as if to reward or placate believers of some faiths, with tunes, tinsel, and treats. No Scrooge in the matter, I got tickets to a stage production of A Christmas Carol starring screen veteran Ron Moody, best known for his role in the musical Oliver! (a more recent production of which I discuss here). Young Twist and old Scrooge, those two have outlasted most of Dickens’s children, in the shadow of which vast nursery lies one Barnaby Rudge.

In the spirit of charity, I have picked up this ill favored Barnaby Rudge, serialized in 1841. Subtitled “A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty” it is a fictionalized account of the anti-Catholic uprisings in England, Protestant anxieties stirred by a member of Parliament opposed to the Catholic Relief Act. With the Pope’s visit to Turkey, a Muslim country whose faith he offended a few months earlier, and the multi-million sex abuse claim settlement by the Catholic diocese in Los Angeles making headlines these days, this old page-turner promises to be topical reading. No escapism here.

Say, what’s your literary treat for the “holidays”?

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On This Day in 1930: ‘”Mystery Gun” Disappears As Lights Go Out’ in Invisible Courtroom

I don’t suppose I shall ever get used to it. The Welsh weather, I mean, the nocturnal roars and howlings of which I often drown out by listening to the familiar voices of old-time radio, reassuring and comforting voices like those of Harry Bartell or Elliot Lewis, both of whom were born on this day, 28 November, in 1913 and 1917, respectively. Storms are part of the Welsh soundscape, much like the bleating of sheep on the hills. If such climate conditions were faced by the people of New York, among whom I numbered for some fifteen years of my life, I wager that the local television newscasts would report little else. To be sure, last night’s storm did make headlines, being that a tornado wreaked havoc in a village just a few miles from my present home.

Thanks to some well-chosen radio thriller, I managed to sleep through it all, losing myself in dreams that, once radioactivated, tend to become particularly vivid. I often wonder just how much my mind, conscious or not, is influenced by the popular culture I consume by listening in. Sometimes, though, it is what we hear about, and not what we perceive, that stirs our imagination. There are a few listening experiences I can only dream of, plays I have only read or read about and consequently fascinate me no end. One such unheard soundplay is the serial The Trial of Vivienne Ware (previously mentioned here and discussed at some length in Etherized, my study of American radio dramatics). Pulled by the Hearst press and propagated on the air by station WJZ, New York, it was a spectacular publicity stunt designed to promote Hearst’s less than reputable papers.

Those tuning in did not only get to hear the proceedings, but were cast as jurors. They stood a chance of being awarded $1000 for coming up with the most convincing verdict (be it “guilty” or “innocent”), thus making it unnecessary for the author of the story—one Kenneth M. Ellis—to determine upon a reasonable conclusion and the fate of his titular character.

From the 25th to the last day of November, the fictional trial was broadcast live, with eminent figures of law and politics, New York Senator Robert F. Wagner and prominent attorney Ferdinand Pecora, heading a cast that included noted stage actress Rosamund Pinchot. Here is how the New York American, the Hearst paper sponsoring the series, described the session of 28 November 1930:

It was almost at the close of the session that the lights suddenly were extinguished and the court plunged into total darkness. Women’s screams, the shouts and bustle of court attaches, and the hammering of the gavel filled five or six black seconds with sound. Then the lights came on again—but the .38 caliber revolver which George Gordon Battle, chief counsel for Vivienne Ware, had just introduced as evidence had disappeared from the table where it lay.

Now, that’s a melodramatic conjuring act fit for the airwaves. It probably wouldn’t do much good during a stormy night, though, since such interactive thrills—let alone the pondering of the verdict, and what to do with the prize money—are, unlike much else that was presented on American radio with comforting predictability, anything but soporific.