Category: Radio Plays

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Eleven): Promise Is a Name Remembered

Well, I am on my way to New York City, the town I once called home. It has been a year since I left, and I am looking forward to catching up with friends, revisiting old haunts, and walking through streets that are so much part of the landscape of my soul that I never thought I would be able to find myself elsewhere. I did, eventually; but I would not be the man I am today, for better or worse, were it not for my New York education—and I don’t just mean earning my PhD. Technology permitting, I will continue my blog from there; it is the first time I am travelling with my laptop and I wonder whether or to what extent being back in town is going to influence the way I am writing here, even though my mind’s eye will remain fixed, for a few days longer, on a certain mansion in Los Angeles—the house of the doomed Martin family.

For two weeks now I have been listening to the old-time radio thriller “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” a serial in fifteen chapters that aired as part of Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery program back in 1939 and (in its New York revival) in 1949. The eleventh chapter was broadcast in the US on this day, 14 November, in 1949.

So, what’s been going on? The troubled Charity Martin has been carried to her quarters, a room she claims to have “always hated.” During her childhood, it was wallpapered with less-than comforting nursery rhyme figures, creatures that seemed to spring to life in the darkness. When asked to return to the events of the night—a night during which the young woman was found bound and gagged next to the basement furnace, Charity tremulously relates being abducted by a faceless figure in a blood-red hood carrying out the horrors which, she insists, have “got to go on and on and on until there isn’t any of [her family] left.”

Having encouraged this outburst, Jack surprises Charity, his partners, and us listeners with a seemingly unrelated question: “Do you know a girl named Pauline West?” Charity (or Cherry, as she prefers to be called) hesitates, acknowledging little more than a vague recollection. Jack explains that he read the name on a casting sheet he found next to Cherry’s body, and that Pauline West appears to be a radio actress.

What else is down there in that basement: transcription disks? The 1949 transcribed run of Morse’s serial was produced during the early days of tape recording; but the script for “The Thing” is a decade older and dates from the time when radio was live.  Is the titular “Thing” live? Or is it a recording, like Morse’s remake?

Before the chapter closes, another shot is fired—right in our presence. Charity and her sister Hope are struggling for the possession of the gun that killed the family chauffeur. Hope is shot. For once, the “thing” has not cried. Was the shooting accidental? Or did one sister try to do away with the other? And was it all part of the scheme to bring about the fall of the house of Martin?

Now you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got a plane to catch . . .

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Ten): Opportunity Is an Unguarded Furnace

Well, before I continue packing my suitcase for a trip back to New York City, I am going to take a moment to consider the journey proposed in my second broadcastellan poll, now closed. Venturing to shed temporal fetters, I asked the following question: “If you could travel in time, when would you stop?” Here are the results (30 votes):

In the distant past (3% / 1 vote); One to three centuries into the past (10% / 3 votes); A few decades into the past (23% / 7 votes); I’ll stay put, thank you very much (17% / 5 votes); A few decades into the future (3% / 1); One to three centuries into the future (10% / 3); In the distant future (20% / 6). Since I always insist on the reader’s right to question a question, rather than accepting it outright, I added the to me valid response “I think it’s a waste of time to think this through” (13% / 4 votes).

Given the subject of this blog, I am not surprised that a chance to return to the recent past would be more welcome by those who care to read these words than any of the other time travel opportunities. I must confess to having expressed my preference for staying right when I am, even though I half regret my lack of daring. I am not sure whether I would be able to resist an offer to walk among the Victorians I have read and studied for so long.

My steadfast refusal to see myself as nostalgic got the better of me, I guess. Besides, I neglected to clarify whether this exploration into the fourth dimension would mean a return trip. The problematics of polling questions did not prevent me from creating a new and considerably less esoteric survey, which will run until my return from the US in early December. What might it yield? Time will tell.

The clinging to a supposedly happier past and the relentlessness of time’s onward march are very much at the heart of Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall, the theatrical thriller I saw yesterday in a production by Clwyd Theatr Cymru. The play opened with the amplified and hence ominous sound of a ticking clock in the home of the superannuated Mrs. Bramson, a self-righteous, imaginary invalid who derives pleasure ordering others about while seeking refuge in the orderly morality of Victorian melodrama. Her time has run out as surely as night must fall.

In Williams’s drama, the retreat into the past is exposed as a false comforter. It offers a superior vantage point, a chance to assign meaning, catalogue and judge; as such, it leaves us unprepared both for the daily negotiations the present in its contingencies demand and for the future that looms dauntingly vague, unfathomable to all who lack a sense of vision. Williams kills off the past as symbolized by the tyrannical Mrs. Bramson; but he offers no future to Dan, her killer, or to Olivia, the old woman’s deeply dissatisfied niece and companion who eventually strips her inhibitions to take his side. The past is not to be conquered by breaking with it violently, Williams suggests; instead, it is the responsibility of the living to dwell and progress in the present with the full understanding that night must fall on us all.

The formidable matriarch of Carlton E. Morse’s radio thriller “The Thing That Cries in the Night” has much in common with Mrs. Bramson; and her grandchildren are all as eager to escape her clutches as Williams’s miserable Olivia, even if it means having to resort to violence or side with their violators.

In the tenth chapter, as heard on this day, 11 November, in 1949, the unconscious Charity Martin is found naked, bound and gagged in front of the furnace down in the basement of the Martin mansion. Who brought her there—and why?

Reggie, one of the three investigators hired to deal with old Mrs. Martin’s “granddaughter trouble,” fears that the young woman was about to be tossed into the flames. Are the violent deeds committed in the house of Martin to be read as an attempt to bury a less than joyful or healthy past—a past whose rotten secrets are fiercely guarded by old Mrs. Martin? Who is playing Atropos? And who might benefit from robbing the Martin children of their future?

Playing by the rules of Morse’s radio serial, I shall have to wait until Monday to find out just what the future will hold. In the meantime, I am living in the now, packing my bags and taking off for New York City, my former home. Catching up with my past while making decisions about the future . . . it’s the adventure I call my present.

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Nine): Destiny Is an Assigned Seat

Well, the scheduled power outage has been postponed due to regional flooding. I ought to be thankful, I guess, for one of the dreariest, wettest, and stormiest autumns ever to be weathered by the umbrella of a smile. Last night I was tolerably amused watching You’ll Find Out (1940), one of those star-studded Hollywood efforts whose chief purpose was to exploit and ostensibly promote the burgeoning radio industry by supplying listeners with images the mind’s eye could have very well done without. While the headliner of the movie, bandleader Kay Kyser, made my head ache with his bargain basement Harold Lloyd antics, the lavishly produced horror-comedy—co-starring Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff—nonetheless kept me in my seat.

You’ll Find Out makes much use of one of radio’s most intriguing technological novelties: the Sonovox. A patented sound effects device, the Sonovox could invest a trombone, a locomotive, or even a few raindrops (in short, anything capable of producing sound) with the power of human speech. Now, if only that deuced infant would speak up and let us know what it’s all about.

I am referring, of course, to the mysterious “Thing” in Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery serial “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” an old-time radio thriller I have been following for nearly two weeks now. On this day, 10 November, in 1949, the “Thing” made itself heard once again, announcing imminent death. When the Martin household’s peculiar baby alarm goes off tonight, another life is being claimed . . . the life of the prime suspect.

It is a thrilling twist in a story that, for two chapters, assumed the guise of a whodunit. In the previous installment, Job Martin, the heretofore good-natured drunk, was exposed as an ill-tempered cynic who showed little affection for his three tormented siblings. His youngest sister, Charity, promises to get a confession out of him, claiming that he was responsible for the murder of the Martin’s chauffeur. She urges Jack Packard, the man hired to investigate the mysterious goings-on, to round up all members of the household in the dining room.

Once they are assembled, Grandmother Martin insists on the observance of the family’s traditional seating arrangements. When the conference is just about to commence, the lights go out; yet no one has been within ten feet of the switch. The “Thing” begins to cry. It is not until the light is being turned on again that a gun goes off and Job is shot through the head.

This is the first murder committed in our presence. We are in the thick of it and, like the three members of the A-1 Detective Agency, left very much in the dark, despite the fact that the Martins and two of their hired investigators were standing right there in a brightly lit room when the shot was fired.

New questions arise: Was Job indeed the murderer of the Martin’s blackmailing hoodlum of a chauffeur? If so, he dodged the electric chair by taking that seat. Was he being silenced by one of his accomplices? If so, he must have been harboring a secret whose revelation is dangerous to another. Or is the “Thing” an otherwordly avenger of the sins committed in the house of Martin, a house doomed to fall?

Say, where were you when the lights went out?

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Eight): Suspicion Is a Frustrated Drunk

Well, here I am, a German in Britain’s wild Welsh west writing about American radio culture of the 1940s. And now that there are finally a few good reasons to follow some made-in-the-UK television programs, I am about to leave for New York City. Anyway. I’ll just have to catch up with The X-Factor, Bleak House, and the new season of Little Britain when I return in early December. I sure had a laugh looking at these pictures from Little Britain‘s forthcoming third season. In the meantime, enjoying a glass of brandy by the fireside, I will continue my daily visits to the Martin mansion, as I listen to the eighth installment of the radio thriller “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” Part of Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery series, it was originally broadcast in the US on this day, 9 November, in 1949.

Job Martin, a supposedly good-natured drunk, has been forcefully returned to the home of his grandmother, the formidable Randolph Martin. Was he just out for a drink? Or is he responsible for the murder of the Martin’s chauffeur? After all, Job’s gun was found next to the corpse and the chauffeur’s attempts to blackmail the less-than-saintly Martins would be motive enough. According to his sister Charity, however, Job is likely to become a victim himself. She claims that he is in grave danger of falling prey to “them,” mysterious and as yet unseen adversaries intent on killing off the Martins one by one.

Meanwhile, the three Martin sisters are locked up in their rooms. For their safety? Jack Packard, hired by Mrs. Martin to prevent further “granddaughter trouble” without being told just what this “trouble” might be, looks upon all of them as suspects in a case as muddled and bizarre as any yet tackled by Jack, Doc, and Reggie, the trio of the A-1 Detective Agency.

This particular instalment plays more like a conventional whodunit, and Job, who is rather nasty when sober, comes across as a prime suspect. “Look,” he sneers, “we got a motto in this house. You mind your business and I mind mine.” He sure shows little concern for his three sisters. He dismisses Hope’s near-death by chloroform as an attempted suicide and, when reminded of the bloody attacks on Charity, remarks disdainfully that “somebody scratched her with a pin.” And if something happened to Fay, he would “send flowers to the funeral.” Besides, Job reminds his interrogator, “nobody is dead, except for the chauffeur, and he doesn’t count.” In vino veritas? Or does the truth come out when the booze runs out?

Having wavered between hard-boiled action and neo-gothic thrills, Morse’s mystery commits itself to one genre for once, putting in place one of the genre markers it previously tossed about in willful abandon. We are in whodunit territory now, with a line-up of suspects or at least some clarification of motives in a murder case whose killings seemed rather arbitrary so far. We have gotten to know all the members of the Martin household, and we have learned enough about them to find them sufficiently suspicious to allow that keeping whatever secret their home is harboring might well be worth a few more murders.

One aspect of the case remains as puzzling to me as it is to the impatient Doc Long: why has Mrs. Martin engaged the three adventurers-for-hire to take care of her troubles if she is so unwilling to disclose just what those troubles might be?

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Seven): Agony Is a Child Heard, Not Seen

Well, here’s to the delights of absent-mindedness. In the pursuit of pleasurable thrills, it is only the forgetful, thoughtless, or ignorant man who is entirely self-sufficient. He never has to rely on others to maintain a cheerful state of glorious surprise. Last night, I was all prepared to see a touring production of Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall; but when I glanced at our theater tickets shortly before leaving, I noticed it was to be The Importance of Being Earnest, as staged by the Ridiculusmus company (you see, I had the date right at one point). As those not “born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag” will be undoubtedly aware, Ridiculusmus does Earnest (and Lady Bracknell, Miss Prism, Cecily and Gwendolen) with a cast of only two players and an assortment of ghastly costumes. Quite a romp, that! Night won’t fall until Thursday, and rather appropriately so, since that day the power is going to be cut off in our house (for maintenance, the “outage” notice read). It will be another blackout to misremember.

Anyway, let’s saunter over to the one house where power need never be in short supply—the theater of the mind. The stage is all set for the fall of the House of Martin. I am referring, of course, to the house that novelist-radio dramatist Carlton E. Morse built back in the late 1930s, an old-time radio serial that I am enjoying in the daily doses in which it was dispensed back when television was not yet ready for mass consumption.

If you’d like to join me in my daily inspections of that other bleak house (I am still following the BBC’s adaptation of Dickens’s thrilling story with great interest), you can find recordings of it in the Internet Archive. In chapter seven (as heard on this day, 8 November, in 1949), “The Thing That Cries in the Night” takes an unnerving turn.

“There ain’t no sense to nothing,” Texan adventurer Doc Long grumbles during a conference with his British pal, Reggie York. Jack Packard, the third member of their A-1 Detective agency, is merely giving instructions, but shares little about what he surmises with his fellow soldiers-of-misfortune. With questions piling up like dirty laundry in a bachelor’s pad and little opportunity to roll up one’s sleeves for some action, Morse’s adventurers—and his listeners—may have cause to be frustrated.

Something’s rotten all right—but just from where is this “stench of a decaying family tree” wafting? What is needed, for the sake of sanity, is empirical evidence. After all, the three amigos do not only have to find whoever murdered the Martin’s chauffeur and attempted to do away with or implicate the Martin siblings; they also need to solve the puzzle of the ominous “Thing,” the cries and giggles of an invisible infant foretelling each violent attack.

“That baby gag gets me down,” Fay Martin sneers, “A houseful of widows, spinsters, and neurotics. What’s a baby doing here?” Now, the permanently distraught Charity Martin warns that her brother Job is in imminent danger of adding to the body count. The murderous entity in their midst, she insists, is intent on rooting out the family tree altogether, killing off the Martins one by one. For now, however, Job has disappeared; and, as Doc, Reggie, and Hope stand by, it is Charity whose skin receives a few new slashes.

To the impatient Doc, the lack of certainty sure puts a damper on the prospect of being in a place where “all these female women are running around in flimsy wisps of lace, wanting to be rescued.” Who among the Martins really wants to be rescued—and who is in pursuit of them? It is an ill-defined chase in which clues are in short supply and alliances dubious.

To those listeners who align themselves with the benighted Doc in an effort to solve the case of a terrorized maiden whose mind does not appear to be altogether sound, “The Thing That Cries in the Night” may be little more than an overwrought mystery of the Gaslight school. The audience, of course, is encouraged to consider Doc’s momentary loss of brio as an act of misreading and to side with an imaginative fellow like Reggie, who is convinced that the puzzle will be solved eventually but declares the present state of confusion to be “deucedly interesting.”

Doc’s momentary frustration is a reminder that Morse, like many storytellers in the gothic tradition, felt compelled to offer his impatient audience, namely that ambiguity is its own reward.

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Six): Urgency Is an Opened Curtain

Before heading out to see a touring production of that crowd-pleasing Emlyn Williams potboiler Night Must Fall, I am going to keep us all up to speed on the latest happenings involving “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” For those stopping by here unawares: I am currently tuned in to a fifteen-chapter adventure story by novelist-radio playwright Carlton E. Morse. For three weeks, I am recreating the experience of listening to an old-time radio serial as such melodramas-on-installment-plan were enjoyed by millions of Americans in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s—one chapter at a time.

Morse’s I Love a Mystery, of which “The Thing” is a particularly memorable storyline, was first heard in the US in 1939; the series developed a large following over the course of its run and was later referenced by authors as diverse as Stephen King, Philip Roth, and Anne Sexton. After a five-year hiatus, during which I Love a Mystery was turned into a short-lived series of motion pictures and an episodic radio thriller titled I Love Adventure, the serial was revived in the fall of 1949. So, let’s pick up today’s piece of the puzzle, as it was broadcast over the Mutual radio network in the US on this day, 7 November, in 1949.

“Unhealthy ideas grow in darkness,” adventurer Jack Packard cautions during another talk with Mrs. Randolph Martin, the old woman who called upon him (and his two comrades, Doc Long and Reggie York) to solve or cover up the strange and dangerous goings-on in her posh L.A. mansion not far from Tinseltown. It’s a great line that almost serves as an advertisement for the sex, violence, and neogothic thrills only the theater of the mind could mass-produce with quite this immediacy. The Martin’s chauffeur has been found dead in the hallway.

As we learn today, he was hoodlum whose racket was blackmail. Apparently, he had been in a shootout at a sleazy nightclub. Much to the vexation of haughty Grandma Martin, one of her troublesome offspring was on his arm when it happened. Her name is Hope, and all she ever hopes for, it seems, is to get undressed and have a good time with anyone—even with a guy who is “putting the screws” on her own family.

Hope seems to have a killer instinct when it comes to picking Mr. Right-for-now. The dead man is still clutching one of her “slip-on, slip-off” numbers, covered in blood. There’s a gun on the floor—and it might be her brother’s.

What is going on in this house? Mrs. Martin is not telling. She seems to have hired Jack, Doc, and Reggie for the sole purpose to protect her offspring—not from mischief or murder, mind you, but from the blight of a bad reputation. The Martins have had fair warning—or make that unfair warning. They have a peculiar alarm system installed in their house: whenever something awful is about to happen (such as a murder, or an attempted one), a baby begins to cry. Thing is, there ain’t no baby in the house—it’s the “Thing,” the mysterious “they” Mrs. Martin’s granddaughter Charity (or Cherry) keeps muttering about in a hushed, trembling voice.

The formidable matriarch of the Martin household dismisses the thought of an oracle in diapers as “a lot of romantic nonsense.” “Twice slashed and thrown downstairs,” Jack scoffs (referring to Charity’s recent experiences), “and you call that romantic nonsense?” Hoodlums and hooey—the clash between hard-boiled thrills and gothic terror continues in this chapter, which ends in another sounding of the Martin’s Delphic alarm.

On this bumpy night, someone has tried to bump off nymphomaniac Hope by taking her breath away with a generous dose of chloroform. “Murder sure is on the loose in this man’s house,” Doc exclaims, putting an end to this installment of Morse’s serial.

Whether just careless in his writing, attempting to spice up the script, or eager to clear up something suggested previously, Morse has Mrs. Martin’s grandson Job recall a dream about a dame in a swimsuit; in an earlier chapter, however, we were told that Job—a lovable loser who reminds me of James Dean—”hates girls.” Are we to assume that he was having nightmares?

As if to make up for an unexceptional entry in his serial, Morse himself steps in front the microphone for a curtain call. In an appeal to the listener, he (pictured above), along with actors Russell Thorson and Tony Randall, requests donations to a charity called Foster Parents Plan for War Children. More than four years after the end of World War II, millions of children in Europe were starving or suffering from malnutrition (my rubble-rebel of a black-markets haunting father, then aged 8, being one of them).

“Remember,” Morse concludes, “that you too can be a Santa Claus for all god’s children.” Hoping for a few thrills this season (or, for that matter, tomorrow), Mr. Morse!

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That Sarong Way to Do It, Ms. Lamour; or, When Sound Leaves a Bad Taste in Your Eyes

Well, it was time to close the first broadcastellan poll. The question I asked was: “If you had to give up one of your five senses, which one would it be?” Here are the results (25 votes): Sight (12% / 3 votes); Hearing (12% / 3 votes); Touch (4% / 1 vote); Smell (40% / 10 votes); and Taste (16% / 4 votes). Since I always insist on the opportunity to question a question, rather than accepting it outright, I added the (to me) facetious “So what, I’ve got a sixth sense,” a way out taken four times (16% / 4 votes). As I said before, I chose to give up my sense of vision; but last night, when it came to choosing an anniversary to go on about, I was reminded of the havoc the sound of a voice can wreak on a vision of beauty. Dorothy Lamour’s, for instance.

On this day, 28 October, in 1948, Ms. Lamour was heard as host and star of the Sealtest Variety Theater, chatting with Jack Carson, singing a few chirpy tunes, and camping it up with Boris Karloff in a pre-Halloween sketch. Only a few days earlier, Karloff had been given a chance to prove his versatility to the American radio audience by playing the lead in an NBC University Theatre adaptation of H. G. Wells’s comic novel The History of Mr. Polly. Now he found himself reduced once more to parodying his monster image, even though his avuncular voice was not the least bit intimidating. Nor, for that matter, did the famous lady in the sarong sound to me anything like her screen image.

Coming across as an efficiently cheerful salesperson or a routine-hardened night club performer putting on a pair of comfortable shoes while waiting in line to cash her paycheck, Lamour did not get her timbre into temptress mode and, aside from a few charming if not always genuine laughs, made few efforts to enhance a clunky script littered with more or less appalling gags. Her voice sure took the G out of Glamour that night.

The “sarong formula” (mocked above in a 1942 Movie-Radio Guide cartoon by Jimmy Caborn), did not work on the air. Some screen sirens or Hollywood hunks are decidedly less rousing when forced to rely solely on their vocal chords to make us swoon or convince us to buy whatever product the radio show in which they starred was peddling.

Such a smelly chestnut of a radio show should overwhelm the sense of nostalgia lingering in anyone’s nostrils, I thought, and aired my listening disappointment in a new poll. Say, when would you rather be, if not today?

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On This Day in 1938: Broadcast “Air Raid” Assaults Like Sontag’s 9/11 Tirade

Sunlight and shadows across my
copy of MacLeish’s Air Raid

Well, only yesterday I wrote about the potentialities of broadcasting and blogging as means and modes of connecting with the world. Today I am going to mark the anniversary of an execrable “disconnect” by relating it to a disturbing episode in my life, a moment of outrage in a period of confusion and despair. Ready?

On this day, 27 October, in 1938, the Columbia Workshop laid an intellectual egg of such poor taste that I sometimes felt the only proper way of connecting to it would be to hurl it right back at its author, the American poet-pamphleteer Archibald MacLeish. The play produced by and broadcast over the US radio network CBS was “Air Raid,” an exercise in propagandist verse. Like “The War of the Worlds”, which aired a few days later over the same network, “Air Raid” entered the anti-fascist debate and commented on the political tensions then mounting in Europe by exploiting and fueling the anxieties of an American public divided between battle cries and isolationism. The nation’s enemies, such plays told in the abstract language to which pre-war radio playwrights were bound to adhere, were not quite so distant as to render their attacks futile.

In “Air Raid,” MacLeish went so far as to hold civilians whose lives were threatened or lost in fascist offensives responsible for their inaction. As in the previously discussed “Fall of the City,” the audience is taken to the scene of terror, listening in as carefree women, heedless of the warnings they receive, ar e going about their daily affairs until blown to bits by machine guns fired from above. The announcer, observing the raid from a secure post, reports and comments on the execution:

There’s the signal: the dip: they’ll
Dive: they’re ready to dive:
They’re steady: they’re heading down:
They’re dead on the town: they’re nosing:
They’re easing over: they’re over:
There they go: there they—

His coverage of the event is cut short by the stammering guns and the shrieking of women and ends in a boy’s calling of my name: “Harry! Harry! Harry!” I did not require such a prompt to feel personally offended.

MacLeish intellectualizing of terror and patronizing of the terrorized is the kind of disastrous argument that reminded me of Susan Sontag’s words shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center. In an article published in the New Yorker, Sontag lamented the “disconnect” between the “monstrous dose of reality” that was 9/11 and the “self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators.”

Sontag opined that the “voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public,” a public lacking in “historical awareness” and subjected instead to the “psychotherapy” of “confidence-building and grief management.” Arguing the insistence on America’s strength to be not “entirely consoling,” Sontag concluded: “Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.”

In retrospect, I find these words unremarkable; they have been uttered many times since. Living through the terror of those days in New York City, however, I was infuriated by such ill-timed chastising from afar (Sontag lived in Paris at the time). I sat down and cried and wrote a lengthy response to let out my anger, shared with the German friend who brought Sontag’s commentary to my attention:

Sie mag aus der Ferne spotten; sähe, fühlte, spürte sie die Stadt würde sie den New Yorkern kaum “Dummheit” vorwerfen.  Wenn ich ihr aus der Ferne auch weder Feigheit noch Dummheit unterstellen will, so muss ich doch feststellen, dass Abstand auch eine Freiheit von Anstand bedeuten kann.  Sontag schrieb einmal ein erfolgreiches, vielzitiertes, und feines Buch mit dem Titel Against Interpretation.  Sie täte gut daran, sich gegen ihre eigenen ‘Interpretationen’ zu sträuben.

In essence, I argued that Sontag should heed the words that formed the title of her book Against Interpretation, that she should have reserved her distant and distancing intellectualizing and her attacks on the supposedly infantile public and the media that pampered it for a period in which a bewildered public was more likely to stomach further humiliation and to respond with a kindness and dignity lacking in Sontag’s words to the unwise.

Attacking both the medium it employs and the masses it engages (that is, attempting to appeal to the latter by questioning the former), MacLeish’s “Air Raid,” like Sontag’s tirade, is a prime example of how not to connect.

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On This Day in 1993: Exit of Vincent Price Delayed by Diary Entry

Like Gwendolen Fairfax, I am wont to consult my diary. After all, “one should always have something sensational to read.” I will no doubt hear this line again very soon, when the Ridiculusmus production of The Importance of Being Earnest comes to town on 7 November. But I digress. Aside from being compelled by a desire to revel in the “sensational,” I stuck my nose into one of my old journals today to find out whether I had taken any notice of the passing of Vincent Price back on 25 October 1993. Though not particularly impressed by his acting in 1950s or ’60s horror films, I have always had an eager ear for the tone of his sophisticated, suave, and slightly sardonic voice.

Now, according to the notoriously selective and inaccurate accounts of the world’s goings-on and departures I scribbled into a series of black volumes over a decade prior to this my first public and somewhat more thoroughly fact-checked journal, Price gave up the ghost on 26 October 1993. My delayed response (or flawed chronicling) led me to remark upon the “uncannily” timed television broadcast of a Price biography on that day, a documentary that was part of the regular schedule, rather than one of those hastily squeezed in tributes. It was as if the obituary had been anticipated by some clairvoyant programming executive in the broadcasting house on haunted hill. Accuracy can be so soberingly unromantic.

Not so an exposure to Mr. Price’s voice. To this day, the mannered speech of the man who laughed to the beat of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” rings in my ears whenever I am in the mood for another adventure of The Saint; and, as this item in the broadcastellan archive attests, I am not infrequently drawn that way. The father of the Saint, Leslie Charteris, may have thought little of Price’s interpretation of Simon Templar (alias the “Robin Hood of modern crime”) and, aside from collecting royalties, had no involvement in the radio series when Price took over the role. It is still Price (rather than, say, Roger Moore) whom I identify most with the part.

These days, UK television viewers may take a gander at George Sanders in the Saint movies of the late 1930s (The Saint Strikes Back, for instance, was shown only last Sunday); but I keep missing them. No matter. In case you have checked out (or, thank you very much, participated in) the first broadcastellan poll and wondered who would rather give up the ocular than the olfactory sense—one of those benighted creatures was yours truly.

So, now that I have the calendric confusions cleared up and my senses prioritized, I shall recall Price to life tonight by listening to another one of his many radio performances. Say, which voice has been haunting you lately?

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Loving Mysteries: Between the Martin Mansion and Bleak House

Well, I am still hoping other internet tourists will join me in rediscovering I Love a Mystery beginning this Halloween (see previous post for details). I know, it might seem sacrilegious to ignore the anniversary of that most famous of all Halloween pranks, “The War of the Worlds,” in favor of Carlton E. Morse’s serial thriller. Actually, “The War” was waged on the night before Halloween (30 October 1938), which means that I can listen forward without remorse to reviewing the first installment of “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” a neo-gothic mystery starring Mercedes McCambridge (as the tortured Charity Martin) and Tony Randall (as Reggie Yorke, one of the three intrepid investigators, pictured above, who are called upon to examine the Martin’s rotten family tree). So, consider tuning in and coming along for the ride.

In the meantime, I am also looking forward to the new adaptation of Bleak House starring Charles Dance (as Mr. Tulkinghorn) and Gillian Anderson (as Lady Dedlock). It has been nearly ten years since last I read the novel, my favorite among Dickens’s works; so perhaps I won’t notice the liberties taken with the original. Beginning this Thursday on BBC One, the complex melodrama will be played out in fifteen parts, just like Morse’s “Thing.”

Not that the comparisons end there. There are deadly secrets, the proverbial skeletons in the closet, and a curse on both of those decidedly bleak houses, the Martin mansion and Dickens’s eponymous edifice. The overused label “soap opera” has been attached to the BBC production, along with other disclaimers, such as the introduction of new characters; whatever the terminology, serialization and bowdlerization are quite in keeping with Victorian practices.

I might put aside my copy of Don Quixote for the duration and reread Bleak House, now that the days are getting shorter and the winds are a-wuthering, if only to re-encounter the carefree Harold Skimpole and the careworn Richard Carstone, two characters of whom I once fancied myself some kind of composite.

Perhaps I’m someone else among the dramatis personae now; that’s one of the pleasures of rereading. As long as I won’t turn into Mr. Turveydrop. . . . Say, what kind of Dickensian character are you?