Tag: Emlyn Williams

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Let George Say It

I penned my first autobiography at the age of sixteen. With the bombast befitting an insecure teenager eager for validation, I called it a “memoir.” It was a short, handwritten volume I passed around to fellow students, a performance designed at once to justify, expose, and invent myself. Like so many pieces of juvenilia, those “memoirs” were destroyed in an act of reinvention, or, not to be fanciful, embarrassment. I fear that many of the instances I recorded, however embellished, edited or carefully selected my memories, may be far more difficult to recreate, faded as my recollections have during all those intervening years that have made me a stranger to my former selves. I seem to have made forgetting a virtue by looking at it as the ability to move on and start over as if from scratch.

Perhaps, one reason for my dwelling in and on the presumably out-of-date in a journal reflective of my readings, viewings, and listening experiences is that it allows me to discover myself in a researchable past other than that which is chronologically and biologically my own: movies, radio programs, books that precede my past and inform my present. To research my story, I must rely on a memory I dare not trust. When it comes to my early life, I have little to go on, other than flashes of dreamlike recollections.

One of the problems involving the autobiographical act is to arrive at a narrative frame that fits the picture without distorting, let alone creating, it. It is difficult to determine where an autobiography ought to end, considering that, as its writer, one is still in engaged in the creation of memories. One is alive and, apparently, compelled to prove it. A future event might call for an entirely new arrangement of facts—a life-changing event may lie ahead, rendering negligible much that seems important at present.

Not quite as problematic, but troublesome nonetheless, is the beginning. Does one begin with one’s family, with one’s ancestors, with a description of the birthplace that, presumably, shaped our early life? Should an autobiography start with an explanation, an apology for the hubris of taking oneself serious enough to warrant such a performance, or an acknowledgement of whomever we construe as our audience? Dear reader, is this my life? Should, as in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, the voice reflect the age, mind and intellect of the subject, the self turned object, in various stages of existence?

One man who knew how to begin was the aforementioned Emlyn Williams, born on this day, 26 November, in 1905; he grew up in a remote town in Wales, his parents hardly proficient in English, to become a well-known actor and playwright (a production of whose Night Must Fall I briefly discussed here), personae or roles that no doubt influenced his performance and may well have created the impetus to for it. He could count on an audience, a public that presumed and demanded to know him.

Williams’s lyrical introduction to George: An Early Autobiography (1961) is one that compels me both to read on and revisit the idea of writing my own life. Aware of the task at hand, of the challenges of starting, of devising a beginning reflective of one’s own start in life and the impossibilities of doing so ab ovo, it is disarmingly reflective:

The world was waiting. Waiting for me, to whisper my incantations. “I am George Emlyn Williams and . . .” I was lying with my head on my fist on morning grass, dry of dew and warm with the first heat of the year. All was still, even the stalks clutched in my hot fingers. I had come up into the fields to gather shaking-grass, a week with a hundred beads tremulous to the touch, which my mother would inter in two vases where it would frugally desiccate and gather dust forever. Spring smells and earth feelings crept into my seven-year-old boy; nine-tenths innocent, one-tenth conscient, it responded. I rolled one cheek up till it closed an eye, and squinted down at the sunlit village. A dog lay asleep in the road. Mrs. Jones South Africa was hanging washing, and quavering a hymn. Cassie hung on their gate and called for Ifor. “Time to go to the well!” The bleat of a sheep. A bird called, careless, mindless. Eighteen inches from my eye, a tawny baby frog was about to leap. It waited.

Everything waited: the hymn had ceased, the bird was dumb and suspended. “I was born November the 26th 1905 and the world was completed at midnight on Saturday July the 10th 4004—our Bible stated the year at the top of page one, the rest I felt free to add—“and has been going ever since, through Genesis Revelation the six wives of Henry the Eighth the Guillotine and the Diamond Jubilee right until this minute 10 AM. Sunday April the 14th 1912, when the world has stopped. The sun will not set tonight, or ever again, and I am the only one who knows.”

No sound: the spool of time has run down, the century is nipped in the bud. I shall never grow up, or old, but shall lie on the grass forever, a mummy of a boy with nestling in the middle of it a nameless warmth like the slow heat inside straw. This is the eternal morning.

The frog jumped. Cassie called again. I scrambled up, brushed my best knickerbockers, pulled the black stockings up inside them, raced down and hopped between my water buckets into the wooden square which kept them well apart so as not to splash. The sun did set, and by the time it rose next morning the Titanic had been sunk. If the world had stopped, they would not have drowned; I thought about it for a day.

The century, un-nipped, has crept forward, and the knickerbockers are no more. They encased one brother till he burst out of them, then another till they fell exhausted away from him, turned into floor rags and at last were decently burned. But I am still here, not yet decently burned or a floor rag or even exhausted, George Emlyn Williams, born November the 26th, 1905.

Autobiographies are performances, to be sure; but the audience, however large, also includes the one in the scrutinizing self in the mirror. Staring at it, it gives me no hints as to how, or whether, to write one. Regardless of all the personal reflections I have offered in this journal, I no longer have the confidence, or the illusions, of a sixteen year old who presumes that his life matters; nor is mine the life of a man like Emlyn Williams, who did.

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Enter Clemence Dane

Okay, so I got momentarily distracted tonight watching American Idol. It’s the only television show I am following these days; but immediately after the twelve anxious men have sung their way into or out of the finals (we are about two days late here in Britain), I am going to lower the blind to screen Hitchcock’s Murder! The arrival of the Gracie Fields DVD set earlier this week has let to a change in my movie diet, with Hollywood fare being put on ice for the duration. Not that Fields’s Love, Life and Laughter was such a gem; it struck me as a poor, distant cousin of The Smiling Lieutenant (recently released on DVD in the US). Last night, I screened Alfred Hitchcock’s peculiar romance Rich and Strange (1931). So, when I noticed that today marks the anniversary of the birth of Clemence Dane, co-author of Enter Sir John, the novel upon which Hitchcock’s Murder! is based, I knew what we would be watching tonight.

Born in England on this day, 21 February, in 1888, the woman who called herself Clemence Dane was a prolific and highly popular novelist-playwright whose works were adapted for screen and radio. The Campbell Playhouse, for instance, presented a dramatization of Dane’s 1931 novel Broome Stages, starring Helen Hayes. Dane’s best-known work, A Bill of Divorcement (which you may read here), was produced by the Theater Guild (1 December 1946) and adapted for Studio One (29 July 1947).

Dane’s screenplays were reworked for broadcasting as well; the Lux Radio Theater soundstaged both “The Sidewalks of London” (12 February 1940) and ”Vacation from Marriage” (26 May 1947).

What I did not know until today is that, like W. H. Auden (to acknowledge the birthday of another, far more enduring writer), Dane also conceived plays especially designed for listening. Did they “do” radio? is a question invariably on my mind when I consider the cultural contributions of 20th-century writers and actors who made a name for themselves in other branches of the performing arts. The answer, in Dane’s case, came to me from this latest addition to my bookshelves, British Radio Drama, 1922-1956 (1957) by BBC radio drama department head Val Gielgud (last featured here).

According to Gielgud, Dane’s The Saviours, was “without doubt” the “most distinguished contribution to Radio Drama during 1941.” Why these plays are no longer presented by the BBC is a mystery to me. Despite the continued popularity of radio drama in Britain, recordings of classic broadcasts are far more difficult to come by, whereas copies of the published scripts for The Saviours, a series of seven propaganda plays on the theme stated in the title, are readily available in second-hand bookstores online. Published radio plays, of course, are always second hand.

So, I resort to an irreverent account by playwright-actor Emlyn Williams (aforementioned) of his experience being cast by Gielgud in one of Dane’s earlier play, Will Shakespeare: An Invention in Four Acts (1921), broadcast in 1937 on the anniversary of the Bard’s birth (23 April). “In spite of the talkies,” Williams remarks in his autobiography Emlyn, “British radio was still a momentous force.” The thought of going “live” before an unseen audience of three million people was “paralysing.” Worse still was the atmosphere in the soundproof studio, a “dungeon” filled with microphones resembling a “regiment of robots,” each ded eye turnd bright red and stared at its victims.”

Present in the studio was Clemence Dane, whom Williams describes as an

outsize author with a handsome generous face topped by hair as overflowing as her talent.  It had been scooped hastily back into a bun and seemed about to come tumbling down and be sat on.

In a cascade of black to the floor, with a corsage of big happy flowers which accentuated her size, she looked as if, were the world not larger than she was, she would cradle it in her lap.  A photographer advanced to arrange the cast round her chair, just as she was handed a vast bouquet which she embraced with a beautiful smile.  She was a mother at a prize-giving where all her children had ended up First.

After all, this formidable woman is rumored to be the model for Madame Arcati, the delightfully eccentric psychic in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (discussed here). Thanks to Williams’s first-hand account, I can picture Clemence Dane in the studio, even if I am not likely ever to hear her plays for radio. To think that the world is dead to the theatrical events of the air, that these offerings are being kept out of earshot. It’s enough to make a body scream bloody Murder!

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In My Library: Emlyn (1973)

Like the man in the old Schlitz commercials says, “I was curious.” So, earlier this week, I went to the local second-hand bookstore in search of George, an autobiography of actor-playwright Emlyn Williams. It had been recommended to me at the recent Fflics film festival here in Aberystwyth as the insightful source of The Corn Is Green, a play and movie about the relationship between a Welsh student and his English teacher. The shelves of Ystwyth Books (shown here in a picture I found on flickr) are well stocked with titles on Welsh history and culture.

Not that titles about Hollywood or radio are wanting. In fact, the first purchase I made in this country shortly after moving here in November 2004 was made in that very store. It was a book on radio writing that had just come out (new releases can be found downstairs). Radio writing? In 2004? There was a chance, I thought, that I might feel at home here, eventually.

Anyway, there was no sign of George. The shop’s new proprietor offered to descend into the basement to check the inventory with which he is as yet not entirely familiar. After a few minutes, he emerged with Emlyn, subtitled a “Sequel” to George. Would I want it, not having been introduced to George (Williams’s other first name)? I opened the book, and it seemed to speak to me and anticipate my doubts:

I don’t think I’ll read this—it says it’s a sequel and I didn’t read the first one so I’d feel out of it from the first page . . .

And even if you did read “the first one,” your mind needs refreshing. It is up to me to ensure that the reader need know nothing of George by supplying rapid salient information about my life up to April 1927.

An author so forthright and accommodating deserves to be given a chance, I thought. Then I read on, sensing that what I wanted to learn from and about the playwright of Night Must Fall (and He Was Born Gay) was something he might not wish to share:

Before I do so, one thing: at the moment when I embarked on the “first one” I decided I would travel no further than the age of twenty-one, feeling that while a writer’s first two decades might be of interest, the third must present a formidable task.  Can he be as honest about it?

I knew that without honesty the story would deteriorate into a parade of professional ventures interspersed with cautious anecdotes.  The alternative must be a marriage between Candour and Taste, with the continuous likelihood of one partner pushing the other out of bed; even then, it would have to be a different book.

A “different” book. That is just what I expect from a self-conscious gay Welshman with a penchant for serial killers. Will he be honest about “it”? Will he lie in bed with Candour or lie about his bedfellow with Taste? Is this autobiography apologia or play-acting, an author-actor’s chance to don masks of his own design? We think of truth as being naked; but the act of self-exposure, the dropping of guises, the whole tease of the strip itself is performance.

Now, Emlyn, subtitled A Sequel to George, is one of those memoirs whose author is kind enough to provide an index, allowing those as impatient as I am to extract from the text what interests them most without having to go to so many parties, rehearsals, and opening nights. The first thing on my mind was not the open secret of Williams’s private life, but anything relating to Night Must Fall, the thriller I had seen on stage during the centenary of Williams’s birth back in 2005.

Williams recalls how the play came about and how, during a party at the house of fellow actor-playwright Frank Vosper, he discovered that his host appeared to be writing a similar thriller, also involving the case of murderer Patrick Mahon. Vosper’s play was titled Love From a Stranger, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s story “Philomel Cottage.”

Murder must out. Must Mr. Williams?

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Next Stop, Proud Valley

How odd, I thought, when I heard myself saying that, instead of screening our customary late night movie, I would retire early because . . . I had a film to catch. The Fflics festival (announced a few weeks ago) got underway today here in Wales and we have tickets for three of the screenings tomorrow. The first film on our agenda, Proud Valley (1940), starring Paul Robeson, will be shown at 10 AM. Robeson’s Welsh connections were still unknown to me when first I posted his picture here; but I have been looking forward to an occasion to explore this bond of brotherhood for quite some time now.

At noon, we are going to emerge from the mineshafts of Proud Valley (also known as The Tunnel) to take in the propaganda film The Silent Village (1943), a recreation of the aforementioned Lidice massacre on Welsh soil. I am equipped with Eduard Stehlík’s account of the 1942 raid on the Czech village, a book I discovered a few weeks ago on a tour of the Jewish Quarter in Prague.

What follows is a detour to Hollywood with Bette Davis as a teacher in a Welsh mining town in The Corn Is Green (1945), based on a play by Welsh actor-dramatist Emlyn Williams. I wonder whether I will be able to spot radio actors John Dehner and Rhoda Williams (whom I once met during an old-time radio convention in Newark) in a cast that is all over the map and as authentic as the one headed by Olivia de Havilland in the 12 June 1950 Lux Radio Theater adaptation of Corn, in which Ms. Williams may also be heard.

In between these courses of acetate treats we might just manage to grab a bite to eat and perhaps get a chance to chat with our friend, silent movie composer and radio playwright Neil Brand, who will accompany Maurice Elvey’s long-lost Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918) at the festival on Saturday evening.

As much as I am looking forward to a day at the pictures, I hope the antemeridian screenings won’t render my cinematic experience an academic one, let alone a series of barely suppressed yawns. Then again, I can count on Mr. Robeson to stir me with his rendition of “Deep River” . . .

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Mining Culture: The Welsh in Hollywood

It was too pleasant an afternoon not to be warming to it. The outdoors, I mean. Though all thumbs (and not one of them green), I nonetheless tried my hands at gardening again, transplanting English-grown Californian Lilac into Welsh soil. Unless deterred by the vagaries of what goes for “vernal” here in Wales, I shall probably spend more time tending to the plants than to this journal next week, when the storm-frayed and patched-up telephone lines to our house are scheduled to be cut down and replaced, a spring renewal of telecommunications during which service is likely to be suspended.

No internet, no landline, and no traffic along the already quiet lane leading to this hermitage I call home—it’s “a proper place for a murder.” That is how the setting of Night Must Fall was described when on this day, 27 March, in 1948, the famous and oft revived thriller by Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams was performed on the US radio thriller anthology Suspense.

Along with two members of the original (1935) London cast—Dame May Whitty (as Mrs. Bramson) and Matthew Boulton (as the inspector)—Robert Montgomery was heard in the role of Dan, the lady killer he had played in the 1937 film adaptation. As I realized after seeing it on stage, Night Must Fall is not your common crop of a crime melodrama. It goes beyond the question of whether or not the victim will die by asking us whether she ought to, by making us eager for the “must” of her demise and examine the decline and “fall” of our own civilized morality. As a psychological and ethical puzzler, it translates well into other languages and media.

Now, Night falls in Essex, England, rather than the wild west of Britain; but according to Williams’s stage directions, the character of “Baby-face” Dan “speaks with a rough accent” that, unlike Montgomery’s, is “more Welsh than anything else.” On Broadway as on the London stage, this “sort of Welsh” Dan (as his girlfriend describes him) was voiced by the very Welshman who created him.

In an acting career spanning six decades, Williams was a frequent player in (mainly British) film, on stage and television; on US radio, he was heard in one of Norman Corwin’s plays for the United Nations. I recently spotted him in The Citadel (1938), his voice lending authenticity to the depiction of life in a Welsh mining town rendered unconvincing by the casting of Hollywood productions like John Ford’s Academy Award-winning How Green Was My Valley (another cinema classic I caught up with this year) or The Corn Is Green. The latter is based on an autobiographical play by Williams; but with stars like Bette Davis (on screen) and Claudette Colbert (on radio, nearly a decade later) taking on the role of a Welsh schoolteacher, it is the audience who is expected to be green.

Having lived in this country for well over two years now, I am all ears for representations and representatives of Wales in popular culture, whether in British cinema or American radio drama. What remains of this country once its landscape, language, and lore are forced through the filter of the camera or microphone, once it is translated by a popular medium like film and transferred to an international audience? During the next few months, leading up to a Welsh film festival hosted by the National Screen and Sound Archive here in Aberystwyth, I am going to mull over such matters from time to time.

To be sure, the landscape and culture of Wales have changed considerably since A. J. Cronyn’s Citadel and Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley were bestsellers in the US back in 1937-38 and 1940, respectively. Prominently featured in 20th-century popular culture (including the previously discussed “Comedy of Danger,” reputedly the first play written for radio), the mines have been shut down years ago and wind farms have replaced collieries. Today, however, the BBC reported that coal mining is making a comeback here, as the first “deep mine” is set to open in over three decades. Could this mean that Ms. Zeta-Jones is going back to her Welsh roots for a Hollywood returns to the Citadel, the Valley or other recycled Corn?