“Keeping up with the out-of-date” am I? Well, sometimes the motto I chose for this journal hits home like a slap in the face. Not a knock-out punch, mind. Just the kind of cuff that crimsons the cheek all the more because it is unnervingly public. Now, I am not slap-happy. If I keep going way back for more and go on reflecting at length on the ostensibly passé that others could care less about it is because, to my mind, time is not of the essence. That lingering tingle is, and I sting easily.
Whether or not we engage with it, there is no out-of-date as long as our memory serves. Or, rather, it dictates, like a fingerpost redirecting us into the remotest regions of our mental landscape. When it comes to our past, it matters little how long ago an experience dates back or however long in the tooth we are getting. The past can still get at us, provided we are fortunate enough—if indeed we feel quite so appreciative—to have faculties that keep us from letting bygones be … well, you know the rest.
Cat People (1942) is a legendary and much-loved B-movie […] that, as Geoffrey O’Brien has argued in “Darkness Betrayed,” his notes on the Blu-ray release of Jacques Tourneur’s fantasy film, “manages, over multiple viewings, to break free from its own legend.” Despite the fact that viewers—professional critics, academics and horror film enthusiasts alike—“have sifted every shot and every situation of this seventy-three-minute feature,” O’Brien adds, a “fundamental mysteriousness remains, a slippery unwillingness to submit to final explanation.”
There is no danger of that slippage into certainty happening here. My mind, too, has a “slippery” nature. It is resistant to, and indeed incapable of, any thought amounting to an “explanation” that could possibly be taken for a “final” solution—a terminal reasoning that, bearing my Germany ancestry in mind, has demonstrably shown to bring about and justify no end of horrors.
A lack of understanding: Irena and Oliver
Cat People was produced at a particular time of uncertainty—and of particular uncertainties—about democratically enshrined equalities, about the limits of reason and the extent to which the stirring of irrational fear could be instrumental in the unfolding of millionfold death. It is fantasy that, rather than being escapist, gets us to the core of uncertainties about the state of humanity, the doubtful definition and futurity of which, a year after the raid on Pearl Harbor and the end of US isolationism, many a cat got many a tongue.
Cat People is “fantastic” in the way the term was proposed by Tzvetan Todorov. In his seminal study The Fantastic(1973), Todorov argues that the phrase “I nearly reached the point of believing” constitutes the “formula” that “sums up the spirit” he calls “fantastic.” Perhaps, that thought, being proposed so declaratively and summarily, itself sounds rather too conclusive. Subverting such reasoning, the “fantastic” exists only because it resists any summing up. To grasp it in this way is to deny it. Its existence is predicated on its elusiveness, on its perceived indeterminacy.
Early in 2023, I participated in a workshop at Aberystwyth University exploring collectibles and the collection of ephemera. I was the only participant, among academics and museum staff, to talk about my private collection of ephemera. So as to give that fruit fly of a presentation an afterlife, I have gathered my notes for this entry in my journal, which, after all, was created for the purpose of ‘keeping up with the out-of-date.’
The presentation was titled “Making It Matter: Ephemerabilia, Queer Identity, and the Imperative of Being Out of Touch.”
I know, titles are like jokes. If you have to explain them, they don’t work. But, here goes:
“Ephemerabilia,” meaning, the love of the fugitive, the fragile, and perhaps even the futile. All of the above – which may apply to any of our lives and bodies. All of the above – but not ‘trivial.’ Nothing is trivial in itself. Just like nothing is memorable in itself. Someone has to make it matter.
For that reason, the word “minor” in Maurice Rickards’ definition of ephemera is problematic, as it devalues what it defines. To quote myself: “Trivia is knowledge we refuse the potential to matter,” whereas “Memorabilia is matter we grant the capacity to mean differently.”
The need to make something matter and mean something, something else, no matter what, is, to me, intimately bound up with queer identity, with my sense of being, thinking, feeling, and loving differently.
And that is where, to me, the compulsion of being out of touch comes in: being drawn to what has been relegated to the margins, to matter that has been disregarded and discarded as presumably nonessential or unrepresentative.
I could have put the last two words in parenthesis; because sharing my passion for the untouchable – or the “not touched much lately” – means coming out with what drives me. Making something neglected and presumably immaterial matter and mean something anew is an act of reification.
It means saying I matter. But the question I keep asking myself, in relation to my collection habits, is “What’s the matter with me?”
Let’s say I say “I am a collector.” Which question should I expect to follow? Is it “What are you collecting?” How about: “Why are you collecting?” “Why do you collect what you collect?”
What I collect is stated – and illustrated – on my website. I collect ephemera related to products of what once was popular entertainment – early-to-mid twentieth-century, mainly US American, film, theatre and radio – that are lesser-known now. I call it “unpopular culture.”
My collection is all fairly methodically put into actual and virtual drawers. Unlike in this scenario.
The image on the left shows my ex’s apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I once lived there, for about fifteen years, and, for over 33 years now I have stayed at that place whenever I am in the city.
Due to the pandemic, I hadn’t been back in three years. In the fall of 2022, my ex had a heart attack just days before I was set to arrive there. I looked after the apartment while visiting him at the hospital. Anyway, I was shocked when I saw the place in such disarray. My ex has always been a hoarder. But the place had become almost unnavigable in the intervening years.
Obviously, hoarding is not collecting. But is it so obvious? Is the distinction perhaps too obvious? Sure, hoarding is chaotic. It is indiscriminate, whereas collecting is orderly and discerning. Collections are curated. whereas the compulsion of the hoarder may strike us as an infliction, an illness that may or may not be curable.
Curating is derived from the Latin word “curare,” meaning to care. Does it follow that the hoarder is careless? While staying in my ex’s apartment, I took it upon myself to discard of some items I deemed trash.
Given that chaos, I thought my ex would never notice. When my ex returned to the apartment after three months of intensive care, hospital care and aftercare, he emailed me and inquired about some of the objects I had discarded.
And he was so incensed about my attempt at tidying that he pretty much ended our 33-year-old friendship.
Seriously, to give up a friendship over a pile of cheap Chinese take-away containers, most of them without matching lids? That struck me as unreasonable, disproportionate.
But the fact that my ex remembered where what is in that chaos made me rethink the relationship between hoarding and collecting.
And it made me question whether collecting is not like hoarding in its illogical, perhaps even pathological clinging to matter that may not matter to most. Something that takes up so much time and space, it can threaten to diminish rather than enrich our experience of life.
Possessions can take possession of us. This is not vanity. It is not conspicuous consumption. For gay men born into decades of intolerance and legal discrimination, it may be a stab at making our existence more concrete and at leaving a trace or trail of it behind. I should have known better than to mess with the mess that I found.
Powell had no offspring, even though he married toward the end of his short life. Stating his intention to leave his collection to our museum, he referred to it as all he possessed of bigotry and virtue, meaning, bijouterie and vertu – trinket and treasure.
Powell left the lot to what is now Aberystwyth University. In his book collection, for instance, was a popular volume called Book of Wonderful Characters, which contains a short account of the life of Chevalier D’Eon, who lived as a crossdresser for half a century and to whom we owe the term “eonism.”
I sensed that Powell created through that bequest a diary of sorts – an invitation, by way of visual and material clues among the objects he once possessed, to go in search of him.
The “it” in “making it matter” refers less to the collection than it does to the collector. Powell did not curate his collection to take care that what might reflect poorly on his character or cause suspicion as to his tastes. To filter anything out would mean to erase what was at the core of his being, which is why Powell initially insisted that a museum be built to house it and that the collection be kept in one place, Aberystwyth, in its entirety.
He did not want to disappear behind his collection but reappear through it. He wanted to be become readable, to be understood. The Powell case made me more aware of the relationship between the private act of collecting and the public act of sharing a collection, of remaining visible through one’s collection.
Powell’s desire to remain visible, become readable and be understood becomes clearer to me in the contemporary periodicals he bequeathed to our University. Here, he did not give us the lot – the magazines, cover to cover – but he cut out which articles he wanted to preserve and bound them in leather. There is no telling whether he read the articles. But it is clear that he thought they mattered and should matter to others. And they are quite eclectic, ranging from articles on animal cruelty to drunkenness and insanity.
Articles on ‘Consanguinity in Marriage’ and ‘Marriages between First Cousins in England and Their Effects,’ which were no doubt of particular interest to him because his grandmothers were sisters and his parents first cousins.
Powell appeared to have been drawing attention to his struggle to figure out who he was and why he was the way he was.
‘Do we collect things simply to indulge our passion for them? If so, why make a display of that passion? Showcasing seems calculated to raise certain objects to the status of ‘collectibles’ so as to advance the collector as connoisseur. And yet, might not the urge to exhibit our personal belongings be rather more elemental?’
What are ‘collectibles’? What is collectible? Take, for instance, two different but related types of objects in my collection. Cigarette cards of once well-known but now mostly forgotten performers, in this case radio stars. As well as movie posters and lobby cards of films of roughly that same period.
Both feature performers from the world of popular – or now less popular – entertainment. Both are finite. Lobby cards were generally produced in sets of eight. Cigarette cards in sets of up to fifty.
The main difference is that cigarette cards were designed to be collected. They were meant to be habit-forming, to encourage addiction.
Lobby cards on the other hand were not designed as collectibles. In fact, as the fine print states, collecting them was prohibited by the studios whose property they remained.
By now, the industry that cigarette cards once served has become detached from them. They no longer advertise and encourage addictive products, which makes them candidates for my belated affection, and which makes it possible for me to make them matter differently.
I became intrigued by the French-born US American actress watching a movie on television with my grandmother when I was 8 or 9. I didn’t start collecting until decades later. Nor did I know then that Colbert was rumoured to be queer.
My collection is also a catalogue of the love: more than 90% of my collection has been gifted to me by gay men, and almost all of which by my husband. Original film posters are now almost out of my league as a collector.
I do not collect objects because of their monetary value, of which, due to the fact that the items were given to me, I often have no knowledge. I have always been attracted to what is of little value to others.
A queer friend told me once that, as a child, he used to pick the crayon no other kid would pick up – the least popular colour. Embracing neglected objects to me is related to the feeling of having been unwanted and misunderstood as a child.
Exhibiting my collection, I realized just how intimate collecting is. I was very self-conscious about opening my drawers to display those objects – paper dolls, mass-produced pictures of performers few people today still relate to. When I tried to exhibit the cigarette cards, I also realized they were too small to be impactful or readable for display.
So I created a slideshow of them. There are objects in my collection that matter more once they are dematerialized. I scan many books and scripts so that I need no longer handle the physical artifact. It preserves the object. But it also makes the object less meaningful if what matters is the visual or written information it conveys. Not that I dispose of ephemera in my collection once I have scanned them.
The most ephemeral items in my collection are literally untouchable. They are digitized sound recordings. The cigarette cards of radio performers are, like scripts and contemporary books on radio, not the real thing. They are a means to materialise the immaterial culture they commemorate: the world of sound broadcasting.
My (Im)memorabilia exhibition contained a listening station and featured a soundtrack of clips on a loop. They are from my collection of audio recordings, now widely available online. The files contain recordings of radio broadcasts from the 1930s to 1950s, most of them plays, almost all of which were part of episodes of series or chapters of serials.
The vast majority of plays were also broadcast only a single time. Despite the recordings that gradually materialized from the vaults, they were as ephemeral as soundwaves. That they survive at all is owing to their commercial value.
The recordings are evidence for the sponsor that the programme they funded actually existed and could be inspected – or audited. As cultural products they were not valued. They still are not valued much. They certainly never received the scrutiny or status accorded to motion pictures or television programmes.
I organize the folders alphabetically by each series title.
And each subfolder contains recordings of broadcasts from those series. Some subfolders contain close to one thousand recordings per series. Cataloguing these immaterial objects, which I have written about at some length in my study Immaterial Culture and on my blog broadcastellan, involves adding and correcting information about talents involved in a broadcast play; verifying air dates by referencing old newspapers and magazines; checking for sound quality and recording speed; and replacing files with newer, cleaner, more authentic recordings.
It is not possible to listen to all of those recordings in full. There are now over 30,000 of them. It is almost impossible to keep track of them.
Unlike my ex, I have forgotten about many of the items in my collection. But like my ex, I would be very upset if only a single item went missing. Most of these recordings are readily available on the internet, copyright being a murky issue. In my writing, I have argued for their cultural significance, their artistic merit. But I have not been successful in making a career out of my caring. I am wary of intellectualising my desire, and I am suspicious of such attempt by academics.
The difference between hoarding and collecting lies in the adding of value. Hoarding is an act of accumulation. Collecting is an act of accretion, of value added.
The ‘imperative’ in my title is the imperative of the matter – what drives us, what makes us who we are. The ‘it’ in “Making it Matter” refers both to the ephemeron and the life of its collector who deems it worth preserving. That my efforts have been futile only seems to fuel a desire that has been termed “The Queer Art of Failure.”
As I browsed those old albums, I was reminded of an unsettling homecoming in 2022, when, on a dark December afternoon, I returned to my mother’s house for the first time in about thirty-four years. I had lived in that house – one in a row of unassuming bungalows in a small town in the dull flatness of North-Rhine Westphalia – for about fifteen years, during which time, in the process of growing up that many deem concluded all too prematurely, I gathered a great many memories, not many of them great, that made me eager to forget the place. And although my skin never developed the thickness of an elephant’s hide, I cannot but remember.
You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe reminds us; but when we do return to the places we once called home – whether by choice or not – it can hit home hard that whatever home may be is a construct the mind makes even when it is not made up on that point. A lot of what happened or befell us where we come back for a second or umpteenth look is bound to topple from the shelves to which we relegated some of those none-too-precious but relentlessly durable mental keepsakes.
The living room in my parents’ house was never my place, even though it held several attractions: a good stereo system, courtesy of my maternal grandmother, and, after years of resistance from my father, who held that the technology had not been perfected yet, a colour television set. My room was more of a listening post; apart from drawings I made, the comics I consumed and the magazines I scoured for material to luxuriate in, vivid dreams were produced there, many with the aid of a radio and cassette recorder.
Since then, my Kinderzimmer had been repurposed, although its current state said nothing more distinctly about its present purpose than “spare.” None of the cheap furnishings had survived, and the change of décor did little to revive, revise or confirm the images that, originating there, I had been carrying in my mind since the late 1980s.
It was the most private place in the house – the shared bathroom – that brought back the identity crises I experienced growing up queer: the shame of developing breasts that waited long for the development of pectoral muscles; the attempts at concealing the unseemly tissue by stretching my t-shirts and tying them around my genitals; the anxieties that caused me to scratch the skin off my ankles that, raw and oozy, were then soaked, doctor’s orders, in a bidet filled with salty water.
Memories tend to come back faster and with greater force when we return to the places where there were made. That was certainly the case when I stepped into Mutti’s abode (my father having left and since died decades ago). The interior was like a time capsule. Not only the furniture was unchanged, but all the bric-a-brac was still in the same spots my mother had set aside for their display and regular dusting.
The self-exploration that happened in that room also took a creative turn, as, transitioning from adolescence to dreaded adulthood, I took what I now call retroactive selfies: photographs of my body that I initially produced mainly for my eyes only but that I am now, in this post, making public for the first time via the social medium of blogging so as further to blur boundaries the maintenance of which can cause so much sustained and needless suffering.
Once we do decide to “come out,” we soon realize that we do not come out once only: we must do so over and over again, and each time we come out – and come out looking – differently, like an inadvertent burst of digital photographs that, owing to a finger staying put too long, shows our poses changing and our masks slipping.
Excusing myself from the dinner table during my short visit to my mother’s, I secreted myself in the bathroom, that anti-parlour of abjection. Not that I needed to go. What I needed was to go look at myself in the mirror that, in my youth, became a lens of self-exploration. I needed to return to the spot where I had once stood and posed – donning masks and dappled in spraypainted dots – a young person, once called “the battle of the sexes” by a classmate, learning to live in and with the strangeness of a changing body, an organism that I seemed to be invading and that rejected me as much as I was rejecting it.
Uneasy, curious and ever self-reflexive, the boy in the avocado bathroom is not gone, though none may recognize him now. He is a persona still grappling with the challenge of achieving personhood: a retroactive selfie.
My memory is poor, generally, and getting worse. My desire to remember the forgotten – the ostensibly unmemorable – remains strong. It is a love rooted in the need to champion the unloved, or, rather, the dis-loved, and to abandon myself to the abandoned. It is a queer thing, to my thinking, which is queer always and could not be otherwise. To love, perversely, what has been discarded or deemed unworthy of consideration, means disregarding what is widely held to matter and instead be drawn – draw on and draw out – what is devalued as immaterial. It involves questioning systems of valuation and creating oppositional values.
Commenced in 2005, this journal was dedicated to what I termed “unpopular culture,” the uncollected leftovers that linger on a trash heap beyond our mythical collective memory. To this day, down to my current project, Asphalt Expressionism – a curated collection of images engaging with the visual culture of New York City sidewalks – I carry on caring about the uncared-for and neglected, the everyday past which others tend to walk without taking notice.
There is no such thing as trivial matter. Nothing is negligible in itself. What makes something worthless is not a particular quality or lack thereof. Rather, it is an attitude, an approach, a judgment – itself often a product of a cultural conditioning. Nothing is intrinsically trivial, but anything may be trivialized. As I put it, years ago, when I curated (Im)memorabilia, an exhibition largely of mass-produced prints entirely from my collection – “Trivia is knowledge we refuse the potential to matter,” whereas “Memorabilia is matter we grant the capacity to mean differently.”
Low as a Kyte? A 1934 Wills’s Cigarette card featuring Sydney Kyte, a bandleader to whom no Wikipedia page is dedicated. The card sells online for under £1.
A 1930s cigarette card, for instance, may have once served the purpose of boosting sales by prompting smokers to collect cheaply mass-produced images of film stars or flowers or tropical fish. Collecting them nearly a century later – long after the advertising campaign has folded and the image has become removed from the product it was designed to promote – means to extend the lives of such devalued objects by moving them into the sphere of our own temporary existence of which they in turn become extensions.
Whether or not we take measures to preserve their afterlife, we instill collectibles with new meaning, give them value by investing them with our longings. I, for one, never regard my belongings as financial investments; I do not collect calculatedly, anticipating that what I gather might be the worth something to someone else some day.
I also refuse to intellectualize my desires; I am wary of turning passion into an academic exercise. That is, I do not rescue the marginalized for the purpose of demarginalizing my own existence by convincing others of the cultural value or historical significance of devalued objects – and of the case I make for their value. Still, there is that longing to be loved, to feel validated, for all the reasons that many, I suspect, would regard as wrong.
Why waste time on what is waste? Why dig up – and dig – what has become infra-dig through the process of devaluing, a hostile attitude toward the multiple, the unoriginal and commercially tainted to which we appear to be conditioned in a capitalist system that makes us feel lesser for consuming the mass-produced within our means so that we aim to live beyond those means, always abandoning one product for another supposedly superior? There can be no upgrading without degradation, no aspiration without a looking down at what has been relegated to refuse.
I remember a gay friend telling me, decades ago, that when he was a child, drawing in kindergarten or elementary with other children, he would pick the color that was least liked by his fellow creatives. I did the same thing when toys were being shared. This unwanted thing could be me – this is me – is what must have gone through my mind when I took temporary ownership of the object of just about nobody’s affection. And this, I believe, is at the heart of my impulse to make keepsakes of the largely forsaken.
I started writing this on the one-hundredth anniversary of the first radio broadcast in Britain – 14 November 1922 – by what was then not yet the BBC. Sound, after all, is the ultimate ephemera, fleeting if uncollected, lost if not cared for. The BBC used to erase recordings of its broadcasts, turning the potentially memorable into the immemorabilia beyond my grasp, and, in turn, turning my determination to lift them into my presence into futile longing, a nostalgia for the unrecoverable past.
“As all the pleasures of intellect arise from the association of ideas,” Richard Payne Knight reasoned in An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805), “the more the materials of association are multiplied, the more will the sphere of these pleasures be enlarged.” He argued that, to a
mind richly stored, almost every object of nature or art, that presents itself to the sense either excites fresh trains and combinations of ideas, or vivifies and strengthens those which existed before: so that recollection enhances enjoyment, and enjoyment brightens recollection.
While I am not convinced that the “association of ideas” always brings “pleasures” or ‘brightens recollection” – experiences that are not strictly a matter of “intellect” to begin with – I am so prone to raids on the store of memories, in varying states of neglect and disrepair, that any and all matter may turn up and, often unexpectedly, turn into reassembled “materials of association.”
Tracing the proverbial dots that speckle – or perhaps constitute – my mindscape, I invariably connect the tell-tale marks that, like splotches of blood, lead right to the heart of what is the matter with me, and, without any recourse to science, make themselves felt to match my DNA. I am dotty that way.
Call it egocentrism, call it empathy, such provoked but uncalled-for recall can lead to discoveries decidedly beyond “enjoyment.” The compulsion to relate – to find associations relevant and revelatory rather than beside whatever the point of anything may be, according to some – keeps driving home that the past, however processed or pasteurized, like spilled milk made longer-lasting to be cried over anew – keeps repeating on us. Hold our tongue as we may, we can still taste it. I am tasting it now.
“Theater Is Not for Fags,” the sign reads. It was brandished, among other such boards, in a rather unconvincing crowd scene in “The Other Vibrator,” the possibly well-intentioned but insipid eleventh episode of Grace and Frankie’s third season, with which I eventually caught up only a few days ago. The morning after, I finished reading Ngaio Marsh’s Killer Dolphin (1966). And the way that my wayward mind works, I put it down with that slogan in mind.
Retitled Death at the Dolphin, Marsh’s mystery novel was published in Britain in 1967, half a century before the Grace and Frankie episode first aired. That means it came before the public just as the Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalized consensual – and private – homosexual acts among adult males in England and Wales. This being Gay Pride month, I am perhaps especially alert to anxieties surrounding gender and queer identity. At any rate, I detected an unease – or a playful response to public misgivings, actual or perceived –about homosexuality in Marsh’s narrative, which features a single gay character, and a minor one at that, while most of the other players – actors and creatives all – are carefully coupled in more or less, and mostly less, cosy heterosexual bonds.
Could it be, I wondered, that Marsh, herself a theater director, was sharing the sentiment that public playhouses – in swinging London, to boot – are not a platform for gay men?
The illusion of the stage. The magic of the movies. The glamour of fashion. In a career spanning half a century, Angus McBean (1904–1990) turned instances of make-believe and masquerade into enduring records of enchantment.
Poster design by Neil Holland, from a photograph of Angus McBean by Robert Greetham
McBean was born and raised in South Wales. His father had worked in the collieries. Encouraged by his mother to make art his life, McBean moved to London. After working in banking and retail, he became a theatrical mask-maker and designer before achieving international fame as a photographer.
This year’s exhibition at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, showcases McBean’s work in advertising, his commissioned portraits, and his annual Christmas cards. It offers rare glimpses of McBean’s private life, holidaying on the continent, as captured in two unique photo albums. Also featured in the exhibition are portraits of McBean at home, in later life, by the contemporary photographer Robert Greetham.
Make/Believe installation view
Not all the personalities on view in this exhibition – Marlene Dietrich, Ruth Draper, Audrey Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Claire Luce, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, and Welsh icon Ivor Novello among them – are as familiar today as they once were, even though some of them, including Rosemary Harris and Maggie Smith are acting to this day. All of them, like McBean, lived by their passions, whether performing on stage and screen or playing on the tennis court, as Wimbledon champion Helen Wills Moody did.
Make/Believe installation view
McBean’s photographs were made in the pre-digital age of the medium. Using scissors and paste, montage and collage, as well as elaborate sets and props, McBean employed every trick of the trade to bring out the beauty, vitality and personality of his subjects. His photographs were staged, not taken.
Drawing inspiration from Salvador Dalí, whose exact birthday he (incorrectly) claimed to share, McBean ‘surrealized’ many of them. ‘This thing of truth doesn’t really come into it,’ MacBean said in late life of his portraits.
Make/Believe installation view
The theater, to McBean, was ‘fantasy.’ It was ‘what you wished it to be.’ It was also the refuge McBean needed at a time when being queer was a crime. During the Second World War, he endured a two-and-a-half-year sentence of imprisonment and hard labour. His work is a testament to the imperatives of making, believing, and make-believe.
Make/Believe, which draws almost entirely on the School’s collection, opened to the public on 16 May 2022 and runs until 30 September 2022.
Curators: Hannah Beach, David Eccles, Helen Flower, Ellie Hodnett, Mayu Maruyama, Ekene Okoliachu, Lucija Perinic, Joanna Reed, Katerina Vranova, Portia Sastawnyuk, Anna Slater, and Helena Zielinska. with support from Senior Lecturer Harry Heuser (text and concept) and Senior Curator Neil Holland (staging and design).
“Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood, / The land of spices, something understood.” As I shared with members assembled for “Redefining the Sacred,” an English Literature class I took many years ago as a graduate student at CUNY, these lines from George Herbert’s “Prayer” never fail to get to me. The last two words alone have more awe and wonder packed into them than I could hope to experience stepping into a gallery surrounding me with Sublime landscapes. “[T]hey express both my longing and my not-belonging,” I wrote then.
Trying to make sense and use of the “Sacred” for my queer atheist self, I reflected on my Protestant upbringing and that yearning for communion, for a community forged by a certain “something understood,” as experienced, or so I assumed, by the Catholic peers from whom I, along with half of my high school class, was segregated during religious instruction.
Compared to the austerity of Protestantism – which in my family had congealed into a work ethic that made sweat and pain criteria for an entitlement to praise and recognition – the Catholics were joined in majesty and magic. Wondering about it from without, I felt both suspicion and envy.
A still image of an animated presentation slide exploring Uneasy Freehold in the context of Uneasy Threshold
That is a roundabout, even misguided, approach to the make-believe of The Uninvited (1944), a Paramount picture based on the novel Uneasy Freehold (1941) by the Irish writer and Republican activist Dorothy Macardle (1889–1958). But The Uninvited is a queer film in more than one sense. It is a movie about absent mothers, false and true, and about siblings who, by taking possession of a possessed house, become caught up in a mystery whose solution may prove more destructive than a secret kept.
The Uninvited is a ghost story that at once meshes and transcends the tried Hollywood formulas of 1940s murder mystery, psychological thriller and so-called “gothic romance” to arrive at a hybrid in which solution does not mean death to belief by detection or psychoanalysis. True, there is an end to a particular case of haunting – but the spirit can linger since it is not a spook that is a means to an end.
“The supernatural is dealt with seriously in this dynamic, suspenseful melodrama, chock full of fine acting that will hold audiences glued to their seats for its entire 93 minutes,” a reviewer of the Paramount picture The Uninvited predicted in the 5 January 1944 issue of Variety.
Yet while the critic welcomed a movie that necromances what Blithe Spirit or Topper make light of without feeling heavy-handed or weighted down in the attempt, there was room for doubt as to its prospects. “Once in, they’ll like it,” the reviewer declared, but getting audiences into the seats to stay “glued” there was less than a dead cert due to the film’s “unusual and controversial subject.”
What the trade paper hints at but refrains from stating, is the treatment of motherhood in The Uninvited, a treatment that is in keeping with the spirit of Dorothy Macardle, a politically engaged writer whose fictional freehold, haunted by two restless mothers, both past their final rest, is a metaphor for an Ireland in which the role of women in society was being codified and curtailed in the 1937 constitution.
As Abigail L. Palko points out in “From The Uninvited to The Visitor: The Post-Independence Dilemma Faced by Irish Women Writers,” Macardle, proudly Irish though she was, saw her work as an activist and writer come under attack by a government whose constitution “recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”
The Uninvited gothicises this threat in its haunting of a young, motherless woman by a memory of what she believes to have been a good mother. What sets her free is the exorcism of that spirit, disabusing her of a vision that kept her from maturing.
While none of that political context is retained in the film adaptation, The Uninvited nonetheless resonated with women who identified differently, so much so that concern was raised by the League of Decency at the time about its attracting “large audiences of a questionable type,” as Rhona J. Berenstein explored in “Adaptation, Censorship, and Audiences of Questionable Type: Lesbian Sightings in Rebecca (1940) and The Uninvited” (1944)” (1998). The Uninvited manages to negotiate the Production Code in such ways that the familiar specter of the Hays Office is does not have the ghost of a chance to spoil the party like an officious inspector who comes unbidden but must be accommodated.
Now, I did not know anything about the histories of Ireland, Hollywood or the Gothic/gothic when I first watched The Uninvited. As is almost invariably the case, though, the film spoke to me about my own sense of otherness. And even though I never watched it surrounded by an audience of “questionable types,” or friends of Cornelia Otis Skinner, it invited me to question what membership might mean.
The moment I realised that the Fitzgeralds, the pair who happen upon and fall in love with a haunted house, are not husband and wife but brother (Ray Milland) and sister (Ruth Hussey), I sensed that the narrative of a young person (Gail Patrick) in search of answers about her mother would take me where fairy tales had taken me years earlier: a territory the navigation of which could make my everyday journey seem less treacherous as I came to terms with the inability to belong, the feeling of being a changeling in my parent’s house.
Dreamlike without being unmoored, The Uninvited seemed to welcome me with a spirit of understanding, of “something understood.”
This curated window at the Oxfam Bookstore, Aberystwyth, drew me in.
The themed window of our local Oxfam bookshop here in Aberystwyth was something to behold on that bright July afternoon. A row of handsome, second-hand but well-preserved copies of once popular fiction beckoned, reminding me of the tag I had chosen for this blog devoted to unpopular culture upon its inception back in 2005: “Keeping up with the out-of-date.”
A novelist friend and avid reader, who had come from London for a visit, treated me to a volume of my choice. Three of them, in fact, as the £5-for-three deal made it unnecessary to be quite so discriminating. I passed up on erstwhile bestsellers by A. J. Cronin and Pearl S. Buck, both of whom had vanished from the display a day later, when I returned for another three titles (all six are pictured above). My first choice, however, had been Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop the Carnival (1965).
I remember picking up Wouk’s tome Youngblood Hawke (1962), in a German translation, from my parent’s sparse bookshelves. My grandfather, likewise, was a Wouk reader, even though his chief interest lay in the writer’s Second World War subjects, to which Opa Heinrich, a former POW, could relate. In my late teens, desultory though my readings were, I enjoyed Wouk’s earlier City Boy (1948) and Marjorie Morningstar (1955).
Volumes I recent additions to my bookshelf
My next encounter with Wouk’s writings dates from my years of graduate studies in New York. I had decided to ditch Thomas Carlyle as a subject and instead write a PhD study on US radio plays. Wouk, as I discussed here previously, had started as a radio writer or gagman. He satirized the industry in Aurora Dawn (1947) and reflected on his experience it in his autobiographical novel Inside, Outside (1985). From the latter I snatched the phrases “Hawkers of feces? Costermongers of shit?” – a reference to laxative commercials on the air – for the title of one of the chapters of Immaterial Culture to capture the dismissal of commercial radio as a legitimate literary forum by those who had written for broadcasting during the 1930s and 1940s but who gained prominence later as published writers and dramatists.
Long story short, I have a kind of casual relationship with Wouk as a writer, a relationship that at one point turned serious (or academic) due to my interest in radio. So, when I spotted that copy of Don’t Stop the Carnival, an old book new to me, I felt inclined to get reacquainted. It turned out to be a bad date.
Don’t Stop the Carnival is a story of middle age. The action, of which there is plenty, is mainly set on an imaginary island in the Caribbean, anno 1959. The novel relates the misadventures of a New Yorker – Norman Paperman – who falls in love with what strikes him as a tropical paradise and decides to take over a hotel, having had no prior experience either with the business or with life on a tropical island. Complications abound, some less comical than others.
Paperman is a Mr. Blandings of sorts, a familiar figure in American fiction. He’d rather lay an egg elsewhere than suffer his ‘disenchantment with Manhattan’ a day longer:
the climbing prices, the increasing crowds and dirt, the gloomy weather, the slow bad transportation, the growing hoodlumism, the political corruption, the mushrooming of office buildings that were rectilinear atrocities of glass, the hideous jams in the few good restaurants, the collapse of decent service even in the luxury hotels, the extortionist prices of tickets to hit shows and the staleness of those hits, and the unutterably narrow weary repetitiousness of the New York life in general, and above all the life of a minor parasite like a press agent.
Perhaps, as his name suggests, Norman is not to be looked at as man but as a page – scribbled on, rather than blank, over the course of nearly fifty years. He may feel like turning over a new leaf – but his life is already scripted in ink that is indelible. Don’t Stop the Carnival sets us up for its conservative moral: stick with what you know, stop kvetching, and don’t even think that the grass could be greener than in Central Park in May.
While it responds to the modernity of its day – to the threat of nuclear war and the growing doubt in the progress narrative of the 1950s – the novel nonetheless shelters in the makeshift of retrospection: it looks back at the end of the Eisenhower years from the vantage point of the violent end of the Kennedy presidency to reflect on the so-called modern liberalism of the early to mid-1960s.
Was this choice of dating the action meant to suggest the datedness of the views expressed by the characters? What were the attitudes of the author toward race relations, civil rights and liberalism? In other words, what comments on the turmoil of the 1960s did Wouk make – or avoid making – by transporting back the readers of his day and dropping them off on an island that, for all its remoteness is nonetheless US territory, and that is about to be developed and exploited for its exoticism and natural resources?
The titular carnival is both figurative and metaphoric – an extended topsy-turvydom (or chaos) in which black mix and mate with white, queer live along straight folks, and Jews like Wouk’s protagonist Norman Paperman mingle with Catholics, Protestants, agnostics, pagans and atheists. He encounters bad infrastructure, worse bureaucracy, and political corruption. This island ain’t that different from Manhattan – which argues getting away from his former life to be futile and pointless.
The Carnival is not only shown to be a dead end but a deadly one. In the final pages of the novel, two characters are killed in quick succession – one central to the narrative, the other – the decidedly other – being marginal. The central one is Norman’s island fling, Iris Tramm, whom he knew as a celebrated actress two decades earlier and is surprised or reencounter, washed up but still alluring, as one of the guests in the hotel he decides to buy.
The island carnival is exposed as a tropical fever that means either death or cure – a cure for an uncommon warmth of non-traditional bonds and realized desires. Paperman recovers, and his understanding wife takes him “home.” His lover, meanwhile, must first lose the companionship of her dog, and then, trashing Paperman’s car while trying to reunite with her wounded pet at a veterinarian’s, her life. Was this the only out Wouk could conceive for a white woman who was the mistress of a black official who dared not to marry her?
It is the treatment of the marginal character of Hassim and his swift, unceremonious and unlamented disposal that lays bare Wouk’s fear of change: the antique dealer Hassim, introduced as a “rotund bald man” with a “bottom swaying like a woman’s,” who openly flirts with young men. In fact, the island is awash with middle-class homosexuals of all ages. Even Paperman’s hotel is pre-owned by a gay couple. And although he must have come across some of them in his former job as a Broadway press agent, Paperman is uneasy in their presence when he and Iris, his illicit love, visit an establishment frequented by gays:
Norman found the proprietor amusing, and he was enjoying the songs of his youth. But the Casa Encantada made him uneasy. Men were flirting with each other all around him; some were cuddling like teen-agers in a movie balcony. The boy in the pink shirt, biting his nails and constantly looking around in a scared way, sat at a small table with one of the rich pederasts from Signal Mountain, a pipe-smoking gray-haired man in tailored olive shirt and shorts, with young tan features carved by plastic surgery, and false teeth. Norman was glad when the proprietor finished a run of Noel Coward songs and left the piano, so that he and Iris could politely get out of the place.
Hassim is shot dead by a policeman, despite posing no risk and committing no crimes. The killing, which occurs in Paperman’s hotel and bar, the Gull Reef, is described in few words and elicits less of a response than the stabbing of a dog a few pages before this incident near the close of the novel.
“As a matter of fact, […] I feel sorry for the poor bugger,” is the response to the death of Hassim by one character, “munching on his thick-piled hamburger” not long after the killing.
“I’ve known thousands of those guys, and there’s no harm in ninety-nine out of a hundred of them. It’s just a sickness and it’s their own business. Though gosh knows, when I was a kid working backstage, I sure got some surprises. Yes ma’am, it was dam near worth my life to bend over and tie my shoelace, I tell you.” He laughed salaciously. His once green face was burning to an odd bronze color like an American Indian’s, and he looked very relaxed and happy. “Actually, Henny [who is Paperman’s wife], I almost hate to say this, but I think this thing’s going to prove a break for the Club. I bet the nances stop coming to Gull Reef after this.”
Such views are unchallenged by the narrator and the main character, who decides to sell his business – to the man expressing those views, no less – and return to New York. “People thought that this [his death] was a bit hard on Hassim,” the narrator sums, “but that the cop after all had only been doing his duty, and that one queer the less in the world was no grievous loss.” Case closed. Business open as usual.
Clearly, queers like me were not considered by Wouk to be among his readers. Targets, yes, but not target audiences. Even the academic treatment of homosexuality – the suggestion that famous writers of the past, too, might have been homosexuals – is ridiculed in the novel, with one PhD student, the lover of Paperman’s teenage daughter, nearly drowning in the sea.
Wouk, who died shortly before his 104th birthday in May 2019, lived beyond the middle age of Don’t Stop the Carnival for more than half a century. I doubt that I shall make him a companion again on whatever is left of my journey.
Harry Heuser 