Tag: Wales

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The King of Clubs

Well, I wonder now. About that golf ball, I mean. Earlier this week, I went on a tour of St. Donats, the Welsh castle that, during the 1920s and ’30s, was being transformed into a getaway for media mogul William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, silent screen and talkies star Marion Davies. A decade after Hearst’s death in 1951, his trustees finally managed to sell this fourteenth-century if thoroughly remodeled castle, something that Hearst had been trying to do since his empire began to crumble in the late 1930s. In 1962, St. Donats became the site of the international Atlantic College and as such no tourist attraction; but, as I mentioned previously, every August and early September, when most of its students are away, it is open to visitors.

Our tour was conducted by one of the students, a girl from New Mexico, who, however charming, smart, and fortunate to land a scholarship to attend this prestigious school, had little to do with or say about the castle and its history, other than sharing a few anecdotes about a ghost, a pirate, and a deadly duel, all part of St. Donats fascinating lore.

However much remains of the old place, its more recent past is now obscured, a fleeting Hollywood romance yielding both to antiquity and utility. Since the castle is now a campus, little is left of its imposed splendor designed to impose, architectural features imported from all over Britain and Europe by Hearst, who had done as much on an even grander scale at San Simeon in California. Assembled from various secular and profane properties, the (pictured) banqueting hall with its English church roof and its fireplace from France, was commissioned by Hearst to accommodate his illustrious guests, however rarely he ultimately got to entertain at St. Donats.

Waiting for our tour to commence, we found a golf ball in a little herb garden on the grounds. I thought little of it at the time; but when I browsed through Enfys McMurry’s slyly titled Hearst’s Other Castle (1999) to satisfy my newly roused curiosity about St. Donats, I came across a reference to . . . Big Broadcast star, USO morale booster, and golf enthusiast Bob Hope.

As those who know me come to dread, I can ride the hobbyhorse of old-time radio to death; but I didn’t expect to drag it back from its pasture quite that quickly in this case, notwithstanding Hearst’s media empire and Davies’s appearances on the Lux Radio Theater. As it turns out, the quintessential radio comedian of the medium’s so-called golden age was indeed staying at St. Donats shortly before Hearst’s death in 1951. Hearst had not been at St. Donats in over a decade; and Hope, of Welsh descent on his mother’s side, was the last major Tinseltownie to occupy this ancient castle. He was in need of a place to flop while attending a golf tournament in the Welsh town of Porthcawl during the spring of that year.

Now, I don’t suppose Bob “Thanks for the Memory” Hope could have planted that ball there among the lavender and fennel, the herb garden being a recent addition; but those moats and towers sure inspire yarns . . .

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Marion Davies Slept Here

St Donats

Well, I’ve never been to Hollywood, tempting offers involving a cat, Elizabeth Taylor’s granddaughter, and a place to stay in LA notwithstanding. You don’t need to be going way out west, though, to be in the presence of Tinseltown’s past, to sense the influence of its players and witness their follies. Now, I am not referring to the likes of Ms. Catherine Zeta-Jones, who was born here in Wales. I mean stars, not celebrities. To be sure, I am somewhat of an Occidental Tourist. Where others, traveling in the Welsh countryside, will find traces of ancient history or sights that quicken the pulse of the most seasoned horticulturalist, I see signs of old Hollywoodland. Take the castle of St. Donats, for instance.

These days, St. Donats is a sort of Hogwarts for assorted Muggles, which is to say that it is an exclusive college for international students, many of whom, if my ears did not deceive me as we walked across the campus last week, come here from the United States. The castle has a centuries-spanning past, as is customary in the case of such fortifications; but in my case, the history lesson exhausted itself in reflections about its state anno 1925, when it got into the ink and blood-stained hands of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst and the far daintier ones of his lovely companion, screen actress Marion Davies (shown in an autographed picture of unverified authenticity from my collection).

Though better known as a silent screen actress, Davies transitioned successfully to sound film and was no stranger to radio. On the air, she starred in the Lux Radio Theater productions of “The Brat” (13 July 1936) and “Peg ‘o My Heart” (29 Nov. 1937), in which she recreated of one of her sentimental talkie roles.  Despite her stardom in the 1920s and ‘30s, Davies has long suffered ridicule and neglect, an unwarranted disrepute largely owing to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. A caricature of Hearst, it leaves audiences with the impression that Davies was the delusional mistress of an influential mogul who humored her whims by purchasing her fame and foisting her lack of talent on an unimpressed multitude. Anyone who has seen Davies in films like The Patsy or Show People knows this to be slanderous. The Brooklynite with the Welsh surname was a brilliant comedienne, far more accomplished than neo-Hollywood A-lister Kirsten Dunst, who impersonated her in the speculative yet tedious Cat’s Meow (2001).

A 1927 volume titled Alice in Movieland (previously raided for a picture of silent screen star Rod La Rocque), attests to Davies’s fondness for Britain: “Well, yes, I d-do admire the Prince of Wales,” she confessed, “and I d-did try to look like him when I played the boy in the lovely uniform in my picture Graustark.” The picture was the delightful yet rarely screened Beverly of Graustark, which, along with a dozen other Davies features, I had the good fortune of catching at New York’s Film Forum some years back. “I love to do boys parts,” Davies added; and as Beverly (listed high among the films I got around to rating on the Internet Movie Database) she is at her most charmingly androgynous.

Unlike her relationship with Hearst, the star’s Hollywood bungalow was no modern affair. It featured a “pure” Tudor door leading to a Tudor hall. “Nothing Pullman about this!” the author of Alice in Movieland marveled. Yet it wasn’t “nearly Tudor enough,” Davies told her. She was determined to move house “some day”—or have her house moved: “It’s got to be the most Tudor thing in the world. I shall have it t-taken away somewhere else, and another one, m-much more beautiful b-built in its place [. . .].”

“[S]ome day,” she knew, was not too far off. Apparently, the Xanadoozy of an imported castle that is San Simeon was not enough for Hearst; perhaps, it was rather too much, too grand and imposing, even for him. Hearst was getting on in years and wanted a quiet retreat for himself and Ms. Davies. A 14th-century castle overlooking the strait known as the Bristol Channel was his idea of quaint, I gather. According to Davies biographer Lawrence Guiles, getting it ready involved the installation of an additional forty-seven bathrooms. And I find the idea of renovating our newly purchased three-bathroom, semi-detached Edwardian house in town daunting!

Unlike San Simeon, which I visited on an August so foggy it suggested Autumn in Wales rather than sunny California, St. Donats is open to the public only for a few days each year, after its current residents are flown out and the school shuts down in mid-Summer. I am determined to go back for another look. To me, it’ll be like Going Hollywood.

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A Ramble of Epic Proportions: Wordsworth in Wales

Well, I suppose we have all taken trips that have changed our lives. After all, why else go anywhere! If it had not been for a New York City subway ride and a brisk walk to Rockefeller Center on an afternoon in December, I would never have ended up here in Wales (a virtual tour of which is being attempted in this 1930s radio broadcast). Indeed, I would not have been able to spot Wales on a map, even though I, a student of English literature, believed myself to be familiar with one of the most famous poems to have been inspired by the Welsh countryside: Wordsworth’s “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.”

It was on this day, 13 July, back in 1798, that Wordsworth revisited the Wye valley in Monmouthshire, Wales, where Tintern Abbey stands in its Romanticism-inspiring ruins (as shown left, in a more prosaic picture from my first visit there).

Wordsworth had been at the same spot some five summers earlier, together with his sister, Dorothy. He felt himself aged and believed himself matured. It had been a memorable journey; indeed, as he remarked in his notes on the poem, no work of his was “composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember.” The memory of the trip and of his “boyish days” were very much on his mind on his return to the scene, a landscape revisited not simply per pedes, but, in a less pedestrian sense, in recollection.

“[H]ow oft,” he recalled in his famous poem, in lines that would change the course of literary history,

In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—  
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!

It was a vision of a landscape that recurred to Wordsworth, “in lonely rooms” and “‘mid the din / Of towns and cities.” A “worshipper of nature,” he had little to say about the Abbey itself, a ruin that inspired many an artist, most notably Turner, Wordsworth’s contemporary. This Sunday, I am going to travel down to Monmouthshire in the knowledge that my days in the Welsh countryside are numbered.

It seems I am moving back into town this fall, after nearly three years in the Welsh countryside. A small town, mind you, but a town nonetheless. It was peaceful here, and pleasant in the sunshine. Yet there has hardly been any sunshine this summer, nor warmth; and the loneliness of our house has at times been a burden to me, and to those having to suffer my presence.

Without this intensely felt isolation I would perhaps not have commenced the broadcastellan journal. Before moving to Wales, I was not aware of how much our surroundings enter our being, of how much a landscape can inhabit or possess, rather than merely surround us. Now, would the Romantic movement have come into being had Wordsworth’s second summer in Wales been as much of a washout as the present season?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Night Falls on Budapest: An Experiment in Broadcasting

I’ve been told to stay away from district eight; but I don’t suppose I’ll return home with impressions so graphic or lurid as to feel compelled to pen a thriller titled Murder in Budapest. BBC radio producer Val Gielgud did just that, back in 1937, after his return from the Hungarian capital. Val, brother of famed thespian Sir John Gielgud, was in town in the early fall of 1936 to accompany his colleague and friend Eric Maschwitz (both pictured above, on location) to “give a broadcasting impression of night-life in the Hungarian capital.”

Now, as I shared in one of the earliest entries into this journal, I have always been fascinated by these portraits in sound; and I intend to take my Micromemo iPod recorder around town to capture the city’s voices and noises, considering that there are plenty of photographers better qualified to supply the images; Zsolt’s splendid photo journal, for instance, to which I was referred after reading the impressions of an American visitor (attending an Arthur Miller play in Hungarian, no less).

“Budapest is—or was—a delightful and lovely city in which to spend a holiday,” Gielgud reminisced in his Years of the Locust (1947), a book I have raided on numerous occasions. He was not on holiday, though, and putting together a four-part radio documentary like Night Falls on Budapest in less than a fortnight proved a challenging undertaking. It “was an elaborate affair” that “began in old Buda, where up on the battlements Eric Maschwitz discoursed on their historic past to the accompaniment of the choir of the Garrison Church.” However enthusiastic and supportive, Hungarian broadcasters were ill equipped to handle the sound collages Gielgud and his crew had in mind.

“There were, of course, compensations,” Gielgud conceded:

It was a new experience to be driven at speed in an official motor-car, with a flag flying on the bonnet, and motor-cyclist outriders clearing the way. Just for a moment one felt it might be fun to be a dictator after all! It was strange and rather exciting to be caricatured in the newspapers, and become a central figure in an anti-semitic “incident,” when a Jewish-owned dance band declined to take part in one of the programmes. It made one feel important to be told so often and so emphatically that one was contributing to an improvement in Anglo-Hungarian relations. And, for a short period, working against time and ‘off the cuff’ could not fail to be exhilarating, especially in such surroundings. But speaking for myself, the time came which I felt that I could not face one more glass of barack, listen to one more tzigane orchestra, nor conceal from one more patriotic Magyar my profound ignorance of the detail of the Treaty of Trianon. I was not exactly encouraged to be told, after the broadcast of the second programme of the four, that the Czechs, regarding the whole affair as a diabolical piece of pro-Hungarian propaganda, had interfered with the land-line carrying the programme through Prague, and most successfully ruined the transmission.

What Gielgud took away from the experience was the “very real camaraderie and mutual sympathy that immediately prevailed between professional broadcasters regardless of nationality.” So, I’m not sure why he ended up writing Murder in Budapest; but then again, even my neck of the woods has inspired a series of neo-noir thrillers, the most recent one being Don’t Cry for Me Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce (whose previous Louie Knight mystery I am clutching here).

I’m not sure what I’ll be taking away from my visit to Budapest next week; but I’m sure grabbing the opportunity to be there.

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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?

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Back to Blackpool: Lost Jewelry, Google Searches, and a Silent Discovery

Well, what do you want from me? That, I’m sure, is a question many web journalists ask themselves when pondering their reception. What is it that leads those following the threads of the internet to the dead end that is broadcastellan? In recent days (after the aforementioned Chinese invasion), the vast majority of folks who stumbled upon this journal did so by Googling for answers regarding Marlene Dietrich’s lost jewelry. Considering that the discovery of Ms. Dietrich’s earring in an amusement park in Blackpool, England, occurred and was shared here some time ago, I am rather puzzled by this upsurge of curiosity (as captured in the screenshot below).

Perhaps, it was a quiz show question and, owing to my musings on Dietrich’s loss, someone has won a little something. While not one chiefly concerned with giving people what they want (otherwise, I’d be writing less cumbersomely on matters less obscure), I took this as an occasion to return to the site of this attention-grabbing incident by screening Hindle Wakes (1927), a silent film partially shot on location in Blackpool (as well as the Welsh seaside resort of Llandudno).

Maurice Elvey’s Hindle Wakes (1927), the first film I successfully digitized from video tape using our (previously maligned) DVD recorder), takes viewers on a ride on the Big Dipper, the rollercoaster from which Dietrich dropped her bauble some seven years later. Like Bhaji on the Beach (1993), it captures the atmosphere of the place, a Vegas for laborers in the north of England, as well as the difficulties of getting away from one’s cares and responsibilities. More than earrings are lost here; and even though visitors hope that their indiscretions remain uncovered, their everyday invariably puts an end to the carnivalesque.

Despite this potentially tawdry premise, Hindle Wakes refrains from the sensational; indeed, its most thrilling scene, the drowning of the heroine’s female companion—a male-rebuffing tomboy whose behavior and demise called to mind the character of Martha in The Children’s Hour (previously discussed here)—is only talked of, not shown. Quietly remarkable, Elvey’s adaptation of Stanley Houghton’s oft-filmed 1918 play documents an indiscretion and its consequences.

Startlingly unconventional, the conclusion departs from both the virgin/whore schema of Victorian melodrama and the finance or romance driven match-makings of Victorian comedy, as the impecunious yet strong-willed heroine deals with her misstep without stooping to a makeshift union with the wealthy man who made love to her while engaged to another.

Of all the forty-odd movies I have seen so far this year (and listed, right), Hindle Wakes is at once the most obscure and surprising. Yet, if it had not been for all those stopping over in search of Dietrich’s jewelry, I might not even have watched it last night. Never mind the quiz show prizes; I walked away with something after all.

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Greek to Me: Notes on an Identity Crisis

Well, I can relate to it. That black sheep on the brow of the hill behind our house. After well over two years of living in Wales, I still feel very much like an outsider. I’m not sure whether I am too resisting of this new, old culture—which is struggling, with a mixture of self-consciousness and pride, to assert itself against or alongside England—retreating and subsequently fading into the American pop culture gone stale to which this journal is largely dedicated.

My self-confidence and sense of belonging were not bolstered any last weekend, when I accompanied my better half (just returned from London) to a dinner party whose far from rustic guests included a Deputy Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales. I did not expect to be conversing about my doctoral study on old-time radio, let alone impart my enthusiasm about the subject. I would have settled for literature, or travel, or dogs (Camilla having ditched the royal Corgies in favor of a Jack Russell like—or perhaps quite unlike—our inimitable Montague). Unfortunately, I did not get to share much of anything that evening. The guests chose, for the most part, to speak in the native tongue, which, I assure you, does not sound anything like English.

Yes, I can relate to the black sheep on the hills. And I sure can relate to the two main characters in the inaugural broadcast of Great Plays. After all, the comedy that evening was Aristophanes’s The Birds, in which two disenchanted old Athenians—Pisthetairos and Euelpides—leave their native soil in search of . . . Cloudcuckooland. A weekly radio program offering adaptations of Western drama ranging from ancient Greece to modernity, Great Plays premiered on this day, 26 February, in 1938. Undoubtedly, it is not the easiest introduction to old-time radio, although the multitude was being accommodated (or patronized) by the deletion of most Greek references.

Pardon me for failing to come up with a rara avis of a metaphor suitable to the occasion, but it sure is difficult to take off for unknown territory and expect to be surrounded there by those who are of the same proverbial plumage.

Nor do I quite understand the recent influx in visitors to this site from China, presently accounting—to me still unaccountably—for over 25 percent of my, er, readership. They are not likely to find much of interest here, aside, perhaps, from my reflections on avian flu in relation to the famed story by Daphne du Maurier. Then again, “China” and “Chinese” have been mentioned in this journal on several occasions, including these essays on The Shadow, Mr. Moto and the passing of Tokyo Rose, and Pearl S. Buck.

In a word, an admittedly somewhat tacky one in this context, I am disoriented. Perhaps, a flight to New York City is in order. A slow boat to China just won’t do.

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"Ancient Sorceries" and New: Wales, Witchcraft, and the Wireless

I can’t say that I knew much about Wales before I moved here from New York City. Undoubtedly, I still do not know as much as I ought to by now, well over two years later. Yet, however much I remain attached to America and its 20th-century popular culture, there is no getting away from what is now becoming home. On this day, 15 February, in 1948, for instance, the East Coast edition of the US radio series Escape presented “Ancient Sorceries,” a fantastic tale set in a remote town on the Welsh border, a town “between two worlds.” Having felt torn between two (or more) worlds myself, I felt compelled to listen in . . .

“Ancient Sorceries” was adapted by the aforementioned Les Crutchfield from a short story by Algernon Blackwood. It opens with what has been called the most romantic of radio sounds, the whistle of a locomotive. Aboard the train is Arthur Llewellyn, a Londoner who relates the strange occurrences during a weeklong—and unexpected—visit to a stay on the border to that wild country west of England.

He describes the countryside as “singularly empty, deserted of life.” There is a haze hanging over “the soft hills and the valleys between,” giving the “whole landscape a feeling of enchantment and unreality.” It is a haze I have often seen from our living room window, as illustrated by the above photograph of that very view, a scene that initially filled a staunch urbanite like myself with sensations not altogether pleasant.

Captivated nonetheless by this air of mystery, the Englishman alights, deciding to spend a night in “this peaceful spot,” despite the advice from a fellow passenger not to linger—not, that is, if he places “any value” on his soul. Heedless of this warning, Llewellyn leaves the train and, inquiring about a room for the night, is welcomed by the local innkeeper. Indeed, he appears to have been expected, as if returned to the village rather than visiting it for the first time.

Nor are the innkeeper and his wife the only ones to treat him like this. Who is the beautiful woman who asks him to come back to her? “You belonged to us once,” she insists. Is it a case of mistaken identity? Or loss of memory, perhaps? Can this mystery be explained away by science? However terrified, Llewellyn is determined to find out . . .

Aside from mentions of Swansea and the English town of Hereford near the Welsh border, there is little Welsh spirit in this dramatization of “Ancient Sorceries.” Dramatized in a perfunctory manner and delivered without accents to lend it character and authenticity, this is one of Escape’s lesser efforts. It is peculiar, however, that Crutchfield should have chosen to impose this relocation, considering that the original story was set in France. Was there, perhaps, more mystery to him in the wild of Wales, so little of which he managed to capture. Indeed, the strength of his play lies in what it suggests, rather than tells or enacts.

The awareness that the narrator has yet to find out—to live out—the end of his own story encourages the listener to become seer. The limitations of the storyteller turn us into tellers of his fortune. Having been conducted by a slight sketch and a few aural signposts, our trains of thought are railroaded to that place “between two worlds,” a misty and indistinct border region in which to conjure and scheme like the fates of the ancients. Such are the sorceries of radio.

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Bloodshed: Did Freddy Kruger Slay Cocteau?

It can do serious damage to one’s sensibilities. Popular culture, I mean. I sensed its deadening force tonight when I attended a screening of Jean Cocteau’s first film, Le sang d’un poète (1930). It was shown, together with the Rene Clair short Entr’acte (1924), at the National Library of Wales here in Aberystwyth, where it was presented with live musical accompaniment by composer Charlie Barber, who also conducted. However animated the score, the images left me almost entirely cold. Why? I wondered.

There was a time when I was thrilled—or at least tickled—by surrealism. Reproductions of Magritte’s paintings lined the walls of my room. In my drawings and watercolors, I ransacked the surrealist inventory, ripping off Dali’s shadows and reshaping the landscapes of Tanguy and de Chirico. Getting experimental with the camera, I posed in front of designer-cracked mirrors, something standing in for blood oozing from my cheek or brow. That was just about the time when early 20th-century art was being reprocessed on MTV, in music videos and horror film franchises like Phantasm, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Evil Dead. This New Wave swept over and wiped out what was once avantgarde but nowadays generate about as much excitement as a can of Campbell’s soup.

Our jaundiced eyes have stared down a multitude of visual assailants. How many times can you be surprised by a mirror turning into a pool of water, startled by violent juxtapositions, or amazed at facile paradoxes? How long does it take to turn an outrage of images into an outage of imagination? Video, it seems, killed something other than the radio star.

Popular culture can make Cocteau’s Poet look like Mr. Potato Head. It exterminates the life of art in the very process of reproduction. Was it this frustration with the fading power of pictures that made me turn to the non-visual arts, to broadcasting in the pre-television age? If so, video did not kill the radio star after all. When you run those digital pictures until the recycled blood on the screen runs dry, you might begin to hunger for a blank slate on which to give new expression to your personal terrors and intimate desires.

Give the poet in you a blood transfusion by taking your eyes from the plasma screen. Close them a while . . . if you have the sang-froid to open your mind’s eye to such a world of possibilities.