{Beneath the screen of closed eyelids (Port Said), a new zine by Louise and me is now available.}
It’s the last few lines I especially love. They are so beautiful and simple and sad; from Bob in The Midnight Bell (1929) to George Harvey Bone in Hangover Square (1941), they are the perfect note to end upon. Having recently read Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square for the first time this summer, George Harvey Bone’s tender relationship with the Hotel’s white cat, Pussy, remains one of the most sensitive drawings of a connection with an(other) animal I have read. So sensitive and simple, and if it were not going to spoil the novel for you, oh! the very last few lines. The pub that was so welcoming an embrace in The Midnight Bell (set in the late ’20s) now, in 1939, is one where you could disappear in a crowd. War is looking in through the window, and we know what is to come, but the focus is more inward and close. Homelessness and isolation become more than a reader’s temporary coat. We fit inside the skin of George Harvey Bone, and that of Miss Roach (The Slaves of Solitude, 1947) and others, effortlessly.
I delighted when I, as Bone, mistook Portslade for Port Said, for me strengthening the link and serving as a fitting way to tell you that Louise and my new zine set in Port Said is now available in our online store. $8.00 and a little something for postage and its yours, all yours.
And The Story of Film, which I have been watching of late, also formed a link with this recent read, with Bone’s schizophrenic episodes described as being akin to silent film. Silent films like Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage or Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc or perhaps Mikio Naruse’s Every-Night Dreams. That is what I picture.
Click! . . . Here it was again!
It was as though a shutter had fallen. It had fallen noiselessly, but the thing had been so quick that he could only think of it as a sudden crack or snap. It had come over his brain as a sudden film, induced by a foreign body, might come over the eye. He felt that if only he could ‘blink’ his brain it would at once be dispelled. A film. Yes, it was like the other sort of film, too — a ‘talkie’. It was as though he had been watching a talking film, and all at once the sound-track had failed, the figures on the screen continued to move, to behave more or less logically; but they were figures in a new, silent, indescribably eerie world. Life, in fact, which had been for him a moment ago ‘talkie’, had all at once become a silent film.
(Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square)
+ Interested in early film? Watch Episode 1: 1895-1918: The World Discovers — A New Artform and Episode 2: 1918-1928: The Triumph of American Film — and the First of Its Rebels. Personally, I recommend the whole series, and have been doing so to all whose paths I have lately crossed. I bet you a fiver you will find yourself slipping into the narrator's pattern of speech afterwards. I have been narrating my activities for days on end now. With five episodes (of fifteen) remaining, it seems unlikely to abate any time soon.
