Are these statements themselves slots obscuring what’s in them?
Forget the slot and give it content. One motive for doing the film was that an American named Constance had been told in so many words that the film was in fact projected. Another motive was that the partners both and each thought it high time to get something together. A third was to mingle England and America. A fourth was to permit accident, say a couple of pompous hippies swapping recipes for gelatin dynamite, but no joke, as Will did not quite see when he suggested a New York tycoon blowing up his own building to collect the insurance.
For years it was possible to bring back to Lorna, Will, and Jenny American gifts. These can be recalled like a roll of events reminding one that three-dimensional Scrabble predated lie-dye jean jackets, and Peter, Paul, and Mary came after the new ultra-thin polyester sandwich bags sticky with static electricity. Bring back a memory Jenny snidely said, but it was often a future. If America was to popularize the universe she must be given a chance.
There was indeed one motive unvoiced to pragmatical Dagger. This was that the film under the guise of documentary daydream (and early associated with the chance that Chaplin might appear in an interview) would express some way two decades of America. The Bonfire in Wales threw into contour this possibility — here, for instance, the trend toward eastern modes, organic community, dislodging from city. The Unplaced Room, which of course had not been Dagger’s contribution, could show the American’s increasing disjunction in his environment and the need and arresting capacity to assert an existence and a self in a departicularized setting; it would be helpful to insert into such a setting Americans; and Dagger, even had he intended to, could not have made an apter contribution to this Unplaced Room than the unknown deserter who came with his friend and talked for several minutes. The Hawaiian-in-the-Under-ground playing his guitar would help to include race, national integrity, and the signal sweep of new folk musics and all they have been able, even unable, to express, Dylan and Mitchell and Newman and Stills. Hints here and there that the film was originating somehow outside America served to cool the focus.
Motives that did not get voiced to Dagger included, for instance, the power of spoken words to make even more magical the merest objects of daily life — seen, say, in the scene designated Suitcase Slowly Packed: the laying of a black Marks and Spencer sweater upon a white-and-green plastic bottle of medicated shampoo, the insertion and removal of hands, the documentary account of each thing given in one voice as Dagger wished against his partner’s alternative but impracticable plan that each thing going into the one gray case go with a new voice to live distinct and separate, though Dagger, as he assured his partner and his partner’s son one day in the park, would not automatically say no to any idea.
One summer there was one gift for the whole family from America — the one and only lost Cartwright family flick found in a large Whitman sampler — for God’s sake take it, my mother had said, the kids might enjoy it.
That was a past all right but barely a remembrance even for those who shot it, certainly not for the stars. These were the two Cartwright children, a curly blond three-year-old boy named Me in light-colored jersey shorts that came out stony gray, and a five-year-old girl my sister in nothing but a rubber life-ring, the frames in those days so few per second that the pretty little girl in the film’s grainy snow hops into and out of a shallow canvas lawn-pool like a swallow dipping its beak and wings in a birdbath. The little boy jerks down his elastic-waisted shorts, he pushes them to his ankles, stands free and bends menacingly at the camera, then erect turns profile and with a dynamic faraway look like a lookout but looking merely at his pretty sister, he forgets his hobble and starting off falls flat on his elbows.
The film (released from New York now) seemed a waste. Lorna said, A manly boy. Will said, There’s no sound. Dagger, stationed at his projector, said, A remarkable film for its period. Alba said, You were enchanting, I recognized you right away. Jenny said, It’s raised a lot of new questions, I must say.
Everybody laughed when Jenny said that. But her pleasantly insignificant quip with the film still running set some new deadline the meaning of which must come clear before the reel ended, and then it raced on and the leader whipped off and flapped clear leaving on Dagger’s screen a glare without clear scale, and like a deadline set just on principle the thought came, with the end of these images of the thirties that weren’t after all so distinctively of the thirties, that this film should not have been taken away from the creaky, spider-inhabited American attic, for someone would have to pay for its removal. The canvas pool is an ancestor of today’s collapsible vinyl-lined Doughboy pools that have their indispensable counterparts in England and can even be heated from the point at which the pool’s filter cartridge is located.
Unlike the three-year-old Virginia who said Daddy bring back a present, the seventeen-year-old Jenny said something else killingly sophisticated to her international businessman father: Bring back a memory.
Motives? Others would come after the film was done, even later — even now — leaving or holding out possibility like a lunar depression or one of a series of superimposed transparencies, even that ultimate form, the shape of that slot-space visible through various contents.
5
Let me convey Monty Graf’s face, confirm his rather still voice. A mixed face and a dark mild voice that doesn’t so much confide as pass on to you some prior confidence reached with someone else. Between nostril and upper lip an area very ample, sensitive, and ambiguous. Absolutely black eyebrows, thick and trimmed. And a vocabulary.
When he spoke to me his zinc-gray eyes widened sharply on certain words—Stratford, Soho, Handel, Coventry, brain-drain.
To see what it was like I widened my eyes the same way on two of mine—Knightsbridge and Stonehenge.
The narrow healthy nose and the eyebrows and eyes so vitally differed from the rest of his face they seemed a section jammed down to fit the rest as if that were a receptacle — pocked sallow cheeks, a pudgy, brief though not recessive chin jabbed by a mole at the fork of a center cleft, which was less an event than a surplus fold.
Dagger’s camera could glibly sum up this face: a wary, half-sensual indeterminately beat-up forty-six soon to be much older.
Three deep lines cross Monty Graf’s forehead no matter what happens lower down. The second stops midway across, but your eye goes on as if drawn between the upper and lower wrinkles to the far temple and its softly combed swell of gray and black hair, and my eye went still further to the ash blonde with her back to me in the next booth and to the right of her hair and above the back of the booth the eyes of the man she was with.
Monty Graf went through Coventry during the war and still knew someone in munitions there; the new modern cathedral was a great experience I should be sure not to miss — bitter experience, Coventry, but of course the English were pretty reserved — but I must know all about that, having lived there.
You said it, I said, they’re so reserved there’s a postman none of his coworkers have spoken to in three years.
Monty Graf picked that right up, said not he thought in Coventry but someplace else, it was due to a strike the postman hadn’t joined, and did I know where that phrase sending to Coventry came from.