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'The fechter who fought for life' by Mamoun Hassan
Review of Never Apologise: The Collected Writings Lindsay Anderson
edited by Paul Ryan andThe Diaries, edited by Paul Sutton.
It is almost impossible to take a detached view of Lindsay
Anderson or his work. Everything he did - his films, his theatre productions,
his writings - and, equally important, everything he was, challenges
one to take sides or, as he would have preferred to put it, to "commit".
But this was often the beginning, not the end, of the journey. He considered
himself - and he was - a political and social film-maker, but he never
articulated a clear political philosophy. Exactly what to commit to
was never straightforward.
His films and writings are shot through with ambiguity and contradiction.
At various times he emerges, superficially at least, as a communist,
socialist, high Tory, imperialist and reactionary, but scratch the surface
and you will always find an anarchist. And a nay-sayer: he was unambiguous
and lucid about what he was against. What exercised him was a genuine
hatred for the intellectually dishonest, the half-baked and the complacent
- he had a fine ear and eye for them all. Especially the complacent.
In the finale of Anderson's If... it is the headmaster's cry of "Boys,
boys, I understand you. Listen to reason and trust me. Trust me"
that earns him the bullet in the middle of the forehead.
Anderson considered smugness, coldness and condescension traits that
were peculiarly English (he used to say "Innggglish", as if
it were some kind of disease). He declared himself Scottish and he was,
in blood, but I have probably visited Scotland more times than he did.
Still, perhaps the Scottish word fechter suits him best: it implies
something more than a fighter, rather an implacable attitude akin to
the lead character of This Sporting Life, the miner and rugby player
Frank Machin, played by Richard Harris. He is the man who takes them
on.
Anderson carried his barricades around with him. He welcomed comradeship
but alienated comrades. Sometimes he would not allow you to agree with
him. Often he stood alone. "He is strongest who stands most alone,"
says Dr Stockmann (stick man, in Norwegian), the fighter against corruption
and conformity, in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. At the end of Anderson's
life it is Chekhov who comes to mind. "To the lonely man, the desert
is everywhere" was the legend on the medallion that Chekhov wore
round his neck.
With all these complexes and complexities, it was and is difficult for
those of us who knew or worked with Anderson to communicate the man's
volatile, exasperating and inspiring temperament. Not that many people
wanted to hear. After his death in 1994, his name almost disappeared
from the media. Film buffs and British film-makers (but not foreigners)
would look blank if you mentioned him. His cinema, his theatre work
and his views were a thing of the past. Now there is something of a
revival: a recent season of his films at the National Film Theatre;
Malcolm McDowell's one-man show about him at the Edinburgh Film Festival
and at the Cottesloe Theatre; and now two books, one about the public
persona, Never Apologise: The Collected Writings, edited by Paul Ryan,
the other about the private man, The Diaries, edited by Paul Sutton.
Never Apologise is a much-needed heart and brain transplant for a tired
and cynical British film industry. We have lost our way yet again; our
films lack distinction; and most young film-makers are desperate to
sell their souls to Hollywood, but nobody wants to buy. The Diaries
are a warning to other diarists to burn their diaries - to stop them
falling into the wrong hands. Sutton's is a tendentious selection from
the original that traduces a man he professes to admire. What emerges
is not a portrait, "warts and all", but a portrait of warts.
Most of Anderson's writings have been published before, although never
brought together to such powerful effect; but the diaries are new -
or nearly so. Anderson's friend Gavin Lambert quoted from the "painfully
lucid" entries in his memoir, Mainly about Lindsay Anderson, but
there was stuff that Lambert could not or would not reveal. Sutton has
no such inhibitions. What interests him most is Anderson's pathological
sadomasochistic relationship with Harris. In addition to accounts of
mental torture and some physical humiliation of Anderson, there are
detailed entries on everything that touches on Harris. Every phone call,
every missed call, every meeting, every cancelled meeting, every card,
every letter is recorded. This is what infatuated people do: they obsess.
Of course it is tedious to the outsider. Misery and thrill aside, it
was also futile. Anderson was a celibate gay and Harris was a married
and philandering straight (this was a recurring syndrome with Anderson:
earlier and subsequent infatuations were also with the straight actors).
You would be led by Sutton to believe that, when Anderson was not stuck
in this airless and destructive relationship, he spent his time almost
exclusively canoodling with celebrities, picking quarrels and later
bad-mouthing them in his notebook. (My own recollection is of full-frontal
attacks.)
There is another, very different perspective. Anderson was not ex-directory;
his name was in the phone book and anybody could call him. Many did,
and he responded generously. Fifteen-year-old Kevin Brownlow called
him, and Anderson visited him at his home to see a short film on a 9.5mm
projector and gave him a serious critique and encouragement. Film student
Bill Douglas screened a film for him and was given pages of notes on
a script. I, too, received pages of (excoriating) criticism of an early
project. There are scores of other examples. Also, Anderson accommodated
many struggling actors and film-makers during lean periods - such as
Vladimír Pucholt, star of Milos Forman's A Blonde in Love, whom
Anderson helped to settle in this country and supported through medical
school. So, Anderson was not consistent. I am not calling for "balance"
from Sutton - Anderson thought that was Innggglish for evasion and dithering
- but how about complexity?
Ryan, by contrast, writes a fine introduction on Anderson's work and
career. Sometimes Ryan even sounds like Anderson: "There were many
who sought... to discredit him. They characterised him as 'bitter' (forgetting
this word is often followed by the word 'truth')." Ryan's writing
is muscular, pungent, dense and precise, and prepares us for what is
to come. That is, for total war. What events, what psychodrama possessed
Anderson could, perhaps, have been gleaned from a different reading
of his diaries.
What is certain is that he started life as an angry undergraduate, became
an Angry Young Man, then an angry middle-aged man and ended an even
angrier old man. Maybe the anger started early, with the simultaneous
abrupt separation from his father and from India, where he was born.
Anderson defined himself as a "son of Empire" - both proudly
and ironically. His father, himself born in India, was a major-general
in the Indian Army, and his mother, born and raised in South Africa,
was related to the Scottish Bell's whisky family. He was brought to
England when he was four and followed the schedule of education for
his class: prep school, public school (Cheltenham College, which provided
the setting for If....) and university (he was awarded a scholarship
to read classics at Wadham College, Oxford). After a year, he left Oxford
and was commissioned into the Army and posted to India for the remainder
of the Second World War. In 1945, he returned to Oxford and switched
to English. He also published and co-edited Sequence, a film journal.
From this point on, the schedule was abandoned.
Anderson was joined on Sequence by Lambert and later by Karel Reisz.
Over the next five years, the world of film criticism was turned upside
down. The enemy was the middlebrow, the target British cinema. Nobody,
no film was safe. Step by step and insult by insult, Anderson and his
companions - with Anderson the first among equals - redefined what was
good and what was worthy of serious attention. Consistently he demanded
and valued a cinema with "social" values, rooted in "reality",
with a "serious" purpose. This combination might suggest a
cinema to shun, but in fact the Sequence writers engaged generally,
though not exclusively, with the popular genres - the Western, the musical
and the thriller - not with highbrow films; and through detailed analysis
elevated them to art. All this is familiar enough today, but in the
late 1940s it was revolutionary. Sequence agonised eloquently over the
question of who the artist is if film is an art, before coming to the
conclusion that "the man most in a position to guide and regulate
the expressive resources of the cinema is the director. To that extent
it (is) the director's medium". This appeared in the autumn issue
of 1950; some five years later the Nouvelle Vague critics in France
propounded the auteur theory. Of course, Anderson attacked them.
However it was not for Sequence that he wrote Britain's most important
piece of film criticism - "Stand up! Stand up!" (1956) - but
for Sight and Sound. Its tone, its passion, its eloquence and its power
may have been inspired by displaced rage over the Suez invasion earlier
that year. Anderson targeted the big critics: C. A. Lejeune of The Observer,
Kenneth Pearson of The Sunday Times, Alistair Cooke of the BBC, Kenneth
Tynan and others. Why did he take on the critics rather than the film-makers?
Because "by celebrating the merits of the trivial and the meretricious,
or by being lengthily funny at its expense, we lower the prestige of
the cinema and, indirectly, make it more difficult for anybody to make
a good film". Some things do not change.
"Stand up! Stand up!" has rightly acquired mythical status,
but it is only one of the 137 articles in Ryan's book, which cover Anderson's
thoughts on critics, the theatre, British cinema, American cinema and
international cinema. It is a wonder that he had time to direct not
only documentaries but also the feature films This Sporting Life, The
White Bus, If..., O Lucky Man!, In Celebration, Britannia Hospital and
The Whales of August; and to direct nearly 40 stage productions, including
most of David Storey's plays. And let us not forget his books, particularly
the definitive About John Ford, and his television work, including his
Channel 4 "Movie masterclass" on Ford's My Darling Clementine,
not mentioned (which I produced).
In 1979, Anderson met Satyajit Ray when both sat on a film jury in Calcutta.
The two had long been friends, but there was always a bit of needle
between them. Anderson felt that Ray always contrived to suggest that
he, Ray, was a film-maker of high repute and experience. Anderson disarmingly
wrote in his diary: "I sometimes feel I am not - but then, I think
I have surely achieved something... " He surely had. And as a world
cultural figure, his influence can be felt today. Read Never Apologise
and you will see why. Mamoun Hassan
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