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'Telling it straight' by David Storey
Saturday December 11, 2004. The Guardian
Review of Never Apologise: The Collected Writings Lindsay Anderson
edited by Paul Ryan."The artist must always bite the hand that feeds
him. He must always aim beyond the limits of tolerance. His duty is
to be a monster" (1963). Lindsay Anderson certainly had a flair
- some would say a genius - for making enemies ("always the right
ones"), and an even greater flair, if not genius, for making friends
and sustaining friendships: the fact that "love was not enough"
was part of the pain that characterised much of his estrangement from
the world by which he found himself surrounded. An early announcement that he would like his gravestone to be inscribed
"a revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed", from Yeats's
poem, matured, in his later years, to the unequivocal "surrounded
by idiots". Often he insisted that much in our relationship was
based not solely on the years we had worked together (33) and on a common
heritage in Wakefield, where he had made his first films and where I
had lived for the first 20 years of my life, but on the "realisation"
that it was "good to have a friend whose work is more
neglected than my own", a conclusion which, on both counts, I invariably
rejected. Recently, a film-producer-turned-academic I met at the heart clinic
of the local hospital explained to me, as we waited (two hours) to be
examined, that his students looked on Lindsay as the only director of
significance to have been produced in this country in the second half
of the previous century.
"The cinema is a war party of Apaches whooping murderously after
the Lordesville stage; and it is also Jean Vigo killing himself to finish
L'Atalante. Nothing is too grand for it, and nothing too humble: it
is its scope which matters, not its limitations. And we have hardly
begun to use it yet" (1954). What comes across so vividly in this richly rewarding and persuasive
book are the ideas, the reflections, the feelings of an enthusiast:
an astonishingly articulate and a fiercely discerning one. It's reassuring
that the editing of this material should fall into the capable, sensitive
and caring hands of Paul Ryan: it is to be hoped that a discerning publisher
will commission him to write a biography. In his introduction he lays
out comprehensively and engagingly the context from within which these
writings emerged: spanning the whole history of film-making, the book
is indispensable. It is in "Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings"
that Anderson comes closest to writing about himself: "the manner
of expression was always individual, and became more and more so. It
was a style that bore the closest possible relationship to his theme
- to that aspect of his subject which his particular vision caused him
consistently to stress. It was, that is to say, a poetic style. In fact
it might reasonably be contested that Humphrey Jennings is the only
real poet that the British cinema has produced." This was written
in 1953: much has changed since, but the premises - the principles invoked
- remain the same. The unique element characterising his work is its cohesiveness: a quality
that marks intrinsically the work of a painter, a composer; an innate
lyricism (in his case) against which occasionally he struggled in attempting
to express the epic nature of his subject. At its best, the lyrical
and the epic fuse, to become a wholly natural phenomenon. It was always amusing, when with him, to see the effect he had on other
people - whether fellow patients (and nurses) in a national health ward
at the Royal Free Hospital, north London, singing a hymn as he wheeled
his "drip" to the toilet; or addressing a team of rugby league
players at Wakefield Trinity, explaining, to their bewilderment, what
it was he intended to do vis-à-vis his film; or chastising my
parents in their council house for not responding to their son's writing
in a way he thought appropriate.
Much of his inner life is reflected in his collected writing (much of
his whole life, it could be said), its external polemic mirroring an
inner turmoil; as if an unresolvable element of his make-up could be
displaced by focusing it on an outer world. Along with this, where his
work was concerned, came an innate sense of grace - and graciousness
- a feeling for place and time and people, for loyalties which he longed
for always to be explicitly expressed. The writing bears the imprint
of his doughty nature: the courage and directness of his approach to
elements and situations from which others might well have turned away;
a need for confrontation, unvaryingly focused on an appetite for "truth";
candour, forthrightness, self-possession were endemic to his nature
- as well as the vulnerability (almost the naivety) expressed in the
inner isolation he was endeavouring to subdue. He was as natural a critic and writer as he was a director, and the
book examines an extraordinary range of subjects: the ethos from within
which a film is made, the technical necessities involved in the creation
of the film itself. He assesses not only direction, writing and acting,
but camera-perceptiveness, lighting, sound, the acumen or otherwise
of producers. Added to this is a profound imaginative engagement with
the material of each film. About John Ford (1981), his previous publication,
can be seen, in many respects, as a spiritual autobiography, laying
out the values he cherishes, in art as in life: a transcendent aspiration.
Never Apologise is as well turned out by Plexus as About
John Ford: exemplars of books about film - clear, neat, thoughtfully
designed, pointedly illustrated. I'm rather glad I wasn't aware, other
than by repute, of Lindsay's critical writing before we worked together:
I might have found the challenge too intimidating to bear. If we began
this review with a description of someone who had a flair, if not a
genius, for creating enemies, and a more transcending gift, if not genius
for securing friendship, we might end by suggesting our author was not
the son of a major-general for nothing (nor a product of Cheltenham
College and Wadham, Oxford): the authoritative tone of command combined
with a unique sensibility (he had the gift of total recall) have surely,
and not only in art, produced a seer. David Storey back |
