Eureka
Page 36
The magazine columnist, a well-turned-out lady with spectacles on a chain and a voice that resounded unpleasantly on the ear, had just concluded a monologue fully as boring as the one that had preceded it. She looked around their table with a satisfied air, offering a narrow gap for another guest to dart in between and seize the conversational baton. As no one had the presence of mind to do so, the lady simply turned to her nearest neighbour and barked, apropos of nothing, ‘And when did you last read Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves?’
Nat managed to smother his snort of laughter behind a fake cough, unremarked by all except the young woman next to him. Her mock-prim expression nearly set him off again.
‘Naughty,’ she whispered, to which he replied with a smiling grimace of contrition. He had barely registered her up to this moment, and realised his first impression had been mistaken. The mousy girl he had dismissed on sight was actually dark-haired, with interesting brown eyes and a smile that revealed a row of geometrically neat teeth. He fleetingly imagined them sinking into his neck.
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch your …’
‘Gwen,’ she said, still keeping her voice low. It transpired she was a junior aide to the minister at the table. ‘You’re gulping down that gin like it’s medicine.’
‘Because that’s exactly what it is,’ he replied. ‘I’m trying to numb my senses to the stentorian drone hard by us. Unsuccessfully, so far.’
She sniggered, and he felt himself being charmed. The same loud voice cut across them like an air-raid siren.
‘Christ,’ he muttered. ‘If Lady Catherine de Bourgh here keeps this up you’re going to have to stop me sticking a fork in her rear.’
Gwen looked across the table. ‘Lady Catherine de Bourgh,’ she murmured, without irony. ‘I didn’t know that was her name.’
Nat stared at her disbelievingly. For a moment he considered explaining that Lady Catherine was in fact – but no; he couldn’t do it. He had spent his whole life among people to whom he could name-drop fictional characters as though they were personal acquaintances, and would receive a knowing smile in reply. It was a mark of their intelligence, almost of their civilised good manners. He was too set in his ways, too much of a snob, to strike up friendships with people who hadn’t read Pride and Prejudice, no matter how pleasing the face or attractive the manner.
He looked around, and leaned in to whisper: ‘I’m just going to sneak off to the gents.’
Gwen narrowed her eyes. ‘No you’re not. You’re going to sneak off out of here and not come back.’
He laughed: shrewder than he thought. ‘You’ll get along fine without me.’
‘Go on then. Abandon me to my cruel fate.’
He caught in her tone the merest feathering of regret. She had lifted her gaze back to the table, and he contemplated her in profile. She would be all right. She was young. She was a junior aide, for God’s sake! But still, it was possible he may have misjudged her.
As he rose to leave he bent his head to hers. ‘I’ll be in the lobby in five minutes, if you’d care to join.’
The ambiguous glance she returned was maddening. If she wasn’t interested then why had she pretended otherwise? He had been here before. Freya had once told him, as only she would dare, that his romantic outlook was ‘basically adolescent’. On meeting a new woman he would raise his hopes immediately and vertiginously; he would idealise her, consider her a paragon of womanhood, a mate for life. The ensuing weeks he would spend mapping out the enchanted path to bliss, before his critical sense was reawoken – a misplaced word, a disagreeable laugh, even an unconscious movement of the face that betrayed some ignorance or imperfection. The cooling off would begin, her flaws gradually shifting from regrettable to unpardonable; soon he was mentally packing up to leave. And yet … surely the Pride and Prejudice gaffe was a fault of youth, one he could correct in a gentle and tolerant way instead of regarding it as a case for dismissal?
He stood in the lobby, checking his watch. The five minutes were up. He felt somewhat affronted by her non-appearance. Another minute he would give her; she had perhaps been detained by the minister, or had dithered over her pretext for scarpering. Outside he could see the London traffic, hear its subdued thunder through the glass doors. God, it was lonely out there.
A feeling of cold certainty engulfed him. She wasn’t coming. He pushed through the doors and descended the steps. The afternoon light held a champagne brightness. He had thought of calling Freya, but she had gone off somewhere at short notice. Back to Albany, and the desk, for him. However sick he was of his own company, the solitude of his self, it had to be faced. The writer was a free man, but he was alone; no one else could do the job for you. So lost was he in these musings that he only became aware of the footsteps when they were right behind him.
‘Hey!’ came Gwen’s narked voice. ‘You told me you’d wait.’
He stopped and considered her. ‘I’d given up hope.’
In the daylight the brown of her eyes was astonishing; they held a liquid brilliance, the colour of old sherry. ‘I didn’t realise you were a stickler for punctuality.’
Stickler. He liked that. She had fallen into step with him. He didn’t really know where he was going, but he felt glad to have her at his side, her heels ticking along the pavement. Their arms brushed against one another. It took him a moment to realise that he had started whistling.
From A New Compendium of Film and Film-makers (seventh edition, 2016)
EUREKA (1968 UK/US, 111 min)
So many stories have accumulated around this movie – of reckless drug-taking, financial scandal, plagiarism, walkouts, reshoots, a notable swansong, a notorious murder – that it’s hard to comprehend how muted was its first appearance at Cannes in May 1968. Its British release that autumn followed suit. Not many people saw it; even fewer understood it. But like Hockney’s A Bigger Splash – another coolly enigmatic product of the time – the ripples of its influence have been deeper and stealthier as the years go by. Eureka is at heart an artistic conundrum, yet its tone is as brisk and varied as life itself: sprightly, sexy, witty, lyrical, creepy, elegiac. Reiner Werther Kloss harmonises these moods without diminishing either the elusiveness of its mystery or the yearning of its romance.
Chas Pallingham is the story’s protagonist and dupe. A chance meeting with a revered elderly novelist, Vereker, sets him off on a quest: what is the unsuspected secret, ‘the figure in the carpet’, that informs Vereker’s entire body of work? He is soon joined in this task by his friend and editor George and George’s fiancée Gwen, herself a writer and an obscure object of desire to the moony Chas. The search for meaning transports them from swinging London to genteel weekends in a Sussex mansion and thence to the sybaritic embrace of Portofino and Rome. ‘Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task’; though in the unfolding of this folie à trois we are never sure if Chas’s passion is more concerned with literary exegesis or romantic possession.
The film comes from a Henry James short story, ‘The Figure in The Carpet’, adapted freely – some might say with diabolical liberty – by Nathaniel Fane. It is no small feat to have carved out a script from the lapidary grandeur of those Jamesian sentences, though Fane’s twists on the source material are violent enough to leave purists suffering whiplash: torque of the devil, indeed. His flagrant steal from the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’ for George’s revelatory trip nearly brought a lawsuit from Apple Records. Yet its mood of sultry unease holds up, thanks to the hazed photography of Jürgen Haffner and the fugue-like jazz score by Dox Walbrook, whose edgy version of ‘My Favourite Things’ beautifully complements the famous hula-hoop sequence. One may safely predict that this will be the only psychedelic Henry James adaptation ever to reach the screen.
Both writer and director were rumoured to be so fogged by LSD during the shoot that it’s a wonder anything of coherence emerged at all: Arno Drexler’s sleek editing may have been instrumental in sorting order from chaos. Yet Kloss confirms here what a
brilliant director of actors he is, especially with Billie Cantrip (on her debut) as Jane and his former muse Sonja Zertz (pre-road accident) as the cold and queenly Gwen. Ronnie Stiles, with his stiff carriage and stuffy language, is dead on as Chas. Note, in one of her few screen roles, Gina Press, before she became a much-loved face of children’s TV in the 1970s and 80s.
It was also Vere Summerhill’s final curtain. Clearly ailing at the time, he managed to be at once light and grave as the fading writer who whips his young acolyte to a frenzy of competitive chagrin. His fine, oboe-like voice haunts the film.
Some have felt cheated by the non-revelation of the finale. The mystery that has seduced and tantalised us turns out to have an ‘O’ at its centre: the circle of life, or a mocking zero? There’s no telling, and the film would be an inferior thing if it did. ‘Pay attention, but stop short of explanation,’ a composer once wrote. Eureka, cupped inside its bubble of charm, seems only surface and intrigue, but beneath this lies a knotty question about the value of art. Can its pleasure be separated from its meaning? In other words, can we enjoy a piece of art without having to ‘get it’? Nearly five decades on, this film at least offers a sly affirmative.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Dan Franklin, Rachel Cugnoni, Ana Fletcher, Michal Shavit, Suzanne Dean, Joe Pickering, Victoria Murray-Browne, Richard Cable, Katherine Fry, Anna Webber, Seren Adams.
Also to Carmen Callil, Simon Hopkinson and, as ever, to my friend and editor Doug Taylor.
The following were invaluable to me in writing this novel: Kenneth Tynan Letters and The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan; David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film; Len Deighton’s London Dossier; The Orton Diaries; and Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head, not just a wonderful book about the Beatles but a vital one about the sixties.
I am lucky to have in Rachel Cooke a true companion and a great reader.
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Copyright © Anthony Quinn 2017
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First published by Jonathan Cape in 2017
First published in London by Vintage in 2017
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The song ‘Surabaya Johnny’ is from the musical Happy End, written by Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann and Bertolt Brecht
The lyrics from the song ‘This Bitter Earth’ are by Clyde Lovern Otis