by Laurie Lee
The power of the levelled camera on a girl. A moment ago she was a dull-faced bun; now her flesh seemed to burn like an electric fire, and her long green eyes, turning restlessly upon us, sparked with voluptuous longings. I couldn’t bear it a minute longer: with my small cheap camera swinging between my legs I waded into the fray.
‘It’s no good wearing that,’ said a voice. ‘These girls are experts; they demand equipment. Anything less than a Rolliflex and they’ll book you for indecent exposure.’
The sage who spoke, a pink, Sunday columnist, was squatting at ease on the sand.
‘And it’s no good looking at her either. That little number is fiendishly faithful. She’s got eyes for no one but her girlfriend Lola. Why did you come? This place is a wash-out. There’s no love, but no love at all. All the girls are on yachts, or are queer as nutmegs. And look at the weather – like a Trades Union Congress. I think I’ll go back to Twickenham.’
We lunched together in the strong east wind, with the table-cloth nailed to the table. Other gossip-men joined us, wailing, wailing. What are we going to send home? No personalities, no griff, no stories. Princess Grace won’t play, I’ve tried her. Ex-King Peter? No good; only wants puffs for his book. Do you know Somerset Maugham? Well, I’ve got Dorothy Dandridge. How about getting them together? I’d pay you, you know. A pity. If only Eva Bartok would come …
We drank Calvados through the long afternoon, then drove to the hills for a party. It was given in a villa of rich Baroque icing, commanding a magnificent view. Our host was a painter whose pink-lipped nudes had made him a considerable fortune. There was champagne in the garden, and a swimming pool; the wind had turned soft, and the evening was the colour of peacocks. All the guests began to appear very familiar to me. There were the cameramen from the beach party. There were the two cropped boys from the balloon. And there was Mr Eddie Constantine. When I left at last, the desperate newsmen were trying to get him to Jump in the pool …
That night they were showing Celui Qui Doit Mourir, Jules Dassin’s long-looked-for adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ Le Christ Récrucifié. Alas, I never got to see it. Instead, I ran full-tilt into an unexpected taboo. At least, it was a surprise to me.
Having arrived at the theatre and shown my card to the flunkey, he suddenly barred my path. ‘But Monsieur is not wearing his “smoking”,’ he said. ‘Then, alors, he cannot pass.’ I stood perplexed in the flower-banked foyer. ‘Who said anything about “smoking”?’ I asked. The big man shrugged. ‘For the evening, it is obliged,’ he said. I was cross: I said I had come a thousand miles; I said I had no ‘smoking’; I even said I was a poet. Streams of black ties were flowing past us. The doorman sent for his superior. ‘He says he’s a poet and has no “smoking”.’ ‘Throw him out,’ rapped the chief. So they did.
I went off to a café and worked up indignation. Capitalist dummies and dolls! Was I really going to stand for this? Would Stephen Spender stand for it? Very well, neither would I. I sat down at a table, called for paper and ink, and wrote off a note to Jean Cocteau.
‘Cher Maítre,’ I began (in so many words). ‘This night I was ejected from the Hall of Festival because I wore no “smoking”. I have no smoking. I come from England to see the films of the world and not to attend a parade. May I, with all the admiration I cherish for you – you who have broken every rule to achieve the supreme law of your own genius – protest against this sartorial dictatorship?’ The note had the right Gallic flourish, I thought. The next day, his reply: ‘You should make as I do,’ he wrote, in French. ‘Go to bed at night – and so avoid the necessity of the “smoking”. But failing this, I enclose a note to help you – though my wishes do not necessarily correspond with my authority.’ The note he enclosed was sharp as a lance. ‘To whom it may concern,’ it ran. ‘M. Laurie Lee has come to Cannes without his “smoking” – mais avec son coeur! Please be kind enough to receive him in the manner which he merits. Signed: Jean Cocteau. President du Festival de Cannes.’
Armed with this note I returned the next night. ‘But Monsieur is without his “smoking”,’ droned the flunkey. ‘He cannot pass.’ ‘But, look,’ I exclaimed, ‘regard this paper.’ Slowly, mumbling, he did so. ‘Please be kind enough to receive him in the manner which he merits,’ he read … So they threw me out again.
I stood in the street, dazed and nonplussed, as though a cheque had bounced hard in my face. Then I gathered myself and fought my way back. I found the superior and rubbed the note in his face. ‘Read it,’ I cried. ‘These are not idle words.’ He read it twice, and slumped and bit his lip. ‘All right,’ he sighed wearily. ‘I suppose you must pass. But not till the lights go down.’
In fact, from then on, I was admitted, sans smoking, to soirées of every description.
Cannes Film Festival is a great Spring Fair which caters for all lines of business. Nationalism offers its barking side-shows and distributes free dollops of snake-oil. Film-renters meet to buy and exchange – job lots, shockers, new or old, a Sofia Loren for two Monroes – according to the state of the market. Famous screen shadows incarnate themselves, can be seen on the beaches and touched in the bars. Girls, with new lines in thighs or eyebrows, offer themselves here for discovery. Newspaper-gossips, their ears in the sand, hatch the rumours their readers know. Everyone lives on expenses and bluff, Cannes takes its cut; and the films themselves, chosen for showing, are inclined to come last on the list.
But the glue that binds this Fair together is mixed by the parties that everyone gives. According to the geography of our particular hosts, we lived in Cannes on champagne and nuts, champagne and vodka, champagne and schnapps, champagne and saké, champagne and gin. Every morning we wore, like a national decoration, a different species of hangover. And although every party had a separate point of departure, each achieved common ground in the end.
I go to the Carlton, the Casino, the Martinez; I go to the Whisky à Gogo. The hosts that receive me are from all over the forest; the resulting scrum is the same. A fight at the bar formally opens the ball. Contemptuous waiters, stern and forbidding, ladle drinks like free soup for the poor. The champagne flows, or trickles, or dries, in controlled and strategic tides. I am rubbing elbows now with a lifetime of film-going. Little did I think, I say. Once cherished faces, the sex-symbols of my youth, swim fading before my eyes. Vivian Romance leans near and asks for a light (her shape on that Naples bed!). And there’s Lilian Harvey – with whose image I once climbed a beech-tree … Both comfy now, like my Aunt Alice. Maria Schell embraces me, smiling bright: ‘Dear poet,’ she sighs, ‘we must meet again.’ She turns to the arms of her co-star, Curt Jurgens. Photographers gather; lights flash; they cling together. But not for long, alas. A carbon-eyed girl slides into the picture, grabs Curt’s other arm and stays put. ‘My very best husband,’ she breathes in his ear. Her cat-like body strokes him slowly, her inked face purrs and glows. Who is this? Eva Bartok! A happy sensation. Miss Maria Schell looks grave, Miss Bartok looks legal, Herr Jurgens a double-head winner.
So the parties sparkle, and spill, and flatten. There is Ram Gopal, in an astrakhan hat, leaning beautifully against a pillar. And a Russian star, with a water-scrubbed face – Strict Baptist Chapel, she. The Japanese soirée meets all our wishes. Lanterns surround us. Little men bow. Their girls have piled hair, kimonos, and clogs, and pretty print parachutes at the rear. Recorded music comes out of the walls – the drums and plucked strings and pipes. ‘What music is this?’ I ask a small doll. She drops her slant-eyes, bobs her bobbin-filled hair: ‘It is very provincial,’ she says. ‘It does not signify.’ ‘Your kimono is beautiful.’ ‘It’s the first time I wear one. I live in South Kensington, see.’ Rice-chicken and saké are served until two – then the lights are switched off like a pub.
But the party I remember best of all was the luncheon served up by the French. We were piled into coaches and driven from Cannes as though in full flight from the plague. At a handsome auberge, alone by the sea, the hors d’oeuvres lasted
two hours. Food, and flowers, and wine, and girls, entirely surround us there. And the girls, printed on my eyes by that hot afternoon sun, are those I remember now.
There was Jackie, a cool, blue, straw-hatted beauty who smiled blindly at the call of her name. There was a bare-footed Tahitian who sang love songs to a guitar, then covered her face in confusion. There was a young French actress, schooled at Gerrards Cross, who spoke fondly of hockey and rissoles. There was a tumbled, teen-age apparition, with wide, crushed, elderberry eyes set in a cream-white face, who looked vague, dreamy, and ready for bed. And there was Eva Bartok. There was another with long hair, and violet eyes, and tight check trousers buttoned down the back. And there was Eva Bartok. There was the kitten with fringe, exhausted childish face, and chemical yellow lips. And a tiny Italian scampi scampering among her lovers. And again there was Eva B …
But such are the flesh of the cinema, the figured flames through which it projects itself. Britain, it’s true, seems to get on pretty well without them, relying for the main burden of its message on the shutter-lipped hero and the family joke – with the girls, at most, their stooges and waiting wives. Hollywood has built up the lactic, ageless Mom, sterile by rule, but whose lovers become her sons. But here and there, on the fringes of France and Italy, the White Goddess of cinema is still a force. One saw her in Cannes again and again – live-blooded, hare-brained, earthy-beautiful – her very vagueness itself a vessel of truth, her figure a legend-bearer. Such girls, mysterious in origin, renew themselves each year, bringing skins of light and names of poetry – Nicole, Mylene, Ma-Ea-Fior. As they pass from darkness into darkness their motions, shapes, and unstoried faces are the camera’s ideal reflectors. They are the divine animators of the cinema dream, and can endure in that priceless purpose. So long as they are loved, encouraged in mystery, kept womanly raw, and told nothing.
As for the films themselves: my stay was limited, I saw about half, but these included some of the most notorious. One could not believe that all were their country’s best; their selection at times was inscrutably unexplained; pains had been taken that no one should be offended; but almost all of them shared one quality. Blatant or implied, according to origin, most films enshrined some large or tiny lie without which they would not have been made. The high cost and corporate talent involved in modern film-making depends for its existence on sponsorship. And every sponsor – be he political, moral, or plain money-grubbing – demands the transmission of some particular illusion. Even so, we saw much to arrest us; spotting the angle was part of the fun.
The Festival was already half-way through when my time for departure arrived. Cruel winds whipped the sea and chilled all spirits. The US 6th Fleet was away off Jordan. HMS Birmingham arrived to see Todd down the Yangtse. Pressmen packed up and pursued scandals to Rome. Most stars had long fled – even Eddie Constantine was gone.
So I looked my last at carnal Cannes, and drank milky Pastis and studied the crowds. The locals already seemed back to normal. Moneyed widows with huskies swept by in flash cars. Old ladies tottered off to the Tables. There was a beach-girl in briefs parading around with a trade name lip-sticked on her bottom. And every so often a honey-locked boy, handsome, tight-trousered, with matted chest, walked up and down, and up and down – a dream of hairy with the light brown jeans.
Hazily I tried to sum up the films I had seen while television in the bar behind me snared the old fishermen’s eyes. My mind clicked with images and I started a poem. But for whom? The printed word was out of date, old and gone as the clay tablets of Ur. Instruction now was for medieval peasants, a shade on a wall, and a preaching voice. ‘One picture,’ they say, ‘is worth a thousand words; and a moving picture a library.’ I wrote no more, but watched the sun go down. Then I looked through a telescope at the crisp half-moon and at Jupiter spinning its balls.
Finally, I took the night train to Paris, and slept, and had a dream. I dreamed I walked with the Queen of Festival, a pocket-sized beauty in white. Her Grecian dress was too big for her. So I gathered it up and fastened it with a brooch, which I’d swiped from a suicide’s body. ‘You’re the prettiest desiccated man I know; the fastest one without feet,’ she said. We walked hand in hand through the crowded town. Nobody saw or cheered.
Gift from the Sea
Holland is like no other place on earth; it is a gift from the sea, Atlantis in reverse, a nation hauled from the waves by the Dutch. A thousand years ago half the land lay submerged, as it had been since the days of the Ice Age; and it was the dyke-digging, dam-building, busy-beavering Hollanders who dried it out and gave it back to the world.
Holland, perhaps, is a miracle of salvage. Originally it was less a country than a deposit of debris dropped in the sea by three of Europe’s great rivers, the scourings of the hinterland borne on the foaming floods of the Schelde, the Maas and the Rhine. The first settlers, so they say, came to these marshy lowlands by swimming down the Rhine on tree-trunks, finding little to welcome them save a few blown sand dunes, the salt lakes, and the creeping tides. From this half-drowned bog lying between France and Denmark, constantly gnawed by invading floods, the Dutch rolled back the sea like a dirty blind to reveal a rich new land, a land rich in soil, in history and humanity, whose way of life has helped to fertilize the world.
The sea-faring Dutch, long the traditional rivals of Britain, have always haunted the horizons of my country; and as a boy they also haunted my history books and the envious edges of my curiosity. So recently I made my first trip to the country, an hour’s flight across the grey North Sea, to try to discover at last what lay behind the legendary nation that had both disturbed and enriched our past. My journey, starting from Amsterdam, was a grand circle round most of the regions, during which I found less of those things I’d been led to expect, and more beauty than I’d bargained for.
Dutch bulbs, Dutch barns, canals and windmills, jolly clowns in pantaloons and clogs, raw rosy faces scrubbed with carbolic soap and a landscape flat as a defeated soufflé: such images, ready-packed in the traveller’s luggage, can be thrown away at the start. The reality to these was but a distant kin, as it is to most preconceptions, and had a vibrant, factual quality of its own, far more startling and various.
My first impression of Holland was of a victorious battlefield, a defiant frontier between sea and sky; it was a shining horizontal, all light and water, racing clouds and immense reflections. Folded so delicately between the dykes and the sea, its fields seemed as fragile as petals – an illusion of impermanence that was almost poignant, as of something floating and vulnerable. All day, as I listened, I seemed to hear the pulsing of pumps, balancing the waters and keeping the land alive. But the intricate structure of the sea defences have the strength of centuries of tough experience, behind which the farming Dutch, with the threatening sea always in their nostrils, live out their lives with the cool confidence of sailors.
Schipol Airport, near Amsterdam, is thirteen feet below sea level, and the name means ‘a refuge for ships’. There is a smell of salt breezes, osiers and leeks; and water is everywhere, like holes in a planet. Amsterdam itself is the beginning and the end of the Netherlands, and it is where I started and finished my trip. It is as gay as Paris, as free-going as London, and as beautiful (I think) as Venice. Like Venice, it was also built in the sea (but, unlike Venice, has not become a fossil for tourism). Its main streets are water, with fifty canals linked by over 400 bridges. Riding the canals you see the city best – the fortifications, secret arches, watch-towers, warehouses, and the wealth of turreted seventeenth-century mansions. Almost unbelievable in this age of concrete replacements, these old houses are the treasure of Amsterdam, lining the curved canals in their mellow rows, narrow-fronted, high-gabled, serene, each differing in its eloquent notes of detail but all joined in one harmony of style. The delicate gables by day quiver with watery light, at sundown turn to beaten bronze, and at night become cameos of antique silver lit by the flood-lamps hung in the trees.
This is a
keen modern city that still inhabits by choice the romantic props of its past – the mansions and storehouses of the merchant adventurers who once made it the richest port in Europe. Walking the crowded quays, with their nail-studded doorways and worn steps leading down to the water, it isn’t difficult to imagine having just come ashore after a journey to some sweltering spice-island.
It is also a city for the young; you will see them everywhere, students from all over the world, sitting in cafés, walking hand in hand, reading their books under bridges, or piling their bicycles against the university buildings like herds of silver-antlered deer. One could write a love-song to Amsterdam for its honest reality, its fine balance between work and pleasure, and for the warmth of touch that laid out this city around its human quays and waterways.
Briefly, I remember not only its diamonds and liqueurs, but the little shops down its narrow alleys, shops selling birds’ eggs, butterflies, telescopes, tarred ropes and medieval maps. Also the cheap students’ food-bars, like Brootje van Kootje, where you could lunch on thick sandwiches of meat or crab. And the many Indonesian restaurants whose multi-plattered suppers might well fill you up for a week.
I hope I can also preserve, in some visual corner of my brain, a few of the paintings I saw in the Rijksmuseum – the golden canvasses of Rembrandt, who was born in Amsterdam, together with over five centuries of the country’s art. Here, trancelike as dreams, were early visions of the scriptures, cool Dutch virgins becalmed by faith; affectionate winter landscapes full of gay skating peasants, scarlet-clothed, bright as birds in the snow; sensuous studies of flowers (a drop of dew on a petal mirroring a minute but infinite summer); drinkers and lute-players lit by wine and music; a crucifixion like frozen moonlight; and cryptic portraits of widows hugging bags of gold and top-hatted merchants counting their profits. From the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the golden age of Rembrandt, this collection reveals one of Holland’s most astonishing achievements, a continuous flowering of art, supported by the church, then by commerce – with perhaps the artist getting the last sly word.