The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  Those were the days of the communal understudied dream of cinema, of vast willing suspensions of disbelief, where people silently mouthed in retroactive advance the words that would come from the actors’ lip-synch, and occupied their roles. Those were the days of snogging in the back rows, of ice-cream cones and Quality Street chocolates, of torch-bearing usherettes and cigarette-girls wearing pillbox hats and page-boy haircuts. Those were the days of cigarettes which people would proffer each other from flat opened packs, the days of books and boxes of matches and the daily whiff of sulphur, nicotine, and tar.

  In about 1958, I saw The Incredible Shrinking Man in the Broadway Cinema. It absolutely terrified me. The plot is simple: this guy is lying sunbathing on a yacht one day, somewhere off America, when an ‘electric storm’ brews up on the horizon, to the accompaniment of weird music; it passes over him like a rapid cloud of drizzle. The next day, or some time later, he notices that the cuffs of his shirt-sleeves droop half-way down the back of his hands. He thinks of making a complaint to the laundry, which, it would appear, has managed an antonym of shrinking. But they disclaim all responsibility, and things get progressively worse. Soon he is the size of a three-year-old boy, and his wife has to feed him on her lap. They find it increasingly difficult to relate to one another. After a while, as a tiny homunculus, he falls down the stairs into the cellar and gets lost. His wife assumes the cat has eaten him. He experiences many adventures in this enormous studio space where he absails from various worktop and table heights by way of a spool of thread, and fights a spider with a darning-needle. The mice are bigger than elephants. At the end of the picture, he finds an air-grille in the cellar and climbs through it to find himself in a lawn of bamboo forest size, and a Twilight Zone voice-over comes on with some big philosophical pronouncement about the measure of man beneath the galaxies. It’s not entirely downbeat, since the Shrinking Man has a whole new microscopic universe to explore.

  As I emerged dazed from the cinema, the habitual post-matinée glare of the afternoon seemed more dazzling than usual. I remembered how the sun had danced in the sky at Fatima. Negative time-lapsed clouds raced overhead. The edges of buildings trembled within their shadows, as if flickered by the wings of lurking, fallen angels. A red trolleybus thrummed by like a passenger-bearing inferno. I held the hand of my younger brother Pat, but he seemed oblivious to the imminent catastrophe. The two-mile road home took an age to achieve,1 as its gravity was stretched and pondered; its minor gradients became mountains of despair and valleys of fear. The overhead parallel trolley-wires met at infinity … ‘Were you not scared?’ I asked Pat. ‘No’, he replied. ‘Were you?’ I clutched his hand all the more tightly, realizing he was leading me.

  Later that night I had what you might call a nervous breakdown, though the term hardly existed then; adults were prone to suffer from ‘bad nerves’, or simple lunacy, and these syndromes did not apply to children. All evening I had been dreading going to bed; my parents noticed that I seemed to be more than usually preoccupied, as I sat in silent agony, but said nothing of it. I could say nothing myself because I did not know what there was to say. When bed-time did come round – so quickly now, as time forgot its previous funereal pace – I cowered behind the door in foetal position, and began to scream.

  The room expanded and contracted and its angles warped and shifted as my parents loomed above me, their huge kind eyes filled with concern. I was struck by the magnified tick of the clock as it trembled on the mantel, working up its dark interior of cogs and ratchets. Creeping roses slanted into the mirror from the trellis wallpaper, and I could smell the votive glow of the Sacred Heart lamp. Rapid faces shimmered in the fireplace tiles, and the empty grate – it was summer – was a solid breath of black soot. I felt bound by a square of the carpet pattern, and I don’t know for how long I huddled there.

  Eventually, relatively pacified, I was got up to bed. I remember the comforting weight of my mother on the coverlet, as she asked me again what was wrong, and I could only answer that it was because I had seen The Incredible Shrinking Man.

  It took me years to get over this experience (whatever it was) and for a long time it took me about half an hour to go up the thirteen electrically lit steps that led to bed. Steeling myself for the lone ascent each night – by this stage, my parents had got tired of escorting me, and I had reluctantly accepted their attitude that I should be more grown-up – I would close the living-room door slowly on them, and stand for a while in the hallway. I would dip my fingers in the little holy-water font to my right. I’d cross myself. As if blind – but I dared not shut my eyes – I would feel my way along the wall of the hall till I came to the stairs, whereupon I would have to negotiate an interminable 180° turn to bring me to their foot. Squeezing myself against the staircase wall, I would take it one step at a time, all the while looking out from the corners of my eyes for possible tremors in the space-time fabric, and things that might creep out from it. My bedroom on the second storey seemed impossibly remote, but I would eventually get there, scuttling up the last few steps and across the landing to dive into bed and sink beneath the blankets.

  It was a long time before I went to see another film.

  1 We had to walk, since we’d spent our bus fares on sweets.

  THE GLASS FACTORY

  It is Sunday, 19 April 1997, and I’ve just come back from the Queen’s Film Theatre, where I saw Orphée, Jean Cocteau’s free interpretation of the Orpheus myth, made in 1950. I first saw this film in about 1970 in this same cinema, a converted lecture theatre belonging to Queen’s University, where I was a student; at that time, the QFT still retained its benches and fold-down desk-tops and, indeed, doubled as a lecture theatre by day. I wonder if this is still the case, though now it has rather plush aircraft-type seats (but no fold-down tables in their back-rests) and authentically dim red exit signs. In what I take to be a soon-to-be-abolished concession to my generation of film-goers, you are allowed to smoke in the foyer, but not, of course, inside. Then, in the past, you had gazed at the screen through a zone of smoke and, at salient points in the drama, a mini-choreography of struck matches would flare up throughout the auditorium, briefly illuminating the absorbed faces of the watchers. The sub-sub-plot of cigarettes was itself a habitual narrative or gestural prop both in and out of the film, proffered from monogrammed silver cases, dragged on thoughtfully or nervously, smouldering between the fingers of a heroine or villain or the person next to you, stubbed out viciously into overflowing cut-glass ash-trays, languidly dismissed from rolled-down automobile windows, ground out absentmindedly underheel, or cast into a gutter, where they might become important bits of evidence. suspects held in police interrogation cells were lavishly supplied with cigarettes to make them talk.

  In Orphée, the female figure of Death has a severe nicotine addiction, and is wont to manipulate contemptuously fat caporals between her gloved fingers; in one scene, Orphée, ensconced in the house of Death, is told by her to ‘Relax … my servants will bring you champagne and cigarettes’, and two white-coated Indo-Chinese waiters appear from a closet, wheeling a trolley bearing these elaborately presented items. It is one instance of Cocteau’s magical handling of space, that mirrors are portals to the underworld, and the poet’s attic is approached by way of a trapdoor, or a ladder to the attic window. The ground-level garage houses a Rolls-Royce Charonmobile whose radio transmits enigmatic messages from down below: ‘L’oiseau chant avec ses doigts’ (the bird sings with its fingers), for instance, reminding us of the winged emblem that surmounts the Acropolis portico of the Rolls-Royce radiator. Here, wondering if cocteau might mean anything in French, I turn to my edition of Harrap’s Shorter French and English Dictionary, first published in 1940, reprinted in 1948, the year that I was born, and find that the word does not exist there; but the near-echo of cocotte can mean ‘a bird made out of folded paper’, which is appropriate to the origami dimensions of the film. Harrap’s spans the war years, and Orphée is, inter alia, an evocation of
the French Underground movement; and its ‘Zone’ – through which one must pass to reach the Underworld from Earth – is a scenario of Second World War blitzed factories and warehouses.

  The dereliction of this landscape is familiar to me from fairly recent hulks of bombed-out factories in Belfast; I could be at home in it, wandering its roofless arcades, looking out of glassless windows, squatting by a heap of rubbled bricks, contemplating their baroque, accidental architecture, imagining myself to be of toy-soldier size in order to crawl into its fractured interstices. In like fashion, I remember sitting on a kerbstone as a child, in a timeless ecstasy of boredom.

  It has just rained, and the air beyond my skin is rinsed and sparkling. Little rills run through the alluvial ooze of the gutter to fall Niagarously into the iron depths of a storm-drain grating, whose upper rim is the edge of a minor Mississippi delta: how appropriate is the onomatopoeiac contour of this name, from the Chippewa mici zibi, ‘big river’, its majuscule important em announcing the sinuous esses, the dotted eyes, the occluded oxbow lakes of the pees!

  The delta-muck of the gutter is graphite-black, slick and gritty-thick when smudged between the thumb and fingers in a ‘money’ sign, reminding us of the fingertips of shopkeepers, grimed from their day’s transactions, of the graduated Chinese-box compartments in the opened drawer of an ornamental brass-bow-fronted till, of the heraldic ding of its bell, and the prices popping up in the glazed display like miniature poker hands composed of the matchbox-sized playing cards you used to get in lucky-bags.

  Gazing into the gutter, I imagined tiny sagas taking place within it, inspired perhaps by Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Constant Tin Soldier’, which was maybe one of the first stories I ever read in a book outside of school. I have the very worn book before me as I write, a Juvenile Productions Ltd., London edition of his Fairy Tales, which is practically falling apart, as its faded-orange, beat-up, cloth hard cover is nearly divorced from the text; many of its smudged-by-sweaty-fingers pages have become loose-leaf, and the whole thing bears the imprint of innumerable readings:

  It now began to rain; every drop fell heavier than the last; there was a regular shower. When it was over, two boys came by.

  ‘Look,’ said one, ‘here is a Tin-soldier! he shall have a sail for once in his life.’

  So they made a boat out of an old newspaper, put the Tin-soldier into it, and away he sailed down the gutter, both the boys running along by the side and clapping their hands. The paper-boat rocked to and fro, and every now and then veered round so quickly that the Tin-soldier became quite giddy; still he moved not a muscle, looked straight before him, and held his bayonet tightly clasped.

  All at once the boat sailed under a long gutter-board; he found it was as dark here as in his own box.

  ‘Where shall I get to next?’ thought he; ‘yes, to be sure, it is all that Conjurer’s doing! Ah, if the little maiden were sailing with me in the boat, I would not care for its being twice as dark!’

  Just then, a great Water-Rat, that lived under the gutter-board, darted out.

  ‘Have you a passport?’ asked the Rat. ‘Where is your passport?’

  But the Tin-soldier was silent, and held his weapon with a still firmer grasp. The boat sailed on, and the Rat followed. Oh! how furiously he showed his teeth and cried to sticks and straws, ‘Stop him! stop him! he has not paid the toll; he has not shown his passport!’ But the stream grew stronger and stronger. The Tin-soldier could already catch a glimpse of the bright day-light before the boat came from under the tunnel, but at the same time he heard a roaring noise, at which the boldest heart would have trembled. Only fancy! where the tunnel ended, the water of the gutter fell perpendicularly into a great canal; this was as dangerous for the Tin-soldier as sailing down a mighty waterfall would be for us.

  I cannot tell if I received this story first from reading or from listening, for my father used to cull such stories from The Arabian Nights, Grimm, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the like, and re-tell them to us children in Irish, which was the language of the home (the world beyond its vestibule was densely terraced with the English language, which I remember learning or lisping on the street, whose populations looked on us with fear and pity; yet we strange bilingual creatures, self-segregated from the mêlée, sometimes felt we had an edge on it, as we used our first language as a private code, in the way that the US intelligence services, in the Second World War, employed speakers of dwindling Native American languages. As English words and constructs seeped into our speech, our gradually bastardized Irish stood in daily correction by my father, and to this day I have a deep uncertainty about prepositions, those important little syntactical bolts which English uses in such confusing abundance). I can hear the smoky grain of my father’s voice in the dark as I enter the colour of the world described by him.

  One such favourite story was another of Andersen’s, ‘The Tinder-Box’, which I loved for its mind-boggling dimensions and its hollow tree:

  ‘What am I to do down in the tree?’ asked the soldier.

  ‘Get money,’ replied the witch. ‘Listen to me. When you come down to the earth under the tree, you will find yourself in a great hall: it is quite light, for above three hundred lamps are burning there. Then you will see three doors: these you can open, for the keys are hanging there. If you go into the first chamber, you’ll see a great chest in the middle of the floor; on this chest sits a dog, and he’s got a pair of eyes as big as two teacups, But you need not worry about that. I’ll give you my blue-checked apron, and you can spread it out upon the floor; then go up quickly and take the dog, and set him on my apron; then open the chest, and take as many shillings as you like. They are of copper; if you prefer silver, you must enter the second chamber. But there sits a dog with a pair of eyes as big as mill-wheels. But do not you care for that. Set him on my apron, and take some of the money. And if you want gold, you can have that too – in fact, as much as you can carry – if you go into the third chamber. But the dog that sits on the money-chest has two eyes as big as round towers. He is a fierce dog, you may be sure; but you needn’t be afraid, for all that. Only set him on my apron, and he won’t hurt you; and take out of the chest as much gold as you like.’

  So, I can hear my father’s rendition of the soldier coming back from the wars, as he walks, trip, trap, tripetty-trap, whose metronomic onomatopoeia seemed to be a common feature of both languages. I have just re-read ‘The Tinder-Box’, and find that this vivid jaunty walk is rendered as ‘One day a soldier came marching along the high-road – Left-right! Left-right!’ – so the former locution is a typical embellishment of my father’s; he was fond of introducing rhythmical runs, in the ornate alliterative manner of the Gaelic storytellers he had heard in Donegal; here, I have a sudden memory of dozing on my mother’s knee, within a whitewashed interior lit by a popping gas-mantle and the smouldering glow of a turf fire, whose muffled perfume wafted in and out of the storyteller’s droning recitation, interrupted, on occasion, by the gargle of his pipe, or the soft exhausted crash of turf collapsing on itself, and I would be well on my way to deeper sleep by the time the episode drew to a close, when I’d be carried homeward under the windswept stars.

  It was always a pleasure, then, to wake in a strange bed in the morning, dazzled by Atlantic sunshine into momentary dislocation, becoming gradually aware of the bumpy damp mattress, light dappling the walls, and the far-off swash of the outgoing tide, where seagulls reigned their echolalia of white noise. Peering out of the tiny window, I could make out most of the parish: the low, white, telescopic houses set at odd angles to each other and in different gradients; the intervening crazy loopy roads of broken limestone, the contoured sheep-paths; sheep, grazing the mountainsides like clouds, or flocks of glacial stones; the deep, ruffled indigo of mountain lakes; the wind blowing the bog cotton this way and that in its galactic blossoming; one speck of kestrel overhead, riding the airy levels; the little Irish-green Post Office beside the pink pub and the blue B&B, t
he petrol pump, the milk-churns, and the pannier-bearing donkey; the church with a visible bell in its pedimented gable; the postman flying down a steep corkscrew on his push-bike, with his bag strung out behind him; turf-cutters out on the bog in small partnerships, carving trenches of black oozy herring-bone, leaving little stooks or pyramids of cut turf in their wake; resorting at noon to scaldings of billy-can tea and buttered cut soda farls wrapped in damp linen tea-cloths; the three majestic rocks in the bay, diminishing like siblings towards America, since they feature in a local legend, where children are petrified. Indeed, the whole landscape is the stuff of legend, and every place-name bears a story.1

  The pane I see all this through is made of that old bobbled glass with little dims and flaws embedded in it, quite unlike the broad clean picture-window glass of nowadays, which offers flat, uninteresting reflections. I have noted this former glass in the photographs of Willy Ronis, most specifically in his Rue Laurence-Savart, which focuses on an itinerant glazier. He is climbing a steep, granite-setted street, empty except for two conferring schoolboys in the background, and the declining sun bleeds his long shadow off the edge of the page. On his bent back he carries a trapezoidal frame with panes of various sizes laminated in it; together, they form ghostly symmetries of opaque light, which look as if they’ve slipped in from a glacial fourth dimension. It is an image that directly corresponds with Cocteau’s Orphic Underworld, for a recurrent motif in the film is the apparition of a young glazier carrying similar material: ‘Vitrier! Vitrier!’ he calls out in a hopeless trance, as he wanders below the glassless embrasures of derelict arcades and bombed factories.