The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  By this time, Ford had his own Hollywood legend to contend with, and it wasn’t subtle: the binge-drinking, woman-slapping, actor-baiting hero of the Naval Reserve, getting more right-wing by the second, and fulfilling his destiny as a man who would burst into tears at the first bars of an Irish song but refused to speak to his own son for the best part of the son’s life. Ford’s politics had been borrowing more and more from his splenetic side for years. Early on he had described himself as a ‘socialistic democrat – always left’. But his Irish Republican cousinage, his belief in the Spanish Loyalists, his involvement with the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, his picketing (afterwards denied) in support of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild strike of 1938, did not stop him from later showing friendliness to the militant anti-communists in the industry or becoming one of the founder members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

  Ford had come under fire while trying to film the war – the American landings in North Africa, the Battle of Midway, the landings at Omaha Beach – and though he received a Purple Heart and the results won Oscars, he never felt rightly rewarded for those efforts and all his life continued to campaign for more recognition from the naval and military authorities. The war years had pushed him further to the right, bringing him under the influence of hard-line anti-communists and burgeoning Cold Warriors. Back in Hollywood, he was ideologically pushed around by John Wayne and Ward Bond, both rabid Red-baiters. As a cowboy director, he made a virtue of being ‘on both sides of the epic’, rooting for the cowboys and the Indians (in his head they took it in turns to be the Black and Tans), but the Blacklist was one of the issues on which Ford’s ambivalence faltered. His FBI file noted that his political activities ‘were of a mild nature’, but thought it likely that he was ‘long a fellow traveller’ with ‘Communist Party Front groups’. As McBride says, he took ‘some principled stands against the Blacklist’, but he also did much to allay fears that he himself was suspect: at one point he named names in an almost casual way, but when the Committee mistakenly blacklisted Anna Lee, one of his favourite regular actors, he railed against it. He made a call and got her removed. McBride remarks:

  Although the story demonstrates Ford’s loyalty to a friend in trouble, the fact that he could get someone off the Blacklist simply by picking up the phone raises disturbing questions. Why did Ford have such power? How often did he use it? Was it appropriate for anyone to be able to say if someone should or should not work? And by clearing Anna Lee, did Ford facilitate and tacitly approve the blacklisting of the woman with whom she had been confused?

  At any rate, and however steep his contradictions, Ford was capable of shaking up a cocktail of native sentimentality and bullish American patriotism and pouring it into the ear of anyone who liked him. ‘Your letter received,’ he wrote to one of his relatives, ‘with the discouraging news that the Reds – one John Huston – are seeking refuge in our lovely Ireland. This ain’t good, he is not of the right wing.’

  No artist would want his style to have to answer to his bad character, but bad character isn’t always a hindrance to a perfect style: it may even be that the style could not exist were the artist merely a good person. This is the deepest mystery about John Ford: how could such crudeness as Ford undeniably had as a man not stand in his way as an artist? How could a man who prided himself on the possession of such reactionary certainties demonstrate such subtlety in his handling of America’s psychogeography, the dreams of its people and their long travels and longer regrets? The sky in Ford’s movies is full of the romance of possibility: it seems to suggest a future for the world much better than that endured by the men and women rolling onwards in the covered wagons below.

  How could a man so blurred with loathings and prejudices also be so open to human weakness, experience and variety? Henry Fonda’s character in The Grapes of Wrath? John Wayne’s mysterious bigot in The Searchers? Roddy McDowall’s dreaming little boy in How Green Was My Valley? Claire Trevor’s loose woman in Stagecoach? John Wayne’s old soldier Captain Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon? James Stewart’s ironical hero of democracy in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance? Margaret Leighton’s fanatical religious zealot in Seven Women? What even the most elegant of Ford’s detractors don’t want to say, I imagine, is that John Ford was an artist in spite of himself – almost to spite himself. His films are beautiful and exciting in a way that might surprise those who imagine that beauty keeps its own company.

  ‘The light,’ Angela Carter wrote in a story about both John Fords, is ‘the unexhausted light of North America that, filtered through celluloid, will become the light by which we see America looking at itself’. It comes down to this: Ford’s rarity was to show America at the difficult business of becoming itself, and his talent for composition is one of the most magical, most painterly things in the history of the cinema. The militarisation of American democracy was not invented by Ford, merely described. In Young Mr Lincoln, he showed a president who could set out to reconcile oppositions and place universal tolerance among the great American ideals. ‘All his actions as a young man,’ writes his biographer, ‘are supercharged with our common knowledge of his destiny.’ Yes indeed, Lincoln’s destiny: to be killed by an actor who would step into his shoes.

  Four Funerals and a Wedding

  MAY 2005

  When I was young people didn’t die and they didn’t pass away. They certainly didn’t expire, or perish, though there was a woman in our street called Hazel who dabbled in spiritualism while her philandering husband went out to fix people’s Hotpoint twin-tubs, and she quite often spoke of people who had ‘crossed to the other side’. I thought that was sick. Hazel had a lot of anger in her, as people now say, and I felt that must explain her hazardous use of words. She’d met Sandy, her husband, when he drove one of the Alexander buses about the town of Elgin. She happened to be the clippy on the same bus, and she would often tell me about the beauty of those single-decker vehicles (‘the Bluebird’) and the handsomeness of Sandy behind the wheel. Now she was furious all the time, and took it out on her accordion, playing Strathspey reels until the red varnish flaked off her fingernails.

  In our town it was all in the words. Nobody was ever ‘dearly’ anything, certainly not ‘departed’. ‘Deceased’ seemed a bit high and mighty, even allowing for the fact that in Scotland everyone’s station is slightly raised by their having enjoyed, if you will, the process of personal death. People in my childhood found the word ‘death’ unsayable, and got round it by saying, of someone whose corpse lay in the next room, that ‘something had happened’.

  ‘If anything ever happens to me,’ my mother would say, ‘you’ll find the Liverpool Assurance policy book in the cupboard up above the stock cubes.’

  ‘If something happens to me,’ my grandmother said, ‘don’t put me up in that Dalbeth Cemetery. It’s a cold place.’

  And my father too. ‘If anything ever happens to me you’ll know what life’s all about.’

  ‘What do you mean “if”?’ I would say. ‘Why can’t you just say “when I die”?’

  ‘You think you’re that smart,’ my granny would say. ‘But that’s just a morbid thing, to use that word.’

  ‘Death!’

  ‘Don’t say it! It’s a horrible word.’

  ‘Death!’

  ‘Stop it,’ my mother would say. ‘I hate talking like this, but if something happens to me …’

  ‘What do you mean “if”? And what do you mean “something”? The thing that will happen to you is called death and there’s no ifs or buts about it.’

  ‘He’s so pessimistic, him, isn’t he?’ my granny would say. ‘Always had a dark side. Probably got it from his uncle John. He was like that as well. Morbid.’

  ‘You’re just trying to draw attention to yourself,’ my father would say. ‘If something ever happens to you, I suppose you’ll want one of them statues to yourself up in the Glasgow Necropolis.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The sign could
say: “Up here, something did happen to Andrew O’Hagan. Like each of us, he wondered if it would happen. And it did.”’

  Something happened to my second ever schoolteacher, Mrs Wallace. We saw her totally somethinged in her coffin under a huge crucifix of Jesus Christ, to whom, by the look of the nails and the blood running down his arms and toes, there might also have been a question of something happening. Mrs Wallace was a champion smoker and worrier of rosary beads. She took a liking to me, giving me the not entirely popular task of writing pupils’ names on the blackboard if they spoke while she was out having a fag. I was so unremitting and keen with the chalk that Mrs Wallace figured me to be a potential candidate for the priesthood; she got me my first gig ringing the bell on the altar at St Winnin’s, though a combination of sleepiness and professional jealousy on my part was to harm my chances of advancement in the eyes of Father McLaughlin.

  Mrs Wallace’s funeral was my first one, and in some senses no funeral could ever have the same intensity, not even my own in the event that anything should ever happen to me. I sat through the funeral mass, aged seven, in a state of shock, with all the pasty-faced solemnity of a Pre-Raphaelite mourner confronting the eternal, my intense concentration broken only for a second by the gentle passing of the family, who I knew instantly must be counted the stars of the occasion, each of them top to toe in respectful, chalk-free, something-comprehending black. My seniority in the diocese was not marked by an invitation to the graveside, but I did go there two years later, taking the bus to a populous cemetery in the small town of Stevenson. Mrs Wallace’s spot was up against the right-hand wall, deep in the shadow of the Ardeer Explosives Factory. Of course, something has since happened to the factory and its cooling towers too, but I remember their real presence in that Stevenson graveyard. In a tangle of crosses and angels it said on the gravestone ‘Mary Wallace’, the chiselled words seeming to embody in some powerful and menacing way the mysteries of faith.

  In the via Monserrato, a few weeks before the death of Pope John Paul II, the light seemed yellow against the rain, and Rome seemed a place not of eternities but of passing trade. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor entered the restaurant in his civilian uniform of open-necked shirt and windcheater, smiling to the waiters and taking his usual table. I didn’t approach him, but took time to notice the high-spiritedness of his friends, happy to be in the company of the head of the English Catholics, a man not given to any obvious show of relaxation but, rather, seeming constantly anxious about being behind with business.

  Nearby is the English College, or the Venerable English College, as its fan base likes to call it. Father Clive was waiting on the steps for me. He was in his late twenties, very neat, soft-toned and red-cheeked, and he welcomed me into the building in the manner of someone obeying time and tradition, naming the exact moment on his watch before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to the Martyr’s Chapel.

  ‘This is a fourteenth-century floor,’ Father Clive said. ‘The college is the oldest of all English institutions abroad.’ He showed me a little pond in the garden where students swam in the hot months. They called it the ‘tank’ and it conveyed to me an image of passengers bathing in the swimming pool of a sinking ship. But the mood of the college did not suggest sinking: there is a form of religious devotion which can, at a certain time in the evening in a place such as Rome, seem to shape the very air itself, though I presume only Catholics could suppose so. In any event the English College had the kind of peacefulness that ancientness alone can bestow – the young men walked the hall knowing the world they walked in possessed the texture of meditation and martyrdom, of prayers uttered and strong beliefs confirmed. Yet round the corner in the Campo de’ Fiori, the statue of Giordano Bruno stands high above a modern centre of bar snacks, designer scarves and trendy beers, a statue reminding those who care to be reminded that modernity has its martyrs too.

  My paternal grandmother ran a fish shop in Glasgow that had nothing on the walls but a framed print of the dying Christ. She used to tell children that they should mind to behave themselves, because – and she’d point at the picture – ‘that’s what he got for being good’. My grandmother took the modern world to be a simple affront to her sense of right and wrong; Protestants were barbarians to her mind, and she refused to attend my cousin’s wedding when he married one. I remember the conversation. My father said to her: ‘Do you hate Pakis as well?’

  ‘No, Gerald,’ she replied. ‘I don’t hate anybody. I’ve never stepped inside a Protestant church in my life and I’m not going to start doing it now.’

  I once wrote some words on a piece of paper and pushed them to her across the sofa. They said: ‘You like authority more than freedom.’ She just looked at me. I like to think that inside the moment that contained the look, she told me, without saying anything, that I was trouble. My father had once thrown a lemonade bottle through her window and that was a kind of trouble she could dislike but understand. Her look told me that my kind of trouble was worse. She looked away and crumpled up the paper and put it on the fire.

  I was ten years old when John Paul II came to power. My granny instantly adored him, loving his feudal side without reservation and simply ignoring the freedom-upholding aspect. The only thing she was truly agnostic about was politics: she never mentioned that, and her only concern when it came to sports was whether Celtic were likely to beat Rangers. She had no worries about communism, though; she worried about poor people and she came from poor people, but that was it, except she might say that poor Protestants had brought it on themselves with a well-known aversion to a day’s work. She didn’t live long enough to see John Paul II’s visit to Glasgow and his giant mass in Bellahouston Park. (She missed it by a year.) ‘There is one Lord,’ he said on that occasion, ‘one faith, one baptism, and one God who is father of us all, all over, through all and within all.’ She would have levitated with pleasure at that line, and the whole business of him saying it in Glasgow would have represented to her a victory far greater than anything achieved at Bannockburn.

  The night before the pope died, Rome became a great character in its own fiction, seizing and displaying all parts of itself to the world’s television cameras. But two rather complicated images of Rome came back to me. The first was of Dorothea Brooke stuck in the via Sistina while her husband worked all day in the Vatican Library. George Eliot gave us to believe that Dorothea felt bleached and drained of blood by the ruins, basilicas and colossi of Rome, those ‘long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monstrous light of an alien world’. For the new Mrs Casaubon, Rome’s spiritual splendour, its role as historic centre, could only suck the colour from the present day, and I wondered, looking at those two high, lighted windows in the pope’s apartments, whether there wasn’t something overblown and cinematic about the event of his death, like the drama of the great operas which can sometimes seem the wrong sort for the small human business at hand. An old man was dying in those rooms; the pomp of history had the will to rob the matter of its most present sadness.

  ‘Dorothea all her life,’ George Eliot wrote, ‘continued to see the vastness of St Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery … spreading itself like a disease of the retina.’ On the day of the funeral the Church showed much of the strength that lies in its hierarchical weave. The coffin had layers too, cypress and zinc inside oak, and was flanked by scarlet cardinals who themselves were flanked by purple bishops and black-clad dignitaries, in the folds of which stood Cherie Blair with her mantilla blowing in the wind, and further in again, the Bushes looking bored and slightly vexed as they always do abroad,
him especially, forever scanning the middle distance for un-American mirages. Fold within fold the dignitaries stood, queens, princes, heathen courtiers, and in some dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe.

  We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little about. Pope John Paul II was pretty much like that himself, creating more saints than any other pope, and so it appeared natural that thousands of mourners interrupted the funeral with cries of ‘Santo Subito!’ The papers said the mourners were mostly Poles, but in fact they were mainly Italians, giving him back a little bit of what he gave them: an excited neediness for supra-human entitlement. There was a great deal of clapping as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger offered his words of appreciation to the dead pontiff. Clapping is the way it is always done nowadays, clapping in church, clapping by roadsides, as if a surge of assent had no outlet bar through the palms. What is a saint these days but a celebrity whose fame is guaranteed for ever? And so we have it: applause, the currency of fame.

  ‘Shhh, we are in a church,’ Anita Ekberg says as she climbs to St Peter’s dome in La Dolce Vita. ‘This is where I want to write my name,’ she says, and the photographers chase her up the steps with light bulbs popping. Ekberg at the top of St Peter’s basilica, as much as her dip in the Trevi fountain, looking almost bleached with attention, is an image of public-personhood becoming a sort of religion. Her hat is blown off and she giggles as it falls down to St Peter’s Square, to the place where the princes of the Church and the princes of the world now attend this funeral, watched in their turn by cameras from every corner of the earth.