What I had said at my last moment was an astonished, derisive question to my wife: “My God, Esme, not the Sniffer?” Nothing much there. But an instant beforehand I had been settling a problem incidental to my newspaper work; we were shortly to have a large and important Film Festival in Toronto, and our best film critic had left a month ago to take a job in some university where he was to give courses in film work. (God help them, those wretched students; he knew little enough about anything but the emotions that fuelled his work as a critic.) Who was to write about the most important films that would appear? The Sniffer wanted to do it. He had told me so rather offensively, as if reminding a forgetful child of some obvious obligation. And just as I took that fatal step into my bedroom I had decided that I would have to do what the Sniffer wanted, not because I had any particular faith in his ideas about films, but because there seemed to be no better way of meeting the difficulty. But I was determined to see those films myself.
It was an editor’s problem. I had been made head of the Entertainment section of the Advocate because I was a good critic. Good, that is to say, from the reader’s point of view because what I wrote was much appreciated. It was the old error of management: take a man out of a job he does well, and make him a boss, for which he has little liking or ability. The theatrical forms of entertainment have always been my great delight and recreation, and I write about them with gusto. Theatre, yes; opera, most decidedly; even television had its place in my affections. But for films I had a special affection, though not for the reasons that possess the majority of critics; I did not care much for technicalities of film-making, though I knew a good deal about them; I never treated film actors as real actors, because their work does not allow of the full range of the actor’s art and they are the creatures of the director and his technicians; I was gentle in my dealings with the writers, for I knew how little those poor wretches amounted to in the film world. But for a handful of truly great directors I had a warm-hearted admiration; they were artists, working in an especially recalcitrant medium, and when they succeeded they brought me great dreams. Dreams, not of a crass reality, a thin-spirited comedy, a blockhead’s notion of tragedy, but of the stuff that lies just beyond the observable, everyday world, that world of the daily news and the club gossip. Dreams in which something significant is told, not in bold Civil Service narrative, but in a puzzle of ambiguity and omission.
When I went into a movie house to see something made by one of these great men, I felt that the half-darkness, the tunnel-like auditorium, spoke of that world of phantasmagoria and dream grotto of which I was aware as a part of my own life, which I could touch only in dreams or waking reverie. But film could open the door to it, for me; film therefore had a place in my life that I had never tried to define, for fear that too much definition might injure the fabric of the dreams.
So of course I wanted to attend myself and write the reviews of these great films, retrieved from splendid archives, which were to be so much a feature of this Festival. Ah, but as an editor I had to play fair. I could not grab all the best jobs for myself, as the loss of my film critic strongly tempted me to do in this case. The Sniffer must have his way, damn him!
But I shall be there. Yes, I shall be there. A favourite quotation of my father’s rises in my memory —
My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on;
Judge not the play — something-something —
Something-something — every day
Speaks a new scene — and so forth —
I can’t recall it exactly, but beyond doubt I shall be a patient looker-on.
Suppose McWearie was right. Or rather, suppose the Bhagavad Gita is right. Is my eternity to be unending movies, sitting beside the Sniffer, as he sniffs for influences?
That would be Hell indeed, or at least a Purgatory worse than any McWearie had ever described. An eternity of watching dearly loved movies, at the side of a man who, in my opinion, had a shallow, self-serving, nincompoop’s attitude toward them? My murderer, furthermore. Can it be? Have I deserved this?
In the true sense of the word, I have been roughly translated, without the complicity of a normal death, into another sort of existence. Can I face what awaits me? What choice have I? An unauthorized translation has always been a shady sort of narrative.
II
Cain Raised
The film festival was prepared for film zealots of all kinds, and was to occupy them for a full week. New films from all over the world were to be shown, and prizes and awards and assessments were offered to tempt the best and challenge the most aspiring. A somewhat unusual feature was to be a showing of historic films, notable films that few people had seen, and films that had been, for one reason or another, suppressed. Great film archives had been ransacked, and persuaded to allow precious reels to leave their vaults; guarantees of safety had been exacted by the Moscow School of Cinema, by the Cinématique Française, by the Reichsfilmarchiv of Berlin, to ensure that their perishable nitrate-based prints should be cherished as they deserved. The organizers of the Festival assured the public that it was the most extraordinary assemblage of hitherto forgotten or neglected films — each one a masterpiece, deserving of breathless scrutiny by those who regarded the film as the great art form of the twentieth century — that had ever been put together. A large and costly program had been prepared for the Festival as a whole, but the most space and the most exultant prose had been reserved for these reclaimed jewels.
This was the part of the Festival that excited the Sniffer, for surely it would be rich in influences and forgotten injustices and anticipations of film techniques that had been attributed to the wrong people; he would gleefully right such wrongs.
The grand opening, which I attended as the shadow of Going, was what one might expect. It took place in a large, enclosed space in one of our best hotels, which could not be called a room, because it had no focus, no centre of interest; nor was it a hall, because it had no architectural concentration to point an audience in any single direction. It was simply a huge, carpeted area, windowless and in no way associated with either nature or art, and its multitude of electric lights could not wholly dispel its cavern-like quality. It was approached through a long tunnel-corridor, hung with modern tapestries, from which masses of yarns hung out at intervals, as if a bull had gored them and their entrails were bursting forth. Otherwise the great space was entered by almost invisible doors, through which waiters and waitresses came and went, bearing trays of jewel-like edibles, the work of artificers whose days were passed in preparing these destructible beauties. Although air was intruded and removed from it mechanically, the space smelled of many such earlier functions; a compound of food and ladies’ scents.
The Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario was patron of the Festival, and as he was the patron of many ambitious and deserving ventures it was not expected that he should show much knowledge of what was happening, but that he should shed the light of his countenance upon it and appear as host of this party, which our provincial government gave in its honour. He did so, with a fine demonstration of viceregal goodwill, greeting people he hardly knew, or did not know at all, with the warmth appropriate to his office. He himself was resolutely democratic, but his hovering uniformed aides, and the splendour that attended his appearance, made it clear that he was indeed a grandee, though of course one who owed his place to the approval of the people — which meant, in effect, the government in office. A curious grandee, surely, for though he bore the democratic stamp of approval he was primarily the representative of the Queen. The provincial premier was not present because he had to be two hundred miles away, warming up the voters in an important by-election, but his wife came, gracious in the highest degree but also unaffectedly democratic. Ontario wines, and especially Ontario champagne, flowed without stint, and were consumed in quantity befitting the occasion. They too were democratic — quite without affectation of superiority. The guests in the room were in evening dress, and those who possessed the Order of Canada wore their enamelled marks of distinction with pride tempered by democratic bonhomie, as though to say, “I wear this because I have been awarded it, but I am very much aware that there are many here more worthy of such meritorious ornaments than my humble self.”