REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Television
New life for old books
Benny Green
Of all the benefits Logie Baird thought he was bestowing on the public of the future, the last one that could ever have occurred to him was that hard-pressed publishers would find his invention the salesequivalent of the arrival of the cavalry. Today the news that somebody is planning an adaptation of one of those widely-loved books that the general public has never heard of (Nana, Middlemarch, Fathers and Sons, Bel Ami, North and South) is an irresistible signal for a new paperback edition which links itself to the kudos and magnetism of the small screen by depicting the actors on the cover. It must have come as a surprise for Anthony Trollope, horsebacking it around the loughs of Paradise looking for pillarboxes, to learn that Melmotte, the central figure of The Way We Live Now, was based, not on George Hudson, 'the Railway King,' but on Colin Blakely; ' similarly Galsworthy, who rather liked being photographed receiving decorations, wearing gaiters, goggling out of study windows at landscape gardens, and sometimes all three at once, must feel there is something faintly vulgar about the usurpation of Soames Forsyte's indeterminate features by the precise ones of Eric Porter; Mrs Gaskell on the other hand, reconciled these many years to the most precarious of toeholds on immortality, sustained only by the transfer of Cranford to the children's shelves, must be ecstatic at the astonishing if well-deserved revival of her stock because of the planners of Lime Grove.
Nor can there be any doubt that this tactic of replacing the mental image of the reader with the visual image of BBC Casting is commercially viable. Next to an obscenity trial, there is no event more likely to resuscitate a literary corpse or stimulate a moribund property than a television adaptation. As a matter of fact it might be a useful exercise in public relations to take the least saleable properties in English literature and find whether their TV adaptation is equal to the task of disseminating the myth of their readability to a wider public. Would it not, for instance, be an educational experience of some piquancy to observe whether there is any producer or cast of players alive capable of rendering even passably interesting Old Mortality himself, Sir Walter Scott?
However, there happens to be an even stiffer test than the buckroom prose of Sir Walter, and one which the BBC has already survived with brilliant aplomb. It is a well-known fact that the works of Henry James are not only unreadable but were also unwriteable, hence the poetic trifle: As he sat on the edge of his bed, Henry James reddened and said, "If my novels get panned I quite understand, They're meant to be written not read."
This cruel vilification of a dedicated artist is due solely to the fact that nobody has ever been able to discover what language it was that James wrote in, or has ever succeeded in translating that baffling, cabalistic tongue into English. In the newly published memoirs of S. N. Behrman, Tribulations and Laughter, the author tells us how he asked Willie Maugham why he thought Henry James's plays never succeeded, to which Maugham replied, "Do you know why James's plays never succeeded? I'll tell you why. I've read them all. They're lousy, that's why they don't succeed."
But television has proved Maugham and many of the rest of us wrong about James, whose works, whether original novels or plays, have poured on to the screen with a fluency which I find staggering. I had intended at this stage to list all his memorable credits but they are by now so numerous that I must content myself by asking whether any organisation which turns the inscrutable into the viewable could possibly be turned away at the Pearly Gates? We live on an island whose inhabitants are convinced that The Golden Bowl is the name of a Chinese restaurant, and yet the BBC has contrived somehow to educate them into believing otherwise. How has this miracle been wrought? Having myself enjoyed almost all the thousands of Jamesian images projected on to the small screen, it seems to me that the reason for their popularity is that the BBC cleverly extracted from them all the literary style, much as an enlightened witch doctor might extract the venom from an excessively poisonous snake. That Henry spent most of the nineteenth century putting style into his works, only for posterity to spend most of the twentieth taking it out again is one of those little ironies without which history would be more or less unbearable. The important thing is that today James is what he always dreamed of being but never remotely succeeded in becoming, good box office.
Now and again television aims at a classic and misfires, as with the current production of Emma, which seems sadly to be foundering under its own gossamer weight. But the list of coming adaptations promises well. A few weeks ago, fielding at deep mid-on in a village cricket match, I happened to pass the time in conversation with long-on, that highly-gifted actor, Freddie Jones, and the two of us became so preoccupied by our examination of his delight at portraying Chaffery, the plausible medium in H. G. Wells's Love and Mr Lewisham that the batting side had doubled its score with pushes on the onside before the discussion was done. The idea of Jones, with whom I have been friendly for about two years, portraying Chaffery, with whom I have been friendly for nearly thirty, pleases my imagination, just as Roy Dotrice did when he gilded Imperial Palace with his fastidious mannerisms, and the entire cast of the Moonstone did by evoking the oppressive terrain and even more oppressive interiors of Wilkie Collins.
We are already being hammered into receptivity for the adaptation of War and Peace whose episodes if laid end to end, would last almost as long as the events they portray, and at least one other possible source of delight is Cranford which we can expect within the next few months. But I anticipate most eagerly of all a serial whose corporate being I have already touched. Some months ago I found myself in a BBC office where visibility appeared to be at an unusually low ebb even for an English summer's day. Soon I realised the trouble. Stacked on the window sill, obscuring the wintry sunlight, was a pile of twenty-six scripts, the fruit of Simon Raven's labours in adapting Trollope's ' Pallister ' novels. Now that the cannon has been primed ready to fire Phineas Finn, the oddly propheticallynamed Robert Kennedy, the Duke of Omnium and the rest of them at the world, I cannot believe that Trollope will not eclipse even that shameless potboiler Henry James as a popular writer.
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