Over the years I've kind of created a small list of books that I tend to often read while in the bathroom, and sometimes at least once a year (and as someone who suffers from IBS, there are periods every now and then where I can spend a disturbingly long period of time in there). Although I've never put these books on my official reading lists because (unlike the books that DO end up on such lists) in some cases I haven't read every single word in them (like the copyright page or the bibliography or whatever), in an unorthodox and at times nonlinear fashion I have, in a weird way, read through some of these books so many times over the years that I almost can claim to have read them, albeit in an unofficial fashion. Anyway, over the course of this year I might do a few posts on here highlighting some of these loyal soldiers, who have gotten me through tough times.
* * * *
—
Alfred Hitchcock
“Hitchcock’s
private style and, opposed to it, his calculated bourgeois exterior, were signs
of an inner division. He considered all life unmanageable, and his obsessive
neatness (like his careful preparation of a film) was a way of taking a stand
against the chaos he believed was always at the ready, to be fended off with
whatever wit and structure one could muster. Social life he thought to be a
giant hypocrisy. He carried the burden of disguise as all his suave villains
do, and the attempt at elegance concealed the boyish secret, the second,
hidden, imagined life. The paradox of Alfred Hitchcock was that his delight in
his craft could never be liberated from a terrible and terrifying heritage of
desire and its concomitant guilt.”
—Donald
Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life
of Alfred Hitchcock
My introduction to the world of Alfred Hitchcock occurred in Fall semester of my Freshman year at Rhode Island College, in the autumn of 1998. One of the films we saw that semester was Hitchcock’s 1951 film Strangers on a Train. Although I had obviously heard of Hitchcock’s name before and knew of him, Strangers on a Train was the first film of his I ever saw, and I really enjoyed it. At another point in my days as a college student I took a class exclusively dedicated to the films of Hitchcock, which got me even more interested in his work. I can’t quite claim to be a Hitchcock expert, as of his 53 films, over the last 25 years or so I’ve seen around 20 of them: though of those 20 they do at least span the entire length of Hitch’s long career, from his early silent films to the British talkies of the 30s to his Selznick period in the 40s to his golden era of the 1950s and early 60s, and even some of his latter day films. One thing I do recall about the Hitchcock course I took back in college was, after we had seen The Birds, the professor told us about how Hitchcock had become very obsessed with the actress Tippi Hedren, and how we could read about it in the book The Dark Side of Genius by Donald Spoto. Shortly after that I went to the campus library (by far the place I spent the most time at during my years at RIC) and found the book in question: naturally, the first thing I did was read about the tumultuous friction that developed between Hitchcock and Hedren as the result of his obsession with her during the shooting of The Birds and Marnie. Later I purchased a copy of the book from the school store, and that’s the copy I still have to this day. As you can see, this book is well-used, to the extent that some pages are literally falling out, and there’s even a bit of water damage to it (I have no idea how that happened). It’s also one of the only books I own where I dog-eared some of my favorite pages: normally when I read a book I keep a separate sheet of paper nearby where I write down notes for the book I’m reading, as I like to keep my books in good condition. But with a book this old and beat-up, such decorum is not necessary.
Although I do not share many of Hitchcock’s indulgences (in particular, his addiction to food and drink), in many ways I can see a lot of myself in Hitch: a similar spiritual background in that we both had a Catholic upbringing, an obsession with order and routine as a way to stave off chaos, a fussy and compulsive neatness, a macabre fascination in the darkest passages of the human mind (which often manifested itself in an interest in the writings of the Gothics), a yearning for the creature comforts of life and a desire to avoid physical suffering at all cost, a Victorian love-hate squeamishness in regards to the human body and its operations, the desire to be an enigma, the adoption of a social pose of detachment/aloofness/snobbery (itself a brilliant disguise to mask a crippling anxiety; the actress Anne Baxter one summed him up memorably: “He had an extraordinary stillness, but then he could move with sudden speed — it was like lightning masqueraded in a Buddha’s casing”), and especially his abstaining from most human physical contact (one of his writers, Arthur Laurents, once said about him that “He thought everyone was doing something physical and nasty behind every closed door — except himself: he withdrew, he wouldn’t be part of it.” A statement proven by Hitchcock’s own admission to Spoto in 1975: “My exertion is all from the neck up. I watch”). Like Hitchcock, I also, from childhood, have had a terror of vomiting and nausea.
Hitchcock, in many ways, was a paradoxical figure, something that Spoto addresses in his book: “He was a profoundly Victorian Catholic, a rigid moralist, who ate and drank too much. He was a classical filmmaker and a manipulator of effects who loved a technical challenge. He was a childlike romantic living in an isolated, chilly gloom. Meticulous at work, he was cavalier and reckless about his health. Proper in public, he was inclined, if there was no microphone present, to outrageous toilet humor. He was the soul of gentility for the press, but he secretly reveled in the ugly, and coolly presented it for the audience’s consideration.” I’m also very fascinated in that for Hitchcock, the real fun of making movies was when he was alone with his writers, planning it all out on paper: but the actual filming of the movie he hated, because by then he had already filmed the whole thing in his head and had to rely on actors and technicians to try their best to depict his vivid fantasies. Funnily enough, Siouxsie & The Banshees (which I tie with Nine Inch Nails as my favorite band) were also big Hitchcock enthusiasts: the band named one of their singles “Spellbound” (inspired by the Hitchcock film of the same name), while the guitars in “Suburban Relapse” echo the violin screeches of Bernard Herrmann’s score for the infamous shower scene in Psycho (in 2014, Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin also compiled a 14 track CD for MOJO magazine, one of the songs being taken from Vertigo). Now that I think about it, I believe that Kim Gordon is a fan as well: one of her songs for Sonic Youth took its title from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Finally, I also admire Hitchcock’s almost Warholian style of self-promotion, and his method of trying to land a title for a project early on: in Spoto’s book, mention is made of how “Hitchcock felt that the lack of a definite title gave the production an atmosphere of the haphazard and a lack of focus — attitudes he shunned at all cost and energy.”
To return to Spoto’s book, I think it is a very interesting warts and all biography, one that spotlights both Hitchcock’s virtues and flaws. Some may accuse Spoto of playing the armchair psychologist, and certainly the book doesn’t shy away from some of Hitch’s more prurient desires and obsessions, but to be fair, in life, Hitchcock was often the same way. But I think a big part of the book’s appeal, to me, is that it’s very well-written. Consider the following passage from the book (my favorite passage, actually) on pg. 465, in which he makes a comparison between the works of Hitchcock and Hieronymus Bosch: “Seekers after the ideal and moralists in spite of themselves, Bosch and Hitchcock each spoke out of the sadness of his age and the experience of massive evil — and each addressed the terror of human isolation that he perceived within his soul, a terror that provided the strongest clue to the meaning of damnation. And finally, each artist regularly tucked himself into a modest corner of his own work as a signature; Bosch’s face and Hitchcock’s cameo are more than seals of authorship — they peer as players in their own nightmares.”
The last few sections of the book, dealing with Hitchcock’s physical and mental decline, his slide into chronic alcoholism and senility, and the loss of his will to live following the realization that he would never be able to do another film again, are almost unbearably poignant: the last few paragraphs of the book never fail to make my eyes water up whenever I read them:
“Gradually, the great final battle subsided. Arthritis had wracked his body, but in early April the pain oddly diminished. He slept more, and deeply, but then his liver failed, his kidney function slowed, and his tired, enlarged heart no longer responded to the modern device he had at first worn so proudly.
On
the night of April 28/29, the doctor was called, and by early morning the
family had gathered quietly. ‘I retire when I die,’ Hitchcock had said not long
before. ‘One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what
happens after death, although Catholics have their hopes.’
The
end came at 9:17 on the morning of April 29, 1980, without suspense, without
violence. The terror, after all, had been met for years in his dreams and in
his art. It was, as so often, a quiet, scarcely discernible moment, as if he
had glimpsed the cloudless horizon that was always his image of serenity — as
if his earlier, almost forgotten hopes had finally come back to gather round
and had not, at the last, left him alone in the darkness.”
Hitchcock Films That I’ve Seen
The
Lodger (1927)
The
39 Steps (1935)
Sabotage
(1936)
Saboteur
(1941)
Shadow
of a Doubt (1943) my favorite: it was also one of Hitch’s favorites as well
Spellbound
(1945)
Notorious
(1946)
Rope
(1948)
Stage
Fright (1950)
Strangers
on a Train (1951)
I
Confess (1953)
Dial
“M” for Murder (1954)
Rear
Window (1954)
To
Catch a Thief (1955)
The
Trouble with Harry (1955)
Vertigo
(1958)
Psycho
(1960)
The
Birds (1963)
Marnie (1964)
Frenzy (1972)
As an appendix to all this, I would also like to post here a short story that I wrote a couple of years ago, that revolved around a fantasized depiction of Alfred Hitchcock shooting a scene for his film Frenzy (and which I originally wrote for the Neo-Decadent Cookbook, but never formally submitted for whatever reason):
The Murder Mystery
“How would you choose to be murdered? Well, there are many nice ways.
Eating is a good one.”
—Alfred Hitchcock
EXT.
THAMES RIVER — DAY
TITLE
CARD: LONDON, AUGUST 2, 1971 (MONDAY)
|
T |
HE SCENE IS a summery morning in
London. Beams of sunlight make the windows of the nearby Modernist buildings
gleam like the blades of enormous scissors poised over the chest of
some chillily attractive blonde matron, and the mischievous bubbling of the Thames
gives one the impression that the water is teeming with lascivious undines
giggling at some private dirty joke. A crowd is assembled on the banks of the
river near London County Hall. A film is being shot this day: the opening scene
of Frenzy[1],
Alfred Hitchcock’s 52nd film, and his first to be filmed in Jolly
Old England in many a year. Like most Hollywood films, this movie is not being
shot in a linear fashion; although they would be shooting the opening scene
this morning, in fact the film’s production had begun a week ago, on July 26.
The Artist of Anxiety
himself is seated on a sturdy folding chair off to the side like a Urizenic
Budai, his face stern as Jove as he watches the preparations for the day’s
filming begin to get underway. Seated next to him is the bespectacled and
heavily side-burned writer and philosopher Colin Wilson, who is serving as a
technical consultant for this picture, and every now and then he leans over to
Hitchcock and the two men engage in some light banter on the subject of
necrophilia (which is one of Hitch’s favorite topics of all), though at one
point in their discourse the macabre lilt of the conversation switches over to
a discussion on serial killers, in particular John Haigh, the so-called “Acid
Bath Murderer,” and his disturbing dreams of blood[2].
A portable record player has been set up nearby, and Hitchcock is listening to
the 3rd Velvet Underground album, the track currently playing being
“The Murder Mystery.” For obvious reasons he likes the song title but the actual
music and lyrics (like so much modern pop and rock & roll) makes no sense
to him, and something about the implied chaos suggested by the song offends his
sensibilities, in much the same way that the sensibilities of the populace of
North Wales were offended by the Sapphic antics of the Ladies of Llangollen[3] in Plas
Newydd in the 18th century (though he did find himself fascinated by the subject of transvestism as
brought up in the opening track, “Candy Says”[4]):
to distract himself from the chaotic so-called “music,” he begins whistling
Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette” (which he first heard on the set of
Munrau’s Sunrise in 1927). From his
vantage point he observes the actors (many of whom are discussing a recent
episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus)
get in their assigned places, watches as the crew members bustle about their
tasks like Mod Myrmidons (all of his key male associates, he’s pleased to note,
are properly dressed in coat and tie, no matter their age). Under the keen eye
of Director of Photography Gil Taylor, cameras are being aimed at the actors
like guns pointed at political hostages, while boom microphones tower overhead
like Cubist giraffes. Everything seems to be running in a glabrous manner . .
. under a Lacerated Sky, a machine of
flesh and blood fornicates in a Crystal Trench. Even the seagulls seem
Spellbound by the spectacle.
Yet Hitchcock’s mind
is elsewhere. Most people would agree that the idea of a man directing two
films at the same time would be an impossible act. And yet, that’s exactly what
Alfred Hitchcock is doing in London on this morning of August 2,
1971. Of course, as far as Hitchcock is concerned, the motion picture he is
currently filming had already been completed months ago, long before the
cameras had even started rolling. In his opinion, all his films were made in
that little office in his bungalow on the lot of Universal Studios, a
collaborative act between him and the screenwriter that saw them putting the
whole thing down on paper. Therefore the creative part is over, and the actual
filming is just a tedious obligation, a going through the motions. Now it was
all in the hands of the actors, who naturally will try their hardest to bungle
it up. Actors! How he loathes the sight of them! The cattle! //Thinking about cattle makes him think of
cows, which makes him think of dairy farms, which makes him think of Grace
Kelly, naked, her wrists bound and her body arranged in a submissive hogtied
position, which makes him think of himself straddling her from behind,
squeezing her tits cruelly and forcing them to secrete milk into rusty pails
arranged beneath her bosom// He is reminded of an interview he had done
with L’Express a few years back,
around the time of the Torn Curtain debacle,
where he had put forth his notion (not for the first time) that his films were
99% finished when the screenplay was complete, and how he dreamt of an IBM
machine where one could insert a screenplay into the machine and watch as the
film emerged complete from the other end.
At the moment his
mind is crowded with black thoughts, like the armies of apocalypse ravens in
his film The Birds. Many of his
trusted collaborators from the past are long gone: James Stewart was too old to
be a convincing leading man in his films any longer, Cary Grant had retired
from acting, Ingrid Bergman had ditched him for Rossellini (whereas Grace Kelly
had ditched him for Rainier III, the Prince of Monaco) . . . he has even lost
Robert Burks (his old Director of Photography), George Tomasini (his chief Editor),
and Bernard Herrmann, who had let him down by not gifting him with a
much-needed “pop” soundtrack for Torn
Curtain. His 72nd birthday was fast approaching and his health
wasn’t getting any better (the same could be said for his wife, Alma, who had
recently suffered a small stroke), and in recent days his normally bland dreams
had become grim nightmares, surrealistic phantasmagorias where giant eyeballs
gazed unblinkingly at him from some vast starless void, and where doors opened
endlessly onto infinitely repeating hallways bathed in green light (which makes him recall a play he first saw in 1905, at the age of 6, in which the villain accompanied the stage
while bathed in green light, to orchestral music of a sinister nature. “I
remember the green light – green for the appearances of ghosts and villains”).
It annoyed him that he had failed to convince Nabokov to adapt the book
currently being filmed into a screenplay. While initially happy to be back in
London after so many years away he found the modernization of the city
appalling, and the less said about the psychedelic nature of modern pubs the
better; even Covent Garden had changed greatly from his memories of it as a
child.
Better to reflect on
happier memories: reading Victorian Christmas crawlers in his youth, his
childhood obsession with the timetables for boats and trains, Confession with
Father Newdigate at St. Ignatius College, his juvenile trips to the Black
Museum at Scotland Yard (where he had seen amongst its collections shoes that had
belonged to prostitutes slain by Jack the Ripper), his discovery of the work of
Poe at the age of 16, designing ads for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company,
attending murder trials at the Old Bailey Court, his past collaboration with
Salvador Dali, the $15 million dollars that Psycho
made at the box office, his annual wedding anniversary holidays with Alma
at the Palace Hotel at Saint Moritz in Switzerland (where he would watch his
family ski from the comfort of his room while he sipped a warm glass of Apfelwein), that visit to the Vice
Museum in Paris where he had fingered the guillotoine blade that had beheaded
Marie Antoinette, watching his daughter ski at Gabriel Valley, vanilla ice
cream covered in Hine brandy, smashing tea cups after breakfast (a daily
ritual), that time in 1956 when he pretended to strangle the actress Mary Scott
on the set of Mr. Blanchard’s Secret,
dinner at Anne Baxter’s house in Los Angeles in August 1959 (digesting dinner
peacefully while stroking the head of her pet poodle Petunia), the note of
gushing praise that David O. Selznick had sent him following the release of Rear Window, Rodin’s The Kiss, that time in the early 1940s when, on a train traveling from Boulogne to Paris, he had seen from his window
a boy and a girl standing before a wall near an old factory, and how the boy
was urinating on the wall while the girl held his hand, never letting go . . .
the inner peace he felt at the sight of a well-organized desk, a cloudless and
placid horizon, and, more so than anything else, food[5].
And there were still things to look forward to in the future: like teatime at
4:30, when he could gulp his troubles away (the Master always swallowed food
and drink without chewing) with some vodka gimlets, or maybe a 1969 Meursault
or a 1964 Chateau Margaux . . . after
all, a good red wine always reminded him of menstrual blood.
In some ways, Hitchcock was a prisoner of his own success, as he freely admitted (and like his hero Poe, he saw himself as a prisoner of the suspense genre). Most modern theatergoers saw him merely as a Suspense Specialist, a Master of the Macabre, suited only to direct spy thrillers and murder stories. Little did they know that, were he to make films to only please himself, the resulting movies would be far different from his usual fare: more realistic and dramatic, with less humor. Of course, the bastards at Universal would never let him get away with it: like most of the other studios the bean-counters just seemed to want pop films with youthful characters, anti-establishment elements, and nudity scenes. While waiting for his crew to finish setting up for the scene, he begins to daydream about one of these more unconventional film ideas of his, which he had first mentioned to François Truffaut at the end of 1967. The film would depict 24 hours in the life of a city, “. . . a complete cyclic movement.” He can already see the movie in his head (the first scene, for example, would feature a fly crawling on the nose of a tramp lying in a doorway at 5 a.m.), and it is this second imaginary film he is directing in the back of the haunted palace of his mind, on this warm August morning on the banks of the Thames. Unsurprisingly, the film will focus on food: its arrival in the city, how it’s distributed and sold, who buys it, how it’s cooked, the different means by which it is consumed. And he even knows how the film will end: a pessimistic montage of sewers dumping garbage out into the oceans of the world. The theme: what people did to good things, the rottenness of humanity. Murder, by proxy of eating, was as vital to existence as breathing. In a manner of speaking, it was the ultimate whodunit, a mystery that could never be solved: why has God or Evolution conspired to create a world where the daily consumption of flesh and organic matter is necessary for the sustenance of its manifold inhabitants?
The producer notifies Hitch that shooting is ready to begin. Bored, his face mimicking the blank facial stare of madness oft refelected in the premature death mask aesthethic of his body of work, Hitchcock turns off the record player and directs his gaze to the scene below. Stunt woman Roberta Gibbs, portraying a murdered corpse, is floating face down in the Thames, completely naked, a necktie wrapped tightly around her neck, and once her body has drifted onto the polluted Shores of Hell two bobby-hatted constables race over to inspect the corpse. In the apaugasma of the morning sun her bare buttocks resemble two pale Shimizu white peaches. The growling in Hitchcock’s stomach resembles the chthonic church bells of St. Paul’s tolling funereal peals.
“Some directors film slices of life, I film slices of cake.”
—Alfred Hitchcock
[1] An adaptation of Arthur La
Bern’s somewhat awkwardly titled 1966 novel Goodbye
Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square.
[2] "I saw before me a forest of crucifixes which gradually
turned into trees. At first, there appeared to be dew or rain, dripping from
the branches, but as I approached I realized it was blood. The whole forest
began to writhe and the trees, dark and erect, to ooze blood. . . A man went
from each tree catching the blood . . . When the cup was full, he approached
me. 'Drink,' he said, but I was unable to move.” —John Haigh
[3] Eleanor
Butler and Sarah Ponsonby
[4] Contrary to what some people
might think, Hitchcock was fascinated by homosexuality and was very comfortable
around homosexual actors.
[5]
“I find contentment from
food. It’s a mental process rather than a physical. There is as much
anticipation in confronting good food as there is in going on a holiday, or
seeing a good show. There are two kinds of eating— eating to sustain and eating
for pleasure. I eat for pleasure.”
—Alfred Hitchcock, August 26, 1937
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