A propos of nothing else, here’s a sequence of photos taken a few days ago.
The bird in question – all four shots are of the same one – was a Long Tailed Tit. We get them from time to time on the feeders opposite to the glass sliding door that leads out from our kitchen to the garden.
For a couple days before, this bird and others of the breed had repeatedly and persistently – seemingly, I’m glad to say, without suffering obvious damage- thrown themselves, or rather flown, against the glass; not with that bone cracking blindness that stuns, and sometimes kills garden birds, but, equally, not with the finesse that enables Blue Tits and some others to hover in the corners of the door frame, picking off insect treats of one sort or another.
We have post-it notes stuck in various places on the glass which successfully deters most of the potential kamikaze flights, but there was something so determined, and so seemingly incapable of learning, about this Long Tailed Tit’s attempts that, when I saw it happening for the third day, made me go find the camera – I don’t have a smart phone – and fire off a dozen shots while I sat with my morning coffee. These are the four best, cropped, and with the bird centred.
I like the Long Tailed Tits. They usually show up in half-dozens around this time of year, though this year I’ve not seen more than three in a group. They remind me of shuttlecocks, and not only when they’re throwing themselves against windows. I like the subtle colours too, though, being shot against the sky, that doesn’t show up in the photos.
The images here make me think of ancient rock art, of modern logos, and of the old saying about doing the same thing over and again and expecting a different outcome… which we can apply to whosoever and whatever has caught our attention in the wider world today and whenever.
I’m always – when I’m not doing something else – trying to put my finger on the difference between the shown story and the told one; the former as expressed in ‘the movies’, the latter in the short story, or even the novel.
The similarities, of which there are many (and arguably more so between the movie and the short story than the other possible pairings in the trio) also interest me. If you’ve been following the blog you’ll know I’ve written about it before, in general terms and in relation to individual stories.
It’s one of those issues in which the metaphor or some other form of analogy comes in handy… films are like this, short stories like that etc.
Working on my current project – a novel, perhaps even a picaresque one – it struck me that one of the scenes, if adapted for film, would force the viewer to witness what happened, whereas the told story of the book merely invites the reader to speculate about how the events might have unfolded.
It’s a brief piece of swordplay, – the story is set in the late 1700s – in which a Highwayman who is used to people putting up their hands and handing over their valuables without resistance (not necessarily in a bunch) misjudges his intended victim, who has been taught a trick or two with the sword.
Making a filmed version of the scene all sorts of commitments would have to be decided upon, by the director, cameraman, lighting and sound engineers, let alone the actors: what would they do? From where would we see it? What would we hear?
Every button, turn-back, spilled coffee (or hot chocolate) stain, repaired tear, and so on would have to be decided upon. The author of the told story doesn’t even have to tell you what colour coat either man is wearing, or even if they are wearing a coat (unless a pocket is going to be involved).
And we haven’t yet considered the role of the editor and, these days, the CGI manipulator!
The told story is a hook that drags out from memory, of films and pictures we’ve seen, of previous stories we’ve read or heard, of toys we’ve played with as a child (or as a parent): and we mix those memories, quite unconsciously, into what we think of as having imagined: we re-colour the originals, no doubt, and re-record the soundtrack and re-edit the whole. We make it up, in fact, and to a far greater degree, perhaps, than has the writer.
With the shown story, we merely see and hear what is put before us. Others have done the imagining , and they’ve done it using their own memories as the resource, renewed and enhanced no doubt by access to the recorded results of the memories of others.
I bang on about this disparity repeatedly, and I do so because stories, told and shown, remind me of it so often. The fascination is in the nature of our, or rather, I suppose, my engagement with the two modes of address: the one that is with other people’s interpretation of the story – a consequence of their lives – and the other with my own – a consequence of mine!
The question it raises, but never really answers, is about the degree of that engagement: its potency, its intimacy. The written story is mine, whether or not I wrote it, in a way that the filmed story can never be. Could it be that the shown story pushes us towards reflection upon the outer world, and the told one towards a contemplation of the inner?
For either, and for both, I’m inclined to believe that story, however communicated, serves to engage us in reflection upon the nature of reality, and unreality, of possibility and potential, of shortfall and limitation, of life as we have lived it, or might have done.
Talking to a writing buddy about my current ‘work-in-progress’ – the story of a man who walks from the Highlands of Scotland to the River Trent in the late C18th – I was asked how I’d deal with period modes of speech.
If only it were that simple.
Ostensibly this is a historical novel, but to give it ‘authentic’ language might not be the ‘thing’. For a start, how could we know? I recently re-read Tom Jones, Fielding’s mid 18th century masterpiece. Should I steal his voices? How accurate were they, I wonder? From the perspective of two and a half centuries’ away, they seem credible but credibility and authenticity aren’t quite the same thing.
And my story is set, consciously and with goodwill aforethought, two generations later. Have you listened lately to the voices of the UK as they were fifty years ago? Besides, it wasn’t period voices that really interested me. A historical setting (even an historical setting) can be like the metal rim (precious or otherwise) of a diamond ring: not the main focus.
What I’ve been struggling with is the regional accents through which my man travels on his journey.
That issue of authenticity versus credibility raises its heed again, and with a similar compounding element – that of purity. It seems to me that, as there is no definitive C18th voice, there is no pure regional voice either. Voices are a moving target, and they belong to individuals. If you look at the distribution maps of vernacular words – ‘mash’ and ‘mass’ for the steeping of tea leaves in freshly boiled water is one of the examples I’ve come across – the intricacies of their boundaries defies logic. Tongues of one usage intrude inexplicably into broad swathes of the alternative; tight enclaves of difference and bulges of intrusion abound.
Of course, it doesn’t mean there is no explanation, only that one isn’t known to us! And language, especially a language of the people, by the people, like English, is changing all the time, and in very small places. When they guy who took the king’s shilling and went off to war came back he might well bring a word to his village or hamlet that other locals picked up and will go on to use for generations, while those in the neighbouring villages simply did not, and will not.
I know my dad came home from his war with Hindi words – or their derivations – that we used, accurately or otherwise, for the rest of his life. More local adoptions happen too. I picked up ‘aye’ in its ‘forever’ sense from a customer of mine and have used it to sign off, as he did, ever since. ‘Mebbe’ came to me from Norman Nicholson, the Cumberland poet, who used it in his speech, and mebbe in his writing too!
And here’s the clue to what I’ve ended up trying to do in that WIP I kicked off with: create characters that speak in a way that is credible for them as individuals, but not in any way representative of some ‘pure’ form, outwith which the speaker might be accused of not having a ‘proper’, authentic accent. I see that my spellchecker doesn’t like ‘outwith’. T.S. Sherlock!
I recently watched the 2022 movie, The Quiet Girl (at Caldbeck’s CAFS film club) which, like Macbeth, ‘hath murdered sleep’, at least for a couple nights until I sat down to write this!
I’ve often noticed that the shown stories of movies have more in common with the told short story than with the novel, and this one more so than most. That’s perhaps not surprising considering it’s based on the story Foster by ‘master’ short story teller Claire Keegan. Her collection Walk The Blue Fields (2007), set also in rural Ireland, bears comparison with George Moore’s 1914 landmark collection The Untilled Field which catalogues a bleak poverty that seems, a biblical lifetime later, to have changed less than might have been expected. There’s a genre of this type of writing, and not only from Ireland. Coppard, Bates and Mary Mann touched on it in their English tales, and so do several European writers and Americans, especially of the deep south .
The titles, of the short story/novella – I’m glad others have difficulty choosing which category to use – and of the film, tell us all we need to know: a quiet girl is fostered out to relatives and learns, as we do, about the meaning of family and of home.
I have seen adaptation described as ‘streamlining’ stories. Sometimes that can seem like dilution, but it would be hard to believe that the heart-wrenching story of The Quiet Girl could be more intense in the telling than it is in the showing. I haven’t read Foster yet, but I will!
I found it a very literary film. Shot in Gaelic and English (as spoken in southern Ireland), we watched it with sub-titles over the Gaelic. I didn’t quite get my ear in to the accent and missed some of the English, but I’m not sure that mattered. In fact, I’m not sure it wasn’t expected, because there were sequences where what was being said ran crystal clear, and where it didn’t the visuals carried the sense.
The most telling statement in the whole film, for me, was where Sean, the fostering father of the eponymous heroine tells her, and us, that ‘many people miss the chance to say nothing’. It is a wonderfully convoluted, and powerful notion, and sits at the heart of this word-scarce movie. Nothing might be said, but we become very aware of what perhaps ought to be heard and acted upon.
Only one character talks endlessly, and that it is a neighbour, who under the guise of friendship gets the quiet girl away from her foster parents for long enough to question her on how they are living. She also takes the chance to tell her, maliciously, the tragic backstory of the family. Yet this bit of nastiness has a positive outcome for secrets revealed allow issues to be confronted, and emotions to be released.
The shown story, careful with what its characters tell us, is shown in a similarly careful way. Like a literary technique the film-maker’s language is of close cropped images, often showing only a fraction of the person whom we are watching, or listening to. The camera follows feet, legs, faces, but no more. But we, and perhaps more so than the characters themselves, see beyond what is shown, and understand what is not being said. The camera, unlike the voice, struggles to exclude, but anything we see behind what we are looking at carries the tale too: walls are bare; shadows lurk. When the rare scene opens up to a long or wide shot we notice it!
This is a story of lack, not so much of money as of care, of sympathy and of understanding, and much of it centres on the two fathers: the foster and the natural.
My first reaction to the natural father was to see him as an irredeemable villain, but as the story progressed I began to recognise that he too was a victim of his own lack, a sort of half-hearted narcissism, his shallow attachments to other women, to drink, to gambling. Around him a sort of torpor exists, in the lack of movement and interest of the other characters. It’s almost as if he stills life by his presence.
The foster father is also an isolated, almost motionless figure to begin with, shown, standing on his own in the corner of the kitchen while his wife and the quiet girl eat at the table. But as the story unfolds he begins to move, and eventually to join the family to which he belongs. It is he who delivers that piece of wisdom which I believe to be the ‘one true statement’, in Hemingway’s words, that validates the story.
The audience I was in sat in pin-drop silence throughout the screening, and wept openly at its ending. I would have been disappointed had it been otherwise.
[Since writing the above I’ve read Foster, Claire Keegan’s originating tale. At 88 pages in my 2022 Faber edition it looks like a novella rather than a short story… but I’m inclined to look for structural definitions rather than merely wordcounts. And this has the feel of a short story about it: it’s tight, centred on a few characters and telling one story, more so, perhaps than the film is.
I’ve long thought that the job of adaptation is not merely to save us from the bother if imagining what words mean, but to offer us a new interpretation. The Quiet Girl manages to do both, in the sense that it sticks very closely to the original, yet is nevertheless very different. I wish I could go back and read the story before I saw the film, and wonder if I’d be writing the same piece now were that possible.
Keegan’s tale is written in the first person voice, and in the present tense, something a film can only try to do, but I’ve never seen one yet that fully works. Barry Lyndon, retelling Thackeray’s first person account of the eponymous hero loses almost entirely the sly revelation of his self-obsessed, whingeing narcissism, and, of course, shows him, as the camera must from the outside. The Quiet Girl cannot avoid doing the same. That first person voice has become the omniscient third person of the lens and the microphone. And while we’re on microphones, let’s mention that Keegan’s narrator thinks in English, reporting only the occasional Gaelic word. As a dabbler with the intricacies of Scot’s Gaelic I could pick out a dozen or more that I recognised in the parent language that the film presents. Why did they do that, I wonder? Was it connected to the storytelling? If it was I couldn’t see what extra it brought. Perhaps it was to do with funding. That’s not to say it spoiled the movie, and it certainly set it more firmly in a foreign country, from an English perspective…all to the good!
There were other differences. The camera cannot help but provide descriptions, even when it’s tight on its subjects. The novella hinted at much that the camera plainly showed. A sentence of words, a headful of imaginings, but a screenshot of bare walls, of bored sisters; trees and sky passing above as the girl lies on the back seat of the moving car, only a line of print.
The fathers too are presented differently, though with recognisably the same moments popping up: Sean – never referred to as such, as I recall, in the novella, but always by his family name; Da, the natural father hardly seen in the early stages of the told tale, but there to see from the beginning of the film.
His ‘I’ve had a liquid lunch’ of the written story, becomes a scene of him sitting alone in a bar, drinking his beer. More significantly that enigmatic ending is quite different, and at the same time, exactly the same. Keegan gives us a short sentence, in which almost every word is open to interpretation; the film gives us glimpses and an intonation that’s unclear. What is being said, and to whom, and with what feeling remains something for us to ponder.
Overall I found the ambience of Keegan’s story in a lower key. I want to describe it as ‘grey’ – a charcoal drawing of a story – though not to diminish it. But to what extent is that prejudiced by my watching of the film? I want to see that as turning up of the heat…not a dilution, but an intensifying of the story: bringing light, and warmth and sound to it. For the film is not shot in the suppressed voice and doubting mind of the girl Cait. The original story was not told in the all encompassing, but detached eye and ear of the movie camera. As is often the case with adaptations, I’d rather encourage you to experience both, and for their differences as much as for the one’s faithfulness to the other.]
I mentioned on the blog that I was busy writing a novel. It’s not a thing I’ve done very often, and when I have done it, I have always done it as if it were a series of short stories. My ‘long fiction’ tends to be like a patchwork quilt, a mass of shorter pieces, not even necessarily a sequence – though some will be sequential – eventually stitched together.
Perhaps I travel through a larger story as a dog might travel a path: stopping here and there, being distracted, being diverted from the path, dashing forwards and sneaking back.
So, irregularly, and certainly not in any order, and probably not even finished, here’s a first Work-in-Progress piece from this long work in progress that has as its working title The Drover’s Dog…
Swarkstone Bridge
Yer father wants tae make me a gentleman.
Davy and Leona had dismounted and were standing on a small rise overlooking the flat marsh and the stone buttresses of the causeway that morphed into Swarkstone Bridge, the last over the river before Nottingham. Andrew and Tunnicliffe were on the bridge itself, peering over the parapet into the waters of the Trent.
He means well, Leona said.
Aye, I knoe he does. But ah’m a drover, and that’s a’.
You’re a drover, Davy, autumn into winter, as he was for many a year, and Andrew with him. But what are you from winter into spring and summer?
He looked at her without speaking. She nodded towards the other two.
Look at them, she said. Chasing the ghosts of ma grandmother’s time.
There it was, he thought. The catch of the Highlands in her voice. Ma grandmother, hidden away inside her lady’s accent.
And all they have to do, Davy, is to hold still and listen.
He cocked his head. What was she meaning? She read his expression.
If you’re quiet enough, Davy, and there are no hooves clattering upon the bridge, and no sheep calling, no cattle lowing, no dogs, and the birds all silent in the trees, and the trees themselves silent as if waiting, then you may hear them if you have the ear for it.
He felt a shiver down his spine.
Listen, listen. She leaned slightly forward, tilting her head. And yes, it was silent. There were neither cattle nor sheep, nor voices of men, nor the wind in the winter bare treetops, and the slow black river, aye, that was silent too, even where the waters were whipped white as they foamed between the arches. Do you not hear them Davy?
He too leaned forwards, his body echoing the poise of hers, but he heard nothing more than the silence that whistled in his ears.
Hear what, Leona? What is it that you hear?
She relaxed and straightened and turned to him with a smile.
Oh, Davy! I hear the faint sound of riders, the blowing of horses, the jingle of their gear, and the clink of the steel of the dragoons, and the soft burr of their voices as they turn away from the river and from the bridge and ride north. And sometimes, Davy, I hear, coming after them, heading northwards too, the sound of soft feet trudging; tramp, tramp, tramp. Who they are I do not know, and the squeal of wagon wheels in the soft wet mush of mud and frost. Perhaps King George’s soldiers? Perhaps our own, walking the long retreat?
And there it was again. Our own. Davy smiled back.
She reached out and touched his arm.
And once Davy, when I was a child and father brought me out here – Andrew was with us, but neither of them heard, nor any of the servants who were with us.
Yes?
I heard the sound of musket shot, Davy. Aye, three shots, and a single cry.
She let go of his arm and looked away, let out a sigh.
What do you think that was, Davy? For I never heard it more. She smiled again. They are coming back.
Where? Where? Davy looked around as if the dragoons had sprung back to life and were bearing down on them, silent as the past.
Andrew, and my father, she said. Look.
They were walking their horses back down the long approach to the bridge.
We’ll meet them on the road, she said.
She leapt lightly to her horse, side-saddle, like a lady. Davy reluctantly mounted his own. At least, once he was up there, he was more comfortable than Andrew ever would be. Leona was looking back at the bridge. Its stonework lustrous in the late afternoon sun, like dried blood, the shadows of its row of buttresses as sharp as claymores.
It will not stand much longer, I’m fearing, she said, adding, and the echoes will fade.
(I wrote this little piece while I was working on The Drover’s Dog, my current Work-in-Progress. It was to remind me, and perhaps to clarify, what I thought I was trying to do)
Metaphors seem to be useful, if the number of times they’re used, especially by politicians is anything to go by.
They point us towards a certain interpretation of whatever is being metaphorised. Of course, that brings with it a certain limitation too, for it’s likely to be one particular element of the metaphor that is intended to be taken as typifying its object, whereas others might well imply a different story. Equally, the metaphor might be intended to do just that.
I have metaphors for the novel and the short story forms. The former I think of as a cruise, the latter as a crossing. Both those ideas are built on a sort preceding metaphor though, which is that story is in some way a journey. This little novel (if indeed it is a novel and not a novella, or indeed a long short story, or series of closely linked short stories – or even a form I’m not aware of but have unconsciously stumbled into) obviously includes journeys taken by several of the characters, but even characters who stay where they are might have taken a metaphorical journey, and so might the storyteller, and so might the author who appointed that teller, and so might the reader. It might be that the more of those who have journeyed, whether successfully or not, the better the story, whatever form we recognise in it.
If the writing of a story is some sort of journey, then so too is imagining it. The writing down and the work that follows, of getting every step right for the reader, is a journey too and neither of them necessarily any business of the reader’s. And whether or not any of those journeys have been accomplished is a question that reader and writer must answer separately, and not necessarily in accord with each other, for what a writer wants to say need not always be what a reader wants to read, nor a listener hear, because the imagining and telling of a story, as a cruise or as a crossing need not be compromised by the need to please some notional purchaser or traveller, but only to prepare a route to the view which the writer has desired that they should see from that particular angle of approach.
A cruise may take us to many destinations and in an order that has nothing to do with the identity or experiencing of any particular one, but only with the spatial arrangement of those locations in relation to each other. A crossing takes us from one location to another, yet the nature of that crossing might be as varied as any of the crossings that punctuate the cruise.
Destinations and passages between them imply arrivals and departures, themselves metaphors perhaps for endings and beginnings. Crossings, implicitly, have one only of each; cruises have several. And maybe stories, and especially the longer stories, are perhaps likely to have both, and to be both at the different levels of their telling.
The perception of what a story has or does not have, and is or is not, will vary with the variety of minds that take its journeys; the potentials and limitations being, perhaps, not confined to those of either reader or writer.
The Slap is, of course, a sort of climax to the story, even though it doesn’t directly further the investigation into who committed the murder.
I’m talking about the moment when Sydney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs in the 1967 film, The Heat of the Night, responds to Eric Endicott’s’s assault by slapping him right back. Is it what we might call the peripeteia? It certainly brings Rod Steiger’s character, who witnesses the exchange, to an undeniably new perspective on the real world as it’s being lived where Tibbs comes from.
But it’s not my favourite moment in the film. That comes a lot earlier, and in its more muted, perhaps more nuanced way it does something very similar. This is the moment when Steiger’s Mississippi Sherriff, having arrested Tibbs and discovered that he really is a Philadelphia cop asks what they call him. In a wonderfully delivered line, which could have been uttered in a thousand ways, I guess, and none of them as perfect, Poitier replies ‘They call me Mr Tibbs’.
The statement is in itself a metaphorical slap in the face to Steiger and his deputy. What else would they call him FHS? It draws our attention to the disparity between their two worlds, and to the gulf across which they both try, and to some extent succeed in reaching in this so much more than a mere murder mystery.
I’m often struck by the way little segments of story, in both shown and told stories, stand out from the rest and seem to encapsulate or symbolise the message behind the whole. The barn raising scene in Witness is one .
Another, from the film Bad Day at Black Rock, is where the bad guys discuss what to do about the arrival of the Spencer Tracey Character in their town, and the threat he brings with him. Standing where the railroad crosses the main street – at a crossroads of sorts – they perform what is almost a ballet sequence as their leader rallies them to his cause. It’s a scene that Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz reminds me of as his gang hold a similar discussion, but he takes the technique into the surreal, moving both the characters and the camera POV, and in subsequent scenes putting it on steroids!
There are similarly striking scenes in the written story. I suppose they’re the ones that once were called ‘purple passages’. Of course many novels and even short stories are what might be called episodic: a series of vignettes, long or short, out of which the overall shape and point of the story is pieced together like a jigsaw.. the later pieces seeming more important as they bring the whole into focus.
In Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party, Sir Randolph’s heartfelt rebuke of Gilbert Hartlip: ‘You were not shooting like a gentleman, Gilbert’ is far, far stronger than the words themselves, taken out of context, would suggest.
In each of Grossman’s two epic novels, Life and Fate and Stalingrad there is a chapter that rings out from the rest. In the former this is the one in which we see the gas-chambers of the Reich in operation. I certainly felt that everything before this chapter had led to it, and that everything that followed was in its shadow.
In Stalingrad it’s the chapter that steps aside from the front-line of the war and takes us down the coal mine with the civilians who have been drafted in to work the coal-face. I think it’s the most genuinely terrifying piece of fiction I’ve ever read.
What raises questions for me is that the scenes I’ve selected in both film and told story– and I’ve picked them because they’re the ones that stick in my memory, and which first come unbidden to mind whenever I think of the tales – are not the closing scenes of any of the pieces I’ve cited.
Is it true that we remember the beginnings of novels and the endings of short stories? I can find examples of the opposite. Yet endings are undoubtedly the most important parts of the short story, and films, I think, are more often like the short story than any other of the storytelling forms. Other scenes make other points as the stories I’ve mentioned end. There’s a long shot of the train as Virgil Tibbs returns to his old world, with the theme song as soundtrack and the credits rolling, but you see him in that carriage as the camera tracks his journey. Colegate’s novel, which, though short for a novel, it most definitely is, ends on a catalogue of what became of all the major characters in the story. The film version has them form up and carry away the dead body of Tom, hauntingly like a column of soldiers, while the same catalogue, reduced to brief headings unfolds on screen. In Witness the Harrison Ford character drives away, briefly pausing to acknowledge the arrival of the local boy who will surely go on to get the girl as the pre-story normality is restored. In Grossman’s Stalingrad there is the heartbreaking scene in the cornfields: ‘You will reap what I have sown’.
But the earlier scenes are not stealing anything from the endings. They are creating the context in which we evaluate those endings, and by extension, the story as a whole. Where a story ends, what a story means, is what has gone before and what must surely follow understood in the light of what has taken place during the story. Those high points that do stay with us are, not always obviously, key events in enabling that understanding.
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