Last night I was ambushed by my past. 

Again. 

I was watching an old black and white movie made in 1939, filmed years before I was born, and yet strangely enough it seemed to be about me. 

Well, in a way. 

It’s a persistent theme in my Requiem series of supernatural mysteries: the way in which the past infiltrates the present with unexpected tendrils of memory and experience. 

I suppose this particular intrusion started when I was at university. 

The program of English Literature I went through was extensive and thorough: from Anglo Saxon in the original, through the odd sounding Middle English, and right on up through the long sweep of the moderns. Getting ready for my graduate work I noticed my curriculum so far had been a little soft on American Literature, so I chose a course that surveyed American writers like Whitman and Thoreau. I showed up for the first class, and the lecturer informed me that his offering had been cancelled due to low enrolment. I left with a copy of the reading list and, after I chose another course, I made a point of doing the American reading anyway. 

It took me a few years, and I was at it, on and off, even after I began teaching English myself. I’ve written in this blog before about my fascination with James Thurber—not just his humorous writing, but also his life and times. That led me to the Algonquin Round Table, a gathering of writer friends over lunch at a New York hotel in the 1920’s. 

I’ve actually stayed at the Algonquin, right across the road from the New Yorker magazine, absorbing the rich atmosphere in a way that has influenced my spirit-haunted stories. I’ve stood at the door where Alexander Woollcott typed his Broadway reviews and argued with George S. Kaufman.

People sometimes ask me if I’ve ever sensed the presence of ghosts. I’m about to laugh it off and say no, but then I remember the eerie feeling of the immanent past lingering in those halls. Or the time I sat alone on Hadrian’s wall at sunset, looking out over the moors—empty but somehow teeming with the righteous anger of the Picts and Scots against the Romans.

The Algonquin group, those famous American literary people trading witty barbs over lunch, included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Robert E. Sherwood. It’s not lost on me that these close friends were renowned for their satire as much as their serious work. Sherwood was very tall and Parker quite short, and Benchley said that when they walked down the street together they looked like a pipe organ. Anyway, it’s Sherwood, the tall one, who ambushed me last night.

The movie I watched was called Idiot’s Delight and it starred Clark Gable as a song and dance man, and Norma Shearer at her loveliest. The title is a clever reference to the slang name for card games like Solitaire. These games, played alone, can be seen as a pointless pastime, and Sherwood had in mind the kind of disinterested and amoral God who allowed human affairs to falter and fester. 

The film is social satire written with a bitter edge, and it can seem silly without the historical and cultural context. In fact, the play that it’s based on won a Pulitzer Prize for Sherwood. You have to see beneath the farcical plot to recognize that it’s a timely, even prophetic piece about the outbreak of war.

Norma Shearer’s part in particular can seem shallow and over the top. She does play a phoney Russian countess with a lustrous but impossibly perfect blond wig, but that superficiality and artifice is really the point of her portrayal. In reality Shearer was Hollywood royalty, the Canadian wife of MGM studio head, Irving Thalberg.

The countess watches Clark Gable do a dance routine with his American showgirls and afterwards tells him he was terrible. It’s a startling comment made to a man who became the Hollywood box office champ in his prime. I thought he did okay with the girls, but then I was dazzled by the idea of Clark Gable doing soft shoe steps with a cane. I tried that once myself with a school choir; it was really hard. 

The countess’s judgment is rooted in her belief that these entertainers were wasting their time on trivialities while the world around them was falling into bloody conflict. That, after all, pretty much describes the Hollywood movies of the day and American isolationism in general.

The film is full of jarring prescience, as when Gable makes a throwaway line about the ‘Japs’ years before Pearl Harbour. There’s a waiter who’s country has already been eaten away by the first world war and who expects it to be devoured again in the looming conflict. And then there’s a young Burgess Meredith playing a man who dares to speak truth to power who is dragged off to be executed.

I hadn’t expected the movie to open a can of memory worms, but my reading and film watching over the years let me see the 1939 confection for what it was: a cultural nugget, eerily revealing of its moment in time.  

The wake up call is apt. Our own moment in time is developing in a dangerous direction with overt wars overseas and dangerous thugs perilously close to domestic power. There’s a British couple, in the film, newlyweds who are in all probability doomed—he to the front lines, she to a bombed out cellar beneath the streets of London, and the glamorous countess laughs bitterly at the absurdity of it all. But then that’s what won Sherwood the Pulitzer Prize long before America was dragged into the second world war—the absurdity of our inability to stop the long slide into hatred and violence.