Wednesday
As Julia, my mother and I have been catching up on season #3 of The Crown, I’ve noticed several episodes where literature plays a pivotal role. A Kipling poem sets the wheels in motion for a potential rightwing coup; a Shakespeare monologue consoles a prince starved for affection; and Keats and (indirectly) Auden figure prominently in an episode about the moon landing and Prince Philip’s midlife crisis.
Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson, facing the need to reduce the size of the military as Britain wrestles with its post-empire identity, fires head of the military Lord Louis Mountebatten. The former Viceroy of India thereupon delivers a fiery speech recalling Great Britain’s glory days, and this in turn leads a ringwing newspaper editor to ask him to lead a coup. In a tense interim that is unsettlingly relevant as we watch Trump attempt to overturn election results, Mountebatten seriously considers leading the movement until the queen talks him out of it.
Her primary responsibility, she tells him, is to the Constitution.
Mountebatten delivers the last stanza of “Mandalay,” and by the poem’s end, the entire audience has risen to its feet and is reciting it along with him:
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
O the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay !
Say what you will about British fascists, at least these ones recite poetry rather than chant “Lock her up!” or “Build that wall!”
The poem itself isn’t fascist—I’ve written about Kipling’s mixed relationship colonialism —but it plugs into revanchist nostalgia and the dream of making Britain great again.
In another episode, this one about Charles attending a Welsh university so that he can deliver his investiture as Prince of Wales speech in Welsh, we see how desperate he is for emotional support. His mother, believing that duty is duty, is impatient with Charles’s longing for something more. He therefore finds himself relating to Shakespeare’s Richard II, who upon Bolingbroke’s rebellion discovers that his royal blood does not protect him:
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?
The emotional core of the episode couldn’t be better summarized.
In the moon landing episode, the queen’s husband Prince Philip is riveted by the adventure, unaware that his fascination masks a profound unhappiness with his own dull life. (I am reminded of Fellini’s heavy-handed symbol in 8 ½, where a rocket that fails to launch captures the filmmaker’s own midlife crisis.) When Philip meets the astronauts in Buckingham Palace, he wants them to have grappled with the meaning of life and is disturbed that that they are technicians more than romantic adventurers. He wants but fails to get the poetry of Keats, whose passage about the moon (in Endymion) is quoted by a television newscaster:
What is there in thee, Moon! That thou should’st move
My heart so potently?
Philip’s disenchantment reminds me of Christine’s in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece Rules of the Game. She falls in love with a daring aviator who crosses the English Channel at night, only to discover he has a bourgeois soul. As her friend Octave explains to her,
You have to understand, it’s the plight of all heroes today. In the air, they’re terrific. But when they come back to earth, they’re weak, poor, and helpless.”
A similar message is to be found in the Auden poem, which is never mentioned but hovers over the episode. (See my detailed analysis of it here.) It too regards the moon landing as an assertion of masculinity, and not in a good way:
It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for
so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
it would not have occurred to women
to think worthwhile, made possible only
because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness
hurrah the deed, although the motives
that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich.
A grand gesture. But what does it period?
What does it osse? We were always adroiter
with objects than lives, and more facile
at courage than kindness: from the moment
the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
a matter of time. But ourselves, like Adam’s,
still don’t fit us exactly, modern
only in this—our lack of decorum.
Homer’s heroes were certainly no braver
than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
was excused the insult of having
his valor covered by television.
Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed: give me a watered
lively garden, remote from blatherers
about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where
on August mornings I can count the morning
glories where to die has a meaning,
and no engine can shift my perspective.
Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens
as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at,
Her Old Man, made of grit not protein,
still visits my Austrian several
with His old detachment, and the old warnings
still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
an ugly finish, Irreverence
is a greater oaf than Superstition.
Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
Prince Philip has learned something similar by the end of the episode: at his rector’s invitation, he has joined a group of priests experiencing midlife crises of faith and has learned Auden’s lesson that “we were always adroiter/ with objects than lives, and more facile/ at courage than kindness.” Or at least a certain kind of courage. As he tells the group, it takes him more courage to join their group than it took the astronauts to go to the moon.
Grand gestures, he comes to learn, will not take him as far as listening to artists and saints.
Another poetic sighting: The episode on Princess Margaret, who tells her sister that the Queen’s role is to paper over the cracks in the British national identity, concludes with yet another poem. This one, composed for the queen’s jubilee by poet laureate John Betjemann, reads like a throwback to the 18th century, when poets strove to flatter rich patrons while, at the same time, writing good poetry. Some succeeded more than others.
The best would slip in subtle criticism. No such cracks appear in Betjemann’s “Jubilee Hymn,” however.
In days of disillusion, However low we've been To fire us and inspire us God gave to us our Queen. She acceded, young and dutiful, To a much-loved father's throne; Serene and kind and beautiful, She holds us as her own. And twenty-five years later So sure her reign has been That our great events are greater For the presence of our Queen. Hers the grace the Church has prayed for, Ours the joy that she is here. Let the bells do what they're made for! Ring our thanks both loud and clear. From that look of dedication In those eyes profoundly blue We know her coronation As a sacrament and true. Chorus For our Monarch and her people, United yet and free, Let the bells from ev'ry steeple Ring out loud the jubilee.