As we look for a few anchors to hold firm the various parts of our lockdown days, we have raised certain of our Darby-and-Joan routines to the status of sacred ritual. The subliminal plan may simply be glorified time-killing, but we find it useful if not indispensable to impose a sense of order and structure on our days. A daily walk, weather permitting, sharing a mid-morning glass of chocolate milk, deploying our awesome powers on Alexa’s “Question of the Day”—such things are the coarse straw that gives some strength to the soft mortar of the day otherwise occupied by individual “projects,” reading, writing, and a good deal of dolce far niente. Particularly important is the reading aloud of parts of the daily New York Times over breakfast. This is a custom of long standing, but it now has become a felt necessity. We can barely down a mouthful of Special K on those very rare days when the paper is late.
We usually do a couple of Trump and/or important international stories, followed by the letters to the editor and selected op-eds. This gives us the opportunity to bicker over, first, what we are going to read and, second, what we eventually have read. I am still in “recovery” from cataract surgery, which was a great success in removing the cataract but, so far, less so in restoring serious vision to the operable eye; so on Monday Joan did most of the reading. The op-eds and letters are normally on the antepenultimate and penultimate pages of section one, which when open for reading reveals the whole of the back page to someone sitting on the other side of the table. Recently this page has been given over to a few short and moving biographies of typical or interesting victims of Covid-19, but this time, as I could see with my good eye, there was a “regular” but very long obituary of a single person not a pandemic casualty: the classic movie star Olivia de Havilland, who just died in Paris at the age of 104. This had a special significance for Joan and me, because we “knew” her—meaning that we have been in a very large space in which she was present.
When we were living in Paris a few years ago we became attached to the lively congregation of Trinity Cathedral, otherwise known as The American Cathedral, on the Avenue George V just across the river from where we lived, and two or three hundred yards up the road from the “living flame” of the Princess Di memorial. Ms. de Havilland had at that point been a member for roughly fifty years. By rough and ready estimate about forty percent of Anglicans show up in an actual church building only on Easter and Christmas, and nonagenarians are generally given a pass altogether. But at Trinity Cathedral there was a tradition, established in time immemorial (probably meaning around 1952) that the sacramental validity of any Christmas Eucharist might be dubious if Ms. de Havilland, whose voice must have been even more impressive than that of the angels who made their announcement to the shepherds, were not the principal lay-reader for the service. This detail is alluded to in the Times obituary.
But there was an aspect of all this not widely known. The dean, talking out of school, told Joan that by the 1980s the situation had become a bit delicate. Ms. de Havilland was a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause; there were certain psalms she found it inappropriate to read. Some of them, you must agree, are a little hard to swallow, such as the enthusiastic infanticide of the imprecation against the Edomites at the end of Super flumina, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stone”. This is an extreme example, no doubt. Hard cases make bad law. Olivia de Havilland was not chary of going up against the powers that be, as evidenced by a successful lawsuit that went a good way toward taming the arrogance of some Hollywood studio moguls back in the day.
For many people I suppose, Ms. de Havilland will forever be associated with Gone With the Wind—a novel published in the year of my own birth and turned into a famous film three years later. I long ago discovered that Americans are likely to put a naïve trust in cinematic versions of important novels when they ought to know there always is a big difference. This was brought to my attention by one of my early English teachers, who for some reason took exception to the fact that in my book report on Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, I consistently referred to an important character, Sydney Carton, as “Sydney Colman”. (In the old film I had seen, Carton had been played by classical Thirties heartthrob Ronald Colman.) If Gone With the Wind is the first thing that comes to mind, Ms. de Havilland’s death may have come at an inconvenient time for her reputation. I learned from the obituary that “The 1939 Civil War epic was briefly pulled from the HBO Max streaming service last month and returned with an introduction saying that the film presents the Georgia plantation at its center as ‘a world of grace and beauty, without acknowledging the brutalities of the system of chattel slavery upon which this world is based’.”
I am not an expert in the history of American cinema, nor am I even a competent film critic. Among other things that the pandemic has already proved is that I will watch almost anything on Nexflix. Nonetheless it will be a pity, in my view, if the honor due to the memory of one of the great movie stars of the twentieth century is clouded by political passions of the moment; but such collateral damage is one of the less significant hazards of a current cultural moment hovering between promise and menace. On the other hand it is going to be highly tedious if people whose job it is to facilitate the technical transmission of visual data appropriate the role of historical censors as well. I have little confidence in their capacities in that department. Be that as it may, the character played by Ms. de Havilland is one of the nicer inhabitants of Tara, so there is that. I would preserve my wrath for Anthony Adverse, in which the actress also appeared. The novel Gone With the Wind is plenty long, but Anthony Adverse, a runaway success of 1933, was even longer, nearly interminable indeed; and its Protean hero was for a time an actual slave trader.
I am a pretty old guy. The demise of a grande dame who was already an international celebrity before I learned to walk is a sobering event for me, and one that encourages meditation upon one of the great classical themes of world literature. I imagine that Ms. de Havilland would have approved of the thirty-ninth psalm, “…mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.” Gone with the wind, so to speak.
