Oh What Tangled Web We Weave When We Practice To
Deceive-With The Film Adaptation Of W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter” In Mind
By Josh Breslin
“I swear I wish sometimes I could be a woman. NO, I am not
talking about turning from male to female or anything like that. Society in the
year of our lord 1936 would not put up with it, would not put up with such an
idea even though anybody who is anybody who has read any amount of history, the
history of sexual experiences anyway knows, that cross-dressing, cross-sexing I
guess you could call it has been going on since Eve came out of Adam’s rib,
maybe before,” Roger Saint John mentioned in passing to his dear friend Bernard
Baron. The causes for Mister Saint John’s comment were two-fold. He had just
read his close friend Somerset’s latest novel, The Letter, after having avoided the pleasure as long as possible
since he did not like the subject matter as a rule of whatever concoction
Somerset had cooked up to titillate the literate reading public here adultery
and murder, murder most foul. Moreover this same Bernard Baron had insisted
that they go see the opening of the film adaptation of Somerset’s novel starring
Bette Davis and he had had quite enough of the whole thing. However Roger was
intrigued by the craziness, his term, that the woman would go through to hold a
man, a man who was no longer interested in being with her.
This Clara, Bette Davis’ role in the film, starts off
directly in scene one doing her version of rooty-toot toot on her paramour who
went south on her, Roger something. Yes, dear Clara was in a tizzy over hard
fact than this Roger cad was smitten by another woman. Maybe it was that Roger
had gone “native” on her, had taken up with a beautiful Polynesian woman whom
he swore he was pledged to eternal devotion. For that transgression he paid
with about two fistfuls of bullets and plenty of splattered blood (to speak
nothing of the defamation of his character as this Clara came up with the usual
tart story that this Roger had made improper advantages toward her and she had
to defend her honor, her womanhood in the only way that woman can-with a handy
revolver.
But Saint John once he started to get up a head of steam
decided that perhaps it would be better for the reader to have a little
background as to why he was at pains to try to figure out what made the female
sex tick. The ploy was pretty simple. Clara, married, unhappily married to
Donald Smythe, the famous geological engineer for the East Coast Oil Company,
was stuck unto death in dreary Indonesia where Donald was often called away on
business for his company. Clara none too strong on Donald anyway except as a
meal ticket out of the West End of London from whence she came got easily bored
and started hanging around the Leeward Inn where she met this guy Steven who
would wind up with many holes in him before Clara was through with him. They
became hard and fast lovers for over a year and Clara, at least had dreams of
getting out from under her Donald burden and leave the goddam archipelago and
then Steven lowered the boom on her. Told her that he was in love with his
native woman, Sisil. End of story. No, end of Steven. Clara was going to have
her man or else she was going to take care of business her own way.
Here’s where things got dicey, where Saint John was at a
lost to figure out what was running behind a woman’s mind when she has been
unceremoniously dumped. She developed this whole elaborate plot about how her
lover, now dead, and unable to contradict her had really being public nuisance
number one, had thrust himself upon her. This weak sister of an alibi which anybody who ever spent ten
minutes at the Leeward Inn would know was false since Clara and Steven had
their little corner love nest spot in the bar got her easily past her gullible
and witless cuckolded husband, No problem. More importantly got her past the
friendly constabulary which was friendly with Donald and wanted to be friendly
toward whatever wishes East Coast Oil had. She was ready to walk after a
perfunctory trial which was necessary given the death in the case,
Then the fucking letter came to light, the letter where
Clara expressed her undying devotion to Steven and gave the back of her hand to
the foolish Donald. She moved might and main to get that fucking letter back
from whoever had found it. Of course it was Sisil who figured to cash in on
Clara’s school girl indiscretion, cash in for then thou in cold hard cash. So
the suppression of the letter got her off the murder rap. Didn’t get her off
the rub out list though which Sisil had compiled just for her after taking her
man from her. Maybe the whole thing should have been centered on what Sisil was
going through rather than white girl Clara but that was a different time and
maybe Somerset was deaf to such inklings. Go figure.
[Afterword- we live in deeply troubled times, cold civil war
times as almost every event over the past decade or so had indicated so this
piece had a certain resonance for today even though the book, the subject
matter and the film represented a very different look at what in the old days
writer Seth Garth, quoting the late Peter Paul Markin a boyhood friend, was
called the “Woman Question” in radical Cambridge circles. (In those halcyon
days every political issue was framed as a question as in the Black Question,
the Russian Question, the Party Question and so on so the Woman Question took
its place in that context with the rise of the women’s liberation movement in
the late 1960s.)
Perhaps Josh, who after all had as a moniker the Prince of
Love in the Summer of Love, 1967 according to that same Seth Garth mentioned
above, had been writing this piece today in 2018 rather than just five years
ago he might have been a bit more circumspect about how he framed this version
of the woman question which would be quite different today. Josh, with three
unsuccessful marriages and many affairs, some while he was in various
marriages, has made no bones about the fact that he doesn’t understand women,
never has, since he was brought up with four brothers and no sisters to kind of
pave the way and beside the time of his growing up time in Maine in the
mid-1960s were not times that would lent themselves to develop any kind of
equitable feelings toward women. And he didn’t-then-as he freely has
admitted.
But men can learn something in this wicked old world and
Josh did, at least in a way, via learning about being on the right side of the
angels on the question of war, now endless wars, having served in Vietnam
during that hellish period. As an adjunct he “learned” to respect what the burgeoning
women’s liberation movement was doing to step up the fact rather than the
fiction of social equality. So, despite fits and starts, and despite that
life-long habit of not understanding women, Josh has been very sympathetic to
the #MeToo movement which has galvanized the country, pro and con pushed, on
these days be those daughters from the various marriages.
This matter came to the fore when he had to deal thoughts of
his own past mainly youthful ways of dealing with women, women as sex objects
rather than social equals since that is really what is what a lot of the
controversy has been about. Josh not only confesses to not understanding women
but has been rather shy around them despite his reputation in various
incantations of that original prince of love business. So he has never used
whatever authority he had to get a woman to submit to his desires, or wants.
When I asked him if he would change what he wrote when he wrote this review
back a few years ago he said probably not because that would be
anachronistic-moreover he really believed that Maugham’s view given his
proclivities was a way of dealing with women not so foreign these days. He did
say he thought running Sisil as the main character rather than Clara would be a
better fit today but that was for somebody else to work on. Site Manager Greg
Green]
