"I shall never forgive myself."

[a farewell to Dame Maggie Smith]

[originally published September 28, 2024]

When it comes to Read This, Then Immediately Watch The Film (Or Vicey Versey), three pairings always leap to my mind:

Rosemary’s Baby, for screenwriter/director Roman Polanski’s uncannily verbatim rendering of Ira Levin’s underrated novel.¹

Housekeeping, which I’m always keen to call attention to, not only for how much I worship Marilynne Robinson’s novel, which I’ve surely read a half dozen times at least, but because every time I mention Bill Forsyth’s lovely 1987 screen adaptation, starring the great Christine Lahti as Sylvie, its very existence seems to come as a shock to many people, even those who similarly worship the novel.²

And A Room with a View, whose screenplay, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, for the 1985 Merchant-Ivory film of E. M. Forster’s vivacious, profound caprice, is a masterpiece of deciding what to retain, what to dismiss, and what to enrich and build on.

I could write paragraph after paragraph about the uproarious paying-the-cabbie scene (a particular favorite among the film’s legion of admirers, I’ve noted), and I’m perpetually amused at how the immediate reaction of Freddy Honeychurch, the brother and surrogate id of our gradually supremely romantic heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, on first seeing stalwart young George Emerson is to try to get him naked.

Here, from Forster himself:

Then Freddy hurled one of the thunderbolts of youth. Perhaps he was shy, perhaps he was friendly, or perhaps he thought that George’s face wanted washing. At all events he greeted him with,³ “How d’ye do? Come and have a bathe.”

But allow me to focus, in fond tribute to the just departed and highly beloved Maggie Smith, on one of my favorite exchanges not only in this particular film but in all of cinema, between thwarted chaperone and would-be confidante Charlotte Bartlett⁴ (Dame Maggie, natch) and peevish and, here, especially peeved Lucy Honeychurch, shortly after the aforementioned stalwart George Emerson has, as Charlotte phrases it, insulted Lucy.⁵

CHARLOTTE: I shall never forgive myself.

LUCY: You always say that, Charlotte, but you always do forgive yourself.

Charlotte’s line is Forster’s.

Lucy’s response is pure Jhabvala.

I like to think that the screenwriter, toting up⁶ how many times in the novel Charlotte declares herself unforgivable (the author gives us nineteen variations on the word “forgive,” easily half of them out of Charlotte’s mouth or in response to her; as well, there are nineteen instances of Forster’s beloved “muddle,” thirty-four uses of “nice,” and fully sixty iterations of “true,” “truth,” and “truthful,” highly appropriate for a novel whose heroine can’t stop lying to herself and to everyone around her⁷), finally got good and fed up and handed Helena Bonham Carter her acidic rejoinder, which HBC⁸ bats out of the park and which, the numerous times I’ve seen the film in theaters, never fails to elicit from the audience something between a gasp, a guffaw, and an ovation.

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Of Dame Maggie, I could say a lot more or just, for now, a little.

Of her myriad brilliant screen performances (I don’t need to tell you to watch or rewatch The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, do I?), I would certainly and especially commend to you the inappropriately little-known The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, in which she does some of her most staggering, devastating, blood-drawing work. And one can never go wrong with Death on the Nile, for the marvelous spectacle of her manhandling Bette Davis (who, to paraphrase Pauline Kael, doesn’t manhandle easy). And how everyone (including me!) dotes on her Dora Charleston, in Neil Simon’s Murder by Death, and “Oh, that’s tacky; that’s really tacky,” a little tchotchke of a bauble of a nothing of a line that our Maggie grabs on to and elevates into immortality.⁹

As I said, I could say a lot more or just, for now, a little.

And so, for now: Farewell. And thank you.

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Taking Care of Taking Care of Business

Thank you for being here, thank you for following, thank you especially for subscribing. All of this ’stackery of mine is free and will remain that way, which means that if you have chosen to contribute to its and my upkeep,¹⁰ in larger or smaller ways, you are doing something you don’t have to do, which makes your generosity that much more resonant, and I am profoundly grateful. If you’re not yet part of that contributing crew and there’s a part of you that’s thinking “Who would have thought that apostrophes, commas, and showbiz ruminations could be so much fun?” and you choose to join the crew, I will be eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.

Benjamin

1. I recall reading somewhere or other that Polanski followed the novel so closely—virtually every line of dialogue is straight out of Levin; mostly Polanski simply trims and snips, always thoughtfully—because he didn’t know that he was allowed to do otherwise. Whether my recollection is accurate or not (I think it is), and whether Polanski was speaking earnestly or with tongue slightly in cheek (or somewhere in the middle), one can only be happy with the result.

2. I will have more—much more—to say down the pike about Housekeeping, but for now I note that between writer-director Forsyth and lead actress Lahti, Robinson’s infinitely elusive Sylvie is brought to walking-talking-visible-breathing life in a way that both respects the novelist’s ambiguous shadings but also, of necessity, makes very specific choices—good and necessary ones, because though one may enact ambivalence, I don’t believe it’s possible to enact ambiguity.

Also, Lahti’s weary, slightly impatient, barely guarded delivery of Sylvie’s irritated, dismissive “Think what you like, Lucille” has been dancing around in my head for decades, and occasionally I find myself muttering it.

3. [Confidential to Morgan Foster: Morgan, you don’t need that comma.]

4. That grating near rhyme—Charlotte Bartlett, ye gods—couldn’t be a better moniker for the grating Charlotte Bartlett herself.

5. He’s kissed her, to be sure.

6. Americans say both “toting up” and “totting up,” and the two phrases periodically exchange supremacy; Brits are almost entirely about “totting up.” I’m rather surprised at myself, incessantly hoovering up Briticisms as I am wont to do, for not having gone with “totting” here. Go figure.

7. Chapter 16: Lying to George

Chapter 17: Lying to Cecil

Chapter 18: Lying to Mr. Beebe, Mrs. Honeychurch, Freddy, and the Servants

Chapter 19: Lying to Mr. Emerson

8. A friend once dubbed her, out of utter affection, Helena Bottled Water, and that’s how I tend to think of her.

9. For more on elevating little nothings into immortality, please, if you’re so inclined, return to my earlier meditation on the sorcery Dame Edith Evans performed on the line “A hand-bag?”

10. And Sallie’s!