Turtle Diary

26 Neaera H

‘Death of the oyster-catchers’ was the heading of an article in the Observer:

A programme to kill 11,000 sea birds has been under way for the past month on the sands of the Burry estuary on the Gower peninsula in South Wales.

Men with shotguns have been shooting oyster-catchers on the morning and afternoon tides and, so far, several hundred have been killed. The marksmen are being paid a bounty of 25p a bird.

The South Wales Sea Fisheries Committee, which is running the culling programme, believes it is necessary to kill the birds in order to save the world-famous cockle beds of Penclawdd. The birds, they say, are eating five to six million baby cockles each winter and they can eat more in a month than the cocklers can gather in a year.

Cockling in Penclawdd, the article went on to say, was one of Britain’s first forms of social security in that it offered a livelihood to women who had lost their men in mining accidents. The article ended with the words of a cockier from Crofty. ‘We’re having a struggle to even reach our daily quota of cockles nowadays,’ he said. ‘Quite simply, it is either us or the birds.’

Uncanny, I thought. Is there something keeping its eye on my mind, waiting to strike down whatever I think about? I’d never in my life seen a word about oyster-catchers in the news before. Now they’re killing them. ‘Us or the birds,’ said the cockier.

Harry Rush’s letter still lay on my desk unanswered, heavy with the burden that would be on me if I accepted. Of course I needed the £1,000, when would there ever be a time when I shouldn’t? The letter nagged at me like a paper devil, I knew I’d never finish such a book if I were fool enough to start it, I’d sicken at the very first page. I had feelings of doom and damnation, utter lostness, and now the dead and dying oyster-catchers seemed to put the seal on it. Everything seemed too much for me, I was overwhelmed.

I was getting hot flashes of desperation and running about the flat picking things up and putting them down aimlessly. I wanted a rest, wanted peace, wanted the world to let me alone for a bit. King Kong was playing at the Chelsea Odeon, so I went.

Wonderful inside the Odeon, cool and quiet and sheltered from the world. The place had been redone, the seating was spacious and comfortable. The lights had not yet dimmed, the screen was still playing music to itself the way they always do before a film starts. I like that music whatever it is, it sounds the same in all cinemas, light and gay and full of safe expectation.

The film was first released in the United States in 1933 during the Great Depression. That sounds strange: the Great Depression. One thinks of millions of people sitting with their heads in their hands and groaning all at the same time. Many did of course but there was no atom bomb then, the world was still like a child too little to know about death. Whatever was happening beyond the camera’s field of vision, innocence was still possible and one felt it in the opening of the picture: the dark and foggy harbour, the film entrepreneur with his ship bound for a secret destination, the beautiful hungry girl he recruits when he finds her stealing apples. He holds her at arm’s length looking intently at her face, she returns the look almost fainting, full of surrender that is transcendentally sexual and innocent. She knows she is beautiful, knows that her beauty has been recognized, that good things will happen if she surrenders.

On the ship he rehearses her in front of the camera, has her look up (‘Higher, higher!’) and scream. He doesn’t tell her what she’ll be screaming at later but he knows he’s going to bring her to some giant terror. It’s a reversal of the Schöne Müllerin theme of the unattainable beauty: the voyeur, the picture-maker, must put his attainable beauty within easy reach of the colossal beast. I watched her scream at the unknown horror she was heading for. That was a good touch, it was absolutely right. She screamed with complete acceptance of her place in life.

When Skull Island appeared it was mostly a painted backdrop but that didn’t matter; even if the studios and camera crew and all the behind-the-scenes equipment had been visible in the film it wouldn’t have mattered. Even showing the animator moving his little articulated models and photographing them frame by frame wouldn’t have made any difference in the effect: Kong with his teddy-bear fur is a fifty-foot tall idea even if the reality was only eighteen inches high. Kong lives. There was a giant arm for close-ups of Fay Wray screaming in Kong’s grasp and that seems right too. Possibly somewhere in Hollywood that giant arm lies in a warehouse, empty-handed now. Kong had no visible male member even when presumably excited but then he was all male member in a manner of speaking so that doesn’t matter either. On the other hand maybe that’s why he only wanted tiny women to play with instead of looking for a fifty-foot-tall she-ape with whom to have sexual kongress. The psychological ripples are ever-widening. Now that I think of it why weren’t there any other fifty-foot-high gorillas about? What had happened to Kong’s mother and father? That too must be part of the pathos of the thing: Kong is an orphan and alone of his kind. Not just an orphan but a giant orphan, a monstrous Tom o’Bedlam.

Carl Denham, the film man, comes ashore with Anne Darrow (Fay Wray) and his crew to look for the legendary beast-god of Skull Island. They see the natives making ready to offer a bride to Kong. The massive wooden gates at the edge of the village suggested the size of the beast they were meant to keep out, his colossalness preceded him. There were the black men dancing in gorilla skins and chanting for Kong to come and claim his bride: ‘Something something KONG! KONG! Something something KONG! KONG!’ flinging up their furry arms at each KONG. The music by Max Steiner was just right. Then they saw Fay Wray and that night they went out to the ship in their boats and captured her and offered her instead of the local girl.

There she was in the light of the torches, wearing a white silk frock I think, all blonde and helpless with her head drooping and her arms outstretched, hands tied to two posts. Then she looked up, higher, higher, and screamed and screamed when Kong’s luminous face rose above the trees like a giant ape-moon. It was at the same time laughable and ineffably real. Yes that’s a big fake ape, ha ha. But the fake ape is only the cipher for the real thing before which we stand with outstretched arms, hands tied, head drooping, and we scream or are silent.

By the end of the film Kong too is a victim, tragic in his greatness and the height (the Empire State Building) from which he falls. When he’s brought a captive to New York to be exhibited on the stage it is he who stands with arms outstretched, crucified by midgets and manacles with great thick chains.

‘He was a king and a god in the world he knew,’ says Denham, ‘but now he comes to civilization merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity. Ladies and gentlemen, Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World!’

Fay Wray is on the stage as well. When the photographers’ flashbulbs go off near her Kong thinks she’s in danger, he growls and strains at his chains. Then comes one of the very best lines in the film or indeed anywhere: ‘Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen, those chains are made of chrome steel,’ says Denham. Then of course Kong breaks loose, kills some people, derails and smashes an overhead train and climbs up the Empire State Building with Fay Wray, there to be shot down by aeroplanes.

‘Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen, those chains are made of chrome steel.’ Wonderful line. Marvellous how one’s afraid of the thing that’s going to break its chains and then so quickly one is the thing that’s broken its chains and climbed the heavenward spire to be shot down.

‘Oh no, it wasn’t the aeroplanes,’ says Denham standing by the fallen Kong (there must be a giant head in the warehouse too), ‘it was Beauty killed the Beast.’

What a sad life. On his island Kong had plenty of other monsters to fight with, he was very good against the tyrannosaurus I thought. But he had no one to be friends with. Poor thing. At the end when he’s dying from the aeroplanes’ machine-gun bullets he reaches towards Fay Wray who’s lying on a ledge where he’d put her. Weak and swaying, his grip on the spire loosening, he touches her gently, then lets go and falls. The year 1933 was full of many things. Showing with King Kong was a documentary film on Hitler’s rise to power. In 1933 there was Goebbels officiating at a book burning. ‘You do well at this midnight hour,’ he said, ‘to exorcise the past in these flames.’ Exorcise the past. Surely that thought alone was sufficient evidence of madness. But more and more I think that madness is the world’s natural condition and to expect anything else is madness compounded. In the train derailment scene in King Kong the engine-driver could not believe his eyes when he saw Kong’s face rising through the gap where he’d torn away the tracks but that was just another day in 1933. That trains mostly stay on rails, that the streets are mostly peaceful, that the square continues green and quiet below my window is more than I have any right to expect, and it happens every day.

Madame Beetle swims in her green world expecting neither continuation nor sanity, I don’t think expectation is a part of her. While there is water she will swim. Arabella spins her weightless web on Skylab-2 and the white shark goes its way without rest. There is no buoyancy in sharks, they cannot rest, they must keep swimming till they die.