Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. Alfred Hitchcock’s question in response to criticism of his film Stage Fright (1950) is relevant here: ‘So why is it that we can’t tell a lie through a flash- back?’ (Truffaut 158) The (apparently) material depiction of the past would appear to guarantee its factuality. As Thomas Sutcliffe notes, part of what is at stake here is the disruption a particular kind of pact between the audience and the film-maker (11). 2. Look at All Those Roses appeared in 1941; of the stories collected in The Demon Lover (1945), ‘The Demon Lover’ appeared in The Listener in November 1941, ‘Happy Autumn Fields’ in The Cornhill in November 1944 and ‘Mysterious Kôr’ in Penguin New Writing in November 1944. 3. I will be focusing on new works published during the 1940s, but it is inter- esting to note Henry Reed’s comments, from an essay of 1946, on the fortunes in wartime of ‘classic’ writers: ‘Anthony Trollope has regained some of the enormous popularity he enjoyed in his own day [ … ] Joseph Conrad is beginning to revive [ … ] D. H. Lawrence is, for the moment, all but forgotten’ (8). As influences on contemporary writers, Reed identifies Thomas Hardy, James Joyce and ‘Henry James, who has entered on a period of popularity which he never attained in his lifetime’ (9). 4. In a discussion of 1980s television adaptations of texts from the 1930s including Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) Roger Bromley identifies a similar shift in relation to the status of realism: ‘At their moment of original publication many of these [works] were welcomed as radical cultural inter- ventions in a political struggle over poverty, injustice and unemployment. They were hailed for their “realism”. The problem is that the “realism” of that period, in the costume drama of television adaptation, becomes the “romanticism” of ours’ (112). 5. The ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’, which Freud uses as an analogy for the workings of memory, cannot be considered an ‘advanced technology’ but it has elements which prove useful in developing this classical analogy. See Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note Upon the “Mystic Writing Pad” ’ (1924). 6. Structurally, the novel takes the type of disruption of chronology favoured by Isherwood in The Memorial to an extreme, leaving Huxley open to Nicholas Murray’s accusation, appropriate in the context of the present discussion, that there is a ‘scissors and paste quality in the flashbacks and fast forwards’ (157) he uses here. In another novel from the same year, Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale, the killer Raven appears to have a ‘photographic’ memory: ‘His eyes, like little concealed cameras, photographed the room instantaneously’ (2–3). This serves both as a sign of his coldness and lack of emotion, and as a means of keeping at bay more painful memories from his past. 7. Daniel Schacter notes that in 1977 psychologists identified a particular type of memory experience which they named ‘flashbulb memory’. These occur 175 176 Notes in relation to shocking or traumatic events and it appears to the subject that their memory ‘preserves or “freezes” whatever happens at the moment we learn of the shocking event’ (Searching 195). Such memories are, however, subject to deterioration, although not to the same extent as emotionally neutral memories from the same period. 8. Such comparisons between cinema and memory are based on the notion that both are essentially realist forms of representation; they forget that, as Matt K. Matsuda explains, for an early film maker such as Méliès, ‘the realism of cinema was neither science nor “objective” witnessing, but a truth of illusions, a reality of tricks and simulations’ (170). Pointing to the use of the word by tak- ers of hallucinogens, Ruth Leys notes that ‘flashbacks’ are often considered by researchers in psychology to have ‘imaginative and role-playing dimensions’ (242). For the most part, the writers I am discussing here presented memory in a realist fashion, although as I will show, there were exceptions. 9. Of Freud’s works, Woolf is only known to have read Moses and Monotheism, which appeared in English in 1939, although it is highly likely that she would have had a general acquaintance with the Freudian ideas that were in circulation during the 1920s and 1930s. As regards the accessibility of Freud’s work in English, translations of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Introductory Lectures appeared in 1922. Writing in 1946, the literary critic H. V. Routh makes particular note of the appearance of the latter (135). Pelican editions of New Introductory Lectures and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life were published in 1934 and 1938 respectively. The latter text deals with one memory-related concept that has achieved continuing wide currency, parapraxes, or what later became known as ‘Freudian slips’. 10. Literature was of course not the only sphere in which these new concepts had an impact. Gillian Swanson notes that ‘psychological studies of family, marriage and parenting conducted through the 1930s informed the moni- toring of civilian morale’ during the war years, and that, for example, ‘[c]laims concerning the centrality of the relationship between mother and child to emotional well-being […] gained new emphasis during the war’ (74). 11. The kinds of techniques recommended for improving the reader’s social or employment prospects could also be used for other purposes. The music-hall entertainer ‘Mr Memory’, in Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), is based on an actual turn-of-the-century act who performed under the name ‘Datas’, and specialised in answering the audience’s questions about sporting events and famous trials, and who, like Mr Memory, had the catch-phrase, ‘Am I right, Sir?’ Datas’ autobiography is unre- vealing about the techniques he used to enable him to remember this infor- mation but it seems unlikely that he suffered from the hypertrophied memory with synaesthesia that afflicted Sherashevsky, the subject of A. R. Luria’s study The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968). Sherashevsky, whose performances involved the reproduction of lists of random words or abstract symbols provided by the audience, found that the associations particular words and sounds had for him made it difficult for him to follow a conversation or read a sentence from beginning to end without ‘irrelevant’ memories intruding. 12. Wells however could not endorse the ideas about immortality and wrote a scathing commentary on Dunne’s The New Immortality (1938) in ‘The Immortality of Mr. J. W. Dunne’ (1939). Notes 177 13. In Priestley’s novel Bright Day (1946), the process of memory is presented rather differently when Gregory Dawson, a screen-writer, sets out to deliberately recall a series of events from his past after an encounter with some former acquaintances. This act of recall is linear (although there are some gaps) and non-spontaneous, and Gregory stops and starts his memory as though it were a film: ‘At that point […] I deliberately stopped remembering. It was late, and I got up to prepare for bed’ (71). 14. As Keith Williams notes, Greene also appealed to Dunne’s theories about dreaming to describe the experience of seeing the film Son of the Sheik (1926) after the death of its star, Rudolph Valentino: ‘The man is moving on the screen and at the same time he is dead and magnificently and absurdly entombed’ (qtd. in Williams 112). 15. Later in his search for an explanation, the narrator visits his friend who is reading The New and the Old Self by Doctor Birinus Hals-Gruber: ‘I opened it at random and read a bit. There was a lot about the Sesame Impulse and the Agamemnon-Reflex which made, as they say, fascinating reading. But I couldn’t relate Miss Hargreaves to any of it’ (147). Indeed, her appearance remains resistant to any rational explanation. 16. J. W. N. Sullivan, reviewing An Experiment with Time for the Times Literary Supplement describes Dunne’s explanation of these phenomena as ‘very obscure’ but nevertheless asserts that ‘it is evident that our ordinary notion of time as a moving present separating a non-existent past from a non- existent future must be given up.’ (659). As Michael H. Whitworth shows in Einstein’s Wake, Sullivan was an important popularizer of new scientific ideas, including Einstein’s theories, throughout the 1920s. 17. Ian Hamilton notes that Connolly had changed his mind by May 1942, and argued that ‘[i]nstead of writing, writers should spend their spare time reading’ (135). 18. For a discussion of the way in which the Communist Party of Great Britain shifted its position in relation to the war during 1939–41, see Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz 77–89. 19. As Jeremy Treglown notes, the editorial in the same issue of the TLS was crit- ical of Cecil’s sympathetic attitude towards those who might wish, despite unfavourable circumstances, to continue to inhabit an ‘ivory tower’ (Treglown, ‘The Times Literary Supplement’ 142). George Orwell also reflected on the issue of escapism in his ‘London Letter to the Partisan Review’ written in April 1941: ‘I don’t see any tendency to escapism in current literature […] If I could get the time and mental peace to write a novel now, I should want to write about the past, the pre-1914 period, which I suppose comes under the heading of “escapism”’ (115). 20. In the course of the series, Lehmann does single out for praise two writers who Henry Reed classed as ‘young novelists’ in his 1946 study, although both were over thirty when the war broke out: F.

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