The Petrified Forest (1936)
“Though flawed by didacticism and romantic clichés, the play offers insight into the search for values in a decadent civilization.” Yes, there’s a lot going on here, and one could be excused for falling asleep during one of Leslie Howard’s wordy dissertations on the state of the world. The Petrified Forest was a pretentious stage play as well as a pretentious movie — and Humphrey Bogart’s ticket to stardom. It’s garrulous preachiness is clearly applicable to modern environmental politics:"Intellectuals thought they’d conquered nature but now…nature’s hitting back, she’s fighting with new instruments called neurosis, proving she can’t be beaten by the likes of us.” The spoken accepted truth re: COVID-19 is that it’s related to our treatment of the environment (animals and particularly bats?) the unspoken truth is that it’s nature's cull, her way of depopulating an overpopulated earth. Whatever. The real intellectual battle in The Petrified Forest seems to be between poetry and human action, and in this way the recalcitrant and thoughtful Leslie Howard presents a Hamletesque melancholy that speaks to tragic paralysis in the face of evil. He is disabled by his own lack of creativity; and after he dies Bette Davis would have him buried in the petrified forest, among trees that have turned to stone. It’s difficult to engage with the complex, somewhat irrelevant philosophizing in The Petrified Forest, as the writer Robert Sherwood is so intent on making each character into a symbol of something that he leaves our emotions behind. Leslie Howard is always convincing as himself — gentle, introspective and kind. But the moment when I became engaged with The Petrified Forest was -- strangely or not --when Howard asks Humphrey Bogart to kill him. Up until that point it’s all just talk -- suddenly there is what T.S. Eliot would have called an' objective correlative' for Howard’s pessimism: ‘I’m useless, so kill me.’ I identified with Howard, as he is clearly an effeminate man who has no effect on anything. The context — the roadside bar and gas station where the drama takes place, is quintessentially American, and anti-intellectual, and not effeminate at all. Howard observes Bogart’s ultimate shootout with the police with a wry cynicism, he sees them as two sides of the same violent Americanism; legalised violence and illegal violence — which is in a way, America right now. A prominent sign on the wall of the restaurant reads “No tipping —it’s unAmerican” and its important to remember that tipping was considered a decadent European custom, and therefore unAmerican, but welcomed by negroes who were considered lower class and unAmerican too. Tipping was an issue in the United States until 1942. The dilemma is much like the one presented by face masks. I don’t object to face masks because they are unAmerican (or unCanadian) but because the science is not all in on COVID-19. Of course that is exactly what prompts so many to social distance; ‘we don’t know anything about this disease — so best to be safe.’ But we don’t now anything about life, death, or why we are here on earth, and we don’t know whether God is good or evil, or even if he/she exists, so I say it’s best to be ‘unsafe’ — i.e. to live. But my opinion is shared by precisely no one, which is why I found it so easy to identify with the suicidal Leslie Howard. He wants Bogart to shoot him so he can leave all his money to Bette Davis, because she represents “the future, the renewal of courage, vitality, aspiration.” The irony is I can’t give my money away after I’m dead because no one will take it. I’ve tried several times to set up an endowment dedicated upon my death to give money for gay men to do sexual gay art— about AIDS, promiscuity, s/m, sex-trade work, or just plain sex - and my gift has been refused by several prominent institutions. (If you hear I've died, and the money goes somewhere else, let this be the proclamation of my true wishes!). But all that is just further proof of how irrelevant I am to the world. Perhaps his blog is an invitation to shoot me. I don’t think anyone will bother, because the accepted wisdom about people like me — and it is quite right — is that egos like mine don’t do well when they see no sun. So it's best to just leave this limp flower unattended; and it will soon die. I can’t imagine I will live a terribly long life; I have good genes but I’ve abused my body pretty terribly. There will be many people — mainly people who did not know me — who will be glad that something finally shut me up. My useless effeminacy makes me — like Leslie Howard —unmournable and ultimately objectionable. I go on about beauty and how everything is a fiction and how sex and pleasure are important. But to what end? If anything, I am clearly a corrupting influence. I will try and continue to write after these blogs are done, but please take what I write today as my final word. Live. You are only yourself; you are not someone else. Any advice — and certainly any moral direction offered you -- is ultimately of little value. Love. Have lots of sex. Dance. Be drunk, always drunk. But most of all, worship beauty; beauty is pleasure and art. Beauty is not exclusive and grows only from goodness. It is innocent and not to be tampered with. What is right and wrong, what is true and not true, is something that must agreed upon between people. Be wary of dogmatists, of those who tell you that they have the answer —as there is none— for the best one can do is try and find the tranquility that comes from recognising life’s apparent contradictions. Yes that boy with the lovely smile has a grimy face and frightened eyes. Perhaps he has been beaten. Yes that girl is loud, engaging and the life of the party — and all you want to do is be with her— but perhaps she is in fierce denial of something. Should you try and fix these people? No. Loving them means being there when they are ready to hear what you have to say — and not before — and only if they ask. And when beauty appears before you, it’s best to touch it, respect it. Don’t interfere with it, or question it, instead let it question you. For beauty will put you on trial, and ask you to measure up to it. Will I meet someone ‘as lovely and temperate as a summer’s day’? Or is that just a poem? Of course you will, but remember ‘winds do shake the darling buds of may.’ It’s oddly true that life is not for us or against us, it just is.
