A Taste of Honey (1961)
Not in the mood to write this, trying to quit smoking — and it was not a good day. A Taste of Honey is not the kind of movie made to cheer you up, except that it’s completely involving. This is Tony Richardson not showing off, the most theatrical thing about A Taste of Honey is the occasional appearance of a string of children chanting nursery rhymes; this is utterly realistic but serves as a kind of chorus, that represents, I suppose, the endless reproductive cycle that characterizes the rhythm of working-class life. I know very little about working-class life, except what I’ve learned from someone very special to me. (What am I supposed to call him? Lover? Partner? Spouse? Boyfriend? All inadequate, insulting and culturally inappropriate.) One thing I have learned from our 21 years is there's a lot of shouting. And there’s a lot of shouting in this film, and what appears — to a middle-class person like myself — to be abuse. But it’s not abuse, you see? (Or am I fooling myself?) No, of course I’m not, it’s only the bourgeoisie who fool themselves. I lived with both my parents until I was 12, and honestly I had no inkling that my mother hated my father. The divorce was traumatic for that reason. It’s what the middle-classes do, bottle everything up in a toxic stew — until the stew explodes and then somebody has to clean the walls. We had to wait for my mother to get a concussion, and then lie in bed for months -- before she would divorce my father -- and even then she required a therapist whispering in her ear that it was the right thing to do. No sign of this at parties. My mother in a pretty white dress -- an A-Line skirt with roses all over it -- my father literally pulling lampshades onto his head. They seemed to be having so much fun. I won’t bore you with the sorry details; the point is they should have been yelling at each other, at least then we would have learned about hate and pain, whereas I grew up with the assumption that such things did not exist, God forbid, and if they did it was certainly impolite to talk about them. In A Taste of Honey everyone is constantly threatening to leave someone in the lurch or dump them in the gutter -- and it’s better that way. Honestly. It’s nice to think that the threads that bind us together are strong as rope but they are really as fickle and sticky as goo. So better to pull on them now and then, rather than pretend they will never break apart. It’s impossible to love someone without hating them, and if you don’t like the sound of that you probably lead a very unhappy life, full of tiny, fiercely unconfessed agonies (but everyone will assume everything is fine — so what does it matter?). Rita Tushingham is the young actress famous only for this movie — she looked too much like Julie Christie for her own good. Here she plays a churlishly ordinary working-class girl, made pregnant by a black sailor. She just says ‘lets do it’ and they do. But soon he’s gone. Her mother is a monstrous reality (like most mothers). We first meet Doris Bryan singing a catchy music hall ditty (in a bar) with an unmatchable and unquenchable joy. She loves her daughter — without showing her any affection whatsoever, because she's too busy wooing the much younger Robert Stephens (the ex-husband of Maggie Smith -- he does the most perfect impersonation of a ‘rotter’ I’ve ever seen on screen). Bryan is a flirty, selfish, cigarette-puffing, vain, indefatigable woman (not unlike my own mother). Rita Tushingham says: “We don’t ask for life we have it thrust upon us.” Shelagh Delaney (the author of the play on which this film is based) could have stolen that from Beckett, but nothing is stolen here — it’s far too original. A love story between a straight girl and a gay boy? Murray Melvin is the gay boy who discovers the pregnant Tushingham and falls in love with her, and the feeling is mutual. So are they a ‘straight’ couple who don't kiss (because, after all, lots of straight couples never kiss)? Tushingham says “you’re just like a big sister to me” and “I”ll always want you with me because I know you’ll never ask for anything from me." Well, sure we ask those we love for things; but sometimes we love them best for just letting us be. Melvin is unequivocal about his feelings for Tushingham “I’d rather be dead than away from you —before I knew you I didn’t care much whether I lived or died.” This kind of devotion is exclusively working-class. I am lucky enough to have several working class people who love me and I will never get rid of them; I joke that they will torture me until I die, and that’s an imperfect love -- but emphatically not rejection or desertion. I know it seems contradictory what I’m trying to say say about working-class love, but the gist is this: middle-class love is about pretending you’ll never die, working-class love is about bringing each other closer to the reality of death every single day. This is because -- if you know how horrid life is --then loving someone means bringing it frequently to their attention. If you want to pretend life is lovely then you go on watching Netflix and pretending that if you wear a mask you are no longer in danger. (Of anything.) Rita Tushingham’s father never appears in A Taste of Honey; he is mentally deficient — or — what is the politically correct term? He is variously described as crazy and 'the village idiot.' But one phrase Tushingham uses to describe him won’t leave my mind: “He lived in the twilight my Daddy, the land of the daft.” The moon is irrevocably on display tonight. In an hour it will move beyond my window, but the sky is still iridescent blue, as it it is not yet completely dark. I want to say something special as this blog is nearing it’s end. Here's what Melvin says when Tushingham asks: “Why do you stay with me?”: “Well somebody’s got to look after you.” This phrase, in a typical working class way, refuses to admit affection, and is just that close to abuse. The last line in Pinter’s The Homecoming is “Don’t be a stranger.” Pinter was asked by Martin Esslin what the poetic significance of the line was. He said something to the effect of: ’Nothing, it’s a working class way of saying goodbye.’ The working class are always saying goodbye, but it’s ultimately kinder than the middle-class habit of constantly saying ‘I love you.’ Pinter only meant that everyone is a stranger, because we are always alone, but that doesn’t mean, thank God, that occasionally we can’t ask some guy on the corner if he's got a light.
