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Viva Lewes Issue #134 November 2017

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COLUMN<br />

David Jarman<br />

DJ's PJs<br />

The 1957 film Woman<br />

in a Dressing Gown<br />

starred Yvonne<br />

Mitchell and Anthony<br />

Quayle as Amy and<br />

Jim (‘Jimbo’) Preston,<br />

a couple whose<br />

twenty-year-old<br />

marriage is starting<br />

to unravel. Jim is<br />

giving consideration to<br />

the competing charms of his siren secretary,<br />

played by Sylvia Sims. Stuck at home, Amy is<br />

increasingly unable to keep the show on the road:<br />

the flat tidy, the breakfast toast from being burnt,<br />

the dinner incinerated. An even greater concern<br />

is her wandering around all day in her dressing<br />

gown. When the film was rereleased in 2012<br />

the Guardian critic claimed that the Russians<br />

had a word for the undiagnosed depression<br />

that is obviously afflicting Amy. It’s ‘halatnost’,<br />

literally ‘dressing gown-ness’. As I often potter<br />

around the house in my dressing gown to at least<br />

midday, in my own naught availing struggle with<br />

the household chores, this rather alarmed me.<br />

I consulted a Bulgarian friend who had worked<br />

in Moscow for seven years, and whose Russian<br />

was more than adequate. She confirmed that the<br />

word ‘halatnost’ did indeed derive from ‘halat’,<br />

meaning dressing gown. Historically it was<br />

associated with the laziness and carelessness of<br />

both landowners and civil servants. Since the<br />

1840s it had gained, originally in literature and<br />

later in life, the suggestion of negligence. But she<br />

felt unable to endorse any suggested connotation<br />

of depression.<br />

In his new book on modern Russia, Peter<br />

Pomerantsev laments the architectural ravages<br />

being inflicted on pre Soviet experiment, Old<br />

Moscow. Streets with names like Pyatnitskaya: in<br />

English the Streetof-all-Fridays,<br />

‘full<br />

of little two-storey,<br />

nineteenth century<br />

mini-mansions,<br />

leaning higgledypiggledy<br />

on each<br />

other like happy<br />

drunk friends<br />

singing on their way<br />

home to a warm bed’.<br />

He adds: ‘Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth<br />

centuries St Petersburg was the capital, the city of<br />

power, regime, order. Moscow was a backwater,<br />

the holiday city where you could sleep in late<br />

and spend the day in your pyjamas’. And yet,<br />

Oblomov, the personification of ‘halatnost’ in<br />

Goncharov’s eponymous 1859 novel, rarely out<br />

of bed let alone his highly emblematic dressing<br />

gown, resides in St Petersburg. But, perhaps that’s<br />

the point.<br />

In his long essay on Venice which has recently<br />

been reissued, Javier Marias mentions that<br />

real Venetians avoid ‘anywhere that has been<br />

developed with tourists in mind.’ They are ‘not<br />

easy to spot; largely because they don’t go out<br />

very much. Entrenched behind their watermelongreen<br />

shutters, they watch the rest of the world<br />

- the periphery of the world - in their pyjamas and<br />

via their twenty TV channels’.<br />

Perhaps staying in your dressing gown is just a<br />

way of putting off the fag of getting dressed. In<br />

the Romanian Max Blecher’s sanatorium novel,<br />

Scarred Hearts, the hero recalls an Englishman<br />

who had committed suicide leaving a note that<br />

read ‘All this buttoning and unbuttoning’.<br />

Woman in a Dressing Gown is said to have done<br />

for dressing gowns what Psycho did for showers.<br />

That’s nonsense, but I fear Harvey Weinstein<br />

may have delivered its coup de grâce.<br />

31

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