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 />
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