Viva Lewes Issue #157 October 2019

COLUMN
David Jarman
My back pages
To Depot to see The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg’s
much garlanded new film. The story is closely
based on a troubling time in her life. Julie
is a young film school student. She meets
Anthony, early thirties, suave in a very
charm-by-numbers sort of way. He claims
to work for the Foreign Office, as evidenced
by announcements such as “I’m going to
be away in Paris for a few days.” Even when
he starts borrowing money from Julie, says
cringemaking things like: “How would
you like to go to Venice?” buys her ooh-la-la
lingerie (from gay paree, you understand) which
she is as unable to carry off as is Anthony his
preposterously coloured bow ties, alarm bells fail
to ring. For Anthony has a dark secret. “Quelle
surprise”, as they probably don’t say in Paris. Oh
well, you know how this is going to end. It’s a film
you’ve seen a hundred times before.
The film’s title is taken from a Fragonard
painting in The Wallace Collection that
depicts a girl carving the letter ‘S’ on a tree
trunk. Anthony, who claims to have studied at
The Courtauld, takes Julie to see the painting.
She thinks the girl looks ‘sad’. He thinks she
looks ‘determined’. Like so much in the film,
none of this has a lot of meaning.
The choice of The Wallace Collection
reminded me of other, literary, references to
the museum. In Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The
Sea the narrator pops in, and discovers that
pretty well all the female characters that we
have been introduced to in the book enjoy
astonishing resemblances to portraits in
The Wallace Collection. Apart that is from
Hartley, the narrator’s long lost love, recently
rediscovered living just up the road with her
husband.
Anita Brookner, who taught at The Courtauld,
mentions visits to The Wallace Collection in A
Family Romance, one of her fine, invigoratingly
depressing novels. The ‘great Bouchers’
on the central staircase are singled out for
praise. I liked a passage in Brookner’s Times
obituary: ‘She loved her parents “painfully”,
she often said, but thought they should never
have had children. She told a friend that she
remembered feeling relief at the news of the
outbreak of the Second World War. It was the
first event that distressed her parents that she
knew was not her fault.’ And then there’s a
passage in her first novel, A Start in Life: ‘“Sea
air will do her a power of good. You won’t
know her when she comes back.” Ruth wished
to believe it. She would indeed have welcomed
back parents whom she did not know.’
But the most famous literary reference to
The Wallace Collection is surely
Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the
Music of Time, a title borrowed
from Poussin’s painting in the
Long Gallery. And I like to
think that Powell also took
the name of the Italian
Soho restaurateur,
Foppa, who appears
in volume three of his
roman fleuve, from that of
the artist whose charming
painting of the young Cicero
reading is also in The Wallace
Collection.
Illustration by Charlotte Gann
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