Worlds Away

Features—

Apr 21, 2021

The first time I saw Terence Davies’s 1992 film The Long Day Closes, I was upended by a recurring image of the sensitive Liverpool lad at its heart, his arms folded across a worn window ledge as he gazes out onto an inner cityscape he finds scary, alienating, and marvelous in equal measure. Affectionately nicknamed Bud by his family, Davies’s boyhood self, played by a bonny, open-faced Leigh McCormack, contemplates a grey world that often excludes him but in which he also finds beauty, joy, and the kind of working-class community that brings a whole street together to sing “Auld Lang Syne.”

“I have a photographic emotional memory,” Davies said in a lively television interview that you can find on the Criterion Channel. “Emotional” is key here: All memory is selective, winnowing out pedestrian routine in favor of the hurts and joys of the felt past. Few of us, though, have the artistic chops to weave together word, image, and music as Davies does, turning autobiography into magic. For me, The Long Day Closes triggered a tidal wave of memories—by turns bleak, wistful, and comic—of arriving in England as a seven-year-old immigrant in the mid-1950s.

The film opens on sheets of rain falling on a dismal tenement alley in a Northern England city. On the soundtrack, in significant contrast, we hear the honeyed tones of Nat King Cole, a sign that this sublimely expressionist filmmaker is about to rescue comfort and solace from the same hard lives he explored in his far more somber Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). Each film shines a different light on Davies’s boyhood as the youngest of ten children in an impoverished Catholic family in Liverpool. But where the first mostly chronicles the miseries of living with a violently abusive father, the second invites us to engage with the family’s warm happiness following the father’s death. Not that they’re better off financially, and their release from suffering is still framed by the dank greyness of life in post–World War II England.

On paper Davies’s youth could hardly be more different from my own as one of two children in a North-West London suburban Jewish family. But his two semiautobiographical films, especially The Long Day Closes, revive my experience of landing in a war-wounded England struggling for rebirth. We had lived a financially strapped but—for us kids at least—idyllic life on the Mediterranean shore. But my parents, both Britons who had emigrated to an Israeli kibbutz as young Zionist-socialist idealists, couldn’t make ends meet in the rickety fledgling state. Reluctantly, they decided to return to England.

My father broke the news to us kids on a walk by the ocean shortly before we boarded ship for, he told us, a shining city with a big blue river running through it. It would take my dad many moons and uproarious ribbings to live down that well-meant whopper. The Thames, which I would later—with ample help from Charles Dickens—learn to love for its murky, smelly self, was never blue and likely never will be. And “shining” hardly described London as it limped through postwar rationing and rebuilding the ruins of a city decimated by the Blitz.

Arriving in the middle of one of the coldest winters on record, we moved into a flat my mother’s three sisters had found for us on Margery Park Road in Forest Gate, at that time one of East London’s poorer neighborhoods. We would stay there only a few months before moving to a small house in the suburbs to live with my widowed Uncle Ruby, and from there to a modest home of our own. In my mind, though, those months in Forest Gate stretch into a dreary lifetime at once echoed and redeemed by a film that, scene by scene, frames my own ambivalence about the fogbound land the Evil Elders had dragged me to.

Davies’s artful positioning of the chipper melodies that played on our radios back then fills me with nostalgia for the longing I felt for some Other Place that would carry me away from a land that froze my toes and seemed determined to regard me as the Other. Watching Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra cut the rug in High Society in our local Gaumont theater with my mother, I was too young to understand what was going on, let alone that the movie was a ho-hum remake of The Philadelphia Story saved only by Cole Porter’s lyrics. The glamour and the swoony song “True Love” got me hooked on Hollywood and on America, whose dark side, expressed in Fantasia’s multiplying-broom sequence and in Snow White’s terrifying scramble through the forest branches, also gave me thrill chills.

The Long Day Closes comes to an end with a sequence of slow-moving tracking shots and segues that capture the small but significant pleasures, sorrows, and nascent yearnings of Davies’s boyhood, the dialogue speckled with snippets from movies as disparate as The Magnificent Ambersons, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Ladykillers, and Great Expectations, at once underscoring his wan surroundings and promising liberation from them.

A short way into the sequence, Bud watches his brother Kev (Anthony Watson, whose muscled laborer’s body is often seen alluringly naked to the waist) fix a bicycle tire so he can cycle off with the others to enjoy themselves. Left behind, lonesome Bud swings from a corroded metal bar above the steps leading to his basement as we hear the opening bars of Debbie Reynolds sing “Tammy.” A series of gliding segues bring us an audience watching a movie, their cigarette smoke drifting through a beam of light from the projector. The moviegoers morph smoothly into parishioners kneeling in prayer with countervailing radio voice-over offering a cutting attack on the “interminable nonsense” of the priestly rhetoric. Segue again to a class full of uniformed boys rising as one from their wooden desks and filing out at the command, “Turn!,” one of many rituals of gratuitous conformity in British schooling that bamboozles me to this day. (The scene triggered another memory of being one of 600 girls, more than a quarter of us Jewish, stopping dead in our tracks while filing out of high school assembly while the piano teacher gaily played the Christian hymn “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken,” which happens to be sung to the same tune as “Deutschland Über Alles,” a gaffe born more of cluelessness than malice.) Another tracking shot returns us to the boy’s meager row house, followed by a final ecstatic pan along moonlit clouds to the plaintive titular melody by Sir Arthur Sullivan, gorgeously sung a cappella by Pro Cantione Antiqua. Bud’s loneliness has also inspired the birth of a creative imagination, and the possibility of new identities that would feed the insider-outsider acuteness so necessary to the artist.

That bravura sequence brings back a cluster of emotive memory shards from my first months in London, a period that, according to my mother, I spent either crying or eating, often both at once. The freezing sheen on the red and black rhombus-shaped tiles of the path to our flat as I trudged back from school in my green hooded coat and black patent-leather shoes, treasured hand-me-downs from an army of girl cousins. Up the stairs, past the cozy ground-floor flat of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph, a kindly, childless elderly couple who had a thing called a television. Once a week my brother and I rushed down to watch The Three Musketeers while the Josephs plied us with digestive biscuits and tea with milk, all the while begging us not to tell Mum about our accelerated sugar highs.

In the playground of my new elementary school two little girls approached me and asked, “Are you Christian?” Despite my limited English I knew I wasn’t that. “Are you Jewish?” one asked. That sounded vaguely familiar, but since back home everyone in my immediate vicinity had been Jewish, it never came up. “I don’t know,” I said. “Well, you must be something,” they said, and walked away. The girls were more curious than unfriendly, but this was my initiation into the outsider status then bestowed in varying degrees on anyone outside the Church of England’s state of grace.

Davies had it infinitely worse in school than I ever did. By turns shunned, bullied, and called a “fruit” in school, the all but friendless Bud finds refuge in the affectionate joshing of his much older siblings and in his mother’s tender love for her late-born son. My uprooted parents were far too harried for singalongs, but it wasn’t long before I discovered a talent for playing class clown and for knowing the words to every melody requested on the BBC radio show Children’s Favourites.

Meanwhile, realizing I had to learn to read and speak English pronto just to fade into the crowd, let alone win peer acceptance, I set about indignantly misinterpreting every sign on the London Underground, a source of family mirth to this day. A poster warning that “Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted” prompted me to ask who this devilish gent Bill Stickers was. “Refuse to Be Put in This Basket” made me wonder who on earth would ask me to squeeze into a rubbish bin, and why. As for “Dogs Must Be Carried on the Escalator,” I feared I’d be left standing at the bottom of the moving stairs for lack of the required portable pooch.

England, where I lived on and off until I turned thirty, would lavish on me gifts I took for granted then and cherish now. Davies and I belong to a generation that enjoyed benefits our Depression-raised parents could have only dreamed of: health care on the dime of a succession of Labour governments; newspapers stuffed with crisp writing and wit, and a stellar literary tradition; a blue-ribbon education through college with a means-tested government grant that gave me a leg up the ladder of self-reinvention; best of all, a tight circle of lifelong friends, many of whom I’ve had since I was ten.

And yet. In the playground with those two little girls, I had learned how to be a minority in a society that deluded itself it was still a moral and imperial light unto a developing world busily cutting the colonial cord. When I visit now, I’m amazed and gratified at the changes wrought on London by a far more ethnically diverse population and a less starchy culture all round.

Davies learned in a much harder school of knocks that he, too, was an outsider, a gay boy coming of age at a time when same-sex love was not just forbidden but illegal. He went on to attend film school and later to take flight as a filmmaker of international renown. In sharply entertaining contrast to his languorously paced films, the director now fields interviews in posh Oxbridge diction delivered at express-train speed, all traces of his Liverpool brogue excised.

I can’t count the number of times I listened to “Tammy” on my old bakelite radio while gazing out, much as Bud does onto his street, at a looming thunderstorm rustling the trees outside my suburban bedroom window. I didn’t know what “cottonwoods” were (trees festooned with to-go cotton candy, perhaps), still less what “whippoorwills” were or who Tammy was. But they sounded lovely, and I longed to be where they were, or at least to feel safe somewhere that felt like home.

Davies found his escape and his safety in his art. For my part, in August of 1978 I arrived in America, ostensibly to study for a doctorate in the sociology department at Brandeis University. I thought I was here on a lark, but the lark went on and on, and so did many opportunities to become what I’d dreamed of, a writer. Much later, abandoning the academy, I landed in Los Angeles, whose flat roofs, boundless oleander bushes, and endless sunshine reminded me of the home I was born into. Today I recognize that Israel has its own problems with othering its minorities, of which I was unaware as a child. As for my imagined America, disillusion inevitably seeps into the gap between reality and the longed-for utopias of popular culture. There are things about this country that still baffle me, having grown up in two nations with full-service welfare states, and where socialism is a perfectly ordinary word for a respectable place on the political spectrum, rather than the term of abuse it became with renewed force in Trump-era America. The driving individualism that made America great and gave me my career breaks has also instilled a terror of confronting inequalities of class and race that continues to fuel dreams of leaps from rags to riches.

Yet I feel comfortable and, insofar as I’ll ever feel at home anywhere, at home in LA, where most people, like me, are from somewhere else. Here, many Jews, indeed most people, feel no pressing need to anglicize their names as they once did in England in order to blend in. The smells and sounds and the sharp light of Southern California were so like Israel’s that for several weeks after my arrival in 1989, intensely pleasurable childhood dreams flitted through my sleep. The casual friendliness, curiosity about others, and open hospitality of Americans helped me integrate at speed. Opportunities opened up in ways they never had in England. In a career move that my mother drily remarked was tailor-made for me, I became a film critic, which led me to the wonders of Davies’s work, equal parts rigor, rapture, and sly cheek. In all his films Davies executes a stately dance both classical and pop, between visions of past and present, mediating between the real and the longed-for. How I’d love to see a Terence Davies sequel that carries us across the decades from the close of his long childhood day to his life as an acclaimed artist and an openly gay adult in an England that’s more colorful in every way than the land I left.

Illustration by Xia Gordon

Worlds Away

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