In a film that is, at once, so measured, intense, sober and so full of lyricism as The Ghost and Mrs Muir, it is hard to select particular highlights, morceaux de bravoure, but if there is one scene that stands out from all the rest it is the farewell scene. The Captain has decided to step aside and not get in the way of Lucy’s ‘temporal time’, even though she is still expecting or hoping that he will stop her planned marriage to the very real Fairley, her marriage to reality. When she is alone – having just explained to Martha why she loves Fairley, however conceited, erratic and even childish he may be, defects she is more than aware of – she goes over to the portrait of the ghost and says: ‘Well, Daniel, haven’t you anything to say?’ The Captain’s voice does not thunder forth as it did on so many other occasions; there is only silence, because he is already leaving. And then comes the farewell scene: Lucy is sleeping, and, as he so often has before, the Captain enters the room via the balcony and talks to her, reproaching her, at first, for not being as sensible as he had thought, but then he adds: ‘Don’t trouble yourself, my dear. It’s not your fault … You’ve made your choice, the only choice you could make. You’ve chosen life.’ Then, in her dream, he orders her to forget him, so that tomorrow, ‘in the morning and the years after’, she’ll remember him only as a dream, a state of mind, an atmosphere that filled her and even prompted her to write a book, which, he tells her, she wrote entirely alone. The Captain gives her not only the royalties, which he had already given to her in their mutual desire to preserve the house, but also his own story, the story of his life, which, from then on, she will believe she invented. This is a crucial moment in the film, because the ghost becomes doubly a ghost, or, rather, he becomes a ‘real’ ghost by becoming an object in a dream as well as a fictional character, Lucy’s creation. It’s as if the ghost had died a second time, had vanished and was thus even less real, even more ghostly when he discovers that, despite being no one, despite having neither flesh nor body, he can still inflict harm. There is a kind of despair at life and the living, as if, even though dead and firmly established in a state in which nothing can become of him, and everything that can happen has happened, the part of him that still makes contact with the living, the part that is still alive in him – his words, his laughter, his company – remains tirelessly harmful and a hindrance. Before disappearing, before his second death, the Captain allows himself a moment of nostalgia that clearly foreshadows the death of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, when the replicant regrets the fact that everything he has seen and experienced will die with him (‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe …’). Here, Captain Gregg looks at the sleeping Lucy and pronounces a few lines that could have come straight out of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’: ‘How you’d have loved the North Cape and the fjords and the midnight sun, to sail across the reef at Barbados, where the blue water turns to green, to the Falklands where a southerly gale rips the whole sea white!’ and he concludes: ‘What we’ve missed, Lucia! What we’ve both missed!’
The rest of the film passes quickly, although years and years go by, indicated, as I mentioned earlier, by the piece of wood bearing the inscription ‘Anna Muir’ and by the shots of waves breaking endlessly on the shore and accompanied by Maestro Herrmann’s now wild music. After this, it is Lucy Muir’s much shorter skirt that tells us how much time she has spent alone. It’s not long before Lucy discovers that Miles Fairley is already married and has two children, in a wonderful scene when she goes to visit him at his London address and is received by his wife (Anna Lee), who tries to console her, saying: ‘It isn’t the first time something like this has happened.’
Lucy’s life, her time – the time of her physical life, the time allotted to her, the time that is subject to change and in which things can still happen – has flowed past in solitude and emptiness, although not filled with any nostalgic thoughts of the Captain, who has freed her from having to remember him when he gave her his instructions before leaving via the balcony – an extraordinarily considerate gift. However, her life, her time, ‘real’ time, has passed without love or flesh or body or words or conversation, in the hopeless state of hope and waiting that Lucy appears to have chosen at the very start of the film and from which she emerged with the intrusion into her life of Captain Gregg. One must assume that he has spent his timeless time waiting for a future identical to the past, waiting to ‘experience’ what he has already ‘experienced’, namely, the company of Lucy Muir, and that cannot happen as long as she remains among the living. His impatience, therefore, will have been directed at the past, a past that was not a past because he was already dead when it began.
Little Anna is now a young woman, who comes to visit her mother with the sailor to whom she is about to be engaged. And suddenly, in the conversation between mother and daughter, they both discover that the other also saw and knew the Captain, or dreamed of him during that first year in Gull Cottage, the house by the sea. Both were in love with him, the little girl as a little girl, and the mother as a grown woman. And Anna says to her mother: ‘Perhaps he did exist, the Captain. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he had … Then you’d have something to look back on with happiness.’ And her view of memory is exactly the opposite of the Captain’s, who sees memory as being the greatest source of unhappiness.
There is not much more to tell. We again see the waves breaking on the shore, and Lucy Muir appears briefly, this time with very white hair. She still lives with Martha, both having grown old together – as it seemed they would at the very beginning of their adventure – both talk to each other in the simultaneously fond and tetchy spirit of those who have been too long in each other’s company. Lucy has a granddaughter also called Lucy, who, as she learns in a letter, is about to get married. That scene is only an epilogue, the scene showing her peaceful, painless death, the moment longed for and expected, although not perhaps by her (or perhaps it was), and, of course, by the Captain and by the viewer. The glass of milk is spilled, and the ghost will tell his beloved as soon as she is dead: ‘And now you’ll never be tired again.’ He holds out his hand to help her up from the armchair in which she has died and, arm in arm, they leave the house where they first met and where they lived together.
This apparently happy ending is the only possible one in a film in which the supernatural is instantly accepted as natural, in which we must pass continually from one dimension to the other, not simply as part of the pleasure of the film, but as a means to understanding it. And yet, as I said earlier, the story of Lucy Muir and Captain Daniel Gregg seems to me one of the most heartbreaking in the history of cinema; the heartbreak is there in the words spoken by the ghost created by Mankiewicz and by screenwriter Philip Dunne, when the Captain bids farewell to Lucy: ‘What we’ve missed, Lucia! What we’ve both missed!’ The Captain is anticipating, because not only did they miss meeting each other when there was still time and physical reality, not only did they miss the North Cape and the fjords and the midnight sun, but also the years of conversation and laughter and company that could have awaited them during the time allotted to Lucy, who, in choosing the living, ultimately chose nothing, whose life was thus wasted, spoiled: that was her fate, to be someone to whom anything could have happened, but nothing did, or perhaps only that state of hopeless waiting. The Ghost and Mrs Muir is not a mere fairy tale or ghost story; and although its director, Joseph Mankiewicz, considered it a youthful experiment, in my opinion, he made a film – on a par with John Huston’s The Dead – that goes much further in touching on something rarely touched on in the cinema or in literature: the abolition of time, the vision of the future as past and the past as future, reconciliation with the dead and with the serene, deep-seated desire to, at last, be one of them.
(1995)
Acknowledgements
The following is a list of the original title of each piece, the first place and date of publication, followed by its first inclusion in book form. All appeared, in the first instance in Spanish (for the m
ost part), in the periodical press, before being collected subsequently in book form, also in Spanish, frequently in more than one volume. The first date of publication in the periodical press is listed, followed by the first collection in book form.
The main collections cited are (in cases of two editions, the pieces appear in both, unless a specific date indicates a given one):
Javier Marías, Pasiones pasadas, Madrid: Anagrama, 1991
Javier Marías, Pasiones pasadas. Edición ampliada, Madrid: Alfaguara, 1999
Javier Marías, Vida del fantasma, Madrid: EL PAÍS/Aguilar, 1995
Javier Marías, Vida del fantasma. Cinco años más tenue, Madrid: Alfaguara, 2001
Javier Marías, Literatura y fantasma, Madrid: Siruela, 1993
Javier Marías, Literatura y fantasma. Edición ampliada, Madrid: Alfaguara, 2001
Javier Marías, Mano de sombra, Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996
Javier Marías, Seré amado cuando falte, Madrid: Alfaguara, 1999
Javier Marías, A veces un caballero, Madrid: Alfaguara, 2001
Javier Marías, El oficio de oír llover, Madrid: Alfaguara, 2005
Javier Marías, Demasiada nieve alrededor, Madrid: Alfaguara, 2007
Javier Marías, Lo que no vengo a decir, Madrid: Alfaguara, 2009
Javier Marías, Ni se les ocurra disparar, Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011
Javier Marías, Tiempos ridículos, Madrid: Alfaguara, 2013
A Borrowed Dream
‘A Borrowed Dream’ (‘Un sueño prestado’, El Semanal, 5 February 2006; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
‘Air-Ships’ (‘Aviones marineros’, Granta en español, no. 1, 2004)
‘The Lederhosen’ (‘Los pantalones tiroleses’, El País Semanal, 27 November 2005; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
‘An Unknowable Mystery’ (‘Un misterio incognoscible’, El Semanal, 4 February 1996; subsequently, in Mano de sombra)
‘Ghosts and Antiquities’ (‘Fantasma y antigüedades’, El País Semanal, 9 November 2003; subsequently, in El oficio de oír llover)
‘The Invading Library’ (‘La biblioteca invasora’, AD, September 1990; subsequently, in Pasiones pasadas)
‘Uncle Jesús’ (‘El tío Jesús’, Publicaciones Dezine, no. 3, May 1991; subsequently, in Pasiones pasadas, 1999)
‘Old Friends’ (‘Los antiguos amigos’, El País Semanal, 5 November 2006; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
‘I’m Going to Have Fun’ (‘Yo me divertiré’, El Semanal, 27 June 1999; subsequently, in A veces un caballero)
The Most Conceited of Cities
‘Chamberí’ (‘En Chamberí’, Diario 16, Cultura, 14 July 1990; subsequently, in Pasiones pasadas)
‘The Most Conceited of Cities’ (‘La ciudad más presumida’, Suplemento Semanal, 4 November 1990; subsequently, in Pasiones pasadas)
‘The Keys of Wisdom’ (‘El manojo de llaves de la sabiduría’, Liber supplement in EL PAÍS, Le Monde, L’Indice, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 December 1990)
‘Venice, An Interior’ (‘Venecia, un interior’, EL PAÍS, 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26 August 1988; subsequently, in Pasiones pasadas, and Penguin/Hamish Hamilton)
All Too Few
‘Noises in the Night’ (‘El ruido en la imaginación produce monstruos’, El País Semanal, 16 April 2006; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
‘The Modest Case of the Dead Stork’ (‘El modesto caso de la cigüeña cadáver’, El País Semanal, 13 September 2009; subsequently, in Ni se les ocurra disparar)
‘Lady with Bombs’ (‘Cuento de la poderosa con bombas’, El País Semanal, 13 June 2010; subsequently, in Ni se les ocurra disparar)
‘A Horrific Nightmare’ (‘Una espantosa pesadilla’, El País Semanal, 6 May 2007; subsequently, in Lo que no vengo a decir)
‘No Narrative Shame’ (in Los intérpretes de vidas, Santillana Ediciones, 2007)
‘All in Our Imagination’ (‘Figuraciones sólo nuestras’, El País Semanal, 12 October 2008; subsequently, in Lo que no vengo a decir)
‘The Weekly Return to Childhood’ (‘La recuperación semanal de la infancia’, Diario 16, Gente, 12 June 1992; subsequently, in Vida del fantasma)
‘Why Almost No One Can be Trusted’ (‘Por qué casi nadie es de fiar’, El País Semanal, 7 June 2009; subsequently, in Ni se les ocurra disparar)
‘In Praise of the Egotist’ (‘Elogio del egoísta’, Vogue, May 1990; subsequently, in Pasiones pasadas)
‘All Too Few’ (‘Siempre muy pocos’, El País Semanal, 3 December 2006; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
Dusty Spectacle
‘Damned Artists!’ (‘Peste de artistas’, El País Semanal, 5 October 2008; subsequently, in Lo que no vengo a decir)
‘Dusty Spectacle’ (‘Polvoriento espectáculo’, EL PAÍS, Libros, 18 November 1990; subsequently, in Pasiones pasadas)
‘My Favourite Book’ (‘Mi libro favorito’, Diario 16, Libros, 21 September 1989; subsequently, in Literatura y fantasma)
‘This Childish Task’ (‘Esta pueril tarea’, El País Semanal, 31 December 2005; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
‘For Me Alone to Read’ (‘Para que yo lo leyera’, El País Semanal, 10 June 2007; subsequently, in Lo que no vengo a decir)
‘Hating The Leopard’ (‘Odiar El Gatopardo’, EL PAÍS, Babelia, 12 March 2011)
‘Writing a Little More’ (in Peter Holbrook, ed., Shakespeare’s Creative Legacies, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016)
‘Roving with a Compass’ (‘Errar con brújula’, El Urogallo, September–October 1992; subsequently, in Literatura y fantasma)
‘Who is Who?’ (‘Quién escribe’, abridged version in Marina Mayoral, ed. El personaje novelesco, Madrid: Cátedra/Ministerio de Cultura, 1990; subsequently, in Literatura y fantasma)
‘Time Machines’ (‘Máquinas del tiempo’, El País Semanal, 9 April 1995; subsequently, in Mano de sombra)
‘The Isolated Writer’ (‘El escritor aislado’, EL PAÍS, Babelia, 3 September 2011); JM’s acceptance speech on receiving the 2011 Austrian State Prize for European Literature in Salzburg
‘Too Much Snow’ (‘Demasiada nieve alrededor’, El País Semanal, 26 March 2006; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
‘The Much-Persecuted Spirit of Joseph Conrad’ (‘El perseguido espíritu de Conrad’, El País Semanal, 24 December 2006; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
‘The Improbable Ghost of Juan Benet’ (‘Y el espíritu inverosímil de Benet’, El País Semanal, 31 December 2006; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
Those Who are Still Here
‘The Hero’s Dreadful Fate’ (‘El espantoso futuro del héroe’, EL PAÍS, Babelia, 16 July 2011)
‘Riding Time’ (‘El tiempo cabalgado’, EL PAÍS, Babelia, 26 July 2008)
‘Travelling between Eternities’ (‘Viajamos entre las eternidades’, El País Semanal, 7 November 2010; subsequently, in Ni se les ocurra disparar)
‘A Hero from 1957’ (‘Un héroe de 1957’, El País Semanal, 9 September 2012; subsequently, in Tiempos ridículos)
‘Those Who are Still Here’ (‘Los que aún están’, El País Semanal, 4 February 2007; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
‘Why Don’t They Come Back?’ (‘Por qué no vuelven’, El País Semanal, 14 May 2006; subsequently, in Demasiada nieve alrededor)
‘Music for the Eyes’ (‘Música en la retina’, El País Semanal, 5 May1996; subsequently, in Mano de sombra)
‘Earthly Sighs’ (‘Suspiros terrenales’, Nickel Odeon, no. 2, Spring 1996; subsequently, in Vida del fantasma, 2001)
‘The Man Who Appeared to Want Nothing’ (‘El hombre que parecía no querer nada’, Nosferatu, no. 20, January 1996; subsequently, in Vida del fantasma, 2001)
‘The Supernatural Master of the World’ (‘El amo sobrenatural del mundo’, Fantasiazko eta beldurrezko zinemaren astea, October–November 1994; subsequently, in Vida del fantasma) r />
‘What If You Had Never Been Born?’ (‘De no haber nacido’, El País Semanal, 8 February 1998; subsequently, in Seré amado cuando falte)
‘The Ghost and Mrs Muir’ (‘El fantasma y la señora Muir’, Écrire le cinéma, Éditions Cahiers du Cinéma, 1995; subsequently, in Vida del fantasma)
THE BEGINNING
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HAMISH HAMILTON
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First published 2017
This selection copyright © Javier Marías, 2017
Translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa, 2017
Introduction copyright © Alexis Grohmann, 2017
The Acknowledgements constitute an extension of this copyright page
The moral right of the author, translator and introducer has been asserted