I have thought for some time, in the lazy way one reverts to hobbies in moments of pique, that a solution to many social ills of the present day would be a revival in some form of the monastic life: the removal of a significant number of people from invidious consumption, a refusal of the involuntary humiliations of poverty and unemployment, the carving out of a zone of freedom beyond law, into a world in which life is not constrained by rules but is rather constituted in them.

The danger in such a fantasy of withdrawal, if translated into present realities, is that it may amount to no more than idle distraction, gap-year pootling. Worse, a sort of workfare hell, the creation of a reserve army of redundant human leftovers doing useless things, a panic-response to the discourse of strivers-and-scroungers that animates much of the right. Worse yet, to use another term of Agamben’s, his “state of exception” (this in turn related to his larger project on Homo Sacer), is the dark place beyond law, the tendency to invoke under the license or pretext of public emergency a new kind of non-being, a creation of categories of non-persons who may be freely killed or subjected to torment without limits. What is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go but a sustained warning that a state of exception in Agamben’s sense may come in the guise of a communal form-of-life whose rules have become equivalent to life itself?

Yet Agamben’s book on monastic rules shows that the dream of use without appropriation, of a space of political freedom not defined by law, was at the heart of the European project for centuries, explicit in the monastic, especially Franciscan, resistance to both secular and ecclesiastical control, a dream in the end unfulfilled and now unimaginable in any polity or form available to us.

Certain details in his account brought back to me forcefully a determinative episode in my own life, the three years I spent, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, in a so-called Bible school, an academy or training-ground for future missionaries, pastors and evangelists.

I put it this way because this is how the institution defined itself officially, and on the basis of which it received financial support from a parent denomination, not to mention the subsidies from families and home churches that supported the students directly. Thus, officially, the minute governance of daily life, the regulation of sleeping time and prayer time and eating time, the control of social encounters, the many prohibitions touching sex, alcohol, tobacco, dress and personal adornment, the emphasis on transparency in all things and the encouragement of public confession, the threat of expulsion for transgressions, were seen as instrumental in the achievement of this training mission. The rules were not only held to be of secondary importance in that context, but were subordinate, naturally, as well, to an overriding religious essentialism: to salvation, to the pursuit of holiness, to the love of God, to the fulfillment of a calling. In recollection, for many people, it is this last, the essentials, that are timeless and permanent, the rules on the other hand only the prejudices of an era, a cultural moment gone unregretted and unmourned.

Yet one may easily invert this picture. In practice, in daily experience, the rules were not felt as means to an end, but constituent parts of a form-of-life: the use of bodies and things without appropriation and self-governance without law. To have turned the Bible school I attended into a monastic order it would only have been necessary to understand the rules as constitutive of an exemplary pattern, a model, in which both the practical function and the doctrinal and cultic higher-order concerns flowed from the form-of-life and not the other way around. This form-of-life-as-rules was the greatest achievement of my school, now unrecognizable as such because we routinely relativise the natural desires and needs of human life, and essentialise the forms of law and possession.

Mr. Beechy had mentioned a documentary film of 1945 about the making of Raleighs at their factory in Nottingham, in its day one of the wonders of vertically integrated mass production in the world. We watched the film that night. It made me think of other celebrations of work: the great 1936 GPO film unit’s Night Mail, with music by Benjamin Britten and poem by W.H.Auden; the classic book of 1930 about an earlier age of craft production, George Sturt’s The Wheelwright Shop. As happens once you start these things, I remembered too the Swedish archival footage from 1932 of a wheelwright making the hub for a wagon wheel. Not exactly the mass-produced Sturmey-Archer three-speed hubs of Nottingham, but the same intelligible fitness for function, the same assumption of timelessness, the same beauty inherent in the necessary. Also arresting from the Nottingham film, images of boys, perhaps fifteen, sixteen years old, with good jobs and steady futures, making things—a way of life as gone as the bicycles they made.

Riding a bike. Was there ever anything a purer experience of freedom? A more unequivocal command of distance, of privacy, of independence? We happened to watch recently Hiroshima, mon amour, the Resnais/Duras film from 1959 with Emmanuelle Riva. What people commonly remark from that film is the opening shot, naked bodies glittering as though covered in radioactive dust. I always think instead of the scene from the flashback sequence, Riva as a girl in Nevers, on her bicycle, down a path through the trees, flying to the rendezvous with her German lover. Oui, jeune à Nevers, she remembers. Et puis aussi, une fois, folle à Nevers.

Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas repetition properly so called is recollected forwards. Therefore repetition, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy.

—Søren Kierkegaard

As much, and more, could be said of the movie world, of the whole apparatus of production and promotion and consumption of cinema. Besides obvious points of comparison—star celebrity, technical virtuosity, lavish expenditure of resources—opera and cinema have in addition intrinsic powers of absorption and suspension. They have, to a degree no other form of narrative art reaches, the means, in their characteristic repertory of devices, of casting the beholder precipitously into an unfolding action, to play with him as a cat with a mouse, prolonging or shortening the perceived passage of time as necessary, making us active participants in a reality not under our immediate control to stop or start or analyse. It may be this absorptive or dominating power which, paradoxically, and in self-defence perhaps, leads to feelings of specious familiarity, ownership, a hobby, fandom, a question of taste.

I thought of these matters after seeing Barbara, a fine little film of Christian Petzold that neatly illustrates the possibility of moral transparency in cinema as drama.

Barbara is constructed on two sturdy narrative scaffolds. The first is the romantic comedy of misplaced affection. A woman of spirit and intelligence is about to commit herself to a man of means who will solve many of her pressing problems, but at the price of her autonomy. Another man appears, a flawed but hugely attractive character whom we see immediately is Mr. Right. The pleasure to be derived here consists in watching how skillfully the film-maker will postpone the inevitable epiphany and resolution.

The second ready-made, so to speak, on which Barbara hangs, is the dynamic of life in the old German Democratic Republic, now well-trodden ground in films. The action of the film takes place entirely in a provincial backwater on the Baltic coast, a shithole of casual brutality and meanness within which, in spite of everything, something like a normal life surfaces in unexpected ways. We are implicitly invited to ponder these familiar antinomies.

But neither of these things is what the film is about. Moral urgency, like a pervasive wash of colour, flows from the circumstance that the eponymous heroine, played with austere economy by Nina Hoss, and André (Mr. Right), played by Ronald Zehrfeld, both doctors banished to a provincial hospital for past transgressions, must each make, under difficult conditions, critical decisions involving personal and professional responsibilities, promises made that cannot be broken, simple decencies that cannot finally be sacrificed to expedience or even self-preservation.

When we step back from the movie and consider it whole, it is not the scenery or the characters or the plot that determine meaning, but rather that this cinematic language has been deployed to place another object—neither the romantic plot nor the awfulness of the DDR—into the foreground of the theatre of one’s mind, so to speak. This object being the idea that no one is exempt from the moral imperative. No one is excused because of transitory circumstances, political or personal, favourable or unfavourable to one’s life chances, on the wrong or the right side of history. And this embrace of one’s moral imperative is true freedom.

That may or may not be a radical idea but it does breathe the air of Verdi.

My first lectures were delivered at the little college in Missouri where I had been an undergraduate and I do not remember much about them. Then as a graduate student at the University of Missouri I was given responsibility for a large survey class, and it was here already that the engine my lectures would become started taking shape. I wrote these lectures out and delivered them in a style copied from teachers I had myself admired. It was very stressful at first. One’s bowels routinely gave out. I learned to make room for it in the planning of my lecture days.

More disturbing was the recurrence of stammering, a curse since childhood which I thought I had in some fashion outgrown. I was terrified these attacks would emerge full-blown in all their hideousness and so went along to a programme of speech therapy at the university, then consisting of a form of behavioural modification in which sufferers were encouraged to seek out hazardous scenarios, such as speaking on the telephone to strangers, rather than avoid them, and, more importantly, learn how to stammer, how to cut out all the secondary manifestations: the gasps, the grimaces, the spasms.

Until the director of the programme, a shrewd old woman, took me aside one day and quizzed me closely about my strategies for coping during lectures. I told her about clever word substitutions, feigning moments of forgetfulness or distraction, writing key words on the blackboard rather than saying them, and so forth. All familiar tricks to stammerers. She said that she thought these “tricks” were in effect good stagecraft, dramatisations of a thinking process, and that I should at once quit the programme, as it might actually do me harm. From that moment I knew I had found what would become my mature classroom style: affectation of spontaneity, a faraway gaze, much pacing with chalk in hand, an elaborate ironical diction, the acting out of the search for the mot juste.

*

The content of these early lectures derived, not unsurprisingly, from the course of reading in American History of graduate students of that time. The old nationalist and progressivist historiographies, of politics and personalities, epic sweep and narrative drive, were being superseded by social science sophistication, quantitative data, minority perspectives, new moral urgencies arising from the civil rights movement, feminism, anti-war feeling, and the sheer explosion of courses and university places. The great books of the 1950s and 1960s were to be chewed over and quarreled over for the next forty years, but the terms of the debates they engendered were never displaced. They were anyway simply better books than anything that came after, and in retrospect I can see why I was drawn to the discipline as it then was, and why I was never afterwards diligent about keeping up with the literature, as they called it.

I ought by rights to have been attracted to the lefty end of this spectrum. The very first book of American History I ever read, in fact, was Howard Fast’s The American, on John Peter Altgeld, the courageous immigrant mayor of Chicago in the 1890s who pardoned the Haymarket anarchists, a book I found on the bookshelf of an uncle and aunt I was visiting for a summer in rural Pennsylvania, when I was about twelve. Besides which, we were unequivocally working class in an immigrant neighbourhood, and benefited richly from the little social-democratic republic that New York City was in the 1940s and 1950s. If my father did not belong to a union, he understood perfectly well that only the threat of unionisation forced the Wall Street bank, where he was night-porter, to offer decent working conditions.

It was not that I drifted politically to the right. As I look back on it now, I think I sensed as a young man, and especially in the heated atmosphere of graduate school in the sixties, that while a left-wing politics was the only defensible position to take as a person, as a citizen, it didn’t follow that one’s task was to add another footnote to the chronicle of exploitation and oppression, since no one of good faith could fail to observe them in operation daily. Far more interesting, it seemed to me then, was to show how such states of affairs came to be embedded dialectically, inscribed as normal in collective life, and for this the practices, the mentalities, even the spiritual aspirations, of cultural élites were the high road to understanding. I switched from an early interest in Black History to write a dissertation on a wealthy American politician and pamphleteer in the Revolutionary era. This was a mistake, however, and a dead end. It led exactly nowhere. I had made a category error, thinking that you could understand a machine by studying the weather.

Out of the haphazard, even random, reading of those days, three influences stand out in memory, all of them misunderstood at the time and discredited in different ways since—outcomes that could have been predicted once you grasped that these were counterfactual exercises, arguments not so much from the presence of a thing as from the absence of a thing, histories of a void, a wound, a great emptiness, an innocence not-in-a-good-sense, and therefore deeply offensive. Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, a book thought sometimes, then and later, to celebrate American exceptionalism, but which, in demonstrating why Socialism was not possible in America—having never experienced Feudalism, it was doomed to Liberalism from its birth—went a long way toward explaining the arrested infantilism of American public discourse. Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, drew on Bruno Bettelheim’s insights about concentration-camp life to illuminate observed slave personality. Elkins got in trouble eventually with both Jews and African-Americans, allowing critics to sidestep the other pillar of his work, derived from Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen, which described the shockingly meagre resources a Protestant culture had to bring to bear on ultimate questions of ethics and human dignity. Elkins showed that, in America, before you were denied rights you were denied a soul. Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society, especially the chapter “Reflections on the American Identity,” argued that the American frontier as a fact and as a template, which is to say the promise of limitless but unrealizable potentials, reaching far beyond the original wilderness settlements, produced a personality at once precocious and permanently retarded, eager to spring into action but with no suitable model for maturity. A necessary adaptation for the young but tragic for generations of bewildered and heart-broken immigrant mothers.

Together these works suggested, I thought, that a society with no organized memory of evil cannot recognize evil when it appears and is defenceless before it, that a society that values inexperience over experience will never learn by experience, that a society ever on the move will never leave behind a durable monument to its labours, however violent the upheavals which it occasions or clever its technical skill.

So I had my theme, but there were two structural flaws with it that I was slow to take into account, and never surmounted. First is that a negative, the history of an absence, does not lend itself to a narrative. It was not coincidental that each of the works I’ve mentioned were comparative in method, measuring its subject against another, Hartz measuring America against societies with a feudal past and against settler societies with other starting points in their separation from the old world, for Elkins that other was the experience of slavery in the Roman Catholic societies of the New World, for Erikson childhood in European society. The second flaw is that this history, if that is what it is, predicts its own failure as pedagogy. Or, put another way, the whole argument requires a vantage point from outside the culture under discussion, which is also the culture of one’s students.

*

I lit early upon a method in my lectures—a method I did not recognize fully as such until much later, when I began writing fiction. In writing fiction I discovered the best way to proceed is to have in mind an event—no, not so much as an event, a mere image, or even a smell or a sound, will do—that will tell you when you are close to the end. It will be the thing for which everything else is prelude and setting. Then get as far away from this thing as you can and start writing, postponing the arrival of the thing until it won’t be held off any longer, along the way having assembled some characters and discovered a plot.

So it was, I see now, in the creation and development of my lectures. Long before arriving at the Puritans, one had to understand Israel. The agony of the black man in America required an entire Heilsgeschichte, a Redemption History, stretching from Christ to Uncle Tom. Log cabins, ballooon framing and Levittowns required excursions into medieval craft guilds, traditional manufacturing, class-based sumptuary rules. And so forth. Chalk in hand, sketching in the air and on the blackboard imaginary intellectual castles, pacing back and forth, searching for just the right word, I wound my skein year after year, all the while observing with the melancholy of all teachers that as the curve of my search for the adequate presentation approached a degree of finish, such fragments of an older literate culture as one still counted on in students were slipping away one at a time. Classical references, the Bible, the history of Western religion, the canon of Western art and literature and music, all dead letters. What these several cohorts of students, the attractive and intelligent as well as the dull and dodgy, made of it all, I can’t imagine.

I knew it was time to quit when I watched younger colleagues lecturing. No chalk, no pacing, no figurations in thin air. Earnest young men and women hiding behind consoles from which they directed PowerPoint presentations to a big screen. See and hear Martin Luther King deliver his “I have a dream” speech in person. What could be left to explain?

I have never regretted my lectures. They were my work after all. It gave me pleasure on occasional visits to Britain, where Professors were rare and exalted people, to explain that I was a Senior Lecturer, a rank unknown in Canada, but a title I felt exactly suited what I was. Nor have I substantially changed the views expressed in my lectures. I have sometimes wondered what text or phenomenon, what smell or sight or sound, might now prompt another journey into that heart of darkness, something of the urgency and scale that the problem of slavery was for Stanley Elkins. I suppose it would have to be the vast and unprecedented carceral system of the United States, its jails and prisons, that empire of the living dead, the savage completeness, yet again, of the denial of a human soul. How far would one have to back away from the phenomenon to present the whole picture in a proper light? What ancient and modern comparisons? What hinterlands of subtly interconnected phenomena?

But then the stammering would surely return with redoubled vengeance. The stagecraft wouldn’t work a second time. That trick with blackboard and a piece of chalk, irony and the mot juste.

It is here, at this most charged moment in the apotheosis of Parsifal, the completion of his journey from Fool to Redeemer, that the recent Met production introduces a novelty. Rather than having Parsifal lift the Grail from its casket, which is Wagner’s stage-direction, we see Kundry rising from abject subordination to perform this supreme ritual, a thing so subversive to the myth-logic of everything that has come before, we must ask, What was the problem to which this became the answer?

Let us say at once that a problem Parsifal lays before an audience now, arises from its preoccupation with sexual pollution, with disgust and fear of women. Much of Act Two, in the domain of the evil Klingsor, where Parsifal’s downfall, like Amfortas’s, is to be accomplished by seduction, is wince-inducing indeed, even though the sirens are imaginary and Kundry is not a free agent.

We know a lot, of course, about the relationship of Parsifal to Wagner’s medieval sources, and as well to Wagner’s infatuation at that time with Schopenhauer, proponent of a philosophical version of Buddhism and, perhaps not incidentally, a notorious misogynist. But such explanations—if not mitigations—cannot be laid out in performance. We move with what we see and hear. The problem is compounded when the action of the drama is set in something like the present, as this production is. We do not so easily relativise the offending parts as we can when characters are archaic figures in Fritz Lang art-deco kit.

The temptation is thus to improve the work, make it relevant to our time, reveal what the artist would have done had he lived in a more enlightened age, which then becomes somehow what he must have really meant. So Kundry, in this adaptation of Wagner’s drama, is not merely a penitent, a Magdalen, but is shown, before she expires, exalted, a priestess, an equal in the cult of the Brotherhood.

The trouble with this is not that Wagner is made nicer than he really was, or that his intention is given a teleological spin, it is rather that we are likely to miss what he actually says about the present age. The burden of Parsifal—which Wagner called ein Bühnenweihfestspiel, A Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage—is that the path to maturity and wisdom for the exceptional individual, the Chosen One, the Redeemer, and, through him, to the redemption of the world of men and nature, must begin and end with religious consecration and utter spiritual isolation. This aristocratic and mystical sense of representative human life is, mutatis mutandis, what was held by his contemporary Kierkegaard (whose bicentennial, like Wagner’s, is in May), to the scandal of many who would like to claim Kierkegaard too for one version or another of the modern narrative. This scandal is not commensurate of course with scandal arising from antisemitism, or misogyny, or some other beyond-the-pale posture, which we know all about and discount in advance, but arises from the difficulty that a great artist might actually intend such a deeply illiberal, anti-equalitarian politics.

I was at Montauk for only that one year. How that came to be and what it meant to me is a story that seems worth recounting.

From P.S. 94 I graduated to Dewey Junior High School, both neighbourhood schools in Sunset Park, which was in those pre-Puerto Rican and pre-Chinatown days, a Norwegian archipelago set in an Irish Catholic sea. At Dewey (named neither for the philosopher nor the admiral nor the governor) I learned to set cold type on a composing stick from a California job case in Mr. Holbert’s print shop. I also somehow came to the attention of the Board of Education, who sent someone down to administer a battery of tests and recommended I transfer at the end of the year to a school with a rapid progress stream. Someone came and spoke to my parents. Torn between deference to authority and an ingrained conviction that putting oneself forward could lead to no good, in the end they agreed but with no great enthusiasm.

Montauk was at Sixteenth Avenue and 42nd Street, in the heart of Borough Park, and we lived near Fourth Avenue on 53rd Street. It was possible to go part of the way by bus, but mostly I walked, or ran, a different way each time, having worked out all the permutations of this grid, eleven blocks on the short sides, twelve on the long, familiar enough territory this side of Eighth Avenue, the boundary of our Norwegian world, but beyond that an amazing, different, Jewish world.

In Sunset Park our local pharmacist was Jewish, as was our dentist, and a haberdasher on Fifth Avenue for whom I ran errands and stocked shelves. But at Montauk Jewishness was the normal. On Jewish religious days only five or six of us would show up for classes. The boys had to shave and the girls had breasts. There was a knowingness in the air, a consciousness of the legitimacy of ambition, an understanding of the way the world really worked, a sense of the distinctions to be made between tactics and strategies, especially in regard to the school itself, to our studies, to our situation, which was understood to be provisional, temporary. I had never encountered this mentality before. Far from fretting that overreaching, or even ambition itself, might be unseemly, or damaging to one’s soul, my classmates’ parents wanted to know why ninety-seven percent on a score was not a hundred percent. And nor were their parents middle-class; most were shopkeepers, trades-people, city workers.

I struggled a bit that year. I was thrown into a group that had already been together for a year and were halfway through an accelerated two-year middle-school programme, while I had only had the first year of a three-year programme. I had to make up a lost first year of Spanish lessons, for example. And I was young for ninth grade, only twelve when I arrived, immature and undisciplined. Nevertheless, I got on well with my classmates. I am sure I remember each of them more vividly than any of them would remember me. They were already mentally at the high school of their choice, the college or university, the profession. I imagine they think of Montauk, if at all, as a minor link in a chain. I bet none of them owns a copy of The Wigwam. We were not destined to be friends. I never saw any of them afterwards.

I am reminded, however, in leafing through our yearbook, of a touching token of recognition, of solidarity, I had forgotten.

Our English class teacher was named Walsh or Welch. A fat, nasty woman who talked incessantly about her operations, her bad feet, her excursions to Broadway musicals. My classmates had the sense to play her like a harp, which was not difficult, but I took to daydreaming during these monologues, which Walsh, or Welch, took as a personal offence, and she was not long in spinning her revenge. She called me Bright Eyes, after a Viking tale of H. Rider Haggard. It was her conceit that I was Swedish, and therefore thick, and it amused her to address me in a macaronic Scandinavian sing-song.

In the caption after my name, below the group picture of our class, I am called, affectionately, “Bright Eyes.”

I shall probably send my copy of the 1952 Wigwam to Ms. Holland, but it will not be easy, and its loss will not make a dent in the pile in the cupboard.

By chance, the day after seeing Amour we went to a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light. The films illuminate one another.

Bergman’s film shows religious people in a religious setting, in which the language of faith is central and where primitive religious art hovers over intensely felt sacramental practices. Yet both films employ the same vocabulary of light and dark, imprisonment and escape, love and responsibility, disintegration and transcendence, violence and redemption. They both understand the power of suggestion, the unfinished gesture, the incomplete trajectory, equivocal actions, the possibility of the supernatural.

This last deserves more attention than it has got. Haneke has, in interviews, remarked on his admiration for the Danish master, Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose film Ordet presents a religious parable culminating in a literal resurrection—one of the greatest moments in all of cinema. The analagous moment in Haneke’s film is perhaps not remarked on in reviews because it is more comfortable to explain the mysterious in psychological terms, or to assume there must be such an explanation. In fact, Amour is no more easily deciphered at this fundamental level of perception and truth than was his Caché.

Both the Bergman film and the Haneke film are about the way personal relationship is entwined with, interdependent on, what we might call metaphysical safety. It is surprisingly explicit in the Bergman film, on a close viewing, that the hero, the priest Tomas, is a frozen soul because he has lived a “life lie” (the term is Ibsen’s), having to believe he loved his dead wife. Only a form of psychological violence frees him from this life lie. Haneke’s film is not so explicit, but we do witness a terrifying plunge into ambiguity of motive and affect, unresolved and unresolvable except through the purgations of violence. There is no euthanasia here. Terror and pity, yes.

But not only in Aristotelian terms. We are not passive witnesses to a drama of cathartic experience “out there,” so to speak, in the agony of these characters. We are drawn in, forced to choose, constituted as beholders, made responsible in our beholding. There is no place to hide ourselves from these words and these images. This is the opposite of sentimental entertainment, and even of helpful instruction. Is this perhaps the function of religious art? To make us unsure what it is we are actually seeing until we have been already changed by it?

I remember his telling this story when I was a boy, with the added detail that the crew of the merchant ship were escorted to shore, and safety, by the German sailors. I knew nothing more of this episode until much later, courtesy of the internet and the many anonymous collectors of marine facts.

Built by R. & J. Evans & Co., Liverpool in 1884 and owned at the time of her loss by K. F. Langfeldt of Kristiansand, John Lockett (Olav slightly misspells the name) was a Norwegian barque of 842 tons. Three-masted, iron-hulled, one of many such relics, formerly work-horses of the Atlantic trade, sold off when British shipping interests converted wholesale to steam, and on which Norway began to build an extensive merchant fleet, they were pretty ships, the last of the romance of sail. Olav’s ship figures in a poem of John Masefield (“Dainty John Lockett well remembered yet”) and was painted, as at sea in a storm, by T.G.Purvis.

On April 26, 1917, in good weather, John Lockett, out from Le Havre via Savannah to Jamaica (Olav misremembered this as Haiti) in ballast, was scuttled by the German submarine UC-47, commanded by Paul Hundius. Twenty-five miles south of Lizard Point, the southernmost tip of Cornwall, at the western gate to the English Channel, a graveyard for ships from time immemorial, a favourite cruising ground for submarines in two world wars, the location of the wreck is marked on nautical charts.

What actually happened that day?

UC-47 belonged to an improved class of mine-laying submarines but carrying only seven torpedoes. Whenever possible these boats surfaced next to a merchantman, boarded her and placed charges in the hull.

As required of neutral vessels, John Lockett displayed amidships on either side of the hull a large Norwegian flag and the name of the ship in bold lettering, easily seen by a submarine at periscope depth. We know this to be true because photographs survive of John Lockett under tow through the Avon Gorge near Bristol, on some slightly earlier voyage, in which these markings are clearly visible.

But so-called unrestricted submarine warfare had commenced in January. Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone, and in April, at just about the time John Lockett was sunk, the United States entered the war in part because of this change and the toll it took on allied and neutral shipping. The old “prize rules” governing interceptions at sea had stipulated that any merchant crew, and especially neutral ones, if they did not resist or attempt to escape were to be taken to a place of safety before the vessel was destroyed. It was not sufficient to leave seamen adrift in lifeboats on the open sea. With unrestricted warfare and more effective anti-submarine tactics, however, such niceties went increasingly by the board.

We can now place Olav’s recollection in a proper context. The Norwegian crew of John Lockett were escorted by the Germans through a dangerous sea to an enemy coast during a period of unrestricted submarine activity. Captain Paul Hundius and the crew of UC-47, in other words, behaved impeccably according to rules they were no longer bound by, at the risk of their own safety.

UC-47 was to last another six months. It was rammed by a British patrol boat off Flamborough Head on November 18, 1917, and went down with all hands. Although accessible to divers, the site is listed as a war grave and the wreck may not be entered or disturbed.

Paul Hundius had left UC-47 in October—escaping the fate of his successor and his old crew—and in December took command of UB-103, a much more advanced submarine. The next year, in August 1918, he was awarded the Pour le Mérite, the Blue Max, Prussia’s highest decoration for valour, usually associated with air aces. Then, just weeks before the armistice that ended hostilities, on September 16, returning to Zeebrugge, UB-103 disappeared, probably bombed by a British dirigible in the Pas de Calais. There were no survivors. Paul Hundius was 29 years old.

On November 11, on Remembrance Day, as I have before, I will think of a Norwegian sailor who survived the war and a German U-boat commander who didn’t, of their chance encounter off The Lizard on April 26, 1917—and of all those in peril on the sea.

The DVD includes an interview with Forman taped for an Australian film school in 1986, after Forman had become famous for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. We learn that film-making conditions during the period of the Czech New Wave were “ideal” because there was no commercial pressure (the industry was state-owned) and, for a brief window of time, no ideological pressure. Conditions in America, on the other hand, are also “ideal” because so many films are made (most of them awful, admittedly) that eventually you will find somebody to bankroll your projects.

One might take such expressions as signs of the deepest cynicism—nothing there about aesthetic or moral traditions or professional or artistic relationships—but perhaps these are only the kinds of things you say in an interview when you are bored with it, as Forman appeared to be.

Forman’s English was of course American English. Not a generic American English (if there is such a thing), more a particular gravelly, lowish-medium, side-of-the-mouth, flat, no-nonsense American voice, its register neither specifically formal nor specifically colloquial, speech requiring no movement of either lips or eyebrows, a nowhere dialect whose native territory one thinks of as Hollywood big-shots, neo-cons in think tanks, sellers of Ponzi schemes. Binyamin Netanyahu has also this American English. It is as though the element of the foreign accent, rather than diluting the adopted idiom only lays bare its essential brutalism. The Australian interviewer was utterly intimidated.

The only important thing to know about Miloš Forman is that he made two good films in America about the crushing effects of malevolence, spite and envy on a free spirit. When you watch Black Peter you see that everything essential to those films, everything enduringly interesting in them, comes from Europe.