THE LOST SOUL OF THE TEXT (ON HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY)

Sorry about the eleven-day gap without publishing here. I’ve been working full-time for the last two weeks on a book which gathers together selected posts from this blog, in Spanish, covering the last five years since the onset of Covid-19. The book was intended for a prestige Spanish academic publisher, but they told me they had no funds to promote it, meaning they wanted me to pay for publication. So, I waited no more to upload the book onto UAB’s repository and here it is, in .pdf, .mobi and .pub: Vivir la universidad. Notas sobre mis experiencias (como profesora de Literatura). I’ll gain no money, but, then, zero royalties is always better than paying to publish. And, anyway, I do need an Open Access publication for my teaching assessment exercise next year. And, yes, I’m angry.

The miseries of academic publishing, however, are not my topic today but a classic film I saw yesterday, which has set me thinking about what we’re missing and what is missing in recent cultural production, namely, the soul. The film is John Ford’s How Green Was my Valley (1941), based on a script by Philip Dunne and adapted from the eponymous 1939 bestselling novel by Richard Llewellyn. I started reading this long novel (650 pages!) years ago, but it did not click with me; I might give it a try again.

Llewellyn is a bit of a literary fraud because he pretended to be Welsh when actually he was English (of Welsh descent), a fact discovered only posthumously. The fame of his novel about the Morgan family is, thus, a bit unfair, or a lot, to local Welsh writers, but the case is that Llewellyn called attention to the harsh plea of Welsh coal miners during the last years of Victoria’s reign and the beginning of her son’s reign, Edward VII, like no other. Llewellyn apparently gathered his knowledge of South Wales from conversations with Gilfach Goch’s villagers, the place where he spent his summers visiting his Welsh grandfather, though it seems he was briefly employed too as a coal miner. How Green Was my Valley, which won a National Book Award in the USA, was the first novel in a long career that extended to the 1980s, while the peripatetic author lived in a great variety of countries.

How Green Was my Valley, the film, was produced by Hollywood legend Darryl F. Zanuck. 1941 must have been a glorious year for the US film industry, despite WWII, because Zanuck’s production won the Oscar for Best Picture beating, attention!, Citizen Kane, Sergeant York and The Maltese Falcon. Its other four Oscars went to John Ford for Best Director, Donald Crisp for Best Supporting Actor, Arthur Miller for Best Cinematography, and Richard Day, Nathan H. Juran and Thomas Little for Best Black-and-White Art Direction-Interior Decoration. Wikipedia informs that “in 1990, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’” and that the Academy Film Archive preserved it in 1998. This is an honour awarded to too few films since most pre-digital movies might get lost forever when frail celluloid decomposes. Apparently 75% of all US silent films have been already lost, and many great jewels are at risk of disappearing, despite the efforts of institutions like Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation. By the way, there were two well-liked BBC mini-series based on How Green Was My Valley, one broadcast in 1960, the other between 1975 and 1976; the latter can be purchased on DVD according to Amazon, but the former seems gone. The BBC had the bad habit of recycling celluloid and video to shoot new programmes.

I’m sure that How Green Was My Valley has been broadcast many times on Spanish television, but I don’t know where to find that information. JustWatch informs that currently it can only be watched on subscription platforms Movistar + (where I saw it) and Filmin. I decided to watch it to fill in a gap in my movie buff record, but also in a bout of nostalgia recalling the many Saturday afternoons spent watching classics on Televisión Española. I loved the two hours of Ford’s masterpiece, even though I was a bit disappointed that the film was shot in black and white because it was made in sunny Florida and there was no way to pretend that was Wales. To be fair, the black and white photography is glorious and matches very well the theme of coal mining, apart from providing a few stunning close-ups of the amazingly beautiful Maureen O’Hara, who plays the only Morgan daughter, Angharad (her two sisters in the novel are not present in the film).

I’m writing this post because I ended up crying a few tears, feeling deep emotions last elicited by Pixar’s masterpiece Coco (2017). It is easy to argue that How Green Was My Valley pulls at the heartstrings by using the panoply of sentimental fiction, beginning with its being focalized through a child (Huw Morgan, played by a lovely Roddy McDowall), who acts as the first-person narrator. The tear-jerking focus on the problems that beset a working-class family tied to an exploitative situation at the coalmines guarantees plenty of misery, from the deaths of young and old men to the forced migration of others. There is also a failed romance that pushes the heroine Angharad into the arms of a man who purchases her as chattel. All these mishaps are grim Ken Loach material, but what makes the difference between director John Ford and Loach, whose films I tend to avoid for their determined negativity, is that Ford focuses on the soul of the people, both individually and collectively.

I was surprised watching How Green Was My Valley by how often the Morgans are surrounded by fellow villagers singing and celebrating life together. There are diverse scenes at the Morgans’ relatively well-to-do working-class home in which neighbours are invited to drink and eat. Composer Alfred Newman gave ample room to the men’s singing, as traditional choir music by the miners is a staple of popular Welsh culture. In a poignant scene, the eldest son directs the local choir to honour Queen Victoria while two of his younger brothers silently leave the village for ever, bound for America. The men’s reluctance to sing when Angharad leaves the church with her new husband comments on the unhappiness that awaits her, while the men’s joyous singing celebrates her mother’s long recovery after she almost freezes to death. The villagers also gossip about or mock the Morgans but their collective presence is a reminder that community matters. This is most visible, perhaps, in the scenes with the men walking back from the mine at the end of the day, or staging a long strike.

This sense of soulful collectivity is also projected onto the minor characters, perhaps because with so many leads it’s hard to say who is the protagonist. The child Huw might be said to be the main focus, as I have noted, yet this is also mainly the story of her rather aged father and mother. I assume that the two miniseries have more room for the large cast of characters, but the film does wonders with the minor ones limited to a few scenes, such as the two men who teach Huw how to box, for he is being mercilessly bullied at school, and end up giving his sadistic teacher what he deserves. There is also plenty to learn about workers and masters when the coalmine’s owner visits the Morgans, dressed to the nines including a top hat, to ask for the hand of their beautiful daughter for his son, without offering to make the rest of the family more prosperous. The girl’s beauty is her ticket out of poverty but also into marital disaster. In contrast, Huw chooses employment at the colliery aged barely 13 over an education, though he eventually understands that this kind of loyalty to his father is misguided.

This soulfulness I’m alluding to is based on the idea that one must care for the characters because they are likeable. They may make mistakes or be plain wrong but, still, there is plenty of room for sympathy. Novelist, script writer and director do not hesitate to show how unfair life is to the characters in a context firmly rooted in the socioeconomic troubles of South Wales at the turn of the 19th century, when, as the film explains, the closure of some collieries caused a surplus of workers which, in turn, depressed wages. The Morgans suddenly face unemployment and the need to migrate, problems compounded with the low safety standards of the mines. All spectators should feel horrified, besides, by the group of boy workers Huw chooses to join, children who should be at school. Those interested in ecocriticism will note that Huw and his father comment on how the slag from the coal mine is beginning to cover the foot of the main hill near the village. This is a sad foreboding of the Aberfan tragedy of 1966 which killed 144 persons, 116 of them schoolchildren, when “a rain-soaked slag heap avalanched upon the mining village”.

Caring for characters has become increasingly difficult in a process that possibly started in the 1960s, or 1970s, when anything sentimental was declared to be false. If the story of a mining village were to be told today, issues that are absent from How Green Was My Valley, such as alcoholism or domestic abuse, would probably take centre stage, and there would be much more detail in the discussion of class issues, the working conditions at the mines, sexuality, education and so on. I mentioned before Ken Loach, and I’ll apologize to him for he certainly works hard, with his habitual scriptwriter Paul Laverty, to offer an extremely sympathetic portrait of working-class people. Perhaps what I mean by ‘soul’ is that whereas watching a Loach film you don’t want to be part of the working classes, watching Ford’s How Green Was My Valley you see that the miners stand for humanity in a way no middle- or upper-class person can. This may be sentimental, but I feel that it is necessary to be more Dickensian. I’ll mention, by the way, that John Ford directed How Green Was My Valley one year after making The Grapes of Wrath, based on John Steinbeck’s indispensable novel about the Great Depression.

I mentioned Coco before, yet another film about a working-class family, as an example of good soulful sentimentality and I realise that this type of empathy is now limited mainly to children’s films, or, even, to adult films with child characters. In these cases spectators are allowed to lower the anti-sentimental barriers and enjoy the story. In most current fiction (print and audiovisual, though), with the exception of YA, characters are approached as specimens under a microscope, from a safe emotional distance and with all their defects exposed. We seem to have developed collectively a preference for dehumanized characters, or for dehumanizing characters by forcing them to face appalling situations. The Morgans of How Green Was My Valley or the Joads of The Grapes of Wrath do face dehumanizing situations, but the Hollywood of the 1940s made a point of keeping their souls intact. Darryl F. Zanuck, who produced both films, may have been working cynically to please the masses, but watching and reading the many contemporary texts that aim at feeding our personal and collective cynicism I wonder what we have gained by losing our souls. I’ll keep on thinking…