Guinnessiana

Speranza

The very title of Garry O'Connor's new account of Sir Alec Guinness's life -- "the unknown" -- rightly implies that no one ever did know Guinness, least of all his biographer, now making his second attempt to wrestle the old shape-shifter to the ground.

Guinness seemed to change alchemically, his metal altered in the crucible of his imagination rather than magicked from a make-up box.

Vocally there was an evenness of production, a careful turning of phrases, an ability to let thought hang in the air, which compelled in a very different way from the great Romantic orchestral effects of Olivier or the Mozartian babbling brook of Gielgud.

There was nothing to excite the ear, but none the less you found yourself listening very deeply.

And then suddenly he would take you to some very strange place, a zone of the soul, perhaps.

On these occasions the temperature in the auditorium would change palpably.

In Alan Bennett's The Old Country, Guinness was left alone for a moment on stage, opened a drawer, took out a gun, looked at it, put it back in the drawer and left the stage.

I and the rest of the audience had been a little lulled by the performance until the moment that the gun was produced, at which point something impossible to explain happened.

The theatre was suddenly engulfed with dark energy.

It became for a moment hard to breathe; the stomach muscles tightened; the heart beat uncomfortably rapidly.

Then Guinness put the gun back and left the stage, and everything went back to normal.
This sort of juju also happened in Habeas Corpus, in Dr Arthur Wicksteed's final dance, a moment created entirely by the actor, against the express wishes, O'Connor tells us, of the author.

It was a kind of dance of death, an oddly angular deconstructed music-hall shuffle which rounded off Bennett's brilliant play on a note of almost expressionist ghoulishness that took the evening to a new level of theatrical poetry.

Beneath his demure exterior, Sir Alec Guinness seemed to be involved in the black arts.

There was something priestly about his procedure, as if he were practising a ritual that would inevitably result in a moment of contact with strange powers.

He later, of course, became Obi Wan Kenobi, though nothing that George Lucas's special effects division could conjure up came within a mile of what the actor could manage by his own efforts on a stage.

He had a number of meals, always at the Connaught, generally in his room.

These dorm bean feasts were substantial, many-coursed affairs.

The amount of alcohol consumed was prodigious, starting with cocktails, proceeding to wine (several bottles of it, red and white), continuing with Armagnac, then resuming with more wine, and finally, at about three in the morning, he would pad over to the fridge to produce a bottle of beer for the road.
Throughout, he would puff away at cigarettes and talk in his measured way about his life.

He did so with unexpected freedom, revealing deep hatreds (of Laurence Olivier, for example, or his mother) and profound loves - of poetry, mostly, and painting.

Sir Alec Guinness spoke most beautifully and illuminatingly about other actors, in particular Charles Laughton, for whom we shared an almost idolatrous admiration.

He told details of their personal friendship in the 30s.

When Callow told him a few things about Laughton's sex life (Callow was beginning to research his life for a biography he was writing), Sir Alec Guinness, quite casually, told Callow that he, too, had engaged in sexual relations with men, "but then one married and gave up all that sort of thing".

Sir Alec Guinness liked to talk about people's sex lives, not in a salacious way, but more in a spirit of gossip.

There was never any suggestion that he himself any longer had anything to do with sex.

Once he described an occasion when as a very young actor he had gone to stay with Gielgud for the weekend.

Olivier and his then wife, Jill Esmond, were the other house guests, and the Oliviers had decided to go back to London on the Sunday night.

They offered Alec a lift which he declined, since he was not working till the following night, and he saw a look pass between the Oliviers which meant only one thing.

This outraged him because, as he said, "even when one was very young and sort of pretty, Sir John Guielgud never ever so much as put a finger on one's knee".

After the Oliviers had gone, Gielgud and he had another bottle of wine, and went to their separate beds.

The following night, Alec was standing in the wings as Osric, and Olivier - Hamlet - sidled up behind him and whispered into his ear:

"So did Johnny put his thing up you or did you put yours up him?"

Telling me this, his rage, nurtured over 50 years, almost shook him physically.

"Sir Laurence was vulgar beyond belief," Guinness said.

He didn't have much time for Olivier's acting, either.

After any of his performances, "one would rush back to the text because some line, some perfectly unimportant line that one had never really been aware of, had been given such prominence that one doubted one's ears.

It was meaningless."

Interestingly, when he delivered the oration at Olivier's memorial service, he cited that tendency as characteristic of Olivier's genius.

Guinness would give advice about film-acting, and toyed with thoughts of roles that he might play on stage.

There was a kind of part that he longed to play but which seemed not to exist: fantastical creations, like the Abel Drugger, with which he had had such a success in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist at the Vic in the 40s, but also poetic, moon-struck.

"One had a sort of gift, a rather small gift, for clownish parts, for innocents.

There haven't been any possibilities in that line lately."

It was hard to envisage the seriously stout gentleman opposite me, brimful of alcohol with a fag hanging from his lips, undertaking any such light-footed role, but then he would make a moment's mental contact with the image in his mind and there it would be, on his face, in his body, in the room with us - Alec as Harlequin, an exquisite creation as light as a dragon-fly's wing - but then he lost contact and the vision was gone, and he and his body sank heavily back to earth.
On several occasions Callow tried to interest Guinness in roles, but he gracefully deflected them all.

Then one day he left a message on my answer-machine asking me to direct him in A Walk Through the Woods. I didn't get back to him for 48 hours, and then he told Callow rather airily that he'd got someone else.

This, as may be imagined, is fairly high on a list of regrets of a lifetime; but the swiftness of his withdrawal of the proffered possibility was absolute.

That was one of the occasions on which a silence fell between Callow and Guinness - that dreaded silence known to everyone who ever had any dealings with Alec.

Letters went unanswered; one could never get him on the phone.

The silence was broken, typically, by the completely unconnected gift of something - on this occasion, an original cartoon done by Gary Cooper when he was in the trenches during the first world war.

Or it might be a confidence suddenly vouchsafed, as when he wrote to me to tell me that he had just seen "A Passage to India", and that as the lights had come up he had vomited in shame at his own performance as Professor Godbole.

One card from him contained a request NOT to cooperate IN ANY WAY with O'Connor when he came to write his first biography of Alec.

Callow obeyed.

The book, when it appeared, was a broken-backed affair, but one could see why.

O'Connor is the author of one of the very best theatrical biographies ever written - that of Ralph Richardson - but here his hands were tied; his heart seemed not to be in it.

When O'Connor came back for a second attempt, Callow did talk to him, as did many other people who had not been helpful while Guinness was alive.

O'Connor has woven these oral testimonies together in a way that lends the book a very interesting texture.

O'Connor is in constant dialogue with others, with the facts, with theories, trying to make sense of this peculiarly elusive phenomenon, both as man and as artist.

As in his Richardson book, though without the personal encounters with his subject which made that book so electrifying, he has let his quest dictate the form of the book.

He is in a continuous state of excited discovery.

He has uncovered some fascinating new material - particularly about Guinness's war, in which, astonishingly, he fought under his mother's maiden name, Cuffe, his "real" name - but the thrust of his inquiry centres on two matters which are in fact one:

sex and identity.

He is determined to prove that Guinness was actively gay, and that he was not what he appeared to be.

As far as the sex is concerned, it is perfectly reasonable to assume - as he had told Callow - that he was homosexually-oriented, but that he DECIDED not to live his life that way.

There were probably lapses, and his feelings found other forms of expression: supper à deux as a substitute for, or a sublimation of, sex.

It is the readily recognisable situation of a repressed gay man of a certain epoch.

But O'Connor's problem is that there is no evidence whatever of any actual sexual activity.

There is a rumour about an arrest in the 1940s, when Guinness gave his name to the police as Herbert Pocket.

Angela Fox reports her husband Robin getting Alec off the hook some time in the 1950s.

Neither is authenticated.

O'Connor talks a great deal about Alec's double life, but since he knows nothing about the hidden side of it, it becomes both repetitive and unenlightening to keep harping on it.

It would indeed be fascinating to know what Alec did and with whom, but we don't, and there's an end to it.

Except there is no end to it in the book.

I am inclined to think Christopher Good is quite right when he says to O'Connor that Alec enjoyed being speculated about sexually.

Perhaps it gave him a sort of vicarious sex life.

The issue of personality, which is of great interest in any biography, but inevitably central in that of an actor, especially one so many-sided as Guinness, is pursued with equal doggedness, as if to have a public face were a lie, as if we didn't all conceal our innermost desires and impulses behind the carapace - consciously fashioned or not - of personality.

 "Constructive deceits", O'Connor calls Guinness's manoeuvres, feeling that he has somehow found him out.

However, despite this spuriously aggressive line of questioning, a great deal else is thrown up of considerable interest.

Guinness's background, so powerfully described in his memoirs, Blessings in Disguise, is considered at length, in all its Dickensian detail - the terrifying stepfather, the solicitor dispensing the monthly allowance from an unnamed benefactor, the doubts as to the identity of the real father, the louche and drunken mother.

The emergence of the young actor is well evoked.

O'Connor is keenly aware of the nature of the acting enterprise that Guinness was slowly identifying for himself, his unusual sense of character, his uncommonly economical transformations.

Above all Guinness possessed the thrilling capacity to embody thought, to harness mental power.

"An actor needs a slightly mystical approach to the stage," he said at a relatively early period in his career. "You can't force yourself on the character."

O'Connor skilfully shows how his confidence grew during the war when, as Commander Cuffe, he had charge of a ship; at the same time, he was adapting The Brothers Karamazov, which reveals the depth of his literary enthusiasms, and indeed his own aspirations as a writer.

It was clear after the egregious disaster of his second, post-war Hamlet that "the specifically English challenge of being a classical stage actor" was not going to be his path (though there were yet to come Richard III, Macbeth, Shylock).

Instead he was working towards a sense of character that had, as O'Connor says, more to do with being than with doing. In a wonderful phrase, Time magazine's anonymous profile writer said that Guinness's "essential gift is not for creating characters but existences". This is, to coin a paradox, assumption from within.

It was a technique perfectly suited to film and in an astonishingly short period of time, he was being widely spoken of as the most famous British actor in the world, and possibly the most famous actor in the world.

That could not last of course; as with Laughton, star character actors always peak quickly.

The more brilliant, the more diverse they are, the sooner they dwindle into supporting actors.

By the mid-60s he seemed to have started the slow withdrawal from acting that lasted until his death in his early 80s.

He increasingly took on roles because he thought he should.

By the end he seemed relieved not to have to do it any more. He wrote to me crowingly about taking hols, and then more hols after the hols.

Did he enjoy his life, one wonders?

Can you enjoy yourself if your life's task is one long working-out of the dilemma posed by your childhood, a process which demands a supreme and continual exercise of will?

Alec certainly took pleasure in things and people, but the forces of rage and resentment and shame that were bottled up inside him with the lid tightly screwed on must have constantly threatened his peace - hence the stabilising structure he created for himself with Merula Guinness at its centre.
It is a sad consequence of his self-denigration that he also felt impelled to denigrate what was his, which meant that not only his talent but Merula and their son Matthew were often publicly put down.

But the extraordinary tenderness of the note that he left for her to be read after his death is incontrovertible proof of his love, and his awareness of how heavily he had dealt with her.

Her ache to join him after his death is equally eloquent testimony to her indivisibility from him.
Guinness's very publicly affirmed religion has always been a source of fascination and some merriment - "a certain very holy person", as he was called - with the suspicion of more than a hint of hypocrisy about it.

But it seems to me, and it seems to O'Connor, that he was fighting a life-long struggle for mastery of his soul, and that Catholicism helped him in that struggle.

Not many actors engage with that battle.

Whether organised religion is a useful way of working on the inner spirit is not for me to say, but at least Guinness acknowledged that his immortal soul was the very stuff of his acting.

The translucency of so many of his performances is evidence of it, but his awareness of the dark, the engulfing dark within him, is equally responsible for the crushing power that he so often brought to bear on his work.

O'Connor's openness to this aspect of Guinness has resulted in a theatrical biography that goes far beyond the reach of most such books, and is his best book so far.