I'm glad I didn't meet John Doe

Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941) must be one of the most unlikely Hollywood stories. I’m astonished it ever survived the initial review of the script.

To summarise, a young ambitious journalist, Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) creates a fictional character, under the pseudonym John Doe, who is going to commit suicide as a protest against social injustices (these social injustices are not specified in detail anywhere in the movie). Her newspaper goes along with the idea and hires a down and out to impersonate John Doe – none other than Gary Cooper. The whole idea flourishes and becomes a political movement. At that point the agenda is hijacked by the newspaper owner, D B Norton, for the purposes of launching his own presidential bid. At the last movement, the John Doe surrogate turns away from suicide and takes over his destiny as the real John Doe, running a populist party.

Where are the holes in this story?

Firstly, the difference between Ann Mitchell and D B Norton are not so clear to me. Both of them are flagrantly prepared to exploit a down-and-out to promote their newspaper (initially), with the idea of social justice distinctly secondary. The journalist wins back her job by a coup – writing the John Doe article without consulting anyone. 

Secondly, perhaps more fundamentally, as David Thompson points out, there are distinctly fascist undertones in the idea of a single leader being able to create and built a political party, of whatever hue. It is clear by the end of the film that the “people” (as identified by this film, a small group from a rural area who in a moving cameo represent neighbourly folk everywhere). No blacks or single women, of course.

There are uncanny echoes of the contemporary political situation in the US. F D Roosevelt (who Wikipedia tells me is often rated as one of the three greatest US presidents) stood for election in 1940 on a peace platform, while having a clear intention to take the US into the War. His 1936 election campaign was unashamedly populist. Campaigning against “economic royalists”, he stated “I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my administration, that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match”. This is just the kind of vague populism that we encounter in Meet John Doe. There are never any examples of specific social injustice, and the only positive recommendations seem to be nicer to your neighbours. The above quote is taken from Jackson Lears’ review of a recent biography of FDR.

Unfortunately, Mr Lears then continues the review above by stating: “It [the speech by FDR in 1936] was the rhetorical high point of American populism – the genuine article, as opposed to the contemporary right-wing counterfeit”. Meet John Doe is I think a clear example of how easy it is to manufacture such a counterfeit. John Doe is selected quite blatantly as the most attractive man among all the tramps applying for the post. In other words, Gary Cooper is anything but John Doe: he’s anything but average. Did Capra not think for a moment that having a physical god addressed by a small group of John Doe Club members, all of them looking like losers, slightly jars? That the whole John Doe initiative is not run by D B Norton but by the chilling journalist Barbara Stanwyck who makes every speech up, and successfully manipulates an innocent and not very intelligent (but stunningly beautiful) Gary Cooper.

Incidentally, the film contains what I think is the worst acting I have ever seen from Barbara Stanwyck. In the final scene of the film, she flings herself at Gary Cooper and begs him not to throw himself off the top of the building. He tears and emotionalism are utterly out of keeping with her character; she looks unconvincing; he believes she is in the pay of D B Norton and not to be trusted. After all, if he dies, she loses her job – she has a vested interest in keeping him alive. Not a very edifying moment for the movies.

Is Period Piece trivial?

It is certainly surprising that a book published more than 75 years ago, an autobiographical account of growing up in Cambridge, should still be in print. But Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece is not a typical autobiography. It continues to sell because of its charming touch. It is a book that seems disarmingly slight. The author’s light-hearted, self-deprecating tone obscures some serious messages that are conveyed – perhaps so much so that many readers are happily diverted into not noticing if it has any serious point at all. Perhaps it’s only possible to realise the subtle power of this book when you read the rather heavy-handed judgement on it by more modern critics. Mary Beard, for example, in the London Review of Books (19 September 2002), is very dismissive. She quotes admiringly Simon Raven’s review of the first edition, describing Raverat’s “minor Proustian skill”. Worst of all, she looks down on it as (the shame of it!) a local title: “the book … in Cambridge, at least, still sells briskly to locals and tourists alike”). Although the book continues to sell, Beard makes it clear that “the book is more bought than read”. There is a certain sneering tone in Oxford and Cambridge Universities that dismisses any work that attempts to be popular. According to Beard, Period Piece

certainly trades on the archly self-proclaimed nostalgia of its title, and on the wry vista it offers onto a lost world, through the childhood recollections of an elderly woman … three hundred pages of memoirs that are largely devoted to the sanitised minutiae of a privileged Victorian childhood. 

 That’s precisely it! Anything other than high culture is condemned. In reading Raverat’s memoir, we are aware of the vast transformation of the aristocratic world in which she grew up, and how much it had changed by the time Raverat described her upbringing. In other words, it is a very knowing memoir. For some reason I cannot fathom, Beard condemns Raverat for writing the book when old, and even for not making a better marriage: “Gwen married Jacques Raverat, middle-ranking artist and one of her neo-Pagan friends”. Clearly, then, not a good choice. One of the great successes of the book is the remarkably vivid pen and ink drawings illustrating the scenes she describes. They have a charm and an immediacy of Ardizzone or Edward Bawden. You could describe Raverat’s art (although I would not) as middle-ranking, or small-scale, or even (heaven help us) lowbrow. It is not mentioned in this review, yet it provided a way for Raverat to express herself vividly and with immediacy.

My reading of the book is very different. This book is indeed a period piece, a remarkable piece of social history that represents the best type of history: giving a greater awareness of the sheer strangeness of Cambridge. How could such a tiny institution, such a hothouse atmosphere, be responsible for most of the thought leaders and actual leaders of the Britain of its day? Is it possible that such elitism still persists, in quite fundamental ways, so that even though women are admitted to the exclusive club, the hegemony largely remains intact?
What are Beard’s criticisms of the book?

1. Its "faux-naivety." I think Raverat knows exactly what she is doing in this book; what you condemn as an adult you accept as a child, and whatever the age at which Raverat wrote the book, she captures wonderfully some of the fears and dreams of a young girl. 
2.  "Self-serving censorship and selectivity" – Beard claims that by leaving out details such as the death of her governess from cancer, Raverat can concentrate on her “litany of more trivial domestic disasters”. For me, one of the most chilling aspects of the book was the social upheaval and class struggle taking place all around Raverat’s privileged upbringing. 
3.  Beard claims the book gets lost in detail, “for all its promised glimpse of mythical Cambridge”. Beard claims that Period Piece is part of the myth-making, that Raverat was “an old lady who may not be most fairly remembered for her part in the mythology of Cambridge croquet mallets, dreary domesticity and early bedtimes”. This is a bit like claiming Jane Austen is responsible for the vast numbers of costume drama escapists who escape to a never-never land that is not actually part of her novels at all. 
4.  Its “cloyingly sentimental perspective on the sun and strawberries of late Victorian privilege, unmitigated … by much interest in social justice.” On the contrary, this book revealed more about the reality of Cambridge than any number of undergraduate and staff memoirs. For the most part, Cambridge memoirs miss out on the everyday. 
5. Weirdly, Period Piece is condemned apparently because the people described are no longer famous: “its complex cast of late Victorian characters who – like Richard Jebb – have long since ceased to be household names, if indeed they ever were”. You should read the memoirs of pop-star groupies if you are seeking this sort of thing. Beard then goes on to quote approvingly some of the eccentricities in the male members of the family noted by Raverat. But it’s simply not true that the eccentricities were only male. Raverat describes her own mother, incapable of cooking yet convinced that she is in charge of the household, rationing the soap in such a regimented fashion that the domestic staff quietly subverted her authority by keeping stocks of essential items available from alternative locations. 

As Beard herself notes, the book describes in chilling detail, without overt criticism, the emptiness of women’s everyday lives. Her description of a shopping expedition to London is astonishing, if only for the unbelievable wealth displayed by her mother and family. If ever a book inspired me to promote female education, this is it. One of the successes of Period Piece, somewhat like Little House on the Prairie, is the restricted world view. Laura Ingalls Wilder writes, we realise as adults, with breath-taking naivety about the rights of white settlers to take native American land. Nonetheless, there is a vividness about Wilder and Raverat that is compelling. We cannot justify their social attitudes, but they are described with such chilling perfection that the effect is way more powerful than any lecture theatre. I would have every Cambridge undergraduate read Period Piece before meekly accepting the ludicrous late Victorian practices that persist at Cambridge colleges today, perpetuating an obsolete social order and elitism. Cambridge has changed far less than Ms Beard seems to suggest. The dismissal of, and blindness towards, the city of Cambridge remains breath-taking.

In her quiet and understated way, Raverat writes a more chilling condemnation of Cambridge privilege than any number of social tracts. Not so much Period Piece as A Tract for our Times. Without any male assertion of grand themes and major theories, Raverat strikes a blow for a female consciousness. Those little line drawings speak volumes. For me, one of the book’s great achievements is to celebrate a woman’s life that should have been systematically trivialised and ignored by the male-centred elitism of late nineteenth-century Cambridge. All possible steps were taken to prevent women studying, succeeding, becoming in any way memorable in the Cambridge of her childhood. Yet in this book Raverat makes her own unconsidered, irrelevant childhood something to celebrate. She has transformed her mundane upbringing through her words and pictures. She is remembered - while hundreds of male Cambridge professors who lived at the same time are not.

Interior design: modern or comfortable, but not both?

I like looking at pictures of people at home. There's something quite comfortable about domestic interiors, especially if they are from the past. In contrast, modern art is often controversial: you might argue about Tracy Emin, but nobody gets too het up about Van Eyck. Art that happened several centuries ago is somehow safer, and perhaps even taken for granted by the majority of people. You don't often hear the cry "it's not art" for paintings over a hundred years old. Some of the controversy appears to have arrived with the concept modern; at at some time in the 19th century, art starts to be modern (or perhaps more precisely, to think of itself as modern). How much grief has that simple word “modern” caused! Baudelaire was one of the first to use the term, even if he picked the wrong man to describe as modern (Constantine Guys, all but forgotten today). 

Like many terms, "modern" has several implications and shades of meaning around it. It doesn't just mean contemporary; if you believe Mr Rybczynski (and many others share this idea), “modern” in architecture and design is in many ways the opposite of “comfort”. A modern chair is not comfortable; it’s not even supposed to be comfortable. At least, that’s what some people would have us believe.

Rather surprisingly, Peter Thornton (in Authentic Décor, 1984) seems to share this opinion, albeit in a rather less overt fashion. Only those dedicated readers who have battled their way through the small print describing each of his chosen 50-year periods in the history of interior design (each introduction a compressed yet tantalizing overview), will notice the following passage, slipped in between discussions of minutiae such as the length of curtains, the position of chairs in a room and the distinction between Louise Quinze and Louis Seize style (not much, in case you are interested). The passage occurs in one of Thornton's introductions to the modern period, 1870 to 1920, in which he writes of the “main tradition”, the mainstream of design in this period, against which Morris and the Bauhaus reacted. During this period,

delightful, extremely comfortable, and in no way despicable interiors were created in this widely accepted mode right into the 1920s. The reason for their having received so little attention from the historians is presumably that they could not be seen as paving the way towards the Modern Movement. Failing a test of progressiveness, such interiors were good for a sneer or a scoffing remark… Now in the 1980s when the Modern Movement itself is coming to be judged more critically, it may well be that a rather more balanced assessment of the alternatives will emerge.

This is remarkable. It suggests nothing less than a revisionist view of much of 20th-century art history, primarily Nikolaus Pevsner, if you accept David Watkin’s view of the Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), which Watkin describes as “an attempt to persuade the English to accept the Modern Movement as the only style in which a modern man ought to express himself.”  That explains why all those poor schoolchildren suffered in the glass panels of modern school design, such as Hunstanton Secondary School (by Alison and Peter Smithson, 1954, one of the early examples of Brutalist architecture in Britain). 

Perhaps Thornton’s implication is that modernism and comfort are mutually incompatible goals; in the 20th century you can be comfortable, or you can be stylish, but not both, Thornton seems to imply. This seems rather simplistic, given that his book describes three hundred years of people wilfully choosing the uncomfortable option. For them, “stylish” and “comfortable” were certainly not considered in the same breath. One astonishing image from Thornton’s Authentic Décor shows a new build of a medieval hall, the very example of uncomfortable and unsuitable architecture that most people were reacting away from. The image shows Shiplake Hall, completed in 1890 to look like a medieval hall that had been adapted to use in the 19th-century.

Can you be modern and comfortable? You wouldn’t think so from Authentic Décor, yet Jim Ede, at Kettle’s Yard, seemed to manage it quite effectively. Is that a lesson for us?