Oh What Tangled Web We Weave When We Practice To Deceive-With The Film Adaptation Of W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter” In Mind

By Josh Breslin 

“I swear I wish sometimes I could be a woman. NO, I am not talking about turning from male to female or anything like that. Society in the year of our lord 1936 would not put up with it, would not put up with such an idea even though anybody who is anybody who has read any amount of history, the history of sexual experiences anyway knows, that cross-dressing, cross-sexing I guess you could call it has been going on since Eve came out of Adam’s rib, maybe before,” Roger Saint John mentioned in passing to his dear friend Bernard Baron. The causes for Mister Saint John’s comment were two-fold. He had just read his close friend Somerset’s latest novel, The Letter, after having avoided the pleasure as long as possible since he did not like the subject matter as a rule of whatever concoction Somerset had cooked up to titillate the literate reading public here adultery and murder, murder most foul. Moreover this same Bernard Baron had insisted that they go see the opening of the film adaptation of Somerset’s novel starring Bette Davis and he had had quite enough of the whole thing. However Roger was intrigued by the craziness, his term, that the woman would go through to hold a man, a man who was no longer interested in being with her.

This Clara, Bette Davis’ role in the film, starts off directly in scene one doing her version of rooty-toot toot on her paramour who went south on her, Roger something. Yes, dear Clara was in a tizzy over hard fact than this Roger cad was smitten by another woman. Maybe it was that Roger had gone “native” on her, had taken up with a beautiful Polynesian woman whom he swore he was pledged to eternal devotion. For that transgression he paid with about two fistfuls of bullets and plenty of splattered blood (to speak nothing of the defamation of his character as this Clara came up with the usual tart story that this Roger had made improper advantages toward her and she had to defend her honor, her womanhood in the only way that woman can-with a handy revolver.

But Saint John once he started to get up a head of steam decided that perhaps it would be better for the reader to have a little background as to why he was at pains to try to figure out what made the female sex tick. The ploy was pretty simple. Clara, married, unhappily married to Donald Smythe, the famous geological engineer for the East Coast Oil Company, was stuck unto death in dreary Indonesia where Donald was often called away on business for his company. Clara none too strong on Donald anyway except as a meal ticket out of the West End of London from whence she came got easily bored and started hanging around the Leeward Inn where she met this guy Steven who would wind up with many holes in him before Clara was through with him. They became hard and fast lovers for over a year and Clara, at least had dreams of getting out from under her Donald burden and leave the goddam archipelago and then Steven lowered the boom on her. Told her that he was in love with his native woman, Sisil. End of story. No, end of Steven. Clara was going to have her man or else she was going to take care of business her own way.

Here’s where things got dicey, where Saint John was at a lost to figure out what was running behind a woman’s mind when she has been unceremoniously dumped. She developed this whole elaborate plot about how her lover, now dead, and unable to contradict her had really being public nuisance number one, had thrust himself upon her. This weak sister of  an alibi which anybody who ever spent ten minutes at the Leeward Inn would know was false since Clara and Steven had their little corner love nest spot in the bar got her easily past her gullible and witless cuckolded husband, No problem. More importantly got her past the friendly constabulary which was friendly with Donald and wanted to be friendly toward whatever wishes East Coast Oil had. She was ready to walk after a perfunctory trial which was necessary given the death in the case,

Then the fucking letter came to light, the letter where Clara expressed her undying devotion to Steven and gave the back of her hand to the foolish Donald. She moved might and main to get that fucking letter back from whoever had found it. Of course it was Sisil who figured to cash in on Clara’s school girl indiscretion, cash in for then thou in cold hard cash. So the suppression of the letter got her off the murder rap. Didn’t get her off the rub out list though which Sisil had compiled just for her after taking her man from her. Maybe the whole thing should have been centered on what Sisil was going through rather than white girl Clara but that was a different time and maybe Somerset was deaf to such inklings. Go figure.             

[Afterword- we live in deeply troubled times, cold civil war times as almost every event over the past decade or so had indicated so this piece had a certain resonance for today even though the book, the subject matter and the film represented a very different look at what in the old days writer Seth Garth, quoting the late Peter Paul Markin a boyhood friend, was called the “Woman Question” in radical Cambridge circles. (In those halcyon days every political issue was framed as a question as in the Black Question, the Russian Question, the Party Question and so on so the Woman Question took its place in that context with the rise of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s.)

Perhaps Josh, who after all had as a moniker the Prince of Love in the Summer of Love, 1967 according to that same Seth Garth mentioned above, had been writing this piece today in 2018 rather than just five years ago he might have been a bit more circumspect about how he framed this version of the woman question which would be quite different today. Josh, with three unsuccessful marriages and many affairs, some while he was in various marriages, has made no bones about the fact that he doesn’t understand women, never has, since he was brought up with four brothers and no sisters to kind of pave the way and beside the time of his growing up time in Maine in the mid-1960s were not times that would lent themselves to develop any kind of equitable feelings toward women. And he didn’t-then-as he freely has admitted.    

But men can learn something in this wicked old world and Josh did, at least in a way, via learning about being on the right side of the angels on the question of war, now endless wars, having served in Vietnam during that hellish period. As an adjunct he “learned” to respect what the burgeoning women’s liberation movement was doing to step up the fact rather than the fiction of social equality. So, despite fits and starts, and despite that life-long habit of not understanding women, Josh has been very sympathetic to the #MeToo movement which has galvanized the country, pro and con pushed, on these days be those daughters from the various marriages.

This matter came to the fore when he had to deal thoughts of his own past mainly youthful ways of dealing with women, women as sex objects rather than social equals since that is really what is what a lot of the controversy has been about. Josh not only confesses to not understanding women but has been rather shy around them despite his reputation in various incantations of that original prince of love business. So he has never used whatever authority he had to get a woman to submit to his desires, or wants. When I asked him if he would change what he wrote when he wrote this review back a few years ago he said probably not because that would be anachronistic-moreover he really believed that Maugham’s view given his proclivities was a way of dealing with women not so foreign these days. He did say he thought running Sisil as the main character rather than Clara would be a better fit today but that was for somebody else to work on. Site Manager Greg Green]