HARRY: Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and Mercy and all that. The dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here poor devils [As he speaks the last words with the odd touch of genuine pity, the car reaches the platform and the faces of the doomed-to-be victims peer in at them.] MARTINS: What do you believe in? HARRY: If you ever get Anna out of this mess, be kind to her. You'll find she's worth it. I wish I'd asked you to bring me some of those tablets. [116] Until this scene, we have been shown images of Harry only through the eyes of Martins, Calloway and Anna. Now we actually see him for ourselves and he is indeed an odd amalgam. There are elements of the boyish Harry, the schoolboy Harry. We see this in the ease with which he secures a separate car for Martins and himself on the big wheel. Lime, the racketeer, is the older incarnation of this schoolboy. He has not grown up. He remains entirely self-motivated, ruthlessly so, without any of the notions of social responsibility that are meant to accompany maturity. Martins tells Harry, 'You've never grown up' [114]. In the book, he is more explicit: 'For the first time, Rollo Martins looked back through the years without admiration as he thought: He's never grown up. Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails; evil was like Peter Pan. It carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.'(116) They leave the wheel and Harry asks after 'Bracer', presumably an old school friend. 'I had a card from him at Christmas' comes the reply. The relationship is a distant one, confined to a youth that has long since passed in Martins. Harry is still young. His famous parting speech (Orson Welles' inspiration) reflects a child-like logic: 'When you've made up your mind, send me a message - I'll meet you any place, any time, and when we do meet, old man, it's you I want to see, not the police... and don't be so gloomy... After all, it's not that awful - you know what the fellow said... In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - the produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce... ? The cuckoo clock.' [117] Just as the Harry that Martins knew as a schoolboy and the Lime that Calloway knows is but a shift in perspective, so too is the world that Harry sees and the world that Martins sees. Where Martins sees people, Harry sees dots; where governments see 'the people', Harry sees 'the mugs'. It is again, a child- like logic that allows Harry to make this jump in perspective and sustain it as a basis for the morality of his actions. In other ways, though, Harry has a much more realistic view of the world than Martins: 'We aren't heroes, Holly, you and I. The world doesn't make heroes outside your books.' [114]. This realism extends to his own warped view of the world: 'a melancholy beats through his guard; a memory that this life does not go on.' This melancholy can be seen penetrating his 'guard' of cheerful boyishness, the 'recognition that his happiness will make the world's day' when he talks of God, Mercy and the misery of the worldly existence of the 'poor devils' that feed his racket. He talks with a genuine concern. Harry's attitude to Anna sums up this uneasy amalgam of the boyish fantastic and mature realistic. He evidently cares for her as an individual, as more than a 'dot' or a mug, but ultimately his interests come first. He does not love Anna as she loves him. It is debatable whether he is capable of love. The boyish Harry is certainly not capable of love precisely because his interests come before anyone else's. Anna, on the other hand, cares less for herself than for Harry. She is given the chance to save herself from the Russians if she helps Calloway catch Harry but she refuses. |
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