Aqaba! Aqaba!
Dec. 26th, 2007 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Among my Xmas presents this year was a DVD of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.I have a long and complicated relationship with this movie that started when I was ten years old and ran away from home for the first time.
My mother used to leave me dinner money on those nights she slept away from home, three dollar bills on the dinette table – she was very proud of that dinette table. She'd built it herself from a kit. This was 1962 when three dollar bills were real money and I had not yet learned to console myself with food. In fact I didn't like food in those days. Food was fuel. What I liked were doll houses, and I was carefully hiding and stashing this meal money with the intent of buying myself one. I'd priced them at F.A.O. Schwartz. You could get a very nice six-room dollhouse with a staircase and roof that lifted off and a porch light that lit up for around eighty dollars.
I had rehearsed the scene in which I came to my mother, eighty dollars in hand, many times with my best friend Roberta with whom every Saturday I circumambulated Central Park.
"I'll tell her I found it," I'd say.
"Eighty dollars? Not very likely," practical Roberta would counter. "Why don't you tell her someone gave it to you?"
"Who?"
"Your father?"
"I don't have a father," I said.
"Everyone has a father."
I wrinkled my nose. "I have a father but I don't know where he lives."
"That's good. That's perfect! Does she know where he lives?"
"I don't know."
"I'll bet you she doesn't. So you can tell her your father found you! In the park. 'I've been watching you for a long time,' he'll say. 'You do me great honor, and I want you to have this –'"
The only problem with Roberta's and my plan was that invariably my mother would find the hiding places where I stashed the cash – that hole in Irving, my guardian stuffed panda or between the pages of my Patty Fairfield books. She'd take it back again. I was such an innocent, it never occurred to me my mother was stealing it. I assumed we had burglars.
"Please don't go," I'd beg my mother on her next evening out. "I'm scared."
"Oh, Patty," she'd sigh. "What are you scared of?"
"I think… we have robbers."
"Oh, honey," she'd sigh again. And she'd kiss me on the forehead. My mother's displays of affection towards me were very rare. "I'll be back tomorrow, honey. You're perfectly safe. Eat something, okay? I leave you that money so you'll eat."
Then I read Edgar Allen Poe's The Purloined Letter. I was struck by the brilliance of his suggestion: if you really want to hide something, put it some place obvious. I began stashing my dinner money in a copy of Norman Mailer's Advertisements For Myself, prominently displayed on my mother's bookshelf.
By the time Christmas, 1962 rolled around I had saved up $27.
It seemed like a fortune.
I forget why I ran away from home that first time. I remember it was Christmas Day. Possibly I was disappointed by the scarcity of my swag. I know I had some vague notion that I could live in the movie theaters in Times Square – they were open 24 hours in those days. I could eat popcorn that had fallen on the floor and drink the dregs of soda from cups and watch lots and lots of movies which is something I loved to do. Plus it was always dark in movie theaters: no one would ever notice me. Not that very many people noticed me anyway. I was more or less invisible going into the adventure.
So I walked the thirty blocks from my mother's apartment on 74th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam down to Times Square. And there was Lawrence of Arabia! I went in, saw it three times before an usher shined his flashlight on me: "Where are your parents?"
The cop was right behind him.
Anyway, it didn't matter. I had fallen in love! My first grown-up literary crush.
In the next year and a half I read every extant biography of T.E. Lawrence including Robert Graves' mytho-poeic take, David Garnett’s essentials, and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s own autobiography, most of which went straight over my head.
What did I know about messianic complexes and masochism? “Bodily integrity” – Lawrence’s own euphemism – and Turks with, uh, unpopular appetites? All I knew was here was a man who changed history all by himself. Nothing led up to him. Everything led away from him.
It could be done. Even if you started out invisible.
By thirteen though I had abandoned Lawrence for the more heterosexually swoon-worthy Lord Byron. I thought no more about him – these being the pre-VCR days when once you had seen a movie, you might never see it again except perhaps in pre-digested bits, filler around commercials, on late night TV.
It wasn’t until 1983 that T.E. Lawrence came back into my life through the intermediary of Bibbit Sweet, my next door neighbor. Ah, Bibbit! Where are you now, I wonder? She was six feet tall, thin as a rail – looked something like Vanessa Redgrave on a bad hair day – and threw herself into her obsessions with a playfulness that approached hypermania. She was obsessed with bicycle riding and we became cycling partners; she was similarly obsessed with the film version of Lawrence of Arabia, and I revived my old passion. When the film played as a revival at the Northpoint Theater in San Francisco, we dressed up in burnooses and stood outside on line for hours, chanting, "Aqaba! Aqaba!" to everyone who passed by.
So anyway – the movie. It suffers greatly in transition to a smaller screen. The cinematography mirrors the narrative. You get shot after shot of riders approaching across a vast, sweeping desert, tiny dots that acquire resolution and size as they get nearer except on a small screen, you never can make out those small dots so the desert shots seem gratuitous, mere prettification.
Also when you see the film on a large screen, the desert shots provide balance for Peter O’Toole in the title role. Without the cinematic scope, you focus excessively on the actor’s eccentricities – his strange inflexions, his drag queen flourishes. The movie becomes camp. I love camp. But not in this context.
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Date: 2007-12-27 02:38 am (UTC)I love Lawrence so. So. So. Much. Sons and lovers....ahhh.
And your story of your childhood was magic. So real. I have a friend, PureJuice, her journal is amazing. She has a yearly Christmas writing, er, contest isn't quite right, but she solicits Christmas memories, I think you should consider letting me tell her about this entry. It's Christmasy and she'd prolly love it.
We use so much dialog from "Lawrence of Arabia" around here. When you "go native" is just a smidge. Even if the kids didn't quite get it when I tried to get them to watch... I mean, what do you want from people who'd just seen Harry Potter 15 and Transformers :)
xox, la
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Date: 2007-12-27 05:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 07:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 01:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 01:43 pm (UTC)My kids aren't into L of A either, sigh...
Of course you can tell yr friend about this entry. And I hope all is well with you and your'n, and the next year brings you all sorts of joy.
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Date: 2007-12-27 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 07:32 pm (UTC)