The Blaze of Noon and Criminal Passion
"It was a love gentle and nervous, gathering itself quickly to a little crisis and then without excess receding, a dance of idealised sensation, wilfully frustrating itself..."
Oh hello
After the concert, Iris had texted about our plans and, when I took a day to reply, followed up three times, the third reply simply “??”. Her fervour, her triple text, her abject neediness in speaking again and again without answer, was because, as she explained at dinner, she was sick of texting, wanted conversations to begin and end definitively, not to start and stop like a dripping shower head. She resisted the relentless comma-fication of communication that texting had created. Hence, dinner at her house where she could, at her whim, open the door, begin talking and, when she felt like it, close it and send me off. When I arrived, in a ruffled cream CDG blouse, which I loved for its pantomime of office attire – office attire being incredibly sexy, in signalling both dominance and repression. The blouse also tended to receive compliments for its understated drama, its chic restraint. Iris said: “This is just the kind of thing I’d hoped you’d wear.”
When I arrived, Iris was stirring a pot tasting Maqluba. She was barefoot, wore blue Levis and an oversized white T that frayed delicately at the bottom hem. She said she hadn’t cooked this before but she liked cooking and wanted to have more cooking in her life that smelt of warmth. I said that I was sure it was delicious but that cookbooks were the death of us, that in their glossy commercial coffee table form, they were destroying our connection to our taste, to our hands, to our history, to, in fact, our memory. There was no thinking anymore. No racking your brains for ingredients, no trust in your touch that the recipe was too wet, too dry. As a child, you would add more sugar to the bread you made at school because you thought it would make it taste better. Where was that experimentation now? Everything was just an ingredient list and step by step instructions. Tragic! I didn’t really believe all of this.
Iris lived alone. She had only recently moved in and was missing curtains, a colander, teaspoons. She said she was too busy right now to concentrate on her home, so she would leave that until a first draft was finished. Anyway, she was travelling regularly, next week she was going to Australia to visit a surfing community that preferred tricks under water, in which, the surfer if successful, would catch the wave and then plunge under, board and all, before beginning a series of acrobatics that friends caught on underwater cams. She showed me videos on youtube, leaning closer as she did, asking me if I could see okay, placing her spare hand on my chair between my legs, as if for balance but also to flirt. Iris had a wonderful ability for generating conversations around her life and work that were, of course, close to her orbit and relied on the telling of a personal anecdote to build the conversation, but didn’t seem self centred. She would ask: what do you think? Has this happened to you? What is that about?
Over rhubarb, Iris kissed me. It was brief, chaste, she retreated, and asked me soon after to leave. I texted Sam, as the door closed behind me: does this suggest a lack of affection or a deliberate withholding? I texted Cara: what do you make of this? I texted Willow: am I crazy? Or should I just tell her now that this isn’t going to work out?
Which has left me even more scattered than usual for this week’s email. But, let’s focus. I am writing about The Blaze of Noon by Rayner Hepenstall, which follows a man who is blind and a masseuse, who falls in love with the niece of the woman he is employed to massage. And Criminal Passion by Donna Deitch an erotic cop thriller, in which a cop falls for the murderer she is investigating.
Blaze of Noon (1939) by Rayner Hepenstall
Louis, the blind masseur, at the centre of Hepenstall’s sensual The Blaze of Noon, says that “[l]ove is not an emotion”. It is not like anger, or lust, or jealousy: traits that can push and shove each other for room, like siblings in the back of a car. Love sits, for Louis, on a different level. “It is a new bias to the whole of his existence and a framework within which his emotions, when they operate, must learn to operate in a new way.” That thinking underpins The Blaze of Noon. Hepenstall, like a true romantic, privileges love, and in particular love felt and shared through touch. The Blaze of Noon is an ode to the physical qualities of intimacy. Hot!
Louis is in Cornwall. He is staying at Mrs Nance’s home, massaging her daily. There, he falls in love with her niece, Sophie Madron. Things get complicated when he meets Amity Nance, who is also blind. But this is not really a novel to read for plot. It is for its lilting, somber, at times comic, movement through ardour. Louis is gripped with love and, because of his blindness, in need of a physical love: “For love is touch, and I am touch.” Hepenstall uses the conceit of his novel – a lead who is a blind masseur – in the same way other authors might write a protagonist who swallowed a dictionary as a child – it allows him to shrug his shoulders at verisimilitude while writing someone who is highly observant and acutely descriptive about what he perceives.
In an author’s note dated April 1962, over 20 years after the novel’s publication, Hepenstall explains that he “had a theoretical notion that the cinema had taken over the story-telling functions of the exteriorised novel and prose narrative would do well to become more lyrical, more inward.” The Blaze of Noon, which is considered a forerunner to the later and French Nouveau Roman movement, is deeply internal, highly descriptive, each moment fraught with anxious reflection and globs of detail, mimicking love’s delight in circling around the small and the gestural, like tracing over and over a heart drawn in biro. “I can’t stop thinking about you!” Kind of thing.
Amidst the fun, experimental form of The Blaze of Noon is a novel that is tender, sweet and committed to a life moved and motivated by love. It is full of moments of longing and reflection on love’s nature. Louis, in bed with Sophie, thinks:
“It was a love gentle and nervous, gathering itself quickly to a little crisis and then without excess receding, a dance of idealised sensation, wilfully frustrating itself, like an erotic dance in the theatre where the limbs of the dancers entwine without a hold and their lips continually approach and never meet, a love without perceptible fatigue that prolonged itself imperceptibly into sleep and seemed never to have interrupted at all when at last the morning came.”
Criminal Passion (1994) by Donna Deitch
“Are you gonna cuff me?” The sexy, rich and oh so mysterious murderer, swimming naked in his pool, asks his pursuer, Mel, a rule breaking cop, who arrives at his poolside in evening wear. “That depends on whether your mouth can do anything but talk”, she replies. One of his former lovers tells the police: “Dating a man like that is an affair, period.” Is he the killer or is he just trouble? Deitch asks.
Donna Deitch, followed up her hit lesbian romance Desert Hearts, with an erotic thriller, Criminal Passion, in which a homicide detective can’t keep her hands off a senator’s son who is suspected of killing multiple women. Mel wears high waisted pants, suspenders, a tucked in man’s shirt, and a tie with the top button undone. She is working on the case with her ex, a boring, angry cop who is predictably worried about her interest in the murderer. Another former lover of the murderer says: “There just aren’t that many interesting men out there. It’s a fact.” Are there only killers left for straight women to date? Deitch asks.
This is a film to watch with glee at its campy performance of the sexy cop thriller genre. It is total steamy fun. But it’s also a film about trust. “A long time ago something happened to trust”, Mel, as a voiceover, tells us. It is a film about disappointment and how that disappointment calcifies into an unforgiving distance and retreat; a refusal to put faith and love in those around you. Mel, always on the case, doesn’t seem to have genuine friends and remains skeptical of the two key men in her life: her ex who is trying to protect her and the murderer who she finds hot. Mel asks herself: “What life am I afraid to give birth to? What in me has to die?” Sophie Madron, in The Blaze of Noon, says: “I think there’s quite a lot to be said for living in despair.”
Love
Anne