by Andre Bagoo
Even before I set foot in Dyrham Park, I had been there. I had trekked up the winding road leading to the front of the property, marked by a stone eagle. I had seen the deer roaming under the chestnut trees. I had felt the temperature shift as I entered the house and made my way through fine rooms and fine halls. For, as a child I had watched The Remains of the Day, the 1993 Merchant Ivory film based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, which was filmed at the Gloucestershire property. How I came to see this rather adult movie, which is about end-of-life regrets, I can’t say for sure. It could have been broadcast on Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT), back in the days when that was the country’s only station (I recall seeing a censored version of another Merchant Ivory film, Maurice, late one night on TTT in an essay in The Undiscovered Country). Or perhaps I saw the tale of Mr Stevens and Miss Benton, a butler and housekeeper played by Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson respectively, in the chill of the airconditioned Globe cinema on Park Street, Port of Spain. Or maybe we rented a VHS from the video outlet in Woodbrook, its front wall covered in dense vines that whispered of worlds contained on cassette tapes inside. However I came to see it, I was struck by the personal stories at the heart of the film. Stevens has spent his life in service to the Earl of Darlington. The butler has been loyal, steadfast, unquestioning. He has held no creed except having none. In one of the most devasting sequences, he is unable to care for his dying father, who is also on staff, downstairs because he must tend to aristocrats and politicians upstairs at a conference put on by Darlington. Instead of his father, he chooses, in a way, the patria. His feelings for Benton, played with fantastic dynamism by Thompson, are subsumed by his devotion to work. It is a tragedy. Hopkins won his first Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs a few years before, but it is his devastatingly understated performance in Remains that should be remembered.
But what does any of this have to do with the Colonial Countryside project?
It turns out a lot. While only exterior scenes were shot at the house, in the logic of film everything takes place there. And so, when editors Corrine Fowler and Jeremy Poynting assigned me to this National Trust property to think about colonial ties and to generate a creative response, the pairing itself felt, weirdly, like poetry. Coming from a country that obtained independence from Britian only in 1962, I had wished to be involved in Colonial Countryside because I felt it relevant to contemporary life. I did not expect to find myself back in a place I knew imaginatively. In a way, I have been trapped there, like Stevens, all along.
Although externally dissimilar, the fate of the butler and all the film’s characters triggered an intense response in me as a schoolboy. Stevens has misjudged his employer and, through his servile repression, let a chance at happiness with Benton escape his grasp. Benton has misjudged herself and Mr Benn, a man she marries almost certainly to spite Stevens. Benn, too, regrets letting his relationship with Benton falter. Darlington, who guilelessly allows his personal sympathy for his German friends to be transformed into Nazi appeasement, among other crimes, comes to be sorry about his serious errors. The whole film is a cautionary tale about devoting oneself blindly to one thing; it is a warning about remaining trapped for life in a role or career or belief or place. It is only recently as I rewatched the movie that I have come to appreciate just how much this warning shaped me.
I was struck, as a mere child, by the subtle, personal stories at the heart of the film. What is strange, however, is that I missed all the unsubtle ways the movie wears its bigger political ideas on its sleeve. Everywhere in the screenplay – by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala drawing on some elements from a previous adaptation of the Ishiguro novel by Harold Pinter, who was wary of Hollywood and did not wish to be credited – there is conspicuous symbolism about the end of British empire and the rise of a new world order. After Lord Darlington’s death, his traitorous sympathy for Nazi Germany is made public and his house is sold to a wealthy American named Mr Lewis (played by Christopher Reeve). The contents of the property are auctioned off, including a portrait of a “courtly Elizabethan gentleman”, which is snapped up by Lewis, who becomes Stevens’ new employer. As Stevens embarks on a mission to bring Miss Denton back to the house and possibly rekindle (or, more correctly, kindle) his relationship with her, the sun sets over the English countryside; his car, a Rolls Royce borrowed from Lewis, stalls. The famous scene when Stevens and Lewis free a pigeon trapped in a room (it was not in Jhabvala’s screenplay; it was improvised) can be taken as symbolic of Stevens dreaming of an escape he may never have. But director James Ivory intended the film’s final scene to present the biggest symbolism of all: it is an aerial shot that moves away from Darlington Hall, as if following the liberated bird in flight, with the property becoming smaller and smaller as it recedes into distant memory. If you magnify the screen, you can discern the shadows of wispy clouds gathering over the building and the green countryside ominously. The British empire has faded, one world order has given way to another, but shakily so. When I had the opportunity to visit Dyrham Park on holiday one year, I had this bird’s eye view of things in my mind. It was Darlington Hall.
I like to think Ivory (his surname at birth was Hazen; he was adopted and traces the origins of the Ivorys to Ireland or possibly Scotland) may have had the colonial history of Dyrham Park in mind in setting Remains so memorably there. The house was built for William Blathwayt, the English diplomat who established the War Office and played an important role administering British colonies (the stone eagle at the front is called the Blathwayt Eagle). Even before Blathwayt, the property was connected to two brothers, Sir William and George Wynter, who organized privateering missions to the West Indies and who were, in the eyes of the Spanish, notorious English pirates. But the selection of the house by location scouts as a setting for Remains might have been very much like the pairing of myself and this property: a stroke of luck. I walked through the main entryway, which bears an inscription in Latin that translates to: ‘Share this with me’, thinking about the sick irony of that edict, thinking about how spaces, vastly separated, can share the same stories; about how colonialism was, if anything, a political idea that crossed lands.
But nothing could have prepared me for the two statues of kneeling Black men, with rings around their necks, holding scalloped shells over their heads that I encountered in one room inside. To date, notwithstanding writing a long poem about the house, which I am pleased has become a part of the Colonial Countryside publication newly issued by Peepal Tree Press, I still do not think I have the language to address these shocking objects. It is beyond the failure of language that all poetry involves. It is a peculiar failure anyone who confronts, in a physical space, the truth of history will recognise. It is a failure so many of us live with in day-to-day life, as we navigate spaces of varying tolerance, of micro-aggressions, of open hostilities sometimes guised as official policies. I decided, as I worked on this commission years ago, that I would confront readers with the disjunction between the sheer opulence of a place packed with markers of wealth and status and a world in which human beings could be rendered chattel. If the poem is difficult because it is an agglomeration of detail after detail then that is because the experience of being in this space is difficult, too. I designated the two figures boys, not because I wished to perpetuate the infantilisation of othered bodies within colonial thinking, but because I had on my mind the deaths of individuals like Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice and Jordan Russell Davis and Black children who are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement officers all over the world. In a sense, what I imagined was a conflation between times: the unfolding catastrophe of racist colonial history. What does it say about the world that generated these objects if we picture them as representing minors?
Because, as mentioned, the internal scenes of Remains were filmed elsewhere (Powderham Castle, Devon; Corsham Court, Wiltshire; Badminton House, Gloucestershire) the two statues do not appear in the film. Nor would such objects have been allowed, I suspect, onscreen had scenes been shot there. What is in the movie, however, is a sequence, taken straight from Ishiguzo’s novel, involving another set of objects that bear relation with the colonial past. At one point, Stevens and Benton spar over the placement of a Cantonese nodding-head figurine.
“Is that or is it not the wrong Chinaman?” Benton asks, using the pejorative term to refer to the porcelain statue for the purpose of implying the error is attributable to the waning capabilities of Stevens’ father, who has misplaced it. “Look at it!” Given that these sorts of objects, which were meant to imply access to faraway vistas and the “exotic”, were common markers of wealth, the scene is a moment when the personal drama between the ill-fated couple intersects with the weighty human events and politics that course through Darlington Hall. It is just another reminder that those who see the Merchant Ivory films as merely light costume dramas need to look again. They need to consider the map of the Belgian Congo on Mr Wilcox’s wall in Howard’s End or the way the homosexual body is policed under colonial-era laws in Maurice. Like Stevens, they need to confront the realities around us, the way the Colonial Countryside project has invited us to.
