Afterlives of Abandoned Work by Harle Matthew;

Author:Harle, Matthew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.3

Bacon’s last unfinished triptych, Triptych 1991, is now in MoMA in New York. It is not on display. The Triptych shows three separate figures climbing out of dark backdrops with a self-portrait of Bacon and a portrait of the racing driver Ayrton Senna on the right and left canvases, respectively. The quotation the curators at MoMA have chosen to accompany the painting on their website has echoes of the strange meeting with Pinter, noting that,

Bacon said his triptychs were ‘the thing I like doing most, and I think this may be related to the thought I’ve sometimes had of making a film. I like the juxtaposition of the images separated on three different canvases.’35

Bacon produced numerous triptychs over his life, and the MoMA quotation is from an interview in 1979.36 The juxtaposition of images on different canvases was a lifelong interest of Bacon’s, and so the connection is coincidental, yet Bacon may well have admired Pinter’s text as this sense of juxtaposition is so clearly applied in the montage and memory sequences. Pages 144 and 145 of The Proust Screenplay, where the ‘sketches’ are drawn, are some of the screenplay’s most dramatic sequences of narrative and montage. Marcel learns of the death of Albertine in a letter as, ‘A riderless horse gallops away from the camera. The camera pulls back slightly to reveal the suggestion of the broken body of a girl.’37 A montage of empty interiors follows.

Whether authentic or not, Bacon’s sketches had led Pinter to confront his text in person, revisiting his lost Proust year of twenty-nine years previous, though not for adaptation for radio or theatre: instead for a moment of distorted remembrance outside of Pinter’s control. The brief scene in the documentary shows Joule forcing Pinter to return to particular pages of his writing that are obscured by sketches and heavy brushstrokes. Perhaps this is the (anti-) climax of Pinter’s Proust, the last letter in his personal archive of Proustian correspondence leading to this strange videoed scene. The peculiar meeting highlights the fact that perhaps the most tangible legacy of his Proustian year was in fact Pinter’s own lived experience, expressed in the trail of private correspondence. Something possible to read directly through the narratives captured in his archive: the author’s Proust file stuffed with personal and heartfelt letters praising him on a film that was never made.38

Interminable texts

Pinter’s next film project commenced during the years of Losey’s misfortune with film financiers and it seemed that the playwright couldn’t rid himself of unfinished work. His next job was to compose a completed adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. Pinter’s finished adaptation saw cinematic release in 1976 to largely mixed reviews. Steven H. Gale cites The Proust Screenplay’s incompletion as a root cause of its apparent lack of critical attention, a total anomaly among Pinter’s other and frankly better-known works.39 This critical neglect provides yet another absence surrounding the text of the screenplay. The incompletion of the project not only provides a

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