0293 Black, White, Gray, Color

Black and white are the magic of the drama in the world of film; gray, the poetry – silver-gray of Paris; sunshine gray; dark tragic gray of lovers’ partings on the symbolic bridge, while the Seine flows inexorably, darkly past like life and love; who needs Casablanca in full color? But there’s another gray – the gray of exhaustion. In 1945, a trip to London was a trip to another race, of gray to unhealthy white exhausted survivors, of the bombs and doodlebugs and rockets, of dead husbands, wives, sons or daughters, broken marriages; bomb-shelter life drained of all emotion, and almost too tired to welcome peace; gray as the soot-encrusted buildings, of smoke and London fog; and Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ which we had read before 1939 as a vision of the new poetry was now in 1945 a vision in the mirror of what we were, of how it was; the truth of life. Paper – so dangerously brought across the sea in war from Canada, in ships sharked by U-boats, bombs, torpedoes, was reserved for the War Effort – propaganda, booklets portraying the British countryside, the villages, we were fighting for; and the occasional Penguin book on brownish paper, of the dazzling white and crisp black contours of the Modern Architecture in which we all, we happy all would live – this earth, this realm, this England, this jewel set in a silver sea, this demi-paradise... Corbusier would house us in the sky, reclining in our Breuer chairs, Gropius would cosset us, our outhouse would be Bauhaus.. in a paradise of black and white and gray as they and we should be and then, as we continued to snip our ration books, ‘restrictions were lifted’ on some things, and from America, that magic land, where possibility had not died, one could order through the post the lavish world of the colour magazine; and such things as ‘American Home’ came like a rainbow zapping through the letter-box – like some art film, black and white and poetic gray which suddenly printed in full Technicolor: California sunned itself by long, low walls, fierce cacti tamed in terracotta pots; New England sparkled, spick and span, white picket fences in the sunshine, The Flag on every trim front lawn, and at the door, She wall-to-walled her smile which matched her frilled red-white gingham apron and the 2.2 children looking up at her adoringly, young Dad with his pipe in the background; inside, the blue-white gingham table-cloth and blue-white crockery zinged against the buttercup yellow wall; the bright blue red green yellow painted (do it yourself) or stencilled Pennsylvania Dutch chairs and cupboards said, life is good, listen to the Hoagy Carmichael, Benny Goodman, Johnny Mercer in the background, life is buoyant, look at all the colours, optimism runs from every tap, it’s in the air, we’ll think of a new word for it all – upbeat… and the blood began to flow in our gray, exhausted cheeks: there must be hope, for Over There, Over There, yes, the Yanks were showing us, there was a magic land, and it was here and now; Somewhere over The Rainbow had arrived; Deanna Durbin sang, Nat crooned; there was, after all, Something Worth Fighting For.. It’s a moment in history some forget, some will never know, some few remember, the moments of the heart which escape the compressions of the history books, the moral fables of a hopedry world; but live undaunted in the memory in full, glorious color, the moments of the heart.