Glenn Hughes teaches screenwriting

A Work in Progress

2

In 1958 Glenn Hughes was approaching the end of his University of Washington career.  He retired as director of the School of Drama in 1961.  While giving a lecture to a class on screenwriting he allowed himself to reminisce prompted by recent news of Ezra Pound’s release from an insane asylum.   Asking his students if they were aware of Ezra Pound, now a 72-year-old American poet, he described his own interactions thirty years before with Pound, a poet he described in an essay as “the Don Quixote of modern literature.”   

“To appreciate Pound’s poetry, especially The Cantos,” he said, “a reader needs a wider breadth of education.  We equip students with some knowledge of the classics, sufficient for them to enjoy a movie like Orphée,” he remarked, mentioning a Cocteau film he insisted his students see.   

“Orphée stands on its own.  If the audience knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, they may enjoy the movie more.  To understand Pound, his readers need, not only a mastery of the Classics, but also a knowledge of Asian languages and culture among many other things.” 

Remembering to that time when he knew Pound, three poets out of the many he met stood out: Richard Aldington, H.D. and Pound.   He thought they were exceptional.  His intention for this class was to demonstrate how a screenplay might be made of their lives.   He’d been a young poet himself.   He now thought cinema was becoming predominant as an art form and was taking the place of epic poetry.  That was why he was teaching this class.  

He described how he and Babette, his first wife, in 1925 had been in England and visited Aldington and his mistress, Dorothy Yorke, in their cottage in England in 1925.   How three years later, they went back again funded by a Guggenheim grant.   How during his visits he came to know Aldington, H.D. and Pound very well.  He had been spent long, happy evenings in nightclubs in Paris socializing with them and people like Nancy Cunard.    

He cited Aldington and H.D. as being typical of an age-old love story like Orpheus and Eurydice, Jason and Medea, Theseus and Ariadne, Aeneas and Dido, all couples where the man had abandoned the woman.  A screenplay about Aldington and H.D. couldn’t be told without alluding to Classical literature.  Both were steeped in it, particularly H.D.  Their poetry was full of allusions to Greek myth.  But if not a myth, a screenplay could link instead to a more recent love story.  Why not explore the story of Catullus and Lesbia?  Catullus was a poet who was writing at the time of the First Triumvirate in Rome.  He had written many poems about a love affair with a woman he called Lesbia. 

“It is easy to go back and forth in time in the cinema.  So, for a screenplay we can choose parallel stories.  One set in Rome and the other in London or Paris.  We can use Catullus and Lesbia as the leading characters in Rome and Aldington and H.D. in London.  We’ll cut back and forth between the two stories as we think best to tell the story.”

Both Aldington and Catullus were young poets.  Both were in the avant garde.  We know much more about Aldington than Catullus, he told them.  Aldington survived trench warfare in France and made his living as a writer.  Because we know so little about Catullus, we have an opportunity to suggest a fictional, yet not entirely impossible, back-story for him.  

“After all,” he said, “this was how myth developed over time.  Old stories were continually adjusted to meet the needs of a current generation, so a modern screenplay is entitled to put a new spin on an old myth.  We’ve already mentioned Cocteau’s Orphée.  In the core myth, Eurydice was abandoned because Orpheus looked back.  Anyone aware of the tale only from Cocteau’s adaption, in Orphée, might have missed that fact.

 “Yes, that’s correct,” he said, answering a quibbling student anxious to get on with the syllabus.

 “Catullus is historical not mythical.”  

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

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