Gifting a friend with a copy of Down to a Sunless Sea, I browsed through the book until I came to “Echo,” a story about the relationship between two men, David and Jonathan, and for the first time I realized that it was a hearkening back to ancient Israel. And then I came across a section of dialogue from Citizen Kane which I had used to further a theme of the story. I found this to be an example of synchronicity because I recently drafted a syllabus for a course in writing in which Kane would be screened. I wanted to focus on the issues of loss, separation and abandonment which run latently and manifestly throughout that great film.
I have never been quite able to nail down the hold that film has on me, regardless of how much analysis I give it. It is like losing a great love in one’s life, for the questions of separation are never resolved and finally fall into the bag of reason, which is always insufficient. What is left is a “nag,” the kettle of fish of what could have been, the ifs and perhaps. For some of us the “nag” remains forever, although rolled about in the mind like a gumdrop on the tongue, refashioning and reshaping it., reformulating the original experiences. The
“nag” becomes a worry bead of memory.
And here in a story I wrote perhaps more than a decade ago I was still wrestling with that movie and using it to good use in the story’s construction. I had seen Kane before the age of 10, for sure, and I was affected by it in ways I did not comprehend until I came to analyze it as a writer many years later. The film is part and parcel of my psychological duffle bag.
And when I saw the passage in “Echo” I was slightly taken aback as how it has resonated down through my writing years. Here is the extended quotation from “Echo.”
“I always remember Bernstein’s speech fromCitizen Kane.
‘A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1986, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since, that I haven’t thought of that girl.'”
“But that is an old man speaking.”
“David! No. It is all of us speaking; it is the gravity of relationship within us, the ebb and flow — the heartbreak, of time misused and unlived. It is life moving into death.”
I did not quite fathom that, granted that it was achingly rueful and tender, of an opportunity lost. And there was something ineffable to it all.”
And here is Bernstein’s “nag,” unresolved, unconsummated.
I find it of interest that I come upon Kane repeatedly. It is a kind of longing I experience of lost memories, of lost acquaintances, of ephemeral friendships as a child that leaves a mnemonic patina in my mind. Indeed, it is a haunting, almost uterine in nature, in that it speaks of a place and time when all was safe and secure in the world, in which attachment was close and strong, a given. Memories are like Gumpian box of chocolates, some sweet, some tart and only a few superbly piquant, so that the taste remains in mind and somewhere a mental note is made to seek out that pleasure once more, for human beings desire repetition. But all real pleasures of mind and soul are evanescent, never to be repeated. In such a light our very lives are a metaphor for that pleasure that will never come this way again.
Wouldn’t it be stimulating to have Kane narrated by his cherished Rosebud? What did Rosebud make of her/his devoted childhood playmate? What was it like to glide on the compacted snow with the young Charles urging more distance and more speed from his intrepid glider? And then after all those decades in storage, like Kane’s other misbegotten treasures, to be dismissively cast into a roaring furnace, incinerated without Kane shedding a tear or two, from memory, for Rosebud in a way had mothered him by being attached to him, never thinking once to separate out from Kane or abandoning him.
I wonder if material and inanimate objects ever keep memories of their users, their owners, their adoring fans. Is a kite mindful of who flies it? Wouldn’t it be a different world if an object or cherished thing remembered?
And so Rosebud ends the long period of neglect and is immolated in the furnace, for only does the audience grasp who Rosebud is and what haunted feelings it possesses. And Charles Foster Kane’s last words are of his only companion, his own mother as a child.
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