‘What the hell!’ I screamed at Julian. ‘I know it’s sort of wonderful in a ghastly cult artefact sort of way. It would be fine if it went to someone else, but it came to me, and, um, I can’t exactly look at it as an aesthetic object just now.’
In the end, Victoria told me to take it to the crossroads where there was a Lady Chapel and burn it with salt, rosemary and rue. Where would I find rue in this day and age? In Vic’s garden. Victoria is not a witch and does not grow this stuff for magical purposes. It’s just a herb, a lovely, old-fashioned herb. It’s in the wonderful mad scene in Hamlet: ‘rue for remembrance’. Or was it rosemary?
OPHELIA: There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.
LAERTES: A document in madness!
But, why burn Kenneth’s hideous screed with rosemary when it was something I clearly didn’t want to remember? I did it in order to remember my true self. And mark that this nonsense from Kenneth had got nothing to do with me. To fight back. For him to remember who he’s dealing with and for me to know who I am.
Kenneth must have been terribly roiled by what I said about him in my book, but I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just said what I really thought, like I do, but one has to have compassion. I realise now, in hindsight, that Kenneth was half using me, and half trying to help me, and in a funny way, I accept that and I can say ‘thank you’, but at the same time, it caused me a hell of a lot of trouble. I should have just said ‘no’. I don’t mean I was ready to reform completely, but I should have said no. ‘No thank you, darling, perhaps we’ll practise one of your satanic rituals some other time!’ If you let somebody do things to you, such as using you as an actress in a demonic ritual, you will pay a price. Let’s face it, it’s dabbling in darkness and it’s no joke. It’s down to a question of darkness and light, and I’m not even talking about it in religious terms because I’m not a religious person. I have my own spiritual track, but I’m certainly not religious. In fact, I’m against religion, and that helped me, of course, to avoid being drawn into Kenneth’s sway, because black magic is a religion. I, of course, did not tell Kenneth what I’d done – burning his letter at a wayside shrine – because in some Harry Potterish way he could have made a counter curse to that, too. It’s quite complicated, this whole business. And you have to be very careful. What I didn’t want to do – which in fact you can do – was to send the curse back to Kenneth so that it would land on him. Within the occult scheme of things if you send out that much hatred against someone and the recipient has enough power to hurl it back at you psychically, it can rebound – like the piece of paper with the spell on it that Dana Andrews slips back into the magician’s pocket at the end of Curse of the Demon. I’m not an expert, needless to say, but it’s a wearying and aggravating business.
I do think my counter-attack worked. I somehow knew intuitively what to do. In that way I’m quite like my mother – I’ve got that side to me, I just choose not to go to the dark side. White magic is another story entirely – that I am quite capable of using – and this is what you must do if you’re ever unfortunate enough to get a poison-pen letter from Kenneth.
Perhaps by playing a demoness I had summoned up long-dormant demons, some ghoulish skull-fondling jinni out of the desert wastes – but what is quite certain is that demons will fasten on you when you are at your weakest point and by toying with them, even in a film, you give them power. As Christopher Marlowe says at the conclusion of Doctor Faustus, his hero’s fate for meddling in dark matters should make wise men pause before dabbling in ‘unlawful things’
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practice more than heavenly power permits.
And I didn’t entirely rely on my magical practices. In a very English way I wrote him a stiff letter in which I said, ‘Now, look, Kenneth, I’ve supported you, I’ve always said how great you are, and you know what a big fan of your films I am …’ blah-di-blah-blah – I mentioned everything I’d ever done or said about him – ‘so do not go into a queenie fit about the book. Please let’s have no more of this nonsense!’
He wrote back – a much calmer Kenneth. But then at the end of his letter he added: ‘Unfortunately, I can’t take the curse back.’
My mother had been another person entirely before the war. I always had a hard time imagining what she was like as a cool, urbane, young Weimar girl. It certainly didn’t carry over into her life with us. The war must have changed her drastically. She was only twenty-four when the Anschluss happened and overnight a precious part of her life was simply ripped away.
As my mother got older, she talked more and more about her parents. It was always a very idealistic portrait, with no unpleasant scenes whatever. Her childhood had been perfect.
Even though I never saw much of this Weimar side to Eva, I must have imbibed it somehow in my mother’s milk – it’s the only explanation I have for how I was able to do the Kurt Weill material so believably. Doing these songs takes an aptitude for seeing the grotesque as an aspect of love. Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht songs are the counterpoint to the unsettling paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz. The style was called the Neue Sachlichkeit, New Realism, but actually it’s a celebration of the edge between beauty and the bizarre. That’s really what the Brecht/Weill canon is all about. You’ve got to be able to go there. That wonderfully masochistic chorus in ‘Surabaya Johnny’, for example. The sheer erotic perversity of it.
Surabaya Johnny. Will the hurt ever mend?
Surabaya Johnny. Oh, I burn at your touch.
You got no heart, Johnny, but oh, I love you,
I love you, I love you so much.
They’re all like that. You can hear it in Pirate Jenny’s song, her all-consuming quest for vengeance in The Threepenny Opera – something my mother understood all too well: the ship, the ominous black ship, sailing into the harbour.
As a person Eva was much warmer than my father and I’m more like her in that respect. But of course that emotional side of her had a downside. She could erupt in an irrational fury. My father’s detachment was oddly soothing compared to my mother’s rages. He didn’t get so emotionally involved, and his remoteness, which I often lamented, was reassuring amidst the family turmoil.
My mother was extreme in her passions: her likes, her dislikes, her resentments. She was an almost savage person. Sophisticated and refined on a certain level, but utterly dominated by hatred and love and regret and bitterness. She first became embittered about my father, later on it was me. But long before either of us had failed her, she was a tinderbox. Drinking made it worse. Unlike my father, my mother wasn’t intellectual. And as she got older and her past began to weigh on her, she became very religious. She suffered from melancholia – that was her word for it. Something like depression, but a much more romantic concept: a gloomy state of mind saturated in Middle-European Weltschmerz, the sense that one’s own sorrow is intrinsically linked to the sadness of the world.
I remember going to church with my mother when I was young and watching her getting incredibly emotional – praying loudly with tears streaming down her face, racked with sobs actually. I was terribly embarrassed. Of course she had just been through the war, but children don’t really understand that. When it finally dawned on me that her involvement with the church brought her peace, I felt glad for her – and then very magnanimously forgave her for embarrassing me.
At the end of her life, God and Christ, Heaven