Adapting Endings from Book to Screen

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Adapting Endings from Book
to Screen

This book offers a new perspective on adaptation of books to the screen; by

focusing on endings, new light is shed on this key facet of film and television
studies. The authors look at a broad range of case studies from different genres,
eras, countries, and formats to analyse literary and cinematic traditions, technical
considerations, and ideological issues involved in film and television adaptions.
The investigation covers both the ideological implications of changes made
in adapting the final pages to the screen, as well as the aesthetic stance taken in
modifying (or on the contrary, maintaining) the ending of the source text. By
including writings on both film and television adaptations, this book examines
the array of possibilities for the closure of an adapted narrative, focusing both
on the specificities of film and different television forms (miniseries and ongoing
television narratives) and at the same time suggesting the commonalities of these
audiovisual forms in their closing moments.
Adapting Endings from Book to Screen will be of interest to all scholars
working in media studies, film and television studies, and adaptation studies.

Armelle Parey is an Assistant Professor at the Université de Caen-Normandie

(France). Her interests embrace narrative endings, memory, and rewritings of the
past in contemporary English-speaking fiction and in adaptation. She has written
several articles and co-directed several collections of essays or special issues on
the question of endings. She has recently co-edited A.S. Byatt, Before and after
Possession: Recent Critical Approaches (Book Practices and Textual Itineraries 8,
PU de Nancy-Editions de Lorraine, 2017) and edited Prequels, Coquels and
Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction (Routledge, 2019).

Shannon Wells-Lassagne is a Full Professor at the University of Burgundy (Dijon,

France), where she specializes in film and television adaptation. She is the author
of Television and Serial Adaptation (Routledge) and editor of Screening Text
(McFarland), Étudier l’adaptation filmique (Presses Universitaires de Rennes),
and L’adaptation filmique : premières pages, premiers plans (Mare et Martin), as
well as special issues of The Journal of Screenwriting, Interfaces, GRAAT, and TV/
Series and dossiers in Screen and Series. Her work has appeared in Screen, Critical
Studies in Television, and The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance,
among others.
Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

Unplugging Popular Culture

Reconsidering Materiality, Analog Technology, and the Digital Native
K. Shannon Howard

Advertising in MENA Goes Digital

Ilhem Allagui

Gambling in Everyday Life

Spaces, Moments and Products of Enjoyment
Fiona Nicoll

Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media

Aspasia Stephanou

Millennials and Media Ecology

Culture, Pedagogy and Politics
Edited by Anthony Cristiano and Ahmet Atay

Media Cultures in Latin America

Key Concepts and New Debates
Edited by Anna Cristina Pertierra and Juan Francisco Salazar

Cultures of participation
Arts, digital media and cultural institutions
Edited by Birgit Eriksson, Carsten Stage and Bjarki Valtysson

Adapting Endings from Book to Screen

Last Pages, Last Shots
Edited by Armelle Parey and Shannon Wells-Lassagne

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Research-in-Cultural-and-Media-Studies/book-series/SE0304
Adapting Endings
from Book to Screen
Last Pages, Last Shots

Edited by Armelle Parey

and Shannon Wells-Lassagne
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Armelle Parey and Shannon
Wells-Lassagne; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Armelle Parey and Shannon Wells-Lassagne to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors
for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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explanation without intent to infringe.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Contents

Notes on contributors vii

Preface: opening remarks: ‘there’s a long goodbye,

and it happens everyday’ 1
ANCA CRISTOFOVICI

Introduction: on adapting endings 9

ARMELLE PAREY AND SHANNON WELLS-LASSAGNE

PART I
Creating an ending: an adaptor’s approach to closure 21

1 Structuring story: beginnings and endings 23

AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL EATON

2 The head and the crown: ending Huston’s The Man Who
Would Be King 33
JONATHAN C. GLANCE

3 Is the past really a foreign country? The different endings

of The Go-Between 48
ISABELLE ROBLIN

PART II
The politics of endings 61

4 Adapting and subverting Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration

Through Violence: the ending of Deliverance
(James Dickey, 1970; John Boorman, 1972) 63
ELIZABETH MULLEN
vi Contents
5 Lee Daniels’ The Butler: from the headlines to the
front line 72
HÉLÈNE CHARLERY

PART III
Adapting to the small screen: endings and television’s
“endless present” 87

6 Serial adaptation: an endless series of endings? The strange

case of Jekyll (BBC One, 2007), or, the last page
and its doubles 89
SÉBASTIEN LEFAIT

7 The ouroboros of television prequels: endings and beginnings

in Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015) 101
SHANNON WELLS-LASSAGNE

8 How to end with an opening: TV series continuity

and metadaptation 112
CHARLES JOSEPH AND DELPHINE LETORT

PART IV
Questioning endings: the impossibility of closure? 125

9 Alter egos and alternative endings in The Scapegoat: Daphne

du Maurier’s novel, Robert Hamer’s and Charles Sturridge’s
adaptations 127
NICOLE CLOAREC

10 Adapting unsettling endings and harlequinization: Neil

LaBute’s Possession and Joe Wright’s Atonement 140
ARMELLE PAREY

11 After the ending – closure in post-apocalyptic narratives

as fictions of uncertainty 152
ECKART VOIGTS

Index 170
Contributors

Hélène Charlery is an Associate Professor in American and film studies

at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France. Her research focuses
on the construction of race and gender identities in contemporary
American mainstream films, and more specifically on the representa-
tions of African American women in these films. She has published a
series of articles and book chapters on this topic.
Nicole Cloarec is a Lecturer in English at Rennes 1 University (France).
She is the author of a thesis on Peter Greenaway and has published a
number of articles on British and English-speaking cinema. She has
edited two collective volumes on letters and the insertion of written
material in films and recently co-edited Social Class on British and
American Screens. Essays on Cinema and Television (2016). Her latest
research focuses on British cinema, in particular questions related to
transmediality, adaptation and the documentary.
Anca Cristofovici is Professor of American literature and arts at the Uni-
versity of Caen, France, where she currently directs the Center for
Memory Studies (ERIBIA). Her publications, in Europe and the United
States, include essays on literature, visual thinking, poetry translations,
exhibition catalogues, and fiction. Her research for Touching Surfaces:
Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging (New York/Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2009) has been distinguished with a Rockefeller Fellowship.
Her latest book is Stela. A Novel (Salt Lake City, UT: Ninebark Press).
Michael Eaton has written for screens small and large, for the radio and
for the stage, and has won several awards for his work, adapting Great
Expectations for the stage for the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Murder
on the Orient Express for the streaming audio service Audible, as well
as writing fictions based on real events (Shipman, ITV; Signs and Won-
ders, BBC; Shoot to Kill, YTV; Fellow Traveller, HBO/BBC/BFI).
Jonathan C. Glance is chair and Griffith Professor of the Department
of English at Mercer University. His current scholarship explores the
viii Contributors
significance of screenplay drafts as indicators of the adaptation pro-
cess. Previous scholarship examined depictions of the supernatural on
stage in Gothic drama and literary dreams in nineteenth-century Brit-
ish novels.
Charles Joseph is an Assistant Professor at the University of Rennes 2
(France) and has completed a Ph.D. in American Studies. His disserta-
tion, entitled Being and Writing (from) Los Angeles: Wanda Coleman,
examines the complex and evolving relationship between the work
of the African-American author and the city that harbored her birth,
life, and death through the prism of cultural studies. He has simul-
taneously developed an interest in the implications and practices of
the entertainment industry based in Los Angeles on the city’s history
and the shaping of its socio-cultural identity, as well as its influential
role on worldwide transmedia strategies. He has published articles
in Les Chantiers de la Création, ORDA, Conserveries Mémorielles,
ANGLES, and Transatlantica.
Sébastien Lefait is Professor at Paris 8 University. He has published books
and articles on Shakespearean adaptation, the representation of sur-
veillance societies on-screen, and the reflexive dimension of TV series.
His published works include Surveillance on Screen: Monitoring Con-
temporary Films and Television Programs (2013), and La question raciale
dans les séries américaines (2014; co-authored with Olivier Esteves).
His current research topics are the connection between terrorism and
fiction, the place of reality TV within American culture, the treatment
of racial issues in recent TV shows, and the reception and appropria-
tion of the issue of on-screen representation by audiences.
Delphine Letort is a Professor in American studies at the University of
Le Mans (France), where she teaches American civilization and film
studies. She has published Du film noir au néo-noir: mythes et stéréo-
types de l’Amérique 1941–2008 (L’Harmattan, 2010) and The Spike
Lee Brand: a Study of Documentary Filmmaking (SUNY, 2015). She
has written articles about film adaptations, documentary filmmaking,
and African-American cinema in journals and co-edited several books
(Women Activists and Civil Rights Leaders in Auto/Biographical Lit-
erature and Films, 2018; Auto/biographies historiques dans les arts,
2017; Social Class on British and American Screens. Essays on Cinema
and Television, 2016), and two thematic issues for the CinémAction
series (Revolutions armées et Terrorisme à l’écran, 2019; Panorama
mondial du film noir, 2014).
Elizabeth Mullen is an Associate Professor at the Université de Bretagne
Occidentale in Brest, France, where she is a member of HCTI, a research
group dedicated to exploring text and image. Primarily focusing on
questions of adaptation, gender, aesthetics, and reception in American
 Contributors ix
film and television (particularly masculinity and the grotesque), she
has recently worked on Deliverance, The Shining, Westworld, and The
Handmaid’s Tale.
Isabelle Roblin is an Assistant Professor at the Université du Littoral-
Côte d’Opale, specializing in contemporary American and British lit-
eratures, and has published many articles on Graham Swift, Kazuo
Ishiguro, C.S. Forester, and Salman Rushdie, among others. She has
been working recently on the literary and filmic adaptations of “the
canon”, and more particularly on Harold Pinter’s adapted screenplays
and wrote in 2011 Harold Pinter, la liberté artistique et ses limites.
Approches des scenarios.
Eckart Voigts is Professor of English literature at TU Braunschweig, Ger-
many. Most recently, he has co-edited (with Katja Krebs and Dennis
Cutchins) the Routledge Companion to Adaptation (2018). He has
written, edited, and co-edited numerous books and articles, such as the
special issue of Adaptation (vol. 6.2, 2013) on transmedia storytelling,
Introduction to Media Studies (Klett 2004), Janespotting and Beyond:
British Heritage Retrovisions since the Mid-1990s (Narr 2005),
Adaptations – Performing Across Media and Genres (WVT 2009),
Reflecting on Darwin (Ashgate 2014), Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-
Apocalypse (WVT 2015), and Transforming Cities (Winter 2018).
Preface
Opening remarks: ‘there’s a long
goodbye, and it happens everyday’
Anca Cristofovici

Resolution, hesitation
As to the ending or denouement not being a surprise, what ending is to
someone in the trade? [. . .] Very often just for the fun of it I look at the
end and then amuse myself with watching the author trying to smudge
his fingerprints.
Raymond Chandler, Letter to James M. Fox, 16 February 1954

Like many readers, my experience of fiction reading has always involved

holding the ending of a good book at bay, and the better the book the less
eager I am to get to its last pages. There comes that delightful moment
when, with disbelief utterly suspended, you slow down the pace of read-
ing to savor it, make it last just a bit longer. You want to know the end . . .
but not quite yet. That hesitation, much like the one which holds life’s
fortunate moments in suspense, tells us something about our relation to
fiction. By way of introduction to the explorations of last scenes and last
shots in this volume, we might want to consider the significance of end-
ings and what, in truth, we expect from them.
In an essay entitled “Why Do We Read Fiction?” addressed to the com-
mon reader,1 novelist, poet and literary critic Robert Penn Warren proposes
a perspective at a distance from theoretical assumptions. Cofounder of new
criticism – an early formalist approach which excludes biographical or
other context-based criteria – Warren takes to the relation between fiction
and actual life to account for the reader’s engagement with the story. He
insists on the expected resolution, which he sees in the form of an event, in
particular its meaning. What keeps the reader in suspense, Warren argues,
is the promise the story holds primarily as a final turn, which brings closure
to the successive turns and twists of the narrative, but above all, we read
fiction

because we are in suspense about another story far closer and more
important to us – the story of our own life as we live it. We do not
know how that story of our own life is going to come out. We do not
2 Anca Cristofovici
know what it will mean. So, in that deepest suspense of life, which
will be shadowed in the suspense we feel about the story in fiction, we
turn to fiction for some slight hint about the story in the life we live.
(57, emphasis mine)

This enchanting if idealistic parallel faces us, twenty-first century readers

subsisting on such notions as cultural or social constructions, with the
question as to the nature of that meaning.
By a mere coincidence of cultural history, the same year Warren’s essay
was published, one of Umberto Eco’s first and seminal books, Opera
aperta, or The Open Work, came out. In The Open Work, Eco has a dif-
ferent take concerning the resolution of the story in terms of a significant
event. Challenging closure, Eco cracks the shell of univocal meaning by
virtue of his experience with the layered significance of medieval texts
on the one hand, and with James Joyce’s branching poetics2 on the other.
Eco proposes an understanding of meaning which is plural, dynamic and
comes close to what we now call the context-bound construction of mean-
ing. Lack of closure, Eco suggests, increases the potential significance of
narrative and thereby enhances the reading experience, and does this by
soliciting the work of the imagination. Since readers or spectators are
motionless travelers, I would like to evoke a third perspective, that of
the poetic. At a distance from critical discourse, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem
“The Imaginary Iceberg” provides a powerful image of aesthetic experi-
ence: “We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,/although it meant the
end of travel” (Bishop 4). In keeping with Bishop’s metaphor, a last scene
or a last shot might be only the tip of the iceberg, for “this iceberg cuts
its facets from within”. By extension, the significance of the final event
doesn’t actually reside in the last scene but rather in the ways in which
the event which provides closure radiates a spectrum of meanings by
referring the reader back to the preceding pages, eliciting new combina-
tions and new understandings of the narrated events. How the last scenes
shift directions and change focus matters more for the construction of
the mental object the literary fiction becomes in the act of reading than
any conclusive ending to the extent to which a last scene may refine the
puzzle and reconstruct the story’s field of significance.
When all is said and done (in terms of theory, at least), while the exact
last scene or a possible meaning we have attached to it at a certain moment
in time might pass into oblivion, it is the experience of reading that lasts:
a chamber of echoes filled with a sense of an ending rather than a framed
picture of it. No doubt, as engaged as they might be in the suspense of
the story – which releases them temporarily from their own life patterns –
readers do, indeed, expect some kind of resolution. But more than a defini-
tive meaning, it is the resonance of events (or, perhaps, that of a detail, an
image, a window opening onto a landscape) which persists and accounts
for the tenor of that particular event or scene.
 Preface 3
Whereas the ramifications of the narrative may be unlimited in number
and may vary with the individual and cultural context of the reading, film
adaptations of literary fictions crystallize resonance into a particular form,
which will – in turn – resonate with other meanings. As the literary fiction
mutates into a cinematic one, engaged in a new dynamics, the last pages
are carried further by the scriptwriter’s and filmmaker’s imaginations and
the internal necessities of the medium.

Resonating steps
He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I
listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After
a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept listening anyway. What
for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn and come back and talk
me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn’t. That was the last I saw of him.
(Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 448)

What more appropriate evocation for an opening to this volume’s theme

than Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye (1953) and its 1973
adaptation by Robert Altman? Clear-cut endings didn’t satisfy Chandler’s
appetite for understatement. As with Farewell, My Lovely (1940), his
second novel, a common idiomatic phrase stands for a “final event” the
way the lettering ‘THE END’ does for the screen.3
A long goodbye may be used by two people to say they won’t be seeing
each other again for quite a time, if ever. It might or might not be drawn
out, endless, agonizing. In the case of Chandler’s novel, the title covers
all the meanings of this common phrase. Echoing the reader’s hesitation
as to reaching the end of a suspense story, the goodbye prolonged in the
successive episodes of the novel evokes the difficult separation between
private eye Philip Marlowe and former friend turned murderer Terry Len-
nox, in addition to the reluctant severing of other ties: Marlowe’s short-
lived involvement with Eileen, the wife of Roger Wade, the man he is
supposed to follow, or that old writer’s struggle with his addiction to alco-
hol. Other more intimate associations might have led Chandler to choose
this title and branch the narrative, thereby deferring an unequivocal end,
one of the landmarks of the detective genre. The Long Goodbye is Chan-
dler’s last novel to be published during his lifetime, the writing of which
kept him alive while his wife’s condition was declining considerably. A
discrete person by nature, Chandler does refer in some letters to being
“worn down with worry over Cissy” and “tired and dispirited” as he was
struggling with the book.4
Yet, the trouble he had with “getting on with it” somehow made the
longest among Chandler’s novels and among the detective genre of the
time the extraordinary book it is, enhancing all the more the reader’s
4 Anca Cristofovici
hesitation to reach the last page. Increased suspense results from mul-
tiplying “the goodbye scenes” that punctuate the narrative before the
grand finale, like a series of frames regressing towards a vanishing point.
The parting scenes provide partial closures, their accumulation leading to
a resolution by degrees. Each goodbye marks yet another opening, or, as
Chandler’s contemporary T.S. Eliot – whom he salutes in the novel with a
tinge of malice – famously put it: “The end is where we start from” (46).5
At the end of chapter 50 out of 53, Marlowe’s involvement with Eileen
sinks into Chandler’s customary tongue-in-cheek tone:

We said Good-bye. I watched the cab out of sight. I went back up the
steps and into the bedroom and pulled the bed to pieces and remade
it. There was a long dark hair on one of the pillows. There was a
lump of lead at the pit of my stomach.
The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for
everything and they are always right. To say Good-bye is to die a little.
(431, emphasis mine)6

Downplaying the bitterness of separation by using a clichéd phrase, and

one from a foreign idiom to boot, Marlowe brings his infatuation with
the lady to an end but not his search. A few more “last scenes” will fol-
low, notably the visit a supposed stranger pays to Marlowe’s office, a cer-
tain Señor Maioranos who brings along the promise to unveil how Terry
Lennox was killed:

He [Señor Maioranos] sat down in the customer’s chair and crossed

his knees. “You wish certain information about Señor Lennox, I am
told.”
“The last scene only.”
(438)

The writing of The Long Goodbye had its exhilarating moments too.
Indeed, in some letters Chandler speaks about the great freedom he took
with this late life novel, which he wrote as he did because he could afford
to at this point in his life. More than in his other books, who commit-
ted the crime matters less than what the events say about human nature
and its infinitely perplexing revelations which leave Marlowe despondent
at the last page of each novel, facing mostly himself.7 But then it is unlike
Chandler to digress on that vast subject, which he explores by creating
new turns in the story and unexpected suspense pop-ups. One way to
increase suspense is by granting multiple personae to the character who
will turn out to be “the villain” of the story. What Chandler elsewhere
calls “the gradual elucidation of character”8 involves here the layered
identity of Marlowe’s friend, Terry Lennox, aka Cisco Maioranos, aka
Paul Marston. Each of these personae has the right to their own ending
 Preface 5
among the accumulation of valedictions in the book, from the casual “see
you later” (26) – Marlowe to his new friend Lennox – to the leave-taking
at the Tijuana airport by the California-Mexico border with Lennox’s
line to Marlowe: “‘This is where I say Good-bye’” (ch. 5, 38). There will
be more goodbyes between the two: Lennox’s in a letter from Mexico
(ch. 12, 97–99), written on the point of his supposed suicide attempt;
then some forty chapters later on the occasion of the comeback he makes
in Marlowe’s life under the guise of Señor Maioranos. The last scene of
Lennox’s life, as related by Señor Maioranos, brings no resolution what-
soever to the mystery, for Lennox didn’t exist in the first place, or, better
said, he was just an avatar of a certain Paul Marston, also believed to
be dead. That chain of lies and betrayals has Marlowe turn the page for
good on one of the few friendships he develops in the course of the seven
novels in which he is a protagonist:

“You bought a lot of me, Terry. For a smile and a nod and a wave
of the hand and a few quiet drinks in a quiet bar here and there. It
was nice as it lasted. So long, amigo. I won’t say good-bye. I said it
to you when it meant something. I said it when it was sad and lonely
and final.”
(446)

“So long” may seem more definitive at that point than the old-time “Good-
bye”, which sounds just like Marlowe, “sad and lonely”, and resonates
with Lennox’s steps “down the imitation marble corridor” just before the
so long/goodbye in the very last lines of the novel:

He stood up. I stood up. He put out a lean hand. I shook it.
“So long, Señor Maioranos. Nice to have known you – however
briefly.”
“Good-bye.” [. . .]
I never saw any of them again – except the cops. No way has yet
been invented to say good-bye to them.
(447–448)

Chandler rewrote the first draft of the novel to shift from the third person
narrative and Lennox’s perspective to that of Marlowe, with whom he
seemed to have a hard time parting company. He also hesitated between
various versions of the end, not in terms of events but of tone. In his essay
“Writing The Long Goodbye”, Mark Coggins, who had access to the
Chandler papers at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University,9 details
the changes made by Chandler and what, in cinematic idiom, he calls
“the alternative takes” of the end. And yet, in spite of Chandler’s difficul-
ties with ending this novel, the last lines of The Long Goodbye now hap-
pen to be listed among the 100 best in English-language novels.
6 Anca Cristofovici
“Just an act”
[Marlowe] “You’ve got nice clothes and perfume and you’re as elegant as
a fifty-dollar whore.”
[Señor Maioranos] “That’s just an act,” he said almost desperately.
“You get a kick out of it, don’t you?”
“Of course. An act is all there is. There isn’t anything else. In here” – he
tapped his chest with the lighter – “there isn’t anything.” [. . .]
(Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 447)

An anecdote circulates about Chandler’s elucidation of who eventually

killed one of the characters in The Big Sleep, or whether it was, in fact, a
suicide, which he formulated by saying: “I don’t know.”
Notoriously unfaithful yet delving deeply into the spirit of Chandler’s
universe as well as that of the American seventies and of film noir, the
last shots of Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye (1973) both reso-
nate with the layered endings in the novel and bring their own closure.
Presented in the opening not as an adaptation of Chandler’s novel but as
“A brilliant adaptation of film noir in the 1970s decadence,” the movie
is indeed rather a cultural translation or relocation of the book, and its
mix of ironic lucidity and melancholy a wonderful tribute to Chandler’s
uncompromising gaze and his endearing quirks. The film is the result of a
tight collaboration between scriptwriter Leigh Brackett (co-author with
William Faulkner of the script for The Big Sleep, 1946), Robert Altman
and the team and the keen sense of improvisation of Elliott Gould, the
main actor.10
If Chandler downplays the tone of the ending, he utterly overplays the
last encounter between Marlowe and Lennox, so much more enjoyable
for its doubtful plausibility. Even as the film’s ending drifts far away from
that scene in the book, it preserves its sense of overplay. Marlowe, who
never believed in the suicide version, eventually learns that Lennox is
alive and kicking. He takes his old friend by surprise as he is enjoying
the sun in his Mexican den, and, after Lennox’s confessing he had indeed
murdered his wife, Marlowe produces a pistol and pulls the trigger, as
Chandler’s protagonist never does throughout the seven novels which
feature him. The last shot brings a resolution to the novel’s open end, with
the villain (angelic as he might appear) being killed. However, Marlowe’s
flippant way of doing it highlights the fatuousness of a conventional end.
With the expectations of the genre fulfilled, if only as a farce, our hero,
for a moment a happy-go-lucky fellow, sings and hops up the road as he
crosses charming Eileen Wade (restored to life from her suicide in the
book, she is driving to the home she’d made with Lennox in Mexico). As
the end credits roll, Marlowe fades out and the song “Hooray for Hol-
lywood” takes over. The musical theme was featured in the beginning as
well, and thus the melody ironically frames the cinematic story. This is the
only soundtrack, other than the numerous variations of the title song by
 Preface 7
John Williams, whose lyrics by Johnny Mercier give to the long goodbye
that “happens everyday” a definitive flavor: “when a missed hello/becomes
a long goodbye”. Incidentally, in the trailer of the movie, the shooting
scene (also featured on the poster) is placed at the beginning so as to
highlight the film noir conventions and spark the public’s expectations, a
freeze-frame which evokes a radial rather than a linear reading, as I have
suggested in the beginning of this essay.11
In an ironic cross between life and fiction, shortly after Cissy’s death,
the master of the simple art of murder tried to shoot himself – and luckily
failed to say goodbye to life. Chandler was to live a few more years, write
another short novel, Playback, published posthumously, and enjoy a glass
now and then. In the letters of the time, he speaks about the embarrass-
ment of that act which made him look so farcical in the eyes of others and
of himself. In spite of which life goes on, up to a vanishing point in an
unfathomable distance! What better resolution to the story? If there’s
meaning in the end, “it’s just an act”.
Onward!

Notes
1 First published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, included in Penn War-
ren 55–60.
2 See Eco, published in 1965, English version 1989.
3 As a matter of fact, the title was not Chandler’s choice but that of Blanche
Knopf, wife and collaborator of his American publisher. Chandler originally
proposed The Second Murderer, then Zounds, He Dies, both from Shake-
speare’s play King Richard III, which is referred to in the book. That novel is
the subject of two excellent film adaptations, one by Edward Dmytryk (Mur-
der, My Sweet, 1944, released in the United Kingdom as Farewell, My Lovely)
and the second by Dick Richards (1975).
4 “I have a great deal of trouble getting on with it. The old zest is not there. I
am worn down with worry over my wife. [. . .] When I get into work I am
already tired and dispirited. I wake in the night with dreadful thoughts.” Let-
ter to Carl Brandt, 27 October 1951 (Hiney, MacShane 172).
5 In “Little Gidding”, a poem in which we also find an evocative image of open
endings: “Dust in the air suspended/Marks the place where the story ended.”
6 All quotes from Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, Penguin edition,
2005. The Long Goodbye was first published in England by Hamish Hamil-
ton, London, in 1953, then, in the United States, by Houghton Mifflin, New
York, in 1954.
7 As in the last scene of The High Window (1943): “It was night. I went home
and put my old house clothes on and set the chessmen out and mixed a drink
and played over another Capablanca. It went fifty-nine moves. Beautiful,
cold, remorseless chess, almost creepy in its silent implacability.
When it was done I listened at the open window for a while and smelled the
night. Then I carried my glass out to the kitchen and rinsed it and filled it with
ice water and stood at the sink sipping it and looking at my face in the mirror.
‘You and Capablanca,’ I said.” (Chandler, The High Window 272).
8 Referring to Dashiell Hammett’s strategies of suspense, Chandler notes: “In
The Maltese Falcon no one concerns himself with who killed Spade’s partner
[. . .] because the reader is kept thinking about something else. Yet in The
8 Anca Cristofovici
Glass Key the reader is constantly reminded that the question is who killed
Taylor Henry, and exactly the same effect is obtained – an effect of move-
ment, intrigue, cross-purposes, and gradual elucidation of character, which
is all the detective story has any right to be about. The rest is spillikins in the
parlor” (Chandler, “The Art of Fiction,” 16–17).
9 www.markcoggins.com/writing-the-long-goodbye/
N.B. The variations in the spelling of the title respect its spelling in the
sources quoted here.
10 Recently, I came across an altogether different “adaptation” of Chandler’s
novel: an artist’s book. Entitled The Short Goodbye, Lisa Rappaport’s book
is described as “being an excerpted, expunged & expurgated rendition of Mr.
Chandler’s novel THE LONG GOODBYE.” She takes a few paragraphs from
the novel (in chronological order), treating them much like found footage,
and transposes them in a figurative typography as: lips, gimlet glass, pistol.
The metallic black and silver covers with special endpapers bear the traces of
two bullet shots above the title, the latter being the oeuvre of a collaboration
acknowledged as follows: “Speaking of shooting, Mark Schacht used a 9mm
pistol to fill the covers full of daylight” (www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/l/
littoral.html). While the visual composition of the book plays on the clichés of
the detective novel, its cover echoes the film’s murderous ending.
11 As the studies in this volume show, open endings are not loose ends, they have
a structure, a direction. An evocative reference to such radial and resonant
endings is referred to by David Foster Wallace in an interview about his novel,
Infinite Jest: “On the surface it might seem like it just stops. But it’s supposed
to stop and then kind of hum and project. Musically and emotionally, it’s a
pitch that seemed right.”

Bibliography
Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Imaginary Iceberg.” 1946. The Complete Poems. 1927–
1979. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979.
Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder. An Essay.” The Simple Art of
Murder. 1939. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
———. The High Window. 1943. New York: Penguin, 2005.
———. The Long Goodbye. 1953. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Coggins, Mark. “Writing The Long Goodbye.” www.markcoggins.com/writing-
the-long-goodbye/.
Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. 1965.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding.” Four Quartets. 1943. San Diego, CA: Harcourt &
Brace Harvest Books, 1968.
Hiney, Tom, and Frank MacShane, eds. Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Let-
ters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959. New York: Grove Press, 2012.
Rappaport, Lisa. The Short Goodbye. Littoral Press, 2011. www.vampandtramp.
com/finepress/l/littoral.html.
Wallace, David Foster. “Boston Phoenix Interview, 1998.” https://biblioklept.org/
2010/11/26/read-the-complete-transcript-of-a-1998-david-foster-wallace-in-
terview/.
Warren, Robert Penn. New and Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1989.
Introduction
On adapting endings
Armelle Parey and Shannon Wells-Lassagne

“The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.
You can have flaws, problems . . . but wow them in the end, and you’ve
got a hit. Find an ending! But don’t cheat.” ~ Robert McKee (Brian Cox)
(Adaptation, 2002)

In the Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman film Adaptation, the screenwriter’s

onscreen persona “Charlie Kaufman” struggles to adapt Susan Orlean’s
book-length essay The Orchid Thief to the screen; unable to create a
narrative from either Orlean’s musings on the titular character, botany,
and Floridian ecosystems, or from his own reading of that text, famed
screenwriting guru Robert McKee becomes the antagonist, representa-
tive of formulaic Hollywood films that Kaufman rejects wholeheartedly.
In the final third of the film (almost to the minute), Kaufman eventually
seeks out the advice of McKee, resulting in the earlier quotation – and
an ensuing cavalcade of the “cheats” McKee warns against, from sex and
drugs to a deus ex machina in the form of a murderous alligator saving
our erstwhile screenwriter from his vengeful subject. The actual McKee
(not his film avatar) argued for this scene as the price of his agreement
to the film’s lampooning of his principles; he refers to it as his “redemp-
tion scene” (Parker), though the scenes that follow characteristically cut
both ways: this speech may allow the diegetic Kaufman to complete his
screenplay, but that screenplay is both true to and a mockery of McKee’s
words, offering some of the most successful comedy of the film, a happy
ending that turns both the source text and indeed the preceding hour of
the film itself on their heads.1
Given both its iconic title and its complex (albeit absurdist) attitude
towards its own conclusion, Adaptation seemed an apt example to open
this analysis of adapting endings. The crucial nature of the final moments
of a narrative, which ideally cohere to its preceding story, but can also
make up for any weaknesses that narrative may have, is made clear in
McKee’s words – as is the difficulty in making an adaptation conform to
any pre-established rules.
10 Armelle Parey and Shannon Wells-Lassagne
Though the issue of closure and endings in fiction has attracted criti-
cal attention over the years (see Larroux, Torgovnik, Hamon, Herrnstein
Smith, Lodge, Parey, and Roblin), and a few key texts have been written
regarding film endings (see Neupert, Bordwell, Hock), examining endings
from the perspective of adaptation is less widely studied, and allows us to
address this phenomenon which has become increasingly common in film
and television.2 Investigating adapted endings brings up unique issues
while offering a sort of mise en abyme of narrative endings as a whole.
After all, for the knowledgeable viewer, adaptation is necessarily meta-
fictional, where the screen adaptation “emphasize[s] rather than hide[s]
the performance that is involved in putting a script on screen” (Geraghty
4). As the story is familiar, narrative suspense is limited (and, arguably,
so is the suspension of disbelief); instead, enjoyment can be evaluative,
examining the performative choices made by adaptors in their rendition
of a previously told tale. Thus, the case studies to be found in this vol-
ume in fact allow us to better understand the nature of film, text, as well
as the specificities of film adaptation. Likewise, though the examination
of final pages and final shots may seem in keeping with a hierarchical
attitude towards source text and adaptation, our intention is instead to
interrogate this crucial site of narrative structure, not only in relation
to fidelity or medium specificity, but also as a moment of negotiation
of genre, industry, and audience expectations, making Aristotle’s advice
that endings should be both inevitable and unexpected particularly true
of adaptation.
In many ways closure entails similar traditions and demands, whether
it be on the page or on the screen. Aristotle reminds us that not only is the
ending the moment when the reader is invited to take stock of the whole
text and evaluate its worth, but the genre of the text (comedy or tragedy)
derives from the end; these are characteristics that remain true in classical
Hollywood film, as Raymond Bellour reminds us:

Classical cinema (especially classical American cinema) depends

heavily on [. . .] rhyming effects. They carry narrative difference
through the ordered network of resemblances; by unfolding sym-
metries (with varying degrees of refinement) they bring out the dis-
symmetry without which there would be no narrative. The classical
film from beginning to end is constantly repeating itself because it
is resolving itself. This is why its beginning often reflects its end in
a final emphasis; in this, the film acknowledges that it is a result,
inscribing the systematic condition of the course it follows by signing
with a final flourish the operation that constructs it throughout.
(193)

The power of tradition is a force to be reckoned with, and one that ulti-
mately may vie with the adaptation’s relation to its source text in its
 Introduction 11
ability to influence narratives, where novels have been said to become
“feeble” at the end (Forster 92) because of their compliance with con-
vention, sometimes seeming to contradict the preceding plot’s more pro-
vocative subject matter.3 Hollywood film of course has also had its own
conventions, having long been denigrated for its “pat” endings, both for
itself, where, as James MacDowell suggests, the “happy ending” has long
been a source of critical disapprobation, and (for Peter Brooks at least),
in its effects on narratives as a whole:

Our most sophisticated literature understands endings to be artificial,

arbitrary, minor rather than major chords, casual and textual rather
than cosmic and definitive. [. . .] This tenuous, fictive, arbitrary status
of ends clearly speaks to and speaks of an altered situation of plot,
which no longer wishes to be seen as end-determined, moving toward
full predication of the narrative sentence, claiming a final plenitude
of meaning. We have, in a sense, become too sophisticated as readers
of plot quite to believe in its orderings. Part of our sophistication no
doubt has to do with the cinema, a form that is consubstantial with
temporal successiveness and has made the syntax of plot so available
it seems to offer no further challenges.
(Brooks 314)

The very ubiquity of film and the strong causality that Bordwell, Staiger,
and Thompson see as characteristic of classical Hollywood narratives,
Brooks suggests, have a streamlining effect on fiction – but may also have
forced narrative into new avenues. His contention echoes Guy Larroux’s
analysis of the role of convention and tradition in endings, pointing out
that this was when the novelist could be seen to distance the work from
these conventions.
Brooks’ suggestion that in defiance of this normative effect, literature
has resorted to more “open” endings bring us to another important ele-
ment in considering adapting endings – the very definition of our terms.
As Julia Kristeva asserts, text is not a product but “productivity” (Kristeva
in Gray 7), and can therefore be said to have no real beginning and end.
As argued in Jonathan Gray’s Show Sold Separately, a film begins well
before its first shots because of its paratext (posters, trailers, interviews
etc.) (Gray 1); a film or TV show may not end with its last shots either,
as it may be the object of a sequel or spin-off or merely live on in the
memory of viewers and become an intertext. For example, an episode of
Midsomer Murders, “Written in Blood” (1998, screenplay by Anthony
Horowitz) uses replica shots from Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) while fea-
turing Anna Massey, the actress who played Mrs. Danvers in the 1979
Rebecca BBC TV series, with the addition of a reference to Hitchcock’s
Psycho (1960) as the character has embalmed her brother and keeps him
in his bedroom. In seeking to examine final pages and final shots, like
12 Armelle Parey and Shannon Wells-Lassagne
our first example from Adaptation, we acknowledge both the rules that
govern concluding a text – and the impossibility of limiting any analysis
to those rules.
Indeed, beyond the complexities of defining an ending, the adaption
of a text often seems to be the occasion to revise said ending. Thus for
example, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) famously ends
with the death of its heroine, but when adapting her novel to the stage
a year later, Wharton had to resist pressures to let Lily live at the end; in
Albert Capellani’s first film adaptation in 1918, Lily is indeed saved by
her cousin and survives, while Terence Davies’s 2000 adaptation does not
contradict Lily’s fate but limits the ambiguity surrounding her death as
being voluntary or accidental. The indeterminate or open ending visible
at the end of Wharton’s novel, like the “scenic ending[s]” (Torgovnick 11)
that proliferate in the novels of Henry James, ending with an ongoing dia-
logue, seem to disappear when adapted to the screen. To this extent, we
can see adaptation as R. Barton Palmer does, as “continuation”, “exten-
sions that respond to the unfinished nature of their hypotexts” (Palmer
77), sometimes by nailing down what has been left ambiguous in the
source. Indeed, if classic Hollywood films end with a concluding scene,
followed by an epilogue (Bordwell et al), thus imitating the traditional
novel, adaptations are frequently the subject of narrative and structural
changes, for various reasons, one of them being of course the need to
produce a commercially successful film (or TV series).
Adaptation is multi-faceted, and some of its diversity is reflected in this
volume that deals with various sources (The Butler (2013) is based on a
newspaper article), mediums (TV, stage, and film), and stages (screenwriting
and finished film product). Part I paradoxically analyzes endings of adapta-
tions by focusing on their inception, highlighting the crucial role played by
the screenplay, as emphasized by Boozer’s comments on the subject:

It is the screenplay, not the source text, that is the most direct foun-
dation and fulcrum for any adapted film. As the film’s narrative
springboard, it guides the screen choices for story structure, charac-
terization, motifs, themes, and genre. It indicates what will or will not
be used from the source, including what is to be altered or invented,
and in what settings and tonal register. Because the modern adapted
screenplay at the point of input from the director includes so many
key decisions relative to the source, it remains the essential concep-
tual and creative bible for the film’s construction.
(4)

Studying the impact of the screenplay allows us to focus on the pro-

cess of adaptation instead of the finished product. If all analysis is ret-
rospective, our contributors’ views on the adaptation process allow us
to better understand how a film adaptation’s ending fits with a previous
 Introduction 13
narrative (be it the source text or the preceding narrative). Michael
Eaton’s remarks about his own career in screenwriting and adaptation
show how an adaptor’s understanding of the source text balances with
his or her own understanding of narrative and the structure of drama
whatever its medium. While Eaton suggests that his screenwriting focuses
on structure and its possible impact on character, Jonathan C. Glance’s
analysis of the final moments of The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
suggest the importance of details, of setting in creating meaning and res-
olution. His use of illustration and its relation to production sketches
emphasize the importance of movement, of ironic incompleteness inher-
ent to these final filmic moments; by focusing on the many versions of the
script, Glance foregrounds the never-ending nature of a film ending and a
more complete picture of filmmaking than the specter of fidelity that has
long haunted adaptation studies:

A screenplay-centric approach to adaptation studies [. . .] highlights

a counterweight to fidelity: the fluidity of the process of adaptation,
which entails not only essential aesthetic and narratological ques-
tions of how best to translate a story to another medium, but just
as imperative industrial pressures involving budget, censorship, and
audience expectations.

Isabelle Roblin also focuses on this crucial process, but her work on The
Go-Between (1970) highlights the collaborative nature of filmmaking.
The longstanding partnership between screenwriter and playwright Har-
old Pinter and director Joseph Losey contrasts with the many screen-
writers responsible for The Man Who Would Be King; the variety of
approaches towards the adaptation process not only makes clear the dif-
ficulty of systematizing filmmaking practices, but also foregrounds the
crucial role of screenwriting in that process and how it changes our per-
ception of the finished product as simply the final step rather than the end
result. The merging of past and present characteristic of this adaptation
of The Go-Between also highlights the difficulty of defining endings at all –
are they simply the last pages and last shots, or on the contrary, the end
of the story and/or plot? Or, as this storyline suggests, does the story end
at all? As the love affair between Marian and Ted seemingly ends only to
continue in the form of offspring (and grandchildren), so the end of the
past timeline of the film continues in its effect and the role it gives to the
protagonist Leo.
Beyond structural and aesthetic dimensions, possible discrepancies
between endings and their adaptation may also be linked to ideology, a
point explored in our second section on “the politics of endings”. This
question is linked to the notion of fidelity – “the responsibility of adapta-
tions to communicate or evoke some essential features associated with the
texts from which they are adapted” (Leitch 7) – which remains a thorny
14 Armelle Parey and Shannon Wells-Lassagne
issue in adaptation studies, “something of an undead spirit” (Leitch 7)
that keeps resurfacing. This notion is indeed central to the question of
adapting endings. As said earlier, endings are of paramount importance
in fiction because not only do they help to define the text and repre-
sent their times, and how the author distinguishes himself or herself not
from convention, but they also convey the ideology of the text (Larroux).
Extrapolating a bit, one may suppose that is why Andrew Davies in his
10 “secrets” to becoming a successful adaptor lists changing openings
but does not mention endings (The Telegraph, quoted in Cartmell 2012).
The question of fidelity, then, necessarily arises when focusing on the
adaptation of endings because the political message of the work may be
modified with a departure from the source ending.
Ultimately, as has been widely discussed, the notion of fidelity is neces-
sarily fraught through its very simplicity: faithful to what? As an artistic
medium, filmmakers necessarily influence meaning, making Mira Nair’s
Vanity Fair (2004) a study of feminism and postcolonialism, for example;
as a commercial medium, industrial pressures influence generic affiliations
and marketing efforts, while audience expectations play a major part,
foregrounding a minor role to highlight the popular actor playing it, cre-
ating a love interest as a prerequisite to screen narrative, etc. Our authors’
analyses of their respective adaptations highlight shifting public percep-
tion as well as artistic intention in the changed endings of these films.
Elizabeth Mullen begins our analysis of these politically charged end-
ings by discussing the adaptation of James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) by
John Boorman (1972) to show that the two endings, created at approxi-
mately the same time, reveal contrasting interpretations of the myth of
the frontier and of the American Dream. Referencing both Frederick
Turner’s famous “frontier thesis” (suggesting that the frontier played a
decisive part in creating the American temperament) and cultural his-
torian Richard Slotkin’s own theories on the subject, she shows how a
seemingly individual story takes on epic meaning, and the way that these
myths impact the collective psyche of the nation. In changing the ending,
Boorman ultimately changes the meaning of the story as a whole (and its
perception in the light of New Hollywood’s counter-culture affiliations).
While Mullen examines fiction as myth-making, Hélène Charlery
reminds us that adaptation is not limited to fiction; she examines the
final scene and dedication of Lee Daniels’ The Butler, a film based on a
2008 article in The Washington Post by Wil Haygood. While the article
depicts Eugene Allen, the real-life butler, as an observer, Charlery demon-
strates how the final imagined scene in Daniels’ film turns the fictional
butler into an active historical agent, offering a reading of the changing
interpretation and constant rereading of American history in general and
race relations in particular.
When the adaptation is to the small screen, where the conclusion (or
conversely, the continuation) of a story is often decided not by creative
 Introduction 15
choice but by what ratings and network dictate, the structural changes
of endings are even more pronounced. Thus this book is interested in
both the ideological implications of changes made in adapting these final
pages to the screen as well as the aesthetic stance taken in modifying (or
on the contrary, maintaining) the ending of the source text. We wish to
emphasize the fundamental structural and generic differences between
television and film, particularly in relation to the concept of endings.
Whereas film offers up a completed narrative (even franchises ultimately
offer some sort of conclusion while leaving the door open for further
narratives in sequels), television is constructed around the idea of serial
narrative, of an episode necessarily being part of a larger whole. This sug-
gests either segmenting the source text to create smaller narrative arcs, or
on the contrary using the source narrative as a starting point for narra-
tive expansion, making proliferation one of the characteristics of televi-
sion fiction. This is particularly the case in American television, where
the endless present of the television narrative (a fiction that is intended
to simply continue indefinitely, until either the production, the studio,
or the broadcasting channel choose to end it) necessarily outstrips even
the most long-winded text. However, as Sébastien Lefait demonstrates,
even British television, which does not have this tendency towards infi-
nite narratives and instead is well-known for its short-form adaptations
(limited run series that adapt a single text more exhaustively than film
is able), ultimately could be characterized by the problematic nature of
small screen endings. His analysis of Jekyll (2007) suggests that source
texts whose endings are ambiguous or unsatisfying might be uniquely
suited to television adaptation:

serial adaptation is especially an asset rather than a drawback when

it comes to dealing with the ending of a story because, paradoxically,
it is the best possible form to adapt stories that refuse to end, and to
be fair to characters who, as doppelgänger figures, were born to be
replicated over and over again rather than be put to death.

His analysis of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) suggests the
narrative is an example of what Lisette Lopez Szwydky refers to as a
“culture-text”, a text that “exist[s] beyond the scope of their respective
‘original’ [. . . and] owe[s its] widespread recognition and cultural visibil-
ity to regular adaptation, appropriation, and allusion” (131).
The suggestion that the replication of character and storyline lends itself
to adaptation on the small screen is also implicit in Shannon Wells-Lassa-
gne’s analysis of television’s interpretation of iconic antihero Hannibal
Lecter. While the Jekyll narratives refuse to end, Hannibal (2013–2015)
and its status as prequel problematizes chronology as a whole. By begin-
ning at the end (of a criminal investigation, of a series of successful film
adaptations) and ending at the beginning (of the series of source texts, of
16 Armelle Parey and Shannon Wells-Lassagne
a new beginning for the plot and the characters), Hannibal suggests that
the final pages and final shots may only be a few of the possible endings –
or may indeed allow the story to begin anew.
Delphine Letort and Charles Joseph continue to examine the complex
nature of television adaptations’ relationship to endings by focusing on
the crucial moment when the adaptation concludes the storyline of the
source text – and prepares for an expansion unique to the small screen
narrative. Examining several recent television adaptations that expand
on source text narratives in their second seasons allows our authors to
suggest that this crucial moment of ending to better begin again is in
fact a form of what they term metadaptation. In so doing, they high-
light television adaptations’ tendency to conform to certain narrative
and thematic expectations suggested by the source text, as well as its
tendency towards innovation and expansion. Thus, the second season
of the series “fills in the gaps” left by the first season’s narrative: “For
the first season of a TV series adapted from a novel to be exploited in
a sequel season, showrunners and scriptwriters have both to respect
and transcend the constraints of the choices made for the first season
adaptation”. Their emphasis on credit sequences and theme music and
their evolution from one season to the next also makes a crucial point
about coherency and innovation in these expanded adaptations, mak-
ing it clear that in a sense these adaptations are just a crystallization of
the nature of the medium of television fiction more generally.
Our fourth section, entitled “Questioning Endings: The Impossibility
of Closure?”, tackles the issue of indeterminacy in the adaptation of end-
ings. E.M. Forster was very critical of nineteenth-century novels or tra-
ditional novels because of their desire “to round things off” (Forster 94),
exclaiming, “If it was not for death or marriage I do not know how the
average novelist would conclude” (Forster 94), and asking, “why need
it close, as a play closes? Cannot it open out?” (Forster 95). Forster was
actually slightly unfair since, as shown by David Lodge in “Ambiguously
Ever After”, nineteenth-century fiction knew how to remain undecided.
The notions of closure and closed endings are constructs that have been
challenged in fiction either with “open endings” or with ambiguous end-
ings, but the taste for happy endings and closure on the screen means that
adaptations may forego the open dimension of the source texts, as the
two adaptations of Daphné du Maurier’s novel The Scapegoat (1957) dis-
cussed by Nicole Cloarec illustrate. Cloarec shows that while The Scape-
goat is typical of du Maurier’s taste for irresolution at the end of her
novels, Robert Hamer’s 1961 adaptation simplifies the complex plot and
characters and eventually offers a “closed ending”, good having defeated
evil (just as was the case in Hitchcock’s adaptation of Rebecca in which
Maxim de Winter is not the murderer he is in du Maurier’s novel). Stur-
ridge’s 2012 adaptation, on the other hand, counteracts its own simplifi-
cation of du Maurier’s writing and evasion of the final irresolution of her
 Introduction 17
novel through various instances of self-reflexivity that point to represen-
tation as a construct.
Armelle Parey also focuses on source texts with the endings where
resolution is not straightforward. She discusses Neil LaBute’s Posses-
sion (2002) and Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007), two films adapted from
novels whose last pages unsettle the conclusion previously reached. The
adaptation of these challenging endings that are essential to the rhetoric
of each novel is analyzed in the context of the tendency to make endings
more pleasing or acceptable to a larger audience, through the emphasis
on the romantic plot which Cora Kaplan calls “harlequenization”.4 Parey
examines the particular ways devised by these adaptations to navigate
the tension between the sense of undecidability present in the source texts
and the need for a strong romantic closure on the screen.
Eckart Voigts examination of post-apocalyptic narratives and their
own preoccupation with endings offers a fitting conclusion to this study,
given that these post-apocalyptic stories make endings thematically cen-
tral but structurally problematic (how do you end a narrative that situ-
ates itself as an appendix/epilogue to the larger story of humanity?). His
extensive overview of apocalyptic narratives and critical approaches to
these fictions shows a shift both in content and reception of these narra-
tives, from political to apolitical, from disaster to survival. The analysis
of one of the most iconic post-apocalyptic fictions in recent memory,
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and its 2009 film adaptation, and
of a possible “happy ending” being situated beyond the text (either in
the ambiguous authorial epilogue for the novel or the musical cues in
the final credits) says much about film traditions of the happy ending
or the new beginnings that it offers. Here again, one might argue, the
adaptation says as much about its genre as about its source text, where
the suggestion of a continuation of story (just not this one) highlights
Julie Grossman’s evaluation of adaptation, which “can change our ways
of determining where individual works of art begin and end, and shift our
ideas about what constitutes art in general [, . . . training] our critical eye
on cultural progeny rather than on origins” (3). Whether those endings
are thematic, structural, or theoretical, they give way to new beginnings,
a continuation in which this collection hopes to play a small part.

Notes
1 The outrageous events refer to an actual passage in the book-length essay,
where Orlean’s frustration with orchid thief LaRoche causes her to imagine
strangling him, as well as to the fictional Kaufman’s comments on his desire
for fidelity: “I don’t want to ruin it by making it a Hollywood thing, an orchid
heist movie or something, turning the orchids into poppies and making it a
movie about drug running . . . it’s like I don’t want to cram in sex, or guns,
or car chases . . . or characters learning profound life lessons, or growing, or
coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end, you
18 Armelle Parey and Shannon Wells-Lassagne
know, the book isn’t like that, and life isn’t like that, it just isn’t. And I feel very
strongly about that.”
2 As many critics have noted, the proliferation of fictions in visual media has led
to an increase of adaptations for simple reasons of visibility (familiar names
stand out from the crowd of new films or shows). See for example Hutcheon
86–88, Thompson 77–78, or Wells-Lassagne 6–9.
3 In nineteenth-century fiction, Blau du Plessis notes, “There is often a disjunc-
tion between narrative discourses and resolutions [. . .] a sense of contradiction
between the plot and the character” (7).
4 The phenomenon at its most obvious is the insertion of a final wedding night
conversation in nightdresses and punctuated with kisses in the American ver-
sion of Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice.

Bibliography
Bellour, Raymond. The Analysis of Film. Ed. Constance Penley. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2000.
Blau du Plessis, Rachel. Writing Beyond the Ending, Narrative Strategies of
Twentieth-century Women Writers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1985.
Boozer, Jack. Authorship in Film Adaptation. Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 2008.
Bordwell, David. “Happily Ever After, Part 2.” Velvet Light Trap 19 (1982): 2–7.
———. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge, 1985.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. 1985. London: Rout-
ledge, 2008.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Boston,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Cartmell, Deborah. “100+ Years of Adaptations, or, Adaptation as the Art Form
of Democracy.” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Ed. Debo-
rah Cartmell. Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2012. 1–13.
Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan. Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema.
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.
Forster, Edward Morgan. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. London: Penguin, 2005.
Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Litera-
ture and Drama. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Para-
texts. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
Grossman, Julie. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and
ElasTEXTity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Hock, Tobias. “Film Endings.” Last Things: Essays on Ends and Endings. Eds.
Gavin Hopps et al. Aachen British and American Studies 19. Frankfurt: Peter
Lang, 2014. 65–79.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Jonze, Spike, director. Adaptation. Sony Pictures, 2002.
Larroux, Guy. Le Mot de la fin. La clôture romanesque en question. Paris:
Nathan, 1995.
Leitch, Thomas. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017.
 Introduction 19
Lopez Szwydky, Lisette. “Adaptations, Culture-Texts and the Literary Canon: On
the Making of Nineteenth-Century ‘Classics’.” The Routledge Companion to
Adaptation. Eds. Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts. London:
Routledge, 2018. 128–142.
MacDowell, James. Happy Endings in Hollywood: Cliché, Convention and the
Final Couple. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Neupert, Richard. The End, Narration and Closure in the Cinema. Detroit, MI:
Wayne State University Press, 1995.
Palmer, Barton R. “Continuation, Adaptation Studies and the Never-Ending
Text.” Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds.
Eds. Julie Grossman and R. Barton Palmer. New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
2017. 73–100.
Parey, Armelle, and Isabelle Roblin, ed. Literary Happy Endings: Closure for
Sunny Imaginations. Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2012.
Parey, Armelle, Isabelle Roblin, and Dominique Sipière, ed. Happy Endings and
Films. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2010.
Parker, Ian. “The Real McKee: Lessons of a Screenwriting Guru.” The New Yorker,
12 Oct. 2003. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/20/the-real-mckee
Thompson, Kristin. Storytelling in Film and Television. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003.
Torgovnick, Mariana. Closure in the Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1981.
Wells-Lassagne, Shannon. Television and Serial Adaptation. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2017.
Part I
Creating an ending
An adaptor’s approach to closure
1 Structuring story
Beginnings and endings
An interview with Michael Eaton

Michael Eaton has written for screens small and large, for the radio and
for the stage, and has won several awards for his work. In this interview,
he uses examples from his own career – adapting Great Expectations for
the stage for the West Yorkshire Playhouse, adapting Murder on the Ori-
ent Express for the streaming audio service Audible, as well as writing
fictions based on real events, either as drama-documentaries (Shipman,
ITV; Shoot to Kill, YTV) or original screenplays (Signs and Wonders,
BBC; Fellow Traveller, HBO/BBC/BFI) – to flesh out his own approach to
screenwriting and highlight the importance of story structure and char-
acter in determining how a narrative should end. In this wide-ranging
interview, his discussion of his work both in drama and in criticism (nota-
bly his book on Roman Polanski’s Chinatown for BFI’s “Film Classics”
collection) and the work of others touches on several points that recur in
the rest of our volume, from the fundamental differences in story struc-
ture between serialized and non-serialized adaptation to the profound
link between beginnings and endings. His perspective as a practitioner
is valuable in its insights into the screenwriting and production process.
The interview, conducted on May 17, 2019 by Shannon Wells-Lassagne,
has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

SWL: Could you tell us about your understanding of narratives [. . .]?

ME: Yes, [. . .] to me, all stories are ultimately based on the same struc-
tures as rites of passage, where a character moves from one status in
society to another status, but through great difficulty, because you
have to leave behind the first status and . . . you’re separated from
that status but you’re not yet part of the one that you’re going to
[. . .] and so there’s a period where you’re neither status A nor status
B, which anthropologists have called les marges or liminality or the
liminal zone or the liminal period, and that to me is the space of
story, because your main character – not all your characters, but your
main protagonist – goes on a journey from one status to another sta-
tus; and that [journey is] propelled by a lack, by something that they
need, whether they know it or not. I mean obviously, in apparently
24 An interview with Michael Eaton
simple stories like heist movies, the “lack” is the gold, or the jewelry,
or whatever. That’s what the character thinks they’re after. But prob-
ably what they more likely are after is comradeship, or something
that they don’t realize. In that journey, things can – things need to
go wrong. If Romeo and Juliet fell in love, and the Montagues and
Capulets said, “Oh, this feud of ours has been ridiculous, we’ve got
two kids in love with each other; let’s just get this over with and
see them get married,” that’d be lovely for Romeo and Juliet, but it
wouldn’t be much of a story. Because the movement through life, the
sociological movement through life, is fraught with difficulty and
danger, and you can’t just want to occupy the new status.
SWL: And how do you end that story? How do you think you come to
an ending?
ME: Well, in an ending the protagonist or protagonists have made that
transition to another state. Now that state may of course – in Shake-
spearean tragedy, though not always in classical tragedy, that state
may be death. That’s a movement from life to death. But usually
there’s also a movement from lack of knowledge to knowledge. Mac-
beth dies, sure, like everyone else around him – but before he dies, he
realizes what a complete waste of effort this has been, and he learns
a lot about life, before he dies. [. . .]
SWL: Could you talk about adapting Great Expectations (West Yorkshire
Theatre) and the problem of the ending of Great Expectations?
ME: Yes, that’s interesting. I mean, Pip’s story is a story of moving from
lack of knowledge to knowledge, it’s also a story of moving from
delusion to reality. When Magwitch returns, Pip learns that it’s not
Miss Havisham who is his benefactor, but this criminal – even though
Magwitch is a much better person than Miss Havisham ever was.
[. . .] Magwitch’s money has turned Pip into a terrible idle jack – an
upper-class wannabe twit. So first he rebels against this knowledge
that his money has come from this low source. But what I also find
interesting is that his delusions actually last much longer than the
realization that Magwitch is his benefactor, because when he comes
to, after his illness, he still has the illusion that he could marry Biddy,
so clearly . . . Pip’s journey is a movement from being deluded to
being enlightened, if you like. The last delusion is about Estella,
whether he could have Estella. Dickens had originally written this
ending where after many years, he’s walking in London down Pic-
cadilly with Joe’s son, Little Pip, who he’s like the uncle of, Joe and
Biddy’s son, and he comes across Estella, as a chance meeting, and
they part, presumably never to see each other again. And his friend,
[Edward] Bulwer-Lytton – [. . .] asked him to write a happy ending.1
The [second] ending that Dickens wrote is definitely in my opinion
a much better ending, but it can’t be said to be happy, and it can’t be
said to resolve all of Pip’s problems. [. . .] The great thing about the
 Structuring story 25
new ending is that Pip goes back to the scene of [. . .] Satis House,
where Miss Havisham lived and where he first met Estella, so actu-
ally from a locational point of view, it’s much more satisfying. Some
posh street in London has nothing to do with the previous story at
all. He goes back and sees Estella there, and he says:

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the
morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening
mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they
showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.2

Now, you’re not going to tell me that’s a straightforwardly happy

ending, or an entirely resolved ending! But nevertheless, we’ve got to
say that Pip has gone on a great movement, not only socially, from
being the possible apprentice of a blacksmith to being a man [. . .]
about town, he’s also progressed in his knowledge about his own
situation, and about his own previous delusions. So in the novel there
are three Pips: the little Pip as a boy, there’s Pip [. . .] in young man-
hood, and there’s the narrator of the story, the first-person narrator,
who is writing from a position after these events have taken place.
But – obviously, when you’re adapting it, you can’t have the third Pip.
You have to make the audience the third Pip.

SWL: So what’s really fascinating about what you were saying [is] the
location, that the location is satisfying.
ME: I think so, yeah.
SWL: So is there a sense of progress, but also return?
ME: Well, if you think about ritual in traditional societies, [. . .] the struc-
ture there was that for instance, as in the Torres Strait islands when a
boy first felt hairs on his chin, that was the time when he was ready
to be initiated, so when there were a group of people of that age,
they were taken out of the village, into a special place in the bush,
where for a period of time, about three months, they were initiated
into what it means to be a man in that society. And that includes
practical stuff, you know, about how to do gardening and fishing;
and it includes moral stuff – you’re not supposed to go on someone
else’s land or steal from people. But it also involves theological stuff:
the things that you’ve been taught as a kid actually are not true,
the real secret stuff you’ve got to know is revealed. And that’s very
physically arduous. [. . .] so they’ve left their status as children, gone
to a different place; when they’re finished, they’re brought back as
men, so they’re coming back to the same place, but they’re coming
back in a different way. When Dorothy goes back to [Kansas], at the
end [of The Wizard Of Oz (1939)], she says, “There’s no place like
home,” we’re not supposed to think she’s come back in the same way
26 An interview with Michael Eaton
she was when she left. Nobody’s going to kick Dorothy around any-
more, she’s been through the adventures in Oz. She might be back in
Kansas, but she’s not that same little girl who nobody believes, and
whose imagination is quashed . . . she’s been over the rainbow. [. . .]
What’s she going to do now? [. . .] The point being, she returns to the
same place, but in a different way.
SWL: So speaking of endings, I was wondering when you’re adapting, do
you ever feel tempted to change an ending? For a new audience, for
a new time, for a new medium?
ME: Well, I’m trying to think. . . . [. . .] I think there are some times where
I’ve thought that a story had ended, and it doesn’t need to go on any
further. Sometimes in a novel a story can go on after what would be
a satisfying ending dramatically. [. . .] I think sometimes those things
that happen after the ending, you might be able to put them in, seed
them in before. . . . Talking of other people’s work rather than my
own, there’s another good story along the lines of the Great Expecta-
tions one, about the ending of Chinatown (1974), because I wrote
a monograph about it. [. . .] [Director Roman] Polanski was very
dissatisfied with [the screenwriter] Robert Towne’s original ending,
and in fact, the Faye Dunaway character, Mrs. Mulwray, apparently
survives in the first-draft script, and I assume – I have not seen that
version of the script, but I assume – that Jake manages to save her.3
Whereas Polanski said, “No, she’s got to die.” Noah Cross, her father,
is a much more powerful figure than the protagonist Jake Gittes,
and the whole point of the story is that the more Jake tries to save
her, the more he makes things worse for her. But also Robert Evans,
who was the producer – because it was shortly after the Sharon Tate
murders4 – said that Roman Polanski thought that blondes have to
die in Hollywood. But nonetheless, from the point of that story, in
terms of the central character, Jake Gittes, [. . .] Polanski’s instincts
there were true: it’s Jake’s tragedy that when he tries to do something
good, it just makes matters worse. And to uncover a conspiracy, a
hornet’s nest – you’re probably better to have left it. Also – in terms
of location – the other thing that Polanski said was that there had
been no scenes in Chinatown. Chinatown’s a metaphor, as you know,
in the film, [meaning] somewhere that you don’t know what’s going
on. Jake used to be a LAPD cop, and his former colleague, Escobar,
they worked in Chinatown together, and there’s one point where they
say they never knew what was really happening there – best to leave
things alone. That’s the metaphor of Chinatown. But Polanski actu-
ally wanted that last scene to physically be set in Chinatown. So at
the last minute they built a big Chinatown set at Paramount to film –
and again, I think his instincts were correct – so that the metaphor
was actualized. Because there’s a lot of people who might not have
picked up on the sophistication of that metaphor, and it’s a beautiful
 Structuring story 27
metaphor. But it only exists in Jake’s backstory – we never see him as
a cop in Chinatown.
SWL: You’ve written for radio, TV miniseries, and so on. I was wonder-
ing, in terms of endings, in the serial form, you have to end several
times. . . .
ME: You’ve always got to construct that story, not only from beginning
to end, but you’ve also got to construct arcs in each episode, where
you’re leaving your main character at the end of each episode: it
looks like they’re going to succeed, but we know things they don’t,
or it looks like they are at their lowest ebb, but how are they going to
get out of it? At the same time, you’ve got to structure the beginning,
middle, and end within each episode as well for the overall story.
SWL: So when you were working on Agatha Christie, Murder on the Ori-
ent Express, for an audio drama, how do you do that with an adapta-
tion, with a novel that has different divisions?
ME: With that one, the Agatha Christie estate, who run these things,
called for an extremely faithful adaptation, and I think part of the
idea for that was that the film was coming out, the recent film with
Kenneth Branagh, and that version had made some changes. Not in
terms of dénouement, but I think the estate wanted the audio ver-
sion to be faithful to the original. I mean, I never wanted to change
the ending. I’m sure most people actually know the ending, but it’s
actually very good, [. . .] how Poirot is perturbed, that it’s only when
he twigs, [SPOILER ALERT!] “It’s all of them” – that he arrives at
the solution. The difficulty with that story, I think, is how Poirot first
realizes all these people are connected to the kidnapping and murder
of the girl back in America, and that’s the motivation for them mur-
dering. It’s very visual – he finds a clue on a charred piece of paper.
That might work visually, but . . . it’s difficult to convey through
sound alone; nevertheless, I stuck rigidly to the brief, there. When I
first wanted to do it, I thought about changing the third-person nar-
rator (they wanted a narrator); I considered putting the narration in
the voice of Poirot himself, and they didn’t like that, so I had to go
back to the original voice of the novel. It wasn’t a hard gig in that
sense, because it was dramatizing what was already there. The dif-
ficulty that you would have normally with that, and this is why the
new platforms [streaming audio or video, like Audible] are in many
ways a real blessing, [is this]: [. . .] when they first offered me that
gig, I said to them, “how many episodes do you want?” Because,
say, on BBC radio, they’ll either do a serial in half-hour or one-hour
episodes, or they’ll do one-offs – 90-minute ones. And they said, “no,
no, you don’t understand. We do the whole book. People download
the whole [thing].” Which means, in terms of what I’ve just been say-
ing to you about [structure], [it] makes things a hell of a lot easier;
you don’t have to think, twenty-seven minutes in, I’ve got to leave
28 An interview with Michael Eaton
on a big moment, and the first five minutes of the next episode, I’ve
got to do some recapping/exposition work, without being clunky, for
people who haven’t heard last week, or people who’ve forgotten last
week . . . with this I did like to build in recappings and things like
that, just so the people who had downloaded the whole seven hours –
unless you’re a lorry driver, you’re on your daily commute, you might
hear three quarters of an hour at a time, so I think it’s nice to remind
people where you are in the story. But in this instance, the structure
of the novel was the structure of the dramatization; it would have
been different if you had to do it episodically.
SWL: It’s interesting because right now we’re living through the end of
Game of Thrones, where the episodes do have varying length – so
this idea that length is something that can be negotiated afterwards,
it’s interesting because it’s in their last season that they were able to
decide how long their episodes were going to be.
ME: Yes, [. . .] this could make that whole approach to how you tell a
story, the length you’ve got to tell a story, completely different. It’s
a real freedom to be able to have varying lengths of episodes rather
than have to obey what I call “the tyranny of the minute.”
SWL: [. . .] I wanted to come back to the idea of the temptation to change
an ending, when you’re adapting; you said you hadn’t –
ME: Certainly in my own original work [. . .] I’ve done a first draft and
then found that the ending was completely wrong. I’ve done a first
draft where I realized that the person I thought was the protagonist
isn’t really the main character; as I said before, the definition for
me of the main protagonist is the person who goes on the biggest
journey. When I wrote Signs and Wonders, [. . .] it’s been a while
ago now, it’s about a young woman who joins a new religious move-
ment like the Moonies, while she’s on a gap year in America. Her
mother goes over to hire a deprogrammer to take her out. [. . .] When
I started it, I thought it was the young woman’s story, because I’d
known people of my own age group who’d been co-opted into those
sorts of groups. But as I wrote it, I realized that the much bigger story
is the story of the mother; she is the one who makes the decision to
go there, she is the one who is changed by this experience; and the
relationship between her and the deprogrammer, played by James
Earl Jones – I mean, she’s a vicar’s wife from rural Nottinghamshire,
and she goes into the heart of Southern California, and she meets
these people – particularly this person, the like of which she’d never
known before. And that’s when, “Hey! The penny’s dropped – it’s the
mother’s story.” It doesn’t mean that the actual incidents in the tale
are very different, but the emphasis, and who you want to be worried
about, is different. Because I think with the girl, the question is, “Do
we get her out? Does she want to come out? Why has she gone in?”
But then the bigger question is what’s going to happen to this mother
 Structuring story 29
when she leaves her normality to go into something that’s completely
bizarre.
SWL: Absolutely. I was thinking about your comments on Murder on the
Orient Express and what a great ending it was – do you think that
endings are sometimes these landmark moments that we need to be
faithful to?
ME: [. . .] In one of the early scripts I wrote, Fellow Traveller (BBC/HBO,
1990), there’s a character in that who says, “I hate endings, I always
walk out of the film before it ends – I don’t want to know how it
ends.” And [. . .] growing up, my favorite show – of course, [I’m from]
Nottingham – was The Adventures of Robin Hood (ATV, 1955–
1959). And it was likely mostly written, I later found out, by exiled
or clandestine blacklisted American writers – and that’s what the film
Fellow Traveller was about. And when you’ve got a series like that,
that ran for five or six seasons, then obviously you’ve got to return
Robin Hood and the Merry Men to the greenwood each time. And
so in my film, which is about an exiled left-wing screenwriter who is
working on the Robin Hood series, there’s a scene where Robin con-
fronts the sheriff, and the sheriff says, “You can’t kill me, Robin; we
need each other. If you kill me, the story’s over.” But Robin does kill
him. And of course [the writer] can’t submit that. But Robin wants
to kill the sheriff, get rid of the evil – the Communist writer wants to
get rid of the exponent of naked oppression – but then, what’s going
to happen then? So in the best Robin Hood film – the Errol Flynn/
Michael Curtiz [The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938] – of course,
at the end King Richard returns. And what’s going to happen then?
Robin’s going to be an aristocrat? No, it’s much better when he’s
in the greenwood, when he’s in the liminal zone with all the Merry
Men, and a different problem enters each week – and he copes with
that adventure, but he still hasn’t won the ultimate battle. So that’s
the difference between the movie and the series.
SWL: Absolutely. So maybe that’s the difference between ending and con-
cluding? That a film has to conclude, and a TV series –
ME: Well in a series, that particular story has to be concluded, it has to
be wound up in each episode, but the situation of the main protago-
nist, or the hero, has to remain pretty much the same to continue –
although that’s not always been the case in recent years.
SWL: Do you think, [. . .] because the serial form has so many conclu-
sions, that makes it more difficult to conclude once and for all?
ME: I just think we’ve seen such brilliant things . . . take for example
The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008). Each of those series [seasons], had a
definite conclusion [. . .] the thing they were up against – one time
it was the media, one time it was organized crime – that would be
concluded, and what they did so brilliantly was that often the main
characters are in a completely different position in the next season:
30 An interview with Michael Eaton
Jimmy McNulty was busted down to be an ordinary cop again. So
they were able to progress or regress in their careers. It wasn’t like the
old-fashioned series, where the main characters never move.
SWL: Back to status quo. Which brings us back to the idea of return – is
there return with change, or return with status quo?
ME: In The Adventures of Robin Hood, say, the character of Robin never
changes. That’s why you may think that he’s the hero – it’s the name
of the series – but he’s not necessarily the protagonist of each episode.
When the series started, he’s come back from the Crusades to find
that his father’s been killed, the castle’s been taken, [. . .] and his idyl-
lic place that he’s returning to has now become a nightmare, and so
he is forced into the position of an outlaw. So that’s a definite begin-
ning. But you keep that guy over six series [seasons], you’ve got to
keep returning him back to the greenwood. We know that his quest is
to defeat the oppressors, but if he ever did, it’d all be over – and that’s
the last thing we want. But in each episode, something comes from
the outside – or sometimes from the inside, Little John might have a
problem that Robin has to solve – but normally, someone is coming
through the forest who’s been dispossessed, and Robin helps them
get their land back, or their money back. So the story comes in from
outside, they take care of it, that’s ended – but Robin’s unchanged,
and his quest hasn’t changed.
[. . .] One more thing that probably needs to be thrown in: over the
years I’ve [written] a few “docudramas.” They are often stories where
everybody knows the general tale, but they don’t know the details
of it. And you’re working there from documentary sources: literal
documentary sources – court reports, etc. – but also documentary
sources in terms of the people you go and meet and interview. [. . .]
The biggest decisions that have to be made on that [are structural]:
where does this story start, and where does this story end? Because
[. . .] the story is potentially infinite. Where you start [. . .] determines
how you deal with the backstory, how you deal with the discovery
of the backstory – and I’ll give you two instances of that. The first
one I did was called Shoot to Kill (YTV, 1990, directed by Peter
Kosminsky). The story, which I think everybody in Britain knew, was
that there had been a series of shootings in Northern Ireland; the
targets were supposed to be terrorists, but they turned out to not be,
and in each case the police who were involved gave a series of cover
stories which turned out not to hang together and seemed to have
been constructed after the event. So it was evident that they were
being told what to say after these incidents. And this became such a
[. . .] scandal when it came to public knowledge that [. . .] a team of
policemen from Manchester was sent over to Northern Ireland to do
an inquiry into these events. And just when it looked as if they had
cracked it, there was a manufactured set of allegations against John
Stalker, the cop who was in charge of the inquiry doing that, and his
 Structuring story 31
report was never officially published. So I was sent a stack this high
[chest-high] of documents. The film was to be in two parts, two,
two-hour episodes, and I came to the conclusion, which I probably
couldn’t get away with now [. . .], that in the first episode we would
see the events that the team came in to investigate. So we would see
them, in the way that we in the production team were sure that this
is what had happened. And only about ten minutes before the end
of the first episode are the team brought over, and so at that point,
we as an audience know pretty much everything, and the team know
nothing. So what the story is then is how the team find out what we
already know, and what are the forces and obstacles trying to pre-
vent them from doing so. [. . .] It could be done the other way, but I
wanted to put the audience in a position of knowledge that the team
themselves didn’t have. And I thought it would be much more excit-
ing than doing that in flashbacks, or them going to interview people:
“I was there that night, and it said in the paper he went through the
checkpoint – he didn’t go through the checkpoint, and then they shot
him!” We have already seen all that stuff, instead of hearing about
it or seeing it in flashback, and the [. . .] hope is that the audience
will then say, “Don’t talk to him, he’s a liar!” or “Oh yeah, you’re on
the right track here! Yes, go to that site.” That’s what I was hoping.
You make that decision; and once you’ve made that decision, and
it’s been accepted, it puts the audience in a particular position. This
is what I call “the choreography of knowledge.” The writer juggles
between three possible positions: the audience knows the same as the
protagonist knows, they know less, or they know more. When they
know more, that’s what Hitchcock called “suspense.”
Another true life drama I wrote was Shipman (ITV, 2002), which
was about one of Britain’s biggest serial killers, who was a doctor
who murdered his patients. And again, it looked like he’d been doing
that for many years . . . how do I tell that story? And it quickly
became apparent to me as I was doing the research – I became very
friendly with the cop, who was by then retired, [. . .] who, despite
incredible opposition from his superiors, begins to suspect, begins
to think the unthinkable, that the local doctor that everybody loved
was in fact knocking off his patients. It was this policeman, DCS Stan
Egerton, who authorized the first exhumations, which set the ball
rolling. And I quickly came to the conclusion, although they called
the show Shipman – that’s the name of [the serial killer] – but that
the actual protagonist was the investigator, the cop Stan Egerton,
who’s now dead, but who I came to know and respect and like enor-
mously. [He] was a beat cop in Manchester, worked his way up the
ranks to detective chief superintendent. He was a Christian, he was
a Mason, he was a man who really saw things in terms of black and
white, good and evil. [. . .] The whole basis of his world view gets
shaken when it turns out that in this little town, where the figures of
32 An interview with Michael Eaton
authority are priest, vicar, cop, and doctor, that one of these figures
of authority is much more evil, and much worse a person than any of
the ordinary villains he’s come up against throughout his career. And
so you’ve got someone not only going on an investigative journey,
which he conducted brilliantly, because [there] was no [guarantee]
that there could have been a successful prosecution; everything was
against him. But much more significantly in terms of drama, he goes
through a psychological change as well, where he has to examine the
whole basis of his world view – and so clearly he is the protagonist.
The murderer is not; the murderer never changes . . . [or] he changes
[only] by getting caught. The fact that he never spoke and he never
revealed his motives, and then he killed himself in prison – if I’d have
known more about him, then maybe he could have been the central
character, but as it stood, it seemed to me much more interesting
to make the film really about the policeman who has to change his
whole perspective. So [. . .] where does the story start? We see this
doctor murdering one of his patients – but that’s, bizarrely, a “nor-
mal” occurrence. The story really starts when we see a woman walk
in to Stan’s office and say, “I think my mother’s doctor forged her
will.” And that’s the initiating incident. [. . .] From then on you can
follow the stages of the investigation. Because what the doctor didn’t
know [. . . was that] one of the women Shipman killed, her daughter
was a solicitor, and she made her own mother’s will. And when this
will, which Shipman had forged, was put forward as the latest will,
she as a solicitor realized that something was seriously wrong. So it’s
really hard, when you’re doing these true-life things, you often have
a lot of false starts trying to work out where best to begin even if you
have a pretty good idea where the story has to end.

Notes
1 “Bulwer-Lytton read the proofs of the last chapter of Great Expectations, and
persuaded Dickens that he should change the ending in order to render the
fates of both Pip and Estella less harsh.” Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (1990), London:
Vintage, 1999, p. 952.
2 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861). Edgar Rosenberg, ed. New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1999, p. 358.
3 Chinatown’s characteristically complex plot revolves around private investiga-
tor Jake Gittes’s investigation of Hollis Mulwray, an engineer for the LA Water
and Power company. After Mulwray is found dead, his widow Evelyn tasks
Jake with finding the murderer, which leads to the discovery of her father Noah
Cross’s involvement in a real-estate scam, his murder of his son-in-law, and his
incestuous relationship with his daughter Evelyn, which resulted in a daughter/
sister. When all attempts to bring Cross to account fail, causing Evelyn’s death,
Jake’s former colleague Escobar famously tells him to give up any hope for
justice: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
4 In August 1969 Sharon Tate (Roman Polanski’s wife and a well-known actress
and model in her own right) was murdered, along with four other people pres-
ent in her home, by the Manson Family.
2 The head and the crown
Ending Huston’s The Man Who
Would Be King
Jonathan C. Glance

Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation notes the difficulty of defin-

ing adaptation “because we use the same word for the process and the
product” (15). While adaptation studies has tended to focus on the
adapted product rather than analyzing the process by which that adap-
tation occurs, some recent critical attention has called for much greater
attention to the screenwriter’s crucial role in that process. John Huston’s
1975 film version of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”
provides an important window into the process of adaptation; Huston
directed this film and co-wrote the screenplay, building on previous drafts
by three other screenwriters. Most commentary on The Man Who Would
Be King focuses on the completed film,1 but I will explore the earlier
stages from October 1953, when Huston initiated the process of adapting
Kipling’s story, to April 1975, when shooting was completed. Revealed
across those two decades are the creative choices, narrative inventions,
and studio pressures that drive the adaptation process and exemplify its
challenges. While Huston’s closing shots might suggest a placid and con-
ventional fidelity to Kipling’s last pages, screenplay drafts and production
notes disclose the prolonged struggles between director, screenwriters,
and producers to shape an ending and especially its final image.
Scholars who discuss screenplays often emphasize their importance
even as they lament their devalued status. Jack Boozer asserts the screen-
play’s “centrality to the collaborative authorship that is at the heart of
film adaptation” (1); Ian MacDonald concurs, observing, “the screenplay
is usually the key documentary evidence of the screen idea” (16). Yet Sim-
one Murray notes, “the contribution of screenwriters has been systemati-
cally marginalized” (132), and Bernardini and Hoxter lament, “Of all the
major craft disciplines involved in the production of motion pictures,
screenwriting has been, until recently, the least studied and theorized
within film and media studies” (12). If film scholars have until recently
failed to explore the critical role of the screenplay, that disregard is all the
more striking for adaptation scholarship. Jamie Sherry notes this lacuna,
asserting, “This lack of attention to the crucial processes of adaptation,
and the transitional mode of adaptation screenwriting . . . illustrates a
34 Jonathan C. Glance
fundamental gap in adaptation studies” (15). Of particular importance
to adaptation studies, Sherry emphasizes, are the early versions of scripts:

While it can be assumed that the final shooting script will be “clos-
est” in content to the film produced, the studying of such a docu-
ment does not necessarily illuminate the “process” of adaptation.
Indeed . . . it could be argued that earlier drafts, and initial responses
to the source material, can tell us more about the adaptation process
than a screenplay that has been honed to the point where it is fit to
be used as the final, “definitive” shooting script.
(23)

Certainly the challenges of conducting scholarly research on screen-

plays, involving matters of copyright, authorship, and access, contribute
to that scholarly inattention. In many cases the scripts and preliminary
drafts were treated as disposable ephemera and no longer exist. Steven
Price and Chris Pallant note that such documents were at times treated
by filmmakers “as little more than industrial waste products” (2). John
Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King presents a notable exception,
however, because its interstitial texts are extant and document the pro-
cess of transition from Kipling’s source text to Huston’s adaptation.
Huston retained multiple drafts of preliminary screenplays and donated
them, with many other documents, to the Fairbanks Center for Motion
Picture Study where the John Huston Papers, ranging from 1932 to
1981, make up part of the Special Collections of the Margaret Herrick
Library.2 Among the sixty-three linear feet of Huston’s archived papers
are dated draft scripts (some with handwritten annotation), discarded
pages, production notes, and correspondence concerning The Man Who
Would Be King. These documents reveal the creative decisions in the
screenwriting process and, most significantly for this study, the struggles
with the ending.3
Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Man Who Would Be King,” written
when he was twenty-two, was first published in 1888 in The Phantom
Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales. Kipling utilizes an unnamed first-person
narrator who tells of his encounter with two British ex-soldiers and
fellow Freemasons, Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, who travel
from Lahore to Kafiristan to seek their fortune. The narrator’s account
frames the heart of the story, the rise and fall of the two adventurers, told
afterwards by the shattered ruin of Carnehan who returns three years
later. Carnehan tells how they succeeded in reaching and ultimately rul-
ing Kafiristan, how Dravot was acclaimed as king and god, but how he
overreached and pursued a dynasty through marriage to a Kafiri girl. At
their wedding ceremony the terrified girl bit him, drawing blood and thus
disproving his divinity. Enraged priests led a pursuing army that encircled
the pair of adventurers, cast Dravot from a rope bridge into the ravine
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Dame Marigold think of what the guardian at the Guildhall had said
of his likeness to a woodpecker.
Then he stood back a few paces and wagged his finger at it in comic
admonition ("Vulgar buffoon!" said Master Ambrose quite audibly),
and then the wag turned to Master Polydore and said, "Just before
we go, to make quite sure, what about having a peep inside this
clock?"
Master Polydore had secretly sympathised with Master Ambrose's
ejaculation, and thought that the Doctor, by jesting at such a time,
was showing a deplorable lack of good breeding.
All the same, the Law does not shrink from reducing thoroughness to
absurdity, so he asked Master Nathaniel if he would kindly produce
the key of the clock.
He did so, and the case was opened; Dame Marigold made a
grimace and held her pomander to her nose, and to the general
amazement that foolish, innocent-looking grandfather's clock stood
revealed as a veritable cornucopia of exotic, strangely coloured,
sinister-looking fruits.
Vine-like tendrils, studded with bright, menacing berries were twined
round the pendulum and the chains of the two leaden weights; and
at the bottom of the case stood a gourd of an unknown colour, which
had been scooped hollow and filled with what looked like crimson
grapes, tawny figs, raspberries of an emerald green, and fruits even
stranger than these, and of colour and shape not found in any of the
species of Dorimare.
A murmur of horror and surprise arose from the assembled
company. And, was it from the clock, or down the chimney, or from
the ivy peeping in at the window?—from somewhere quite close
came the mocking sound of "Ho, ho, hoh!"
Of course, before many hours were over the whole of Lud-in-the-Mist
was laughing at the anti-climax to the Mayor's high-falutin' speech
that morning in the Senate. And in the evening he was burned in
effigy by the mob, and among those who danced round the bon-fire
were Bawdy Bess and Mother Tibbs. Though it was doubtful whether
Mother Tibbs really understood what was happening. It was an
excuse for dancing, and that was enough for her.
It was reported, too, that the Yeomanry and their Captain, though not
actually taking part in these demonstrations, stood looking on with
indulgent smiles.
Among the respectable tradesmen in the far from unsympathetic
crowd of spectators was Ebeneezor Prim the clockmaker. He had,
however, not allowed his two daughters to be there; and they were
sitting dully at home, keeping the supper hot for their father and the
black-wigged apprentice.
But Ebeneezor came back without him, and Rosie and Lettice were
too much in awe of their father to ask any questions. The evening
dragged wearily on—Ebeneezor sat reading The Good Mayor's Walk
Through Lud-in-the-Mist (a didactic and unspeakably dreary poem,
dating from the early days of the Republic), and from time to time he
would glance severely over the top of his spectacles at his
daughters, who were whispering over their tatting, and looking
frequently towards the door.
But when they finally went upstairs to bed the apprentice had not yet
come in, and in the privacy of their bedroom the girls admitted to
each other that it was the dullest evening they had spent since his
arrival, early in spring. For it was wonderful what high spirits were
concealed behind that young man's prim exterior.
Why, it was sufficient to enliven even an evening spent in the society
of papa to watch the comical grimaces he pulled behind that
gentleman's respectable back! And it was delicious when the shrill
"Ho, ho, hoh!" would suddenly escape him, and he would instantly
snap down on the top of it his most sanctimonious expression. And
then, he seemed to possess an inexhaustible store of riddles and
funny songs, and there was really no end to the invention and variety
of his practical jokes.
The Misses Prim, since their earliest childhood, had craved for a
monkey or a cockatoo, such as sailor brothers or cousins brought to
their friends; their father, however, had always sternly refused to
have any such creature in his house. But the new apprentice had
been ten times more amusing than any monkey or cockatoo that had
ever come from the Cinnamon Isles.
The next morning, as he did not come for his usual early roll and
glass of home-made cordial, the two girls peeped into his room, and
found that his bed had not been slept in; and lying neglected on the
floor was the neat black wig. Nor did he ever come back to claim it.
And when they timidly asked their father what had happened to him,
he sternly forbade them ever again to mention his name, adding,
with a mysterious shake of the head, "For some time I have had my
suspicions that he was not what he appeared."
And then he sighed regretfully, and murmured, "But never before
have I had an apprentice with such wonderfully skillful fingers."
As for Master Nathaniel—while he was being burned in effigy in the
market-place, he was sitting comfortably in his pipe-room, deep in an
in-folio.
He had suddenly remembered that it was something in the widow
Gibberty's trial that was connected in his mind with Master
Ambrose's joke about the dead bleeding. And he was re-reading that
trial—this time with absorption.
As he read, the colours of his mental landscape were gradually
modified, as the colours of a real landscape are modified according
to the position of the sun. But if a white road cuts through the
landscape it still gleams white—even when the moon has taken the
place of the sun. And a straight road still gleamed white across the
landscape of Master Nathaniel's mind.
 CHAPTER XVI
THE WIDOW GIBBERTY'S TRIAL
The following day, with all the masquerading that the Law delights in,
Master Nathaniel was pronounced in the Senate to be dead. His
robes of office were taken off him, and they were donned by Master
Polydore Vigil, the new Mayor. As for Master Nathaniel—was
wrapped in a shroud, laid on a bier and carried to his home by four of
the Senators, the populace lining the streets and greeting the mock
obsequies with catcalls and shouts of triumph.
But the ceremony over, when Master Ambrose, boiling with
indignation at the outrage, came to visit his friend, he found a very
cheerful corpse who greeted him with a smack on the back and a cry
of "Never say die, Brosie! I've something here that should interest
you," and he thrust into his hand an open in-folio.
"What's this?" asked the bewildered Master Ambrose.
There was a certain solemnity in Master Nathaniel's voice as he
replied, "It's the Law, Ambrose—the homoeopathic antidote that our
forefathers discovered to delusion. Sit down this very minute and
read that trial through."
As Master Ambrose knew well, it was useless trying to talk to Nat
about one thing when his mind was filled with another. Besides, his
curiosity was aroused, for he had come to realize that Nat's butterfly
whims were sometimes the disguise of shrewd and useful intuitions.
So, through force of long habit, growling out a protest about this
being no time for tomfoolery and rubbish, he settled down to read the
volume at the place where Master Nathaniel had opened it, namely,
at the account of the trial of the widow Gibberty for the murder of her
husband.
The plaintiff, as we have seen, was a labourer, Diggory Carp by
name, who had been in the employ of the late farmer. He said he
had been suddenly dismissed by the defendant just after harvest,
when it was not easy to find another job.
No reason was given for his dismissal, so Diggory went to the farmer
himself, who, he said, had always been a kind and just master, to
beg that he might be kept on. The farmer practically admitted that
there was no reason for his dismissal except that the mistress had
taken a dislike to him. "Women are kittle cattle, Diggory," he had
said, with an apologetic laugh, "and it's best humouring them.
Though it's hard on the folks they get their knife into. So I fear it will
be best for every one concerned that you should leave my service,
Diggory."
But he gave him a handful of florins over and above his wages, and
told him he might take a sack of lentils from the granary—if he were
careful that the mistress did not get wind of it.
Now, Diggory had a shrewd suspicion as to why the defendant
wanted to get rid of him. Though she was little more than a girl—she
was the farmer's second wife and more like his daughter's elder
sister than her stepdame—she had the reputation of being as staid
and sensible as a woman of forty. But Diggory knew better. He had
discovered that she had a lover. One evening he had come on her in
the orchard, lying in the arms of a young foreigner, called
Christopher Pugwalker, a herbalist, who had first appeared in the
neighbourhood just before the great drought.
"And from that time on," said Diggory, "she had got her knife into me,
and everything I did was wrong. And I believe she hadn't a moment's
peace till she'd got rid of me. Though, if she'd only known, I was no
blab, and not one for blaming young blood and a wife half the age of
her husband."
So he and his wife and his children were turned out on the world.
The first night they camped out in a field, and when they had lighted
a fire Diggory opened the sack that, with the farmer's permission, he
had taken from the granary, in order that his wife might make them
some lentil soup for supper. But lo and behold! instead of lentils the
sack contained fruit—fruit that Diggory Carp, as a west countryman,
born and bred near the Elfin Marches, recognised at the first glance
to be of a kind that he would not dream of touching himself or of
allowing his wife and children to touch ... the sack, in fact, contained
fairy fruit. So they buried it in the field, for, as Diggory said, "Though
the stuff be poison for men, they do say as how it's a mighty fine
manure for the crops."
For a week or so they tramped the country, living from hand to
mouth. Sometimes Diggory would earn a little by doing odd jobs for
the farmers, or by playing the fiddle at village weddings, for Diggory,
it would seem, was a noted fiddler.
But with the coming of winter they began to feel the pinch of poverty,
and his wife bethought her of the trade of basket-making she had
learned in her youth; and, as they were camping at the time at the
place where grew the best osiers for the purpose, she determined to
see if her fingers had retained their old cunning. As the sap of these
particular osiers was a deadly poison, she would not allow the
children to help her to gather them.
So she set to and make wicker urns in which the farmers' wives
could keep their grain in winter, and baskets of fancy shapes for lads
to give to their sweethearts to hold their ribbands and fal-lals. The
children peddled them about the countryside, and thus they
managed to keep the pot boiling.
The following summer, shortly before harvest, Diggory's eldest girl
went to try and sell some baskets in the village of Swan. There she
met the defendant, whom she asked to look at her wares, relying on
not being recognised as a daughter of Diggory's, through having
been in service at another farm when her father was working at the
Gibbertys'.
The defendant seemed pleased with the baskets, bought two or
three, and got into talk with the girl about the basket-making industry,
in the course of which she learned that the best osiers for the
purpose were very poisonous. Finally she asked the girl to bring her
a bundle of the osiers in question, as making baskets, she said,
would make a pleasant variety, of an evening, from the eternal
spinning; and in the course of a few days the girl brought her, as
requested, a bundle of the osiers, and was well paid for them.
Not long afterwards came the news that the farmer Gibberty had
died suddenly in the night, and with it was wafted the rumour of foul
play. There was an old custom in that part of the country that
whenever there was a death in the house all the inmates should
march in procession past the corpse. It was really a sort of primitive
inquest, for it was believed that in the case of foul play the corpse
would bleed at the nose as the murderer passed it. This custom, said
Diggory, was universally observed in that part of the country, even in
cases as free from all suspicion as those of women dying in child-
bed. And in all the taverns and farm-houses of the neighbourhood it
was being whispered that the corpse of the farmer Gibberty, on the
defendant's walking past it, had bled copiously, and when
Christopher Pugwalker's turn had come to pass it, it had bled a
second time.
And knowing what he did, Diggory Carp came to feel that it was his
duty to lodge an accusation against the widow.
His two reasons, then, for thinking her guilty were that the corpse
had bled when she passed it, and that she had bought from his
daughter osiers the sap of which was poisonous. The motive for the
crime he found in her having a young lover, whom she wished
should stand in her dead husband's shoes. It was useless for the
defendant to deny that Pugwalker was her lover—the fact had for
months been the scandal of the neighbourhood, and she had finally
lost all sense of shame and had actually had him to lodge in the farm
for several months before her husband's death. This was proved
beyond a shadow of a doubt by the witnesses summoned by
Diggory.
As for the bleeding of the corpse: vulgar superstitions did not fall
within the cognizance of the Law, and the widow ignored it in her
defence. However, with regard to that other vulgar superstition to
which the plaintiff had alluded, fairy fruit, she admitted, in passing,
that very much against her wishes her late husband had sometimes
used it as manure—though she had never discovered how he
procured it.
As to the osiers—she allowed that she had bought a bundle from the
plaintiff's daughter; but that it was for no sinister purpose she was
able conclusively to prove. For she summoned various witnesses—
among others the midwife from the village, who was always called in
in cases of sickness—who had been present during the last hours of
the farmer, and who had been present during the last hours of the
farmer, and who all of them swore that his death had been a painless
one. And various physicians, who were summoned as expert
witnesses, all maintained that the victim of the poisonous sap of
osiers always died in agony.
Then she turned the tables on the plaintiff. She proved that Diggory's
dismissal had been neither sudden nor unjust; for, owing to his
thieving propensities, he had often been threatened with it by her
late husband, and several of the farm-servants testified to the truth of
her words.
As to the handful of florins and the sack of lentils, all she could say
was that it was not like the farmer to load a dishonest servant with
presents. But nothing had been said about two sacks of corn, a pig,
and a valuable hen and her brood, which had disappeared
simultaneously with the departure of the plaintiff. Her husband, she
said, had been very angry about it, and had wanted to have Diggory
pursued and clapped into gaol; but she had persuaded him to be
merciful. The long and the short of it was that the widow left the court
without a stain on her character, and that a ten years' sentence for
theft was passed on Diggory.
As for Christopher Pugwalker, he had disappeared shortly before the
trial, and the widow denied all knowledge of his whereabouts.
 CHAPTER XVII
THE WORLD-IN-LAW
"Well," said Master Ambrose, as he laid down the volume, "the
woman was clearly as innocent as you are. And I should very much
like to know what bearing the case has upon the present crisis."
Master Nathaniel drew up his chair close to his friend's and said in a
low voice, as if he feared an invisible listener, "Ambrose, do you
remember how you startled Leer with your question as to whether
the dead could bleed?"
"I'm not likely to forget it," said Master Ambrose, with an angry laugh.
"That was all explained the night before last in the Fields of
Grammary."
"Yes, but supposing he had been thinking of something else—not of
fairy fruit. What if Endymion Leer and Christopher Pugwalker were
one and the same?"
"Well, I don't see the slightest reason for thinking so. But even if they
were—what good would it do us?"
"Because I have an instinct that hidden in that old case is a good
honest hempen rope, too strong for all the gossamer threads of
Fairie."
"You mean that we can get the rascal hanged? By the Harvest of
Souls, you're an optimist, Nat. If ever a fellow died quietly in his bed
from natural causes, it was that fellow Gibberty. But, for all that,
there's no reason to lie down under the outrageous practical joke
that was played off on you yesterday. By my Great-aunt's Rump, I
thought Polydore and the rest of them had more sense than to be
taken in by such tomfoolery. But the truth of it is that that villain Leer
can make them believe what he chooses."
"Exactly!" cried Master Nathaniel eagerly. "The original meaning of
Fairie is supposed to be delusion. They can juggle with appearances
—we have seen them at it in that tapestry-room. How are we to
make any stand against an enemy with such powers behind him?"
"You don't mean that you are going to lie down under it, Nat?" cried
Master Ambrose indignantly.
"Not ultimately—but for a time I must be like the mole and work in
secret. And now I want you to listen to me, Ambrose, and not scold
me for what you call wandering from the point and being prosy. Will
you listen to me?"
"Well, yes, if you've got anything sensible to say," said Master
Ambrose grudgingly.
"Here goes, then! What do you suppose the Law was invented for,
Ambrose?"
"What was the Law invented for? What are you driving at, Nat? I
suppose it was invented to prevent rapine, and robbery, and murder,
and all that sort of thing."
"But you remember what my father said about the Law being man's
substitute for fairy fruit? Fairy things are all of them supposed to be
shadowy cheats—delusion. But man can't live without delusion, so
he creates for himself another form of delusion—the world-in-law,
subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with
facts to his heart's content, and says, 'If I choose I shall make a man
old enough to be my father my son, and if I choose I shall turn fruit
into silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself,
and here I am master.' And he creates a monster to inhabit it—the
man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly
as he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than
are the fairies."
For the life of him, Master Ambrose could not suppress a grunt of
impatience. But he was a man of his word, so he refrained from
further interruption.
"Beyond the borders of the world-in-law," continued Master
Nathaniel, "that is to say, the world as we choose for our
convenience that it should appear, there is delusion—or reality. And
the people who live there are as safe from our clutches as if they
lived on another planet. No, Ambrose, you needn't purse up your lips
like that ... everything I've been saying is to be found more or less in
my father's writings, and nobody ever thought him fantastic—
probably because they never took the trouble to read his books. I
must confess I never did myself till just the other day."
As he spoke he glanced up at the portrait of the late Master Josiah,
taken in the very arm-chair he, Nathaniel, was at that very moment
sitting in, and following his son's every movement with a sly, legal
smile. No, there had certainly been nothing fantastic about Master
Josiah.
And yet ... there was something not altogether human about these
bright bird-like eyes and that very pointed chin. Had Master Josiah
also heard the Note ... and fled from it to the world-in-law?
Then he went on: "But what I'm going to say now is my own idea.
Supposing that everything that happens on the one planet, the
planet that we call Delusion, reacts on the other planet; that is to say,
the world as we choose to see it, the world-in-law? No, no, Ambrose!
You promised to hear me out!" (For it was clear that Master Ambrose
was getting restive.) "Supposing then, that one planet reacts on the
other, but that these reactions are translated, as it were, into the
terms of the other? To take an example, supposing that what on one
planet is a spiritual sin should turn on the other into a felony? That
what in the world of delusion are hands stained with fairy fruit should,
in the world-in-law, turn into hands stained with human blood? In
short, that Endymion Leer should turn into Christopher Pugwalker?"
Master Ambrose's impatience had changed to real alarm. He greatly
feared that Nathaniel's brain had been unhinged by his recent
misfortunes. Master Nathaniel burst out laughing: "I believe you think
I've gone off my head, Brosie—but I've not, I promise you. In plain
language, unless we can find that this fellow Leer has been guilty of
something in the eye of the Law he'll go on triumphing over us and
laughing at us in his sleeve and ruining our country for our children
till, finally, all the Senate, except you and me, follows his funeral
procession, with weeping and wailing, to the Fields of Grammary. It's
our one hope of getting even with him, Brosie. Otherwise, we might
as soon hope to catch a dream and put it in a cage."
"Well, according to your ideas of the Law, Nat, it shouldn't be too
difficult," said Master Ambrose drily. "You seem to consider that in
what you call the world-in-law one does as one likes with facts—
launch a new legal fiction, then, according to which, for your own
particular convenience, Endymion Leer is for the future Christopher
Pugwalker."
Master Nathaniel laughed: "I'm in hopes we can prove it without legal
fiction," he said. "The widow Gibberty's trial took place thirty-six
years ago, four years after the great drought, when, as Marigold has
discovered, Leer was in Dorimare, though he has always given us to
understand that he did not arrive till considerably later ... and the
reason would be obvious if he left as Pugwalker, and returned as
Leer. Also, we know that he is intimate with the widow Gibberty.
Pugwalker was a herbalist; so is Leer. And then there is the fright
you gave him with your question, 'Do the dead bleed?' Nothing will
make me believe that that question immediately suggested to him
the mock funeral and the coffin with fairy fruit ... he might think of that
on second thoughts, not right away. No, no, I hope to be able to
convince you, and before very long, that I am right in this matter, as I
was in the other—it's our one hope, Ambrose."
"Well, Nat," said Master Ambrose, "though you talk more nonsense
in half an hour than most people do in a lifetime, I've been coming to
the conclusion that you're not such a fool as you look—and, after all,
in Hempie's old story it was the village idiot who put salt on the
dragon's tail."
Master Nathaniel laughed, quite pleased by this equivocal
compliment—it was so rarely that Ambrose paid one a compliment at
all.
"Well," continued Master Ambrose, "and how are you going to set
about launching your legal fiction, eh?"
"Oh, I'll try and get in touch with some of the witnesses in the trial—
Diggory Carp himself may turn out to be still alive. At any rate, it will
give me something to do, and Lud's no place for me just now."
Master Ambrose groaned: "Has it really come to this, Nat, that you
have to leave Lud, and that we can do nothing against this ... this ...
this cobweb of lies and buffoonery and ... well, delusion, if you like? I
can tell you, I haven't spared Polydore and the rest of them the
rough side of my tongue—but it's as if that fellow Leer had cast a
spell on them."
"But we'll break the spell, by the Golden Apples of the West, we'll
break it, Ambrose!" cried Master Nathaniel buoyantly; "we'll dredge
the shadows with the net of the Law, and Leer shall end on the
gallows, or my name's not Chanticleer!"
"Well," said Master Ambrose, "seeing you've got this bee in your
bonnet about Leer you might like a little souvenir of him; it's the
embroidered slipper I took from that gibbering criminal old woman's
parlour, and now that her affair is settled there's no more use for it."
(The variety of "silk" found in the Academy had finally been decided
to be part "barratine tuftaffity" and part "figured mohair," and Miss
Primrose had been heavily fined and set at liberty.) "I told you how
the sight of it made him jump, and though the reason is obvious
enough—he thought it was fairy fruit—it seems to take so little to set
your brain romancing there's no telling what you mayn't discover
from it! I'll have it sent over to you tonight."
"You're very kind, Ambrose. I'm sure it will be most valuable," said
Master Nathaniel ironically.
During Miss Primrose's trial the slipper had from time to time been
handed round among the judges, without its helping them in the
slightest in the delicate distinctions they were drawing between
tuftaffity and mohair. In Master Nathaniel it had aroused a vague
sense of boredom and embarrassment, for it suggested a long series
of birthday presents from Prunella that had put him to the
inconvenience of pumping up adequate expressions of gratitude and
admiration. He had little hope of being able to extricate any useful
information from that slipper—still, Ambrose must have his joke.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Master Nathaniel
rose to his feet and said, "This may be a long business, Ambrose,
and we may not have an opportunity for another talk. Shall we
pledge each other in wild thyme gin?"
"I'm not the man to refuse your wild-thyme gin, Nat. And you don't
often give one a chance of tasting it, you old miser," said Master
Ambrose, trying to mask his emotion with facetiousness. When he
had been given a glass filled with the perfumed grass-green syrup,
he raised it, and smiling at Master Nathaniel, began, "Well, Nat...."
"Stop a minute, Ambrose!" interrupted Master Nathaniel. "I've got a
sudden silly whim that we must should take an oath I must have read
when I was a youngster in some old book ... the words have
suddenly come back to me. They go like this: 'We' (and then we say
our own names), 'Nathaniel Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle,
swear by the Living and the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by
Memories and Hopes, that if a Vision comes begging at our door we
will take it in and warm it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser
than the foolish nor more cunning than the simple, and that we will
remember that he who rides the Wind needs must go where his
Steed carries him.' Say it after me, Ambrose."
"By the White Ladies of the Fields, never in my life have I heard such
fustian!" grumbled Master Ambrose.
But Nat seemed to have set his heart on this absurd ceremony, and
Master Ambrose felt that the least he could do was to humour him,
for who could say what the future held in store and when they might
meet again. So, in a protesting and excessively matter-of-fact voice,
he repeated after him the words of the oath.
When, and in what book had Master Nathaniel found it? For it was
the vow taken by the candidates for initiation into the first degree of
the ancient Mysteries of Dorimare.
Do not forget that, in the eye of the Law, Master Nathaniel was a
dead man.
 CHAPTER XVIII
MISTRESS IVY PEPPERCORN
The tasks assigned to the clerks in Master Nathaniel's counting-
house did not always concern cargoes and tonnage. For instance,
once for two whole days they had not opened a ledger, but had been
kept busy, under their employer's supervision, in cutting out and
pinning together fantastic paper costumes to be worn at Ranulph's
birthday party. And they were quite accustomed to his shutting
himself into his private office, with strict injunctions that he was not to
be disturbed, while he wrote, say, a comic valentine to old Dame
Polly Pyepowders, popping his head frequently round the door to
demand their help in finding a rhyme. So they were not surprised
that morning when told to close their books and to devote their
talents to discovering, by whatever means they chose, whether there
were any relations living in Lud of a west country farmer called
Gibberty who had died nearly forty years ago.
Great was Master Nathaniel's satisfaction when one of them
returned from his quest with the information that the late farmer's
widowed daughter, Mistress Ivy Peppercorn, had recently bought a
small grocer's shop in Mothgreen, a village that lay a couple of miles
beyond the north gate.
There was no time to be lost, so Master Nathaniel ordered his horse,
put on the suit of fustian he wore for fishing, pulled his hat well down
over his eyes, and set off for Mothgreen.
Once there, he had no difficulty in finding Mistress Ivy's little shop,
and she herself was sitting behind the counter.
She was a comely, apple-cheeked woman of middle age, who
looked as if she would be more in her element among cows and
meadows than in a stuffy little shop, redolent of the various
necessities and luxuries of a village community.
She seemed of a cheerful, chatty disposition, and Master Nathaniel
punctuated his various purchases with quips and cranks and friendly
questions.
By the time she had weighed him out two ounces of snuff and done
them up in a neat little paper poke she had told him that her maiden
name had been Gibberty, and that her late husband had been a
ship's captain, and she had lived till his death in the seaport town. By
the time she had provided him with a quarter of lollipops, he knew
that she much preferred a country life to trade. And by the time a
woolen muffler had been admired, purchased and done up in a
parcel, she had informed him that she would have liked to have
settled in the neighbourhood of her old home, but—there were
reasons.
What these reasons were took time, tact and patience to discover.
But never had Master Nathaniel's wistful inquisitiveness,
masquerading as warm-hearted sympathy, stood him in better stead.
And she finally admitted that she had a stepmother whom she
detested, and whom, moreover, she had good reason to distrust.
At this point Master Nathaniel considered he might begin to show his
hand. He gave her a meaning glance; and asked her if she would
like to see justice done and rascals getting their deserts, adding,
"There's no more foolish proverb than the one which says that dead
men tell no tales. To help dead men to find their tongues is one of
the chief uses of the Law."
Mistress Ivy looked a little scared. "Who may you be, sir, please?"
she asked timidly.
"I'm the nephew of a farmer who once employed a labourer called
Diggory Carp," he answered promptly.
A smile of enlightenment broke over her face.
"Well, who would have thought it!" she murmured. "And what may
your uncle's name have been? I used to know all the farmers and
their families round our part."
There was a twinkle in Master Nathaniel's candid hazel eyes: "I
doubt I've been too sharp and cut myself!" he laughed. "You see, I've
worked for the magistrates, and that gets one into the habit of setting
traps for folk ... the Law's a wily lady. I've no uncle in the West, and I
never knew Diggory Carp. But I've always taken an interest in crime
and enjoyed reading the old trials. So when you said your name had
been Gibberty my mind at once flew back to a certain trial that had
always puzzled me, and I thought perhaps, the name Diggory Carp
might unlock your tongue. I've always felt there was more behind
that trial than met the eye."
"Did you indeed?" said Mistress Ivy evasively. "You seem mighty
interested in other folks' affairs," and she looked at him rather
suspiciously.
This put Master Nathaniel on his mettle. "Now, hark'ee, Mistress Ivy,
I'm sure your father took a pleasure in looking at a fine crop, even if
it was in another man's field, and that your husband liked good
seamanship...."
And here he had to break off his dissertation and listen, which he did
very patiently, to a series of reminiscences about the tastes and
habits of her late husband.
"Well, as I was saying," he went on, when she paused for a moment
to sigh, and smile and wipe her eyes with the corner of her apron,
"what the sight of a field filled to the brim with golden wheat was to
your father, and that of a ship skilfully piloted into harbour was to
your husband, the sight of Justice crouching and springing on her
prey is to me. I'm a bachelor, and I've managed to put by a
comfortable little nest-egg, and there's nothing I'd like to spend it on
better than in preventing Justice being balked of her lawful prey, not
to mention helping to avenge a fine fellow like your father. We old
bachelors, you know, have our hobbies ... they're quieter about the
house than a crowd of brats, but they're sometimes quite as
expensive," and he chuckled and rubbed his hands.
He was thoroughly enjoying himself, and seemed actually to have
become the shrewd, honest, and somewhat bloodthirsty old fellow
he had created. His eyes shone with the light of fanaticism when he
spoke of Justice, the tiger; and he could picture the snug little house
he lived in in Lud—it had a little garden gay with flowers, and a tiny
lawn, and espalier fruit trees, to the care of which he dedicated his
leisure hours. And he had a dog, and a canary, and an old
housekeeper. Probably, when he got home tonight, he would sit
down to a supper of sausages and mashed, followed by a toasted
cheese. And then, when he had finished his supper, he would get out
his collection of patibulary treasures, and over a bowl of negus finger
lovingly the various bits of gallows rope, the blood-stained glove of a
murdered strumpet, the piece of amber worn as a charm by a
notorious brigand chief, and gloat over the stealthy steps of his pet
tiger, the Law. Yes, his obscure little life was as gay with hobbies as
his garden was with flowers. How comfortable were other men's
shoes!
"Well, if what you mean," said Mistress Ivy, "is that you'd like to help
punish wicked people, why, I wouldn't mind lending a hand myself.
All the same," and again she looked at him suspiciously, "what
makes you think my father didn't come by a natural death?"
"My nose, good lady, my nose!" and, as he spoke, he laid a knowing
finger alongside the said organ. "I smelt blood. Didn't it say in the
trial that the corpse bled?"
She bridled, and cried scornfully, "And you, to be town-bred, too, and
an educated man from the look of you, to go believing that vulgar
talk! You know what country people are, setting everything that
happens to the tunes of old songs. It was two drops of blood when
the story was told in the tavern at Swan, and by the time it had
reached Moongrass it was a gallon. I walked past the corpse with the
others, and I can't say I noticed any blood—but, then, my eyes were
all swelled with crying. All the same, it's what made Pugwalker leave
the country."
"Indeed?" cried Master Nathaniel, and his voice was very eager.
"Yes. My stepmother was never the kind to be saucy with—though I
had no cause to love her, I must say she looked like a queen, but he
was a foreigner and a little bit of a chap, and the boys in the village
and all round gave him no peace, jumping out at him from behind
hedges and chasing him down the street, shouting, 'Who made the
corpse of Farmer Gibberty bleed?' and such like. And he just couldn't
stand it, and slipped off one night, and I never thought to see him
again. But I've seen him in the streets of Lud, and not long ago too—
though he didn't see me."
Master Nathaniel's heart was thumping with excitement. "What is he
like?" he asked breathlessly.
"Oh! very like what he was as a young man. They say there's
nothing keeps you young like a good conscience!" and she laughed
drily. "Not that he was ever much to look at—squat and tubby and
freckled, and such saucy prying eyes!"
Master Nathaniel could contain himself no longer, and in a voice
hoarse with excitement he cried, "Was it ... do you mean the Lud
doctor, Endymion Leer?"
Mistress Ivy pursed up her mouth and nodded meaningfully.
"Yes, that's what he calls himself now ... and many folks set such
store by him as a doctor, that, to hear them talk, one would think a
baby wasn't properly born unless he'd brought it into the world, nor a
man properly dead unless he'd closed his eyes."
"Yes, yes. But are you sure he is the same as Christopher
Pugwalker? Could you swear to him in court?" cried Master
Nathaniel eagerly.
Mistress Ivy looked puzzled. "What good would it do to swear at
him?" she asked doubtfully. "I must say I never held with foul
language in a woman's mouth, nor did my poor Peppercorn—for all
that he was a sailor."
"No, no!" cried Master Nathaniel impatiently, and proceeded to
explain to her the meaning of the expression. She dimpled a little at
her own blunder, and then said guardedly, "And what would bring me
into the law courts, I should like to know? The past is over and done
with, and what is done can't be undone."
Master Nathaniel fixed her with a searching gaze, and, forgetting his
assumed character, spoke as himself.
"Mistress Peppercorn," he said solemnly, "have you no pity for the
dead, the dumb, helpless dead? You loved your father, I am sure.
When a word from you might help to avenge him, are you going to
leave that word unsaid? Who can say that the dead are not grateful
for the loving thoughts of the living, and that they do not rest more
quietly in their graves when they have been avenged? Have you no
time or pity left for your dead father?"
During this speech Mistress Ivy's face had begun working, and at the
last words she burst into sobs. "Don't think that, sir," she gasped;
"don't think that! I remember well how my poor father used to sit
looking at her of an evening, not a word passing his lips, but his eyes
saying as clearly as if it had been his tongue, 'No, Clem,' (for my
stepmother's name was Clementine), 'I don't trust you no further than
I see you, but, for all that, you can turn me round your little finger,
because I'm a silly, besotted old fool, and we both know it.' Oh! I've
always said that my poor father had both his eyes wide open, in spite
of him being the slave of her pretty face. It was not that he didn't see,
or couldn't see—what he lacked was the heart to speak out."
"Poor fellow! And now, Mistress Ivy, I think you should tell me all you
know and what it is that makes you think that, in spite of the medical
evidence to the contrary, your father was murdered," and he planted
his elbows on the counter and looked at her squarely in the face.
But Mistress Ivy trimmed. "I didn't say that poor father was poisoned
with osiers. He died quiet and peaceful, father did."
"All the same, you think there was foul play. I am not entirely
disinterested in this matter, now that I know Dr. Leer is connected
with it. I happen to bear him a grudge."
First Mistress Ivy shut the door on to the street, and then leant over
the counter, so that her face was close to his, and said in a low
voice: "Why, yes, I always did think there had been foul play, and I'll
tell you why. Just before my father died we'd been making jam. And
one of poor father's funny little ways was to like the scum of jam or
jelly, and we used to keep some of every boiling in a saucer for him.
Well, my own little brother Robin, and her little girl—a little tot of
three—were buzzing round the fruit and sugar like a pair of little