Some unimaginative commentators think of Merchant Ivory Pictures as an unexciting enterprise devoted to “heritage pictures” burdened with sentimentalized narratives and reactionary esthetics. They are wrong. Of course, the company’s principal talents—director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—and their shifting array of collaborators have generated occasional misfires during more than four decades of creative activity, but nearly all of their work embodies three core values I’ve always applauded them for upholding: it is thoughtful, it is civilized, and, above all, it is literate. This goes for the movies centered on Merchant’s native India, such as Shakespeare-Wallah (1965) and The Guru (1969), and for their celebrated adaptations of classic novels, such as E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1992) and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (2000), and for their portraits of modern American life, such as Roseland (1977), from Jhabvala’s original story, and A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998), based on Kaylie Jones’s memoir of life with James Jones, her famous and cantankerous father. As for reactionary attitudes, skeptics should have a look at the sexual antics in The Wild Party (1975), the lesbian overtones of The Bostonians (1984), the capering male nudes in A Room with a View (1985), and the same-sex smooching in Maurice (1987), a movie with gay sympathies at its very heart. The treatment of sexual themes in the company’s films is usually subtle and reserved, but this accords with the periods, places, and sources of the stories they are telling; they have never worshiped at the shrine of “good taste” for its own sake, as do so many pictures that actually are steeped in the tradition of picturesque heritage productions. In a video interview for a recent Blu-ray edition of The Bostonians (1984), Ivory maintained that the whole body of his work is marked by a “subversive” streak, and while that’s an exaggeration, the movies are more complex and sophisticated than lazy critics often recognize.
The impressive range and overall quality of Ivory’s films testify to his own complexity and sophistication as a person and an artist, and if there is any question as to the vigor of his sexuality, it is (so to speak) laid to rest by Solid Ivory, his consistently engaging and surprisingly candid memoir, named after a “little comedy routine” he performed as a teenager at high-school assemblies in Klamath Falls, Oregon, the town where he grew up. The book is about far more than sex and sexuality, but sharing the pleasures of very active sex life is high on Ivory’s agenda. I say its frankness is surprising because during most of his career his remarks about such matters have been reticent and reserved; in bygone years I moderated quite a few onstage dialogues with him and Merchant, and even when discussing an outspokenly gay film like Maurice they never chose to connect the material on the screen with their private lives off the screen, notwithstanding the fact that their decades-long history as a couple was a thoroughly open secret. In the aforementioned video interview, Ivory attributes his restraint to consideration for Merchant during his lifetime, saying that many of Ismail’s compatriots in India would never have understood or perhaps tolerated his homosexual identity. I’m skeptical about this statement, since if all interested parties in the United States took the longtime intimacy of Jim and Ismail as a matter of course, it’s unlikely that Merchant’s peers in the South Asian community would have been especially startled or scandalized by it. It’s more probable that the discretion of both filmmakers was motivated less by worries about censure than by the taste for dignity and diplomacy that characterizes their films.
Different policies apply in the memoir department, however, and a volume with a sizable chapter called “Queer as Jack’s Hatband” is clearly not interested in artful circumlocution. The book tells of Ivory’s early crushes on boys he found handsome and stylish—he himself was voted Most Stylish in his 1946 high-school yearbook, although Most Witty was the title he wanted—and of his predilection for “star qualities” in friends he had as a youth as well as performers he prized as an adult. On the negative side, recalling college life at the University of Oregon leads him to say that he has “rarely mixed well in large groups of gregarious men,” feeling “excluded from their physicality, expressed most often in roughhouse or sports,” and here his sensibility comports well with the tony esthetics of his filmmaking. Throughout the memoir he pursues a healthy array of recollections large and small: childhood experiences, his parents’ unselfconscious approach to nudity, a visit to a prostitute with a group of collegians who never learned he was as much a virgin after the encounter as before it, and much more, including all manner of male friendships, some energetically sexual, others platonic, and a few intriguingly in between.
For cinephiles, the most compelling parts of the memoir will be those focused on Ivory’s filmmaking career, and while a great deal of that is spelled out, readers must connect the dots between episodes scattered through a largely discontinuous narrative. Connecting those dots is a pleasure, even though Ivory is no completist, preferring the contingencies of free association to the logic of linear reconstruction; this is very much a meandering memoir, not a formal autobiography. A long section comprises verbal portraits of friends and collaborators—among them are Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sontag, Kenneth Clark, Bruce Chatwin, and Lillian Ross, who merits two chapters—with sketches of Jhabvala and Merchant closing things off. For me, the most unexpected aspect of the book is Ismail’s relatively small presence. His death at age 68, after surgery for abdominal ulcers in 2005, was obviously a key event in Ivory’s life and a turning point in his work. More about Merchant, and about their hugely productive personal and professional relationship, would have been welcome.
Much of the fun in Solid Ivory comes from comments that seem offhand but are richly colorful. In an anecdote that draws a fascinating contrast with his own movies, Ivory recalls a childhood viewing of a newsreel in which a heavy statue was dropped onto a mob, and speculates that this may have inspired his lifelong “love of disaster movies, with all their disorder, physical destruction, and mass annihilation.” The chapter on George Cukor, a great director and erstwhile benefactor who facilitated Ivory’s early career, depicts him years later as a crank who enlivens a meeting in the late 1970s by ranting that “agents, lawyers, writers – all were best consigned to a special Fucking Hell,” spewing this as he sat in “a sort of vexed heap” and revealed his hatred of a Hollywood where “all the beauty had gone, and where everything and everyone was ugly.” (Paradoxically enough, Cukor overcame his loathing and did a bit more Hollywood directing before his death in 1983.) Recalling a chance encounter with Pauline Kael before she had reviewed any of his films, Ivory remembers having “friendly, even hopeful, feelings about her,” and leaves us to imagine what happened later. On the subject of criticism writ large, Ivory tells an acquaintance that “all critics [are] a lesser form of life.” And in a passage that does link the personal and the professional, he waxes quite eloquent: “If you are a very restless, energetic, and physically active male, you make a film that has those qualities naturally. Ismail’s best scenes [in his occasional work as a director] reflect that side of him. If, on the other hand, you are relaxed, easygoing, and comfort seeking, are happiest when lolling about without a single thought in your head – or with perhaps many thoughts in your head, all more or less of equal importance, then maybe your films – that is, my films – naturally reflect those qualities.”
Solid Ivory shows that this very solid filmmaker has many, many thoughts in his head, and well into his nineties he continues to work, mainly as a writer and producer. His memoir, some portions of which have appeared in other forms in books and periodicals, is an engaging, generously illustrated addendum to a career that has made unique and irreplaceable contributions to modern cinema. It is worth the attention of every cinephile.