The Servant: a 60s masterwork that hides its homosexuality
in the shadows
Joseph Losey's superb 1963 film about class and sex is once
again in cinemas – but to locate its elusive gay gene, you have to revisit its
source in Robin Maugham's extraordinary and disturbing novella
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Wed 27 Mar 2013 16.21 GMT First published on Wed 27 Mar 2013
16.21 GMT
Homosexuality is everywhere and nowhere in The Servant.
Harold Pinter's superbly controlled, elliptical, menacing dialogue is able to
hint, to imply, to seduce, to repulse, in precisely the manner that gay men
were forced to adopt in 1963, when homosexuality was still a criminal offence,
and when representing homosexuality on screen was forbidden. To locate the gay
gene in The Servant, you have to go back to its source, the 1948 novella
written by Robin Maugham, the nephew of W Somerset Maugham. The Servant has its
spark in an extraordinary event in Maugham's own life, to be treasured by
connoisseurs of British sex and class.
Maugham had rented a house, which came with its own servant,
a man who unnerved him by gliding about almost invisibly. One evening, Maugham
went on a date with Mary Soames, the daughter of Winston Churchill. He took her
back to his flat and she asked for a drink: a cold lager from the fridge, as
opposed to warm ale. (Interestingly, this drink recurs in the movie, but not
the novel.) The fridge was just next to the manservant's room in the basement,
the door of which was open; Maugham glanced in and saw a naked teenage boy on
the bed. The servant appeared from nowhere and said in his odd drawl: "I
see you are admiring my young nephew, sahr. Would you like me to send him up to
you to say goodnight, sahr?" Maugham pretended he hadn't heard and simply
went away without replying.
The trap was plainly set for blackmail – financial or moral,
or both. In the book, of course, Maugham heterosexualises the trap. Barrett
brings in a young woman he describes as his "niece"; in the film it
is his sister, and the misplaced suspicion of incest between Barrett and Vera
becomes the "unnatural" act. It is a woman who seduces Tony. But it
is Barrett who is pulling the strings. It is Barrett who effects the seduction
at one remove, in the hope that he can use this as leverage over the master. In
the film, it is as much about power as pleasure, but this manipulation is
replete with sexuality.
Maugham's book is far more candid about the homosexual act.
He has a character, Richard Merton, who does not appear in the film: a
concerned friend of Tony who is the narrator (Maugham even implies that it is
their relationship that is the bond of true love). Merton asks Tony outright if
he and Barrett have sex, and Tony laughingly denies it, though without being
offended or shocked. His passions are to become centred on Vera, who is
absurdly and rather naively depicted as a nymphomaniac. But students of
linguistic history might be interested in the use of the word "gay"
in the book. After Barrett's redecoration, Tony's "chairs had been covered
in a gay yellow chintz". Tony is asked by his friend if he is at heart a
roving bachelor or a "gay wolf". "Moderately gay" is how Tony
replies. The word did not yet mean "homosexual" but is in the process
of transition. Harold Pinter avoids it entirely. His movie is about more than
sex.
What did audiences make of this extraordinary, disturbing
and compelling story? They may well have been alive to its literary echoes.
Everyone adored PG Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster. They understood how Jeeves
had the upper hand. But Jeeves was entirely benign and discreet. He knew his
place. JM Barrie's play The Admirable Crichton showed a butler taking power
because he is the only one with practical knowhow when his aristocratic
employers are shipwrecked with him on a desert island: but the status quo is
ultimately restored.
Insidious and insinuating, Barrett is more like a subtler
Uriah Heep, and in their claustrophobia and hysteria, Tony and Barrett have
something of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or perhaps Lord Henry Wootton and Dorian
Gray, or even Edward II and Gaveston in Christopher Marlowe's play.
As far as movies go, Joseph Losey's previous film with Dirk
Bogarde had a similar cuckoo-in-the-nest theme. The Sleeping Tiger (1954)
starred Bogarde as Frank, a criminal who is invited by a trendy psychotherapist
to come and live in the family house, believing that a stable environment will
help him. Frank makes himself at home and begins an affair with the therapist's
troubled wife. In later years, when live-in servants are less common, parallels
with The Servant are less common also, but there is Curtis Hanson's The Hand
That Rocks the Cradle (1992) featuring Rebecca De Mornay as the nanny who tries
to take over the household. And a mention should go to Tinge Krishnan's
social-realist drama Junkhearts (2011), which features Eddie Marsan as the
ex-soldier who befriends a young homeless teen and gives her a platonic bed for
the night in his council flat, only to discover she wants to bring in her
boyfriend, who has been planning from the outset to take over his property.
Even in context, however, The Servant looks unique: its
formal, theatrical elegance, combined with the ugliness of its emotions and
fears, looks sharper and fiercer than ever. With its dark shadows, and faces
distorted in convex mirrors, it looks like a scary movie, which is what it is.
In Britain in 2013, even with Old Etonians in charge, the master/servant
dialogue of 50 years ago seems impossibly arrogant. It was not unusual for
instructions to be brusque, and the word "please" to be avoided, and
a sentence rounded off with a curt "… would you?" And so the servant
classes might well take refuge in an enigmatic mask, or take revenge with
little gestures of pique or cheek, and generally store up resentment. In
Britain the rhetoric of class, like that of sex, was largely in code. This is
what the outsider Losey orchestrates, what Pinter writes and what Bogarde
embodies.
• This is an edited extract from Peter Bradshaw's essay on
The Servant included in the film's DVD booklet. The Servant is out now in
cinemas, and will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on 8 April.
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