Mr Memory is up on stage. He’s demonstrating his superpower, with his sidekick asking the audience to ask him questions. Go on, test him. General knowledge, history, geography, sporting records and trivia, livestock management… the sort of stuff that has now migrated from the Music Hall to the television game show. Who doesn’t love a quiz?
Mr Memory knows absolutely everything.
And then a member of the audience shouts: “Who won the Derby in 1936?”
Laughter.
Then Mr Memory: “Come back in 1937 and I’ll tell you.”
Study of Mahmoud by Alfred Munnings
This gave me what I thought was a neat way of making an evocative point about the ephemeral nature of the cinema. The ephemeral nature of film, I should say. And obviously this is central to the underlying point I wanted to make about celluloid.
Sotheby's auction catalogue, January 2020
The film’s official national distribution date was 25 November 1935 but there had been previews in September and there was a press and trade premier on 6 June 1935 (strangely enough, a matter of days after the 1935 Derby). The 1936 Derby was run on Wednesday 27 May 1936. So we’ll be generous and say that the joke, the comic little exchange between Mr Memory and a member of his audience, had a shelf life of ten days short of a year.
After that, everybody knew the name of the winner of the 1936 Derby. Until of course they forgot. To be superseded by those who never knew.
But that’s by the by. In a sense, the film itself had an expiry date of 27 May 1936.
Which might tend to suggest that, where his life’s work was concerned, Hitchcock had no conception of immortality. He thought his films were disposable, perishable consumer products.
Unless… Maybe this is actually a bit of a time-loop, an eddy in the seemingly smooth surface of things. Maybe he’s toying with us. Maybe he knew full well that his films would survive, he’s just being cute and sardonic about this notion. In effect (to make this personal), he’s forestalling my quest, mocking it even, undermining its validity before it has even begun.
Anyway. Neither Mr Memory nor Alfred Hitchcock could have known that the 1936 running of the Epsom Derby would turn out to be one of the most memorable in its whole history.
Or that it would inspire arguably the greatest painting in sporting art, Mahmoud Being Saddled for the Derby by Alfred Munnings.
By sheer happenstance, a study for this painting came up for auction while I was writing Saddling Mahmoud.
So obviously I started researching the painting and one of the first interesting nuggets I stumbled upon was the fact that it had inspired a British commemorative postage stamp in 1979; and eventually, thanks to a philatelic bureau on The Strand, I managed to acquire one such in mint condition.
Which prompted me to do even more research and I set out (on the flimsiest of pretexts: we’re in real meta territory here) to contact the owner of the painting, who just happened to be the wife of the man who’d bought Mahmoud from the Aga Khan in 1940. I also managed to track down relatives of the Aga Khan’s stable-hands who helped train and prepare the horse in 1936. All of this, I happily concede, adds up to a confession of mania verging on mental illness, but there you have it.
These are other stories for another time.
I just wanted to say, really, that the 1936 Derby business may well be the sort of metaphysical conceit that raises the frivolous yarn into your genuine work of art. The aesthetic theory I’ve been working on for decades (I will never, I realise, form it fully) is that a narrative becomes a work of transcendent genius when it succeeds in living in (and making you superabundantly aware of) the membrane that separates the past from the future. But, again, that’s another story for another time.
When exactly? Well… I forget.
Marylou Whitney in her prime: did I really write to her? I can't recall.
