By John Hodgen
Art by Sage Kerrigan-Christ

There is no poet in The English Patient. Not a single one. And the patient isn’t English. And there is only one bodice ripped, though it is readily repaired by the penitent ripper. There’s a Canadian nurse who believes with good reason that everyone she ever loves is doomed to die. There’s a sapper from a bomb disposal squad who blows up and one who doesn’t. There’s a thief and morphine-addicted spy everyone calls Caravaggio whose thumbs are cut off and who blames a Hungarian count. And there is an English pilot’s wife who engages in a torrid and doomed affair with the Hungarian count who ultimately becomes the titular English patient. And still, there is no poet. Not one. 

And yet there is, and her name is Katharine Clifton, and she has no idea she’s a poet, but she embodies one and may be the best representation of a poet to appear in a major motion picture that somehow thinks it’s a poem as well. Katharine is a change agent, a newly and already badly married woman dropped in out of the pre-war skies over Cairo to move within a group of men who represent the British Royal Geographic Society but call themselves, somewhat poetically, the International Sand Club. She seems as out of place as a poet among mapmakers, but she’ll transform them all.  Nothing is ever quite what it seems in this film. Transference is all. A great war is coming peopled by lovers and traitors and fools. And Katharine is Circe but a Circe of true love whose childhood best friend has become her husband who now calls her “Sausage” and defends the word “uxoriousness,” to explain over-worshipping a wife. Then she engages with Count Lazlo Almasy, who worships his aloneness and history, especially that of his beloved Herodotus in his battered leather-bound book, and who does not worship wives until he meets her. That transference of allegiances, that dramatic awakening is what poems often aim for and what movies that want to be poems aim for as well. It works best if the author of The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, is more often a poet than a novelist. Anthony Minghella, the screenwriter and director, is also a poet, a visual one, line after line of the film filled with imagistic figures of speech, charged and charred language, parallel characters, interwoven stories and countries, and even the Arabic names for the winds of Egypt and the parts of the body for which there can never be enough names. 

How an international best-selling novel becomes a screenplay which becomes an Academy Award Best Picture winner while also insisting upon transforming itself into a poem is the heady stuff of unanticipated dreams and collaborative artistry. The English Patient more than anything else seems to become a poem by the end. Consider Minghella’s opening scene fusing cinematography, music, dialogue, and action at the front end of the film which also ends up serving as foreshadowing for the very last scene in the film. Consider how it all becomes one.  

From the air in an old British Royal Geographic Society biplane the Sahara Desert looks like “an ocean of dunes” to Minghella with the shadow of the plane appearing to be swimming over “the contours of the land.” The late afternoon sun forms multi-colored shadows ranging from sepia to crimson to black suggesting lines written on an ancient page while also resembling “bodies pressed together.” Add the “Szerelem, szerelem” of a Hungarian folk song, the words meaning “Love, lost love,” and one will have the makings of a poem about the beauty of a desert resembling an ocean that exists for the love of the gods. The scene is being shot from above as if from the view of those gods when desert flight nearly a hundred years ago must have stunned anyone and everyone, the shadows becoming handwriting on the pages of sand and then simultaneously transforming into the bodies of lovers. Those shadows, shapes and sounds reflect the figures of speech from which a poet can come to believe in a fabled cave found later in the film with breathtaking paintings of underground swimmers in those same shadows and shapes and colors. And then the plane is shot down by German anti-aircraft fire and bursts into a crucible of flames in which the film can both end and begin.  

The pilot is the Hungarian Count Lazlo Almasy, who is described at this point as “The Man Who Falls Out of The Sky.” His passenger, Katharine, the English pilot’s wife, is dead (and was already dead) and he, who had been subconsciously singing to her throughout the film has been badly burned, as the flames “erase all that matters—his name, his past, his face, his lover.” How he survives for a time, like a burned phoenix from the flames, haunted by his memories until he can atone for his losses, forms the heart’s core of this sumptuous film which seems like a cave painting bookended by two halves of an enormous mural holding a history of wartime love. To succeed at this venture may require a heart the size of Cairo, one character representing a poet writing the last words of her life and the other, burned beyond recognition, turning the poem into spellbinding spoken word. That transference from the poetic character to the historic narrator, calls for an emotional and artistic language stitched within a history text and presented in flashbacks, promises and reversals seen out of sequence that come together as added pages of handwriting as their own histories of a great and broken love. Herodotus’s histories fill with added sketches and keepsakes and paintings and the dying poet’s words written into the corners of blank spaces on pages while the light, also dying in a cave filled with paintings, is suggesting that there once was water so vast under a cave’s desert floor that people could swim there easy as lovers. 

The easy and seemingly instant lovers in this film, Katharine and Almasy, recognize it right away as they banter upon meeting about her saying she’d read his monograph and was astounded by the lack of adjectives. He counters by saying a car, for example, no matter how it’s delineated, is still a car. She counters by citing types of love, noting their differences, and the desert air instantly deepens. That night at the base camp she tells a Herodotus story about a Queen of Lydia whose lover Gyges agrees to kill the king, the story foreshadowing and paralleling that of the film’s characters. She has introduced her own underground rivers of change. When Almasy discovers the actual underground cave with paintings of swimmers no one can speak at first, but Katharine paints copies of the images and gives them to Almasy to keep inside his Herodotus. And when they share a night in a lorry in a sandstorm he tells her about Herodotus’s names for the great winds of the desert, the names themselves so luscious and intriguing, like ghibli, aajej, simoon, and harmatton, that each character reveals what they can no longer withhold.    

And when Katharine comes to Almasy’s room at the Shepheard’s Hotel, she is glowing in a sunlit white dress that seems like a wedding dress, and which foreshadows the parachute she will wrap around herself as she dies, while Almasy seems dead to the world, morose at the thought of losing her. He is not yet The Man Who Fell From the Sky, but he tears at her dress and falls to his knees, and they lose themselves in their passion. Later, after he’s sewn her dress back together they find themselves in a tub asking questions of each other that become a screenwriter’s poem in two voices. 

A. When were you most happy? 
K.   Now. 
A.  What do you love? Say everything. 
K.  Let me see…I love water, the fish in it. Hedgehogs! I love hedgehogs. 
A.  And what else? 
K.  Marmite. I’m addicted. Baths – but not with other people. Islands. Your handwriting. I could go on all day. 
A. Go on all day. 
K.   My husband. 
(Almasy looks away.) 
A. What do you hate most? 
K.   A lie. What do you hate most? 
A.   Ownership. Being owned. When you leave you should forget me. 

Here we see their shared brightness and conflicted passion, how it flares and is extinguished as if he were Gyges and she the Queen of Lydia plotting to replace the king. And we see what will haunt them even during their passion and the coming war, she with her hatred of a lie and her boundless love of water while in the middle of the Sahara. Almasy strikes a contrasting position in his disdain for ownership, even the idea of being owned as a righteous anger about losing one’s freedom but also registering his dismay about countries warring over ownership and even ascribing names to lands and seas when they should never be named or owned. In addition, just before the war breaks out Almasy anguishes about the betrayals in war, saying they are childlike compared with the betrayals during peace. “New lovers,” he says, “are nervous and tender, but smash everything—for the heart is an organ of fire.”

Is it enough to say that the blessings and mysteries and fire of poetry might be at the heart of The English Patient? Sadly, no. The long-awaited war breaks out and the Nazis and Brits line up along boundaries with differing names. And the Man Who Fell From the Sky and The Woman Who’ll Die in a Cave are consigned to write and speak their own poems and prayers for each other before they die. How to do that? How to make a movie out of a painting or poem? How to make a history lesson that’s also a love story? And how best to make the story of new lovers “who smash everything”?

Start with a painting of war, a painting massive as Guernica. Split it in two and make the two halves bookend a novel such as To the Lighthouse, a love story large enough to hold “romantic love, platonic love, filial love,” and deadly wartime love as well. Make a painting like Lily Briscoe’s at the center, at the heart. Make what she says about it in a poem not unlike Auden’s from “Four Letters and a Funeral.” Now people it. Make the painting move because with cinema we can. We are making a pastiche. We are speaking from the heart. Make it come alive like Frankenstein’s monster carrying a dead lover stumbling out of a cave filled with paintings and grief. Make him carry her out as if it were Plato’s Cave. Only make it be too late. Make him get her into the plane and fly high enough to feel like the gods must feel over the deserts. Make him head ideally for Dorset, England to his lover’s family home where she wanted to be buried by the edge of the sea. Make him sing “Wang Wang Blues” and tell her the names of all the winds, even the harmatton which mariners called “the sea of darkness” and which Herodotus said filled with red sand so full it looked like blood and flew as far as England. Make him name that place just below her neck called the suprasternal notch or the place on her shoulder he wants to own despite what he has said about ownership, that no one can own deserts or art or music, and call it Almasy’s Bosphorous. Make there be no more countries. Make people countries instead. Make Katharine’s last words be the ones she is writing like a poet even when the light has finally died inside the cave. Make her know she is writing the way every poet dreams they will die, writing when the lamp has gone out, writing even into the darkness.  

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John Hodgen is Writer-in-Residence at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachussets, and Advisory Editor at New Letters at UMKC. His awards include the AWP Prize in Poetry for Grace and inclusion in Best American Poetry. His latest book What We May Be is out from Lynx House Press.