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The Disciple and His Devil: Gabriel Pascal Bernard Shaw
One of the most shattering and upsetting stories I have read for a long time. I certainly finished it feeling as if I had watched and earthquake.The final irony is that Pascal's last mad idea was a musical based on PYGMALION. He broke himself-and several others-keeping up the option payments on it.One day Pascal looked at his wife's hand and said with amazement, 'I am going to leave you with millions,' Nothing seemed less likely. He died penniless and deep in debt.But the book ends with the first night of MY FAIR LADY.-Colin Wilson
366 pages, Paperback
First published December 14, 2004
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October 27, 2020
Not often I read a memoir, perhaps I should do it more often. There was enough material here for a successful novel, perhaps a few successful novels. The first section in particular was reminiscient of The Invisible Bridge, and by the end we have a love square - one man, three women; a contested but uncertain inheritance; and mystical and magical intrigue, possibly murder. But I had intended to read this book for the middle section, the creative partnership between Hungarian film producer, Gabriel Pacsal and British playwright, George Bernard Shaw. They are the subtitular disciple and devil, though by the end of the book you realise like everything else, the title is ambiguous.
The memorist, named Valerie Pascal for the purposes of this text, had been a successful stage and film actress in Hungary long before she met Pascal. Her Hungarian wikipedia page Hidvéghy Valéria details a film and stage career undescribed on her English wikipedia page Valerie Delecorte. Neither of these pages detail her origins which remain as murky as she complains Pascal's are. I suppose migration offers an opportunity for self-reinvention, and Mr and Mrs Pascal migrated a lot. My interest in the Pascal/Shaw connection has now been superceded by an interest in Ms Hidvéghi/Pascal/Delacorte. I would enjoy a biography which covered not only a non-partisan view of her marriage to Gabriel Pascal, but her career in prewar Budapest and her work as a philanthropist in the United States. But given that this volume only covers ten years, and is perhaps too sketchy for my tastes, that biography would be a lengthy read.
The opening chapters focus on her meeting and subsequent love affair with Pascal. This involves difficult journeys across the iron curtain bewteen Budapest and Paris (with Hungarian artistic types it's always Paris, My Happy Days In Hell). This is is written in a breathless romantic fiction style which suddenly gives way to a few chapters written in a quite forensic style which detail Pascal's life before he met Valéria. At first I thought that the change in style represented her handing over the material to a ghost writer, she was after all a wealthy socialite philanthropist when this was written. But as I read on, the joins between these two styles became less obvious. I decided what I was dealing with was a sophisticated writer who wanted to present herself in a certain light, and make sure that certain 'facts' about her relationship with her second husband were clearly established. Given the circumstances of the court case over Pascal's estate who wouldn't. It would quite easy to represent the facts of their relationship (the infidelty, the neglect) in a quite different way.
To get back to Pascal and Shaw, as soon as I watched "My Fair Lady" in Hungary, (in Hungarian one might not have been so surprised) I wondered how all these Hungarian references got into Pygmalion. In addition the Hungarian internet is alive with quotations from GBS about the mystical and magical properties of the Hungarian lanaguage, quotations which I could never source. This book, I hoped would be the source: it isn't. I have now discovered there is a volume of Shaw's correspondence which might give me the solution to this puzzle, or finally make me accept that Hungarians make things up about their language's significance to important British playwrights. But now I've lost my enthusiasm for that project, I would rather find out about Valéria, and what things she might be want us to overlook.
A final thing to add in recommedation of this book, is that it takes in the film industry of the 1940s and 1950s and there are anecdotes about Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons, Sir Alexander Korda (another magyar) and most importantly for me, Aldous Huxley. He almost wrote a screenplay for Pascal's film treatment on Ghandi's life. Give Huxley's and Pascal's mutual interest in mysticism, and Huxley's early experimentation in psychedelic drugs (The Doors of Perception was written in the year Pascal died) I suspect that film would have been quite unlike Richard Attenborough's. In fact the whole memoir reads like a Huxley story, probably why I like it so much. It is Pascal's interest in mysticism and his involvement with Meher Baba, and Baba's subsequent involvement with Pascal's estate that introduces the ambiguity over who is the devil, and who is the disciple.
The memorist, named Valerie Pascal for the purposes of this text, had been a successful stage and film actress in Hungary long before she met Pascal. Her Hungarian wikipedia page Hidvéghy Valéria details a film and stage career undescribed on her English wikipedia page Valerie Delecorte. Neither of these pages detail her origins which remain as murky as she complains Pascal's are. I suppose migration offers an opportunity for self-reinvention, and Mr and Mrs Pascal migrated a lot. My interest in the Pascal/Shaw connection has now been superceded by an interest in Ms Hidvéghi/Pascal/Delacorte. I would enjoy a biography which covered not only a non-partisan view of her marriage to Gabriel Pascal, but her career in prewar Budapest and her work as a philanthropist in the United States. But given that this volume only covers ten years, and is perhaps too sketchy for my tastes, that biography would be a lengthy read.
The opening chapters focus on her meeting and subsequent love affair with Pascal. This involves difficult journeys across the iron curtain bewteen Budapest and Paris (with Hungarian artistic types it's always Paris, My Happy Days In Hell). This is is written in a breathless romantic fiction style which suddenly gives way to a few chapters written in a quite forensic style which detail Pascal's life before he met Valéria. At first I thought that the change in style represented her handing over the material to a ghost writer, she was after all a wealthy socialite philanthropist when this was written. But as I read on, the joins between these two styles became less obvious. I decided what I was dealing with was a sophisticated writer who wanted to present herself in a certain light, and make sure that certain 'facts' about her relationship with her second husband were clearly established. Given the circumstances of the court case over Pascal's estate who wouldn't. It would quite easy to represent the facts of their relationship (the infidelty, the neglect) in a quite different way.
To get back to Pascal and Shaw, as soon as I watched "My Fair Lady" in Hungary, (in Hungarian one might not have been so surprised) I wondered how all these Hungarian references got into Pygmalion. In addition the Hungarian internet is alive with quotations from GBS about the mystical and magical properties of the Hungarian lanaguage, quotations which I could never source. This book, I hoped would be the source: it isn't. I have now discovered there is a volume of Shaw's correspondence which might give me the solution to this puzzle, or finally make me accept that Hungarians make things up about their language's significance to important British playwrights. But now I've lost my enthusiasm for that project, I would rather find out about Valéria, and what things she might be want us to overlook.
A final thing to add in recommedation of this book, is that it takes in the film industry of the 1940s and 1950s and there are anecdotes about Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons, Sir Alexander Korda (another magyar) and most importantly for me, Aldous Huxley. He almost wrote a screenplay for Pascal's film treatment on Ghandi's life. Give Huxley's and Pascal's mutual interest in mysticism, and Huxley's early experimentation in psychedelic drugs (The Doors of Perception was written in the year Pascal died) I suspect that film would have been quite unlike Richard Attenborough's. In fact the whole memoir reads like a Huxley story, probably why I like it so much. It is Pascal's interest in mysticism and his involvement with Meher Baba, and Baba's subsequent involvement with Pascal's estate that introduces the ambiguity over who is the devil, and who is the disciple.
July 22, 2014
A fairly extraordinary read about a strange, charismatic European film impresario whom no one remembers, I'm sure. I certainly wasn't aware of him, and I've always read a lot of movieland history.
So Pascal was one of those mysterious Eastern European refugees World War II threw out of old Tzarist Russia & its even more obscure former Austro-Hungarian Empire satellite nations. Pascal claimed he was of Hungarian gypsy origins, but the story shifted with time and the perceptions of whomever he told it to.... He liked mysteries and wanted to be one as well.
The author, not so enamoured of mysteries, fell under his spell when very young. She seems to have been patient with him for a time, due to love, but then slowly lost patience and perhaps love as his mad and increasingly fruitless movie schemes exhausted them both.
His one ace in the hole was George Bernard Shaw, popular British playwright and showman in his own right. The two could not have been more different, but they had a love-hate bond that held for decades, though it didn't make Pascal rich till after his death.
Valerie clung to her husband's vows that they were "connected" by some supernatural bond as she grew into jaded adulthood, suspicious of his female protégées and his long, expensive absences while putting together the ever-more-elusive film deals that never came to much. Eventually he fell ill and found a truly mysterious woman who appeared to "cure" him, and Valerie's marriage seemed finished. However, she refused to let him--or his promise of showering her with riches--go, and held onto him at his deathbed. She got her wish, as "My Fair Lady" opened on Broadway days after his death, but she then had to fight Pascal's final sorceress mistress who also claimed Pascal had pledged his "millions" to her in repayment for her loan.
A cautionary tale about loving too much, believing in another human being too much? Or merely a money-grubbing tale of a man who promised his wife more than he could deliver in his life? A book of puzzles....
So Pascal was one of those mysterious Eastern European refugees World War II threw out of old Tzarist Russia & its even more obscure former Austro-Hungarian Empire satellite nations. Pascal claimed he was of Hungarian gypsy origins, but the story shifted with time and the perceptions of whomever he told it to.... He liked mysteries and wanted to be one as well.
The author, not so enamoured of mysteries, fell under his spell when very young. She seems to have been patient with him for a time, due to love, but then slowly lost patience and perhaps love as his mad and increasingly fruitless movie schemes exhausted them both.
His one ace in the hole was George Bernard Shaw, popular British playwright and showman in his own right. The two could not have been more different, but they had a love-hate bond that held for decades, though it didn't make Pascal rich till after his death.
Valerie clung to her husband's vows that they were "connected" by some supernatural bond as she grew into jaded adulthood, suspicious of his female protégées and his long, expensive absences while putting together the ever-more-elusive film deals that never came to much. Eventually he fell ill and found a truly mysterious woman who appeared to "cure" him, and Valerie's marriage seemed finished. However, she refused to let him--or his promise of showering her with riches--go, and held onto him at his deathbed. She got her wish, as "My Fair Lady" opened on Broadway days after his death, but she then had to fight Pascal's final sorceress mistress who also claimed Pascal had pledged his "millions" to her in repayment for her loan.
A cautionary tale about loving too much, believing in another human being too much? Or merely a money-grubbing tale of a man who promised his wife more than he could deliver in his life? A book of puzzles....
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