Trivial Fond Records, Continued

[Leslie Howard with his son, Ronald, at
the Hotel Carlyle in New York, 1935]

Ronald Howard states in Trivial Fond Records, a book containing the writings of his father, Leslie Howard, that he wrote a series of poems in a "sense of protest" immediately after learning of his father's death. However, after the younger Howard understood what his father must have gone through in the minutes before his death, he wrote another
series of poems (ten in all) as though he were talking to his father—his father being Hamlet. Yesterday, I shared one of those poems. Below is the only other "Hamlet" poem Howard included in the book.

The poem is heartbreaking in its sadness, the sadness of a son who would never be allowed to know why his father had to die that way, a son whose questions would never be answered. When Leslie Howard was first reported killed by the Luftwaffe, Ronald, a 25-year-old seaman in the Royal Navy, was shocked and horrified. But those feelings quickly changed to resignation that his father's death was just one more tragedy of war, one of the "risks we all took," an "accident" and not to be taken personally. As time went on, however, and Ronald received conflicting information about his father's death, he came to believe that his father's plane was not shot down by accident as the German's had claimed, but that his father was murdered. And so he wrote these poems disturbing in the images they evoke, images I myself have visualized when I think of what happened that day.

Hamlet:  O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
               Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
               If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
               Absent thee from felicity a while,
               And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
               To tell my story...

So might I if the ocean had a tongue,
Or air could speak. Yet where he pioneers
No man may follow, no saviour may be wrung
From mystery unfleshed. What lives behind
Within a wounded name may shed a world's tears
Yet not be healed where so much stands unknown.
What may I tell? Of waves incarnadined,
Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause?
They say the burning plane fell like a stone
Into the sea — but I can't vouch the facts,
As could Horatio, how these things came about;
My Hamlet will not rise to greet applause,
Taking his bow with bullets in his breast.
For him no soldiers' music, rites of wars,
Save where the choirs of their machine guns shoot :
A flight of Junkers sang him to his rest.

Go ask the sea-swell why it groans, the wind
Why it laments : all the drawn breaths of pain
Shall never tell his story or explain
The reason of his dying. From that bourne
No voice comes back — nor travellers return;
Into the blinding dark he went alone,
Where he shall rest till he is whole again.

[From Trivial Fond Records by Leslie Howard, edited by Ronald Howard, William Kimber • London, 1982, ISBN 0-7183-0418-7]

Subscribe to Leslie Howard by Email