I Know Where I’m Going: You can’t hurry an elm

Whenever Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell  wanted to express the importance of giving an idea time, they would often remind each other of what the old wheelwright Jim Horton says in A Canterbury Tale (1944) about seasoning timber: “You can’t hurry an elm.”

Mulling over an idea – allowing it to season – was at the heart of Pressburger’s approach to writing. He talked about the process when he introduced a screening of A Canterbury Tale in 1978. Although the film had been panned and quickly forgotten when it first came out, thirty years later it was at last being hailed as a great work. All it had needed was a little time to be appreciated.

Pressburger thought that the same was true for ideas. When an idea lost whatever spark it originally had, he described how he would stop writing it, put it in a drawer and move on to something else. “Then months, even years pass. Later purely by accident, I come across that hopeless writing of mine and find – it has again gathered unexpected qualities.”

The writer’s experience of false starts and wrong turns before reaching a more satisfying conclusion was similar to that of the character Joan Webster in I Know Where I’m Going (1945). When Joan sets out on her journey, she thinks she knows where she’s going only to discover that she’s heading in the wrong direction, but she still manages, eventually, to find a happy ending.

In his autobiography Michael Powell wrote that I Know Where I’m Going was an idea that Pressburger proposed when A Matter of Life and Death (1946) had to be postponed due to the temporary unavailability of Technicolor. “I have always wanted to make a film about a girl who wants to get to an island,” he told Powell. “At the end of her journey she is so near that she can see the people clearly on the island, but a storm stops her from getting there, and by the time the storm has died down she no longer wants to go there, because her life has changed quite suddenly.” When Powell asked why the girl wanted to go to the island, Pressburger answered, “Let’s make the film and find out.” What this involved in practice was Pressburger opening his drawer of past work, where he found an old idea that helped him to shape the new idea.

Victorious Defeat had started out as an adaptation of a 1936 novel Rings on Her Finger, by Laurence Kirk, about a young woman who lures rich men into making offers of marriage and then sues them for breach of promise (an actionable offence under English common law until 1971).

In the early months of the war Pressburger sold a treatment of Victorious Defeat, dated January 1940, to a newly formed independent production company, Mercury Pictures. This treatment was given to the writer Roland Pertwee, who wrote a script and then co-directed with the producer Harold Huth a film starring Clive Brook. It was released in England at the beginning of 1942 as Breach of Promise, and later in America as Adventure in Blackmail.

In his diary Pressburger recalled going along to see it with Michael Powell when it opened  at the Empire, Leicester Square: “The picture is unbelievably bad,” he commented. “Clive Brook and the dialogue the worst.” But after Pressburger had sold the January 1940 treatment to Mercury Pictures, he had continued to work on the original idea, developing it into a second, very different treatment with a wartime theme. This second version of Victorious Defeat was dated December 1940.

It tells the story of Peter Conway, a famous playwright, who in the first days of the war is sued by a young woman he has never met before, Kay Lawrence, for breach of a marriage promise that he never made. The faked evidence is so convincing that his lawyer friend, Bruce, tells him that he is likely to lose the case. Rather than settle for damages, Peter decides to exact a revenge on Kay by marrying her.  After the wedding he gives away all his money and stops working, moving into two dingy, uncomfortable rooms. No sooner has he achieved the desired victory of driving Kay to desert him than he regrets her departure, turning down Bruce’s suggestion that they should now take Kay back to court.

This is how Pressburger describes Peter’s change of heart in the treatment: “He suddenly said that he wanted to think about it. And anyway he thought Bruce had joined up in the Army. This was true. But there was something else equally true that Peter did not mention. I think he did not know it himself. The days in the dingy rooms had had the effect of tending to bring the two of them together; although there was still an ocean between them there was a faint possibility – unrealised by Kay and Peter – of crossing it safely.” Pressburger couldn’t have known it at the time, but the use of such imagery to describe a mind in turmoil provided valuable inspiration for the yet to be imagined I Know Where I’m Going, where in place of an ocean there would be a storm and a whirlpool.

When Kay later returns to Peter because she has nowhere to live, he is terrified because he ought to want her to leave but doesn’t. “What was happening to him? He didn’t know himself. He couldn’t give up his principles now!” Here was the mindset of the future Joan Webster, who, in I Know Where I’m Going, having started out with the plan of marrying a millionaire, struggles against her realisation that she has fallen in love with Torquil, the penniless laird of Kiloran.

In the end Kay and Peter accept victorious defeat. They give up their original plans in favour of something much better, finding a way safely to cross that ocean between them. But Pressburger could not find the creative spark needed to turn the December 1940 treatment into a script. So he put it away in his writer’s drawer. When he took it out again a few years later, it had gathered so many unexpected qualities that writing a script was easy. “It just burst out, you couldn’t hold it back,” he recalled. “I wrote the full script in four days…”

When Joan Webster – the new character that Peter Conway inspired – sets off for the island of Kiloran, she has a detailed itinerary and a big map. She is certain that she knows where she is going, but no sooner has she met Torquil on the Isle of Mull than the fog of confusion descends. Her awareness that she is falling in love with him makes her all the more desperate to cross to the island where her rich fiancé is waiting for her.

Joan does not want to give up her plans even though she senses that they’re not very good ones, but ultimately, like Kay and Peter, she succumbs to love. This paradox of victorious defeat (omnia vincit amor) was so appealing to Pressburger that he even turned it into the curse of Kiloran with which the film provides a “happily ever after” ending. Having embraced Joan, Torquil enters the castle of Moy, triggering the curse that has been placed on every laird of Kiloran: “If he shall ever cross the threshold of Moy, never shall he leave it a free man. He shall be chained to a woman to the end of his days and shall die in his chains.”

It was a final ending to a story that had begun long before Pressburger told Powell about the girl who wants to get to an island. The reality of good stories is that – a little like the red shoes, I suppose – they often defy your efforts to control them. They needed time to settle down, to find their most pleasing shape. After all, you can’t hurry an elm.