Iceberg Characters Poem by gershon hepner

Iceberg characters, nine-tenths concealed,
divulge their secrets in their depths, but freeze
the divers who discover they don’t yield
deep treasures underneath the frozen seas.

Inspired by an article on Alec Guinness by Terry Teachout in the May 2009 issue of Commentary:
When Alec Guinness died in 2000, obituary writers around the world mourned the passing of a beloved artist, one of the last survivors of the great generation of British actors born between the death of Queen Victoria and the coming of World War I. He had launched his career by sharing the stage with John Gielgud and ended it by playing Obi-Wan Kenobi on the screen and George Smiley, John le Carré’s enigmatic spymaster, on TV. In between he won a best-actor Oscar and made a string of screen comedies that Time praised as the work of “one of the most subtle and profound of all the clowns since Chaplin.”…
The “Ealing comedies” (as they are now collectively known) set the stage for Guinness’s career-clinching appearance in Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) , in which he played an emotionally inhibited British army officer interned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Appearing opposite William Holden, then Hollywood’s most popular leading man, Guinness gave an indelible performance that won him a well-deserved Academy Award. Time’s cover story claimed that The Bridge on the River Kwai had “revealed Guinness as a dramatic actor of imposing skill and large imagination.” In truth, however, his performance was of a piece with his work in the Ealing comedies. The drama critic Kenneth Tynan, one of his most perceptive admirers, wrote that “the people Guinness plays best are all iceberg characters, nine-tenths concealed.” To put it another way, they were men who were not what they seemed to be—and who, like Colonel Nicholson, often did not know what they really were…
And what of Alec Guinness? It is a far more pleasing irony that an emotionally cramped man who lacked the self-confidence needed to fully inhabit the great Shakespearean roles that he longed to play should instead have written himself into the history of British film by playing charming buffoons. Yet it says at least as much about modern-day England—the England whose subsidence, as Alexander Mackendrick put it, is surely now all but complete—that the ignominious fates of the characters that Guinness played in his finest films should have foreshadowed the decidedly unfunny destiny of the once-great land that spawned them.


5/10/09