A Room with a View
Comics inspired by the classic movie!
I learned yesterday that the wonderful actress Maggie Smith had passed away at the age of 89. Every week, I try to share some comics from my old sketchbook journal, The Drawing Book, but this week I thought I’d do something different in honour of Dame Maggie.
Maggie Smith’s career was full of memorable roles, from 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Downtown Abbey in the 2000s. But for me, she’ll always be Charlotte Bartlett, the prim and proper chaperone of 1985’s A Room with a View. This movie, which I watched with my friends on a rented VHS tape shortly after it came out, told a story that always stayed with me. So much so, that it showed up about ten times in The Drawing Book. I think I’ll share those appearances here today.
A Room with a View started out as a novel by E. M. Forster. It tells the story of a young woman, Lucy Honeychurch, who has to figure out that it’s important to follow your heart, even if it seems like the wrong thing to do. I didn’t read the book till long after I saw the movie. After that, I read it over and over. Here’s me, re-reading that book on a German train ride in 2000.
Spoiler alert!! I’m going to talk about what happens in the movie (and the book). If you don’t know the story, don’t let me ruin it for you. Go and watch the movie, or read the book. They are both wonderful!
The vast armies of the benighted
In the novel, E. M. Forster writes about Lucy (and I’m paraphrasing here) that if she didn’t learn to follow her heart, she’d “join the vast armies of the benighted” - those people who go through their lives without knowing true joy and fellowship. In my drawing book, back in 1997, I wrote about how I could relate to Lucy. There were times when I’d pretended I was just fine, when really, I was failing to follow my heart…
As I’ve written about elsewhere, I went through some hard times in my early twenties, when I just didn’t know if I was on the right path. During that time, I often thought of Lucy, and especially of a gloomy song she sings in the movie. That song (and the panels below) have already been mentioned in another newsletter, but here they are again:
Lucy’s danger took this form: she was planning to marry the wrong guy! Her intended was the villainous (and villainously named) Cecil Vyse. Cecil was a jerk, yes. But he’s such a great villain!!! That’s the thing about A Room with a View: all the characters are wonderful. Here’s Cecil on a 2002 drawing book page.
Enter the hero, George Emerson (as depicted on a drawing book page in 2000). He’s got Cecil’s measure, and tells Lucy frankly:
And his message gets through! Right through to Lucy’s heart. It gives her the courage she needed to confront Cecil (who, though still villainous, takes the news like a hero-in-the-making. Who knows, maybe he’ll learn to follow his own heart and turn out to make a great husband for someone else. I’ll never stop hoping!).
As you can see, I’m not sharing these drawings in the actual order in which they appear in the drawing book. That sketch of Lucy and Cecil was drawn in 1997, and the one of George, above it, was in 2000. I think it’s kind of crazy that I wrote down the same quote, three years apart.
By the way, one of the best things about the movie A Room with a View is the amazing cast, with Julian Sands playing George Emerson, Daniel Day-Lewis playing Cecil, and Helena Bonham Carter playing Lucy… just to name a few. Go watch it! Maybe even right now. They’re all so great.
Young Girl Transfigured
Lucy doesn’t join the vast armies of the benighted! She follows her heart. And what brings that about? “It’s Fate, but call it Italy, if it pleases you,” George says. But Italy certainly has a lot to do with it. Lucy’s voyage to Florence changes her life. In A Room with a View, the novelist Eleanor Lavish speculates about Lucy, calling her “the young girl transfigured by Italy. And why should she not be transfigured? It happened to the Goths!”
This is my only drawing of Maggie Smith in the drawing book (1998). Smith’s portrayal of the uptight spinster Charlotte Bartlett is so perfect that it always reminds me of… wait for it… Star Wars’ C-3P0, the droid who is polite and correct to a fault, but still seems to get everything wrong. My favourite part of A Room with a View is near the end, when the reader starts to wonder if maybe, deep down, Miss Bartlett still believes that you should follow your heart. It might be too late for her, but she’ll do whatever she can to ensure that it won’t be too late for Lucy. I think Charlotte is really the secret hero of the story.
This isn’t from the drawing book, and the image quality is lousy, but here’s a painting I painted of myself back in 1998 when I felt like I’d turned my life around and was figuring out how to follow my heart. Guess what I called it: “Young Girl Transfigured.”
When I watched A Room with a View as a kid, it was with some friends, who, like me, still liked the story as we got older. (When we were in high school, we called ourselves “The Brill Alternatives” - that’s another story.) In 2000, I imagined us all on a trip to Italy, quoting all our favourite lines.
As it turned out, I did go to Florence in 2000 - not with the Brills, but with a boyfriend depicted here in the place of George Emerson! That trip started out gloriously, but it didn’t end quite the way I’d hoped. You can read about that in another previous newsletter, here.
But the words of A Room with a View still echoed (and continue to echo) in my head. Here’s one last picture from the drawing book: me waking up in 2002 after sleeping all night on a couch on a garage roof, and waking up under a blue Alberta sky. Of course, the first thing I did was to quote Senor by Bob Dylan… but the next thing I did was to quote A Room with a View.
You tell him, Lucy!
Thanks for reading! I try to share old Drawing Book comics here every week. And if you need more comics: I try to write a new “Curious Calgary” history comic for The Sprawl, about once a month. I haven’t posted many of them on this Substack, but maybe I should start to do that. For now, you can see them on The Sprawl website. Last week, the “Curious Calgary” series was given an Innovation Award by the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association! That’s pretty cool. Thanks, AMPA!