The French director François Truffaut, who conducted a famous series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, said afterward that he had found him to be a “neurotic” and “fearful” and “deeply vulnerable” man, but this was precisely what had made him an “artist of anxiety.”
Hitchcock kept both the anxiety and the artist hidden. He developed a public persona that went well with his ample form and uniform dark suits—a phlegmatic, understated manner; a droll, deadpan wit. He spoke in carefully enunciated words delivered in a low monotone, like a high priest or a funeral director. But beneath the imperturbable surface was a man as jittery as a cat, or a Kafka—another artist of anxiety whose recurrent theme was an innocent man accused of some enigmatic crime. As Peter Ackroyd remarks at the beginning of this brisk, discerning critical biography:
Born in 1899, the son of a fishmonger, the future fearmonger was a plump, homely, shy child growing up amid the teeming street life and rough Cockney vitality of Limehouse, an industrial district beside the Thames in London’s East End. He had no playmates.
But his childhood coincided with the infancy of movies, and he took refuge in the new picture palaces springing up in London. Books were another refuge, and Poe was his favorite author. He was already drawn to the macabre: He would take a bus down to the Old Bailey, where he liked to watch murder trials. He began to control his fears by projecting them into stories. One advantage of fear is that it spurs imagination, either for purposes of escape or for precise, intense, suspenseful anticipation of what is feared. Hitchcock’s movies would offer both.
His family background was mostly Irish and Roman Catholic, and he was sent to a strict Jesuit school that often meted out physical punishments: “I was terrified of the police, of the Jesuit fathers, of physical punishment, of a lot of things,” he recalled. “This is the root of my work.” By 1921 he had made his way into a film studio through graphic design work, and he directed his first movie (The Pleasure Garden) in 1925, the year he married his film editor, Alma Reville, who became an indispensable collaborator. His early silent pictures, after some filming in Berlin, absorbed the shadowy atmospherics of German Expressionism, which stayed with him.
The theme Ackroyd identifies in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), which Hitchcock regarded as the real beginning of his career, became the theme of almost all his movies: “Ordinary people, living in a familiar setting, are suddenly plunged into a ‘chaos world’ where no one is safe.” For Hitchcock, no ordinary person, the world was always a chaos world: Ackroyd recognizes that this became a Conradian vision of life reflected in all his films—a sense that civilized order, like the orderly life of an individual, is poised over an abyss we are always just a misstep (or case of mistaken identity) away from slipping into.
In his own life and work, Hitchcock trod carefully. He was known for his meticulous preparation. So there is something to Ackroyd’s observation that he “arranged his life as if it were a military campaign.” But he was less like a general than a spy—ever watchful, ever oblique and secretive, preferring to get what he wanted by stealth, not by issuing orders. He smuggled the art into his movies while pretending to have no interest in it: “I really hate the word artistic,” he once said. He had no theories, and he didn’t talk about the deep meaning of his films. (“It’s only a movie,” he liked to say.) Yet his life was as devoted to his art as that of any starving artist in a garret. It’s just that he didn’t want to starve. He left England in 1938 to work with the producer David O. Selznick, partly because of the technical resources that Hollywood offered, but also because of the money it offered.
Living in comfortable houses, eating and drinking copiously were ways of staving off Hitchcock’s anxieties, but he was simultaneously staving off meddling studio executives and censors, defending his bold choices of theme and image. Images were always what he began with and cared most about; plots were woven around them and didn’t have to make sense. He knew his gift was for fantasy, not reality.
He said that the difference between his English and American phases was instinct and spontaneity versus calculation. Despite a brilliantly amusing fantasia like North by Northwest (which owed much to his flawless British masterpiece The 39 Steps) and the dry humor, including his own trademark cameos, worked into other films, he lost some of his comic finesse in Hollywood. There he became the “master of suspense,” a brand name for creepiness and horror. But his best American movies, such as Notorious and Rear Window, have their impact in their unsettling ambiguities and complicities; and in some of them, especially Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, and Psycho, he played variations on the theme of the double—twinned opposites, mirror images, two guises of the same person—which he first encountered in Poe. All this gives his greatest films, and even lesser ones like The Wrong Man and I Confess, their charged, uncanny psychological atmosphere. He went wrong only when he (or his screenwriters) tried to make the psychology too explicit (as in Spellbound, the end of Psycho, and the end of Marnie).
Luckily, Ackroyd doesn’t try to spell out Hitchcock’s own psychology, but there are enough ambiguities and dualities there for a Hitchcock movie. The orderly protocol and gentlemanly demeanor, the tact and tutelage that made lifelong friends out of many of his actors—and a penchant for gross practical jokes, an urge to embarrass young actresses with suggestive quips, and prying, proprietary obsessions with some of his female stars (Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Vera Miles, and, especially, Tippi Hedren). You can see an element of resentment, or even vengeance, there—perhaps payback for his lifelong sense of being out of it, an uncomely misfit. Still, in general, scaring the living daylights out of people in theaters sufficed.
At less than half the length, Ackroyd’s book can’t offer the depth of analysis or the density of beguiling detail found in Donald Spoto’s classic, The Dark Side of Genius (1983). But it always respects and never distorts its subject. It convinces us that Hitchcock, who made over 50 films before his death in 1980, 8 or 10 of them masterpieces, had the requisite number of inner demons to be a genius—and that despite them he was, as geniuses go, endearingly unpretentious, humorous, and civilized.
Lawrence Klepp is a writer in New York.
