The Uncompromising Way

John Donne’s poetry and a terminal cancer patient’s musings on mortality may not sell popcorn and jujubes, but Emma Thompson leads an excellent ensemble in this wise and thoughtful drama.

Wit, directed by Mike Nichols for HBO, was adapted by Nichols and Thompson from Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Thompson plays Dr. Vivian Bearing, a professor of 17th century poetry specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne which, she says, ‘explore mortality in greater depth than any other body of work in the English language.’ Bearing also is dying of metastatic ovarian cancer. Thompson, with an ensemble that includes Eileen Atkins, Christopher Lloyd and Harold Pinter, does a marvelous job of examining Bearing’s life and circumstances in a voice pitched to Donne’s music.

Thompson’s gift for blank verse brings the lines of a Shakespeare or a Donne naturally to the modern ear. It also ennobles simpler stuff, though Nichols and Thompson retain most of Edson’s beautifully written clarity of thought and feeling (some technical discussion of Donne’s work was cut from the original play). For instance, Edson wrote the words Thompson speaks as Bearing considers the passage of time in a hospital room:  

 

‘You cannot imagine, how time can be

So still. It hangs; it weighs; and yet there is

So little of it. It goes so slowly,

And yet it is so scarce.’

 

In the first scene between Bearing and her tutor, ‘The Great E. M. Ashford’ (Atkins), Bearing reflects that Donne scholar Ashford once chided her as an undergraduate for entirely missing the point of Donne’s Holy Sonnet 6 because she used ‘an edition of the text that is inauthenticly punctuated’. (Most online versions use this version.)

Ashford continued: ‘The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death and eternal life. In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation: “And Death” capital D, “shall be no more,” semicolon; “Death” capital D, comma, ‘thou shalt die!” exclamation mark. If you go in for this sort of thing, I suggest you take up Shakespeare.’


'Just a comma': Eileen Atkins as  'The Great E.M. Ashford' in Wit. 

‘The proper rendition of the text reads: “And death shall be no more,” comma, “death thou shalt die.” Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting. Very simple, really.
With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma, a pause. In this way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from the poem, wouldn’t you say? Life, death, soul, God, past, present: not insuperable barriers. Not semicolons. Just a comma,’ Ashford said.

Bearing at the time owed her misreading to Donne’s ‘wit’: she had not mastered the material because she had not properly thought it through. Bearing’s conception of ‘the uncompromising way’ is signaled by the semicolon at the center of ‘W;t’ in the play’s original title.

Ashford corrects her: ‘It is not “wit”, Miss Bearing, it is truth.’

‘Wit’ in this context is a term of art that refers to a 17th century English literary conceit of which Donne was a master. W. Fraser Mitchell described wit as involving ‘insights into the nature of things, their relations and consequences; quickness in fancy, farfetched simile, antithesis, puns, conceits, and passion.’ He notes that this was of special importance to writers of this period, an age when theological matters were serious business and learned fathers’ ‘witty preaching’ posed subtle Scriptural interpretations to elite, well-educated audiences such as the royal court.

T.S. Eliot, who a century ago revived interest in the writing of this time, wrote: ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’ Eliot advocated for the unity of thought and feeling expressed in this poetry, which he felt had been lost since that time. It was this ‘experience’ that Ashford tried to convey to the young Bearing—‘Don’t go back to the library. Go spend time with your friends,’ the tutor Ashford told her bright student.  

However, Bearing returned to the library; she established a brilliant career as a scholar. She could accept that there is a connection between simple human truth and uncompromising scholarly standards; but she did not truly grasp this connection until her doctors’ own uncompromising way—cancer researchers Drs. Harvey Kelekian (Lloyd) and Jason Posner’s (Jonathan M. Woodward) single-minded focus on her as a case to advance their knowledge of her disease—showed her where she missed the point.

Teacher becomes subject: Emma Thompson and her doctors in Wit.

The film is filled with wit and humor light and dark, much at the expense of modern healthcare providers; Pinter cameos as Vivian’s father. But two moments left the strongest impression.

Emma Thompson and Eileen Atkins in Wit 

Near the end, the elderly Ashford visits Bearing in hospital, her first and only visitor. Bearing is in great pain and heavily medicated. She agrees when Ashford asks to recite something, though not Donne. Ashford finds a book she bought for her great grandchild, lets down the rail of the hospital bed and climbs in next to Bearing to hold and comfort her like a child as she reads her The Runaway Bunny adding commentary (‘Ah, look at that: a little allegory of the soul. Wherever it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian? ... Ah, very clever.’). Ashford’s ‘Time to go’ when she finishes the book is as much for herself as for her dying former student.

Emma Thompson and Audra McDonald in Wit.

The other moment comes when Bearing is asleep and near death. Susie Monahan (Audra MacDonald), Bearing’s primary nurse, puts lotion on Bearing’s hands using her own hands without wearing gloves. The nurse appears to do this simply to acknowledge Bearing as a fellow human as her doctors have not done—contact possible to flesh to allay the fever of the bone.

Wit 2001 U.S. HBO (99 minutes) directed by Mike Nichols, screenplay by Nichols and Emma Thompson; based Margaret Edson’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play W;t; cinematography by Seamus McGarvey; edited by John Bloom.