White Carnation’s Akşam column clipping

The White Carnation’s Akşam column clipping is a physical record of how private desire becomes public scandal in Istanbul society. Published on November 8, 1979, it portrays Kemal Basmacı as a jealous, irresponsible rich man and Füsun as a young woman whose name risks being blackened by his actions. Kemal saves the offending page, yet its exposure wounds and briefly gratifies him: the gossip distorts their relationship, but also makes it impossible to deny that society has noticed it.

The column and its accusations

The clipping is identified as a piece from Akşam’s “High Society” page, headed “Society and the Cinema: A Modest Warning.” It begins with a broad account of Turkish cinema’s troubles: the rise of sex films and the fear of political violence keeping families away from cinemas, while filmmakers struggle to attract audiences and financial backing. Against this background, it satirizes wealthy men who claim to support art films but use the film industry to pursue actresses. Its warning turns from the state of cinema to a supposed society bachelor, identified only as Mr. K, who is said to be infatuated with a young married woman he calls a distant relation.

The report describes Mr. K as so jealous that he cannot bring himself to put a commissioned art-film screenplay into production. It alleges that he follows the woman and her director husband through Yeşilçam bars and Bosphorus restaurants, and objects even to her leaving the house. It also recalls the bachelor’s celebrated engagement to a Sorbonne graduate, the daughter of a retired diplomat, and claims he broke it off in order to make the young woman a star. The article’s closing admonition casts his conduct as hypocrisy: he cannot both guard a woman from other men’s attention and pursue a film career that would require her to perform kissing scenes.

The column’s account mixes identifiable facts with fabricated or mistaken details. It refers to Kemal’s engagement to Sibel and the film project involving Füsun and Feridun, but Kemal later makes clear that he did not end his engagement to Sibel in order to make Füsun a star, nor had he commissioned Feridun to write a screenplay. He regards these errors as minor beside what readers would take to be the central truth: that his love for Füsun and what he had done for her had brought him into disgrace. The clipping’s force lies in that imbalance. Its specifics can be challenged, while its public verdict on Kemal’s conduct still lands.

The clipping enters Kemal’s life

Kemal’s mother read the newspapers delivered to the family home, including the society gossip. On the morning the column appeared, Kemal waited until she had gone to cut out the page, then folded it and slipped it into his pocket. At the office he tried to act cheerful, telling an anecdote, whistling in the corridor, and making the rounds among Satsat’s increasingly idle employees. By lunchtime, however, the staff had read the article; their expressions, especially the compassion and fear in Zeynep Hanım’s eyes, told him that the story had reached them.

His mother also knew. She called to ask how he was, trying to keep concern out of her ordinary voice, while he understood that she had obtained another copy of the paper and cried over the report. The clipped page thus becomes a quiet exchange between them: she has removed it from the newspaper, he has taken it away, and each knows the other has read it without being able to speak plainly about his relationship with Füsun. Kemal imagines that a full confession would bring love and understanding, but also blame and questions. He senses that his mother’s silence is an effort to respect a predicament she cannot share.

Public exposure and private shame

Kemal cannot stop wondering how Akşam’s readers regard him, how many believe the report, and how Füsun will react when she sees it. He considers warning Feridun to keep the newspaper from Füsun and the rest of the family, but does not call. He fears that Feridun might become so upset that he would feel compelled to act. Beneath that fear, however, is a more complicated reason: in spite of the humiliation, Kemal is glad the column has appeared. Their closeness, whatever name could be given to it, has been reported, and he takes this public recognition as a kind of social acceptance. He even persuades himself that the gossip might signal a return to his former place in society, with Füsun beside him.

That hope does not last. Kemal feels that the gossip and insinuation are turning him into someone different: no longer a man pursuing an unconventional course by his own will, but a figure ostracized after appearing in a gossip column. He identifies White Carnation as the writer and suspects Tahir Tan of supplying many of the invented details. He longs to sit with Füsun and condemn their enemies together, imagining that they could go to Pelür Bar with Feridun and defy the story. But the imagined confrontation does not become a visit. The night the column appears, Kemal cannot bring himself to go to the Keskin family home.

What the page makes visible

Kemal’s fear of meeting Füsun is not simply fear that she will be angry or ashamed. He imagines that their eyes would reveal their shared turmoil, then recognizes a more unsettling possibility: they would understand that the false report had been taken as true. For Kemal, the clipping exposes the gap between the errors that can be corrected and the deeper truth that cannot be easily disowned. He knows the article has misstated how the engagement ended and how the film project began, yet he also accepts that his devotion has damaged his standing and made him an object of ridicule or pity.

He tells himself that the Istanbul social circle is small, and that its members are neither truly rich nor principled, but this judgment does not ease his shame. He thinks he had been offered the chance of an honest, civilized, happy life and had thrown it away. His imagined remedy is to marry Füsun, put his business affairs in order, make his fortune, and return to society in triumph; at the same time, he has lost the strength to pursue that plan and grown to hate the circle into which he once hoped to be readmitted. He also understands that, after reading the column, the Keskin family will not encourage his hopes.

Kemal exhibits the clipping as an object, not merely as an account of what happened. Its public language fixes his private entanglement in print, and its survival preserves the contradiction he cannot resolve: he is ashamed to have been exposed, yet glad that his connection to Füsun has entered society’s view. In the days after its appearance, he turns inward and goes to the cinema every night for a week, visiting the Site, the Konak, and the Kent to watch American films. He values their capacity to offer a different world and to make an audience happy; identifying with their heroes, he temporarily sees his own troubles as exaggerated, before returning to self-reproach and even beginning to believe some of the column’s lies. The clipping therefore marks more than a burst of gossip: it records the moment when public mockery becomes part of Kemal’s own account of himself.