For the Time Being (14 page)

I couldn't possibly read the book now. For years it was my bedside book, but the years led to the war and that led to a general break-up of everything, including my childhood. I couldn't recommend it to anyone unless they were passionate about wild animals and DIY and shipwrecks: no modern child would give it credence. But it's a rollicking good adventure, far better than
Kidnapped
or
Treasure Island,
and if you can find a copy you may be influenced to build your own private world, as I was.

It still has an influence on me today, to some degree. I tried acting and now I'm trying to write. I built my own house and sat in it and wrote my monologues and read them aloud for hours to the uncomprehending apple trees, and it changed me from an apathetic youth into an ambitious one, at least – if over-ambitious.

Independent on Sunday,
9 November 1997

A writer's beginnings

I suppose that my beginning, as a writer, was pretty early. I mean I was very occupied in writing plays for my sibling and me to act in when I was about six. When I could use a pencil, spell words, read.

At nine, or about then, I sat before my father's solid and (to me) enormous Underwood up in his office, learning how to use it. To slot in a bit of paper and discover #@%& and the other magical things. I grew fairly good at it, in a woodpecker way. Well, not ever as fast as a woodpecker, really, and a bit hit and miss, but by the time I was thirteen or fourteen I had managed to compose my very first Epic Piece. This was a very long monologue for myself to read aloud. ‘Man in the Hole' was its title, and it was all about a wounded soldier lying in no man's land in a shell hole dying and thinking about home.

I was greatly affected by the First World War at the time. Obsessed, really. I knew all the places and dates and years. Ypres, Poelkapelle, Béthune, Vimy were names which were as familiar to me as those of my nearest Sussex villages. I wrote constantly. I began, at about seventeen, to be seriously worried that the First World War would very soon give way to a second. With signs of a coming confrontation with Germany, I was forced then to write passionate if vaguely over-emotional poems. A little Rupert Brooke, an essence of Wilfred Owen. Notebooks were crammed tight with abandoned ‘works'; here and there a really imposing one, some three pages long, would emerge. It was tosh, of course, but it was a beginning.

Then I was caught up, willy nilly, in a war of my very own. The great majority of what was called the ‘Intake' at Catterick Camp
was, to my astonishment, illiterate. Many of them were farm boys or young men who had hardly ever been to school and got shoved into some kind of factory. Or, on occasions, just drifted about. These were netted up for war and spilled out into huts all over Great Britain. My barrack room was jammed with tough fellows who yearned to communicate with Mum, their sisters or, most important of all, ‘The Girl'. And they couldn't do anything about it for themselves. I became a cigarette millionaire very shortly after arriving in my hut by the simple virtue of my ability to write.

In corners of the hut, out on the range, marching out to Church Parade, lying about for a ten-minute break on route marches, all manner of private longings and expressions of love and misery were given to me to set down in my notebooks. I then had to write the things on small sheets of NAAFI letter paper which sometimes they signed laboriously or with merely a row of crosses along the bottom.

I remember pointing out that a single O could indicate a hug. Thus XXXOO or OOOXXX could be taken to mean hugs and kisses and I wrote to the recipient of that fact so that she would understand herself. ‘Do you want to send hugs and kisses? Or just hugs?' became a standard phrase for me. Very often just a row of Os was requested.

It was useful to my mates that I had begun, years before, to ‘write'. It was vastly useful to me to learn so much at first hand about my fellow men. I never ceased to be amazed that people who were more or less absolutely illiterate could use such beautiful language in the cause of love. It delighted and moved me, and I grew extremely fond of my ‘job' and of my clients. It was always completely private and very secret.

Of course there were more exciting, frightening things, like being bombed or driven across hideous assault courses, which set my shaking hand to clasp its pencil and attest to the terror, agony, cowardice or relief which I had recently had to endure. I wrote it all down. Always. Grenade practice, throwing live grenades at a distant target, provided my first sight of real, not imagined, gore. After vomiting, I wrote.

The severed hand in the heather, the ashen astonishment of its one-time owner, the pallid faces of his mates, the smell of cordite and excreta – for the shock very often loosened the bowels. Down it all went into my notebook, crammed in among the suggested outlines for various plays which never got written. I didn't need now to imagine soldiers dying in shell holes and dreaming of home. They were doing it for real as I watched. It went on right through to the Normandy landings, which were so much ‘for real' that there wasn't a lot of time to record them. But I did write every week to my father. He'd had a bloody war in his time, and I was sharing things with him.

To my astonishment I had two poems, two real poems, published about that time. One in the
TLS
, the other in
Poetry Today.
I had written them for a girl with whom I had considered myself to be very much in love. She lived in Belsize Park; she sent the poems on their way.

And then a new existence, after the war. Not as exciting or fascinating, but enjoyable in a way. I became a cinema actor. There wasn't much time for writing then. For years and years all I was able to do was ‘mend' terrible scripts which I had to play in. I mended assiduously, causing great hostility among the writers, naturally, and often directors.

To be sure there were occasional moments which did not require my anxious, sometimes desperate, meddling. Harold Pinter was one. But he wrote glories for the actor. There was never any need (nor was one remotely permitted) to alter so much as a semi-colon. There were others which had all the vileness of a cheap Valentine card, but, whatever I did to them, I at least managed to appear ‘real' for most of my time on the screen.

And then, sitting trapped in her host's drawing room on a dismal day, forced to endure
Match of the Day
and, later, the replay, Norah Smallwood, at that time the boss at Chatto and Windus, switched channels in fury and caught a chat show on which I was a guest talking about Bergen-Belsen and my appalled arrival there one bright April morning.

She wrote to say: ‘If you can write as well as you appear to speak,
we would be happy to publish you.'Just like that. Zonk. Out of the blue. I had written, as it happened, a few modest pieces for a woman I wrote to in America. These became the first three chapters of
A Postillion Struck by Lightning.
My first, and I then honestly believed, only, book.

The cinema began to disenchant me. It started to die anyway, and I realized that I was growing too old to play more than grandfathers, agonized and ageing men lusting for pretty girls, druids or senior monks. I was forced abroad, but Mrs Smallwood, and my typewriter, came along with me. I chucked the cinema and stayed with the writing.

A whole new world was set before me, much the same as the cinema in many ways. The absolute discipline, the drudgery, the joy, the promotions, the talks with the reps, the grisly book signings, which gradually became three-hour marathons of absolute delight before packed audiences who now read me instead of just watching me remotely on screen.

It was very much the same job: observation, words, economy, truth, technique, passion. The same resentful critics, the same panic before a ‘performance', the same apprehension that the audience won't come.

Writing was marvellously private, if you wanted it to be so. It could even be mysterious; there was a definite cult of loneliness, solitude and learning. I confess that none of these things has come my way. I just write. One does need peace, although Jane Austen, one is told, wrote at a table in the front hall amid the bustle of family life. Odd.

That I could not do, but I love, passionately, what I now do, and I am constantly aware that I have to be eternally grateful to Mrs Smallwood's unthinking host, without whom I might be doing nothing more exciting than voice-overs for cheap holidays in Majorca or someone's lager. If this was a beginning, it was a magical one.

Observer,
28 March 1993

I have appeared in only two screen adaptations of novels which are undisputed classics: Dickens's
A Tale of Two Cities
and Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice –
one a failure in the cinema, the other a success. Therefore I really didn't think I was qualified to write with authority on the subject of classic books used as the basis of films. However …

My name, I fear, held me back from being cast in classical films. Too foreign, too ‘pop', too associated with lightweight stuff – funny doctors, sad-eyed subalterns, stern wing commanders, romantic ‘juves' – ever to be considered for the loftier realms of the classic-book department. Anyway, they weren't making many. And when they did, the film chaps tended to use theatre people. It was assumed that they were better at classic work, on account of all the strutting and camping and the essential fact that they could ‘carry a costume'. Cinema actors, such as I was, were fine for technical, cinematic stuff. We didn't ‘over-project', which kept everyone comfortable. Theatre actors, though essential for the classics, did rather have to be ‘pulled down' a bit. Which made filming them tiresome – and costly. All those retakes and things. I am, of course, talking about a long time ago. Things have altered now and all kinds of extraordinary cinema people are shoved into wigs and farthingales at the bang of a clapperboard. It seems almost to be the rule rather than the exception.

I did, I remember now, make a couple of adaptations of classic books for the screen: Dickens's
A Tale of Two Cities
for Rank here in the UK, and Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice
in that city for Visconti. They were interesting exceptions to my diet of charm, or what English critics called ‘waspish wit and mannered movement'. As poor Sydney Carton, I fared pretty well with most critics,
but deliberately avoided any histrionics. This seemed to sadden them. They rather longed for a bit of that.

In
A Tale of Two Cities,
T. E. B. Clarke did a brilliant job on the adaptation; we had a most impressive cast of (mainly) theatre actors; enormous care was lavished on the authenticity of sets and costumes; we went all the way to Bourges in France and shot the film there. But even though it was a faithful ‘reproduction' of Dickens, even though we spoke his words and delivered his rather preposterous plot perfectly to the screen, the film failed. My contention is that (A), they wanted Ronald Colman, and (B), we cut costs and made it in black and white. Although it drove a generation of schoolgirls into hysterics (my breeches were pretty tight) and still sends hordes of Japanese ladies (and some gentlemen) frantic to this day (for the same reason), the effort was not successful. Apart from in Japan, where people have very short legs. Mine were long. As a ‘classic' adaptation, it could not be faulted, but it did not transfer to the screen of the late fifties. It was not of the time. And, I fear, because of my position in popular cinema then, it just came over as ‘another Dirk Bogarde piece'. OK for the fans, but not really suitable for the nobs. In the UK anyway, my name stuck to a classic was the kiss of death. Abroad it was not. After all, mine was a foreign name, and abroad I had long been accepted as a serious player. I suppose because they had been mercifully spared most of the junk films I had had to make in the early years.

So when it came to Thomas Mann and Von Aschenbach no one curled sardonic lips. At least as far as I know. And the adaptation was fascinating. There was
no
script for the players. We were merely given the Penguin edition of
Death in Venice
and told that that was what we would shoot. Of course there
was
a script for the money people, production, set designers and costume people – a faithful, or as faithful as it could possibly be, replica of the book, with a couple of important alterations. Von Aschenbach became a musician and not a writer. This was for two reasons. A writer is pretty dull in what he does. On his bum at a typewriter or a desk. A musician has far more romantic connotations and, very useful this, he is producing (usually) glorious sounds which can flood the soundtrack
of the film. Mann had seen, on a journey from Venice to Munich, a crumpled, hysterical, badly made-up elderly man, slumped in a corner seat, weeping silently. His name was Gustav Mahler and, he told Mann, he had finally seen ‘absolute perfection, purity and beauty, in one person', and life no longer had any reason for him. That is the story Visconti was told (I will refrain from saying by whom) and that is the story that I was given on which to base my portrayal. I was made to
look
like Mahler, but, alas, the plastic nose I had to wear filled up with perspiration all the time and fell off, forcing me, at the last moment, to reject it and just stick on a moustache hastily found in a box. That was one change. The other was the introduction of a fellow composer in order to use a chunk of hefty polemic based on, but not written by, Thomas Mann.

We also had to eliminate the opening sequence of the book, which simply did not translate to film. But that is about all we did alter, and although one or two bow-tied musical critics squealed that it was ‘dire!', it seemed to satisfy a great many people worldwide and made Mann far more accessible than he had been before to the general public. It also reintroduced Mahler to a completely new, adoring, audience. It also inspired an opera and a ballet. It was a successful ‘opening-up' of a novel – and a classic one at that – to fit the screen.