For the Time Being (15 page)

But it has to be remembered that books are for reading and films are for reviewing. Books are usually read alone and in silence. One makes up one's own mind about the characters, how they look, what they wear, how they move. If that book, classic or not, is translated to visual terms, the imagination we use when we read is dispensed with. We lack a dimension. I dislike, in the main, the conversion of books to the screen. It seldom works. The germ of the story is used; the adapter is at liberty to hack away at the verbiage in order to get to this germ and in doing so, as with polished rice, destroys the nourishment. Blandness is the result. What an audience must see, a reader can
imagine.
It's far better in my opinion. I have been in so many films-of-the-book that I can't recall them all, but not one, and I am careful what I say here, was ever as good as the original book.

In the decade when I was Golden Boy, a book would be bought solely for me as a perfect ‘Bogarde subject', even though I bore no physical relation to the written character. That was all rejigged by the film adapter. Mostly these were middle-aged ladies, of both genders, who knew exactly how to get a script out of the most daunting material. Later in my working life, after I had gained my training in these popular films for the Odeons, I was granted the magical chance of working with writers like Harold Pinter who adapted other writers' books with amazing brilliance.

But that has nothing to do with the subject I have been set, which is the adaptation of classic books for the screen. Well, in my opinion, it is usually a disaster, although, as I have said above, I have had little personal experience. Adapted novels, yes. Classic ones, no. I never finished reading
Middlemarch
when I was young; it bored me witless, just as the television series did. And that was as reverent an adaptation as you could have. I was so stunned by the overt attention to detail, to costume, to the careful pronouncing of Eliot's deathly dialogue, that it confirmed in me the determination, now that I am aged, to sit down and read the bloody book to see just what all the fuss was about.

To have one's own book adapted for the screen is an agony no writer should be forced to endure. Never again. At almost my first meeting with the clever Dicks who had acquired the rights, I was informed that ‘all the dialogue will have to be changed,
no one
speaks like that now'. The sadness was that perhaps they don't in Pinner or Palmers Green, but there are a few pockets, thank God, where they do. And that, anyway, was the whole point of the plot – youth from the suburbs against age with an aristocratic background on Cap Ferrat. The main character was finally played by a middle-aged Jewish lady with dark hair and a sardonic French accent.
My
lady had been based on Diana Cooper, whom I adored. It came as a bit of a shock, frankly. But there you go. My book was no classic, but what on earth did they want the thing for? They'd have been far wiser to have written their own. Dialogue included. I feel certain there have been wonderful exceptions to the general rule, but by
and large I really do think it is not advisable to have ‘adapted for the screen' stuck on after the title.

Literary Review,
July 1994

by Nicholas Shakespeare,
Literary Editor,
Daily Telegraph,
1988–91;
Sunday Telegraph,
1989–91

It was a hunch, really, no more than that. I had recently been appointed literary editor and was wanting someone to drop firecrackers into the book world's cosy lap. I was looking for an acceptable outsider. So when, in the spring of 1988, I learned that after twenty-two years abroad Dirk Bogarde had returned to London, I telephoned him.

I had admired the lucid frankness of his autobiographies: here was someone who came late to writing as if he had been practising since an infant. Also an interview he once granted Russell Harty. ‘No one's ever possessed you?' Harty had asked during that programme. ‘No,' said Bogarde, but his expression was that of someone asking what on earth can have possessed him to agree to this interview in the first place.

Other nuggets included an admission he was not so dear and cuddly (‘I ain't') and that he did not much like acting ('That's a revolutionary remark,' said Harty hopefully). I thought, watching Bogarde preserve his irascible self: here is someone who tells the truth.

One Monday evening I knocked at a Queen Anne cottage off High Street, Kensington. I knew it was a bloody time for Bogarde – his manager and companion of fifty years lay ill upstairs, and the house smelt of nurses – but I was not to know how bloody. Earlier in the day Bogarde had learned the cancer had reached Forwood's lymph glands. It was simply a question of time. ‘I suppose I should have called and asked you to cancel your meeting with me,' he wrote later. ‘But for some strange reason I did not do so.'

He let me in and we sat in the drawing-room and he talked, without rancour, of a half-century's companionship crawling to its hideous end. ‘Someone who's looked after you since you were eighteen,' he said. He was drinking whisky and his shirt was hanging out. ‘You've got to stick with them, haven't you?'

We must have found other things to talk about on that sorry evening. I can't remember, but I know he was sharp, charming, uncertain, confident, likeable, and he had a bigger nose than I imagined. When at last I mentioned the possibility of reviewing books, he was diffident. He wasn't an intellectual. Yet if I thought he was up to it, all right, he'd give it a try.

We spoke again a week later. I said a book had arrived which might have his name on it. He warned: ‘If it's no good, I'm not going to be unkind.'

‘Just write what you think.'

Bogarde's first review was of
Mr Harty's Grand Tour.
As soon as I read the copy, I knew how correct had been my instinct. His spelling was atrocious, but the writing utterly professional, and it had the loud smack of honesty: ‘This, [Russell Harty's] first book, is easily read, light, frothy, as digestible as the wafer on a vanilla ice-cream, and about as insubstantial.'

Thereafter Bogarde became a part of the team. He was not prima donna-ish about being edited and remained keen to learn, although I don't know what I could have taught him. He hated writing about the film world, but if half-nelsoned could be cajoled into not being too nice or cuddly about it. His respect was hard-earned, always – of Josephine Hart's novel,
Sin:
‘This is utter tosh. Sorry' – but precious when won.

His best reviews were those in which the book mined something valuable out of himself. The readers responded. A review of three memoirs of the Holocaust – he had been among those to liberate Bergen-Belsen – elicited 200 letters. ‘No one ever poses the question which raced through my mind all the time: “Why?” ‘ I could rely on Bogarde to pose the question. Somewhere in the tree-dappled shadow outside Hanover, his tent peg had slipped into a mass grave.

It must have been the most difficult review to write. It was unforgettable to read.

Daily Telegraph, 2
October 1993

Mr Harty's Grand Tour
by Russell Harty (Century)

I owe Russell Harty an enormous debt. One which I don't suppose I will ever be able to repay, however hard I might try.

Years ago, in the early seventies, he invited me on to one of his television shows and permitted me to talk, uninterrupted, about myself for some forty minutes. What could have been more irresistible? Ego flourished like bindweed and I all but managed to smother the programme.

Some days later a publisher of high standing wrote to me and stated that if I could write as well as I had talked they would be ‘delighted to publish you'. This offer naturally went straight to my head and I wrote seven books over a period of ten years or so.

Mr Harty was, therefore, midwife to a new, if modest, career and we have remained good friends ever since.

He is a warm, sensitive, curious, funny, canny, straight-down-the-line creature, and exceptionally good company, but, and this is the rub, I don't think that he writes nearly as well as he talks: somehow he doesn't ‘come off the page' as robustly as he does on the screen or in the drawing-room. That is a very great pity indeed and I don't know where the fault lies.

This, his first book, is easily read, light, frothy, as digestible as the wafer on a vanilla ice-cream, and about as insubstantial. It leaves no lingering flavour behind; one has nothing to savour. Perhaps the awful phrase on the front cover, ‘Now a Major TV Series', puts one off; perhaps it is one of the faults? Maybe Mr Harty is relying on the vision to give body to his tour rather than the written word? We shall no doubt see for ourselves.

For example, he
tells
us that Siena is glorious, but I never for an instant felt that he had taken me there and shared the glory with
me. There is no feeling of colour, of scents, of heat, of light, of the ochre and plaster, the marble and brick. We are taken to the Palio and this is described in detail rather like a football match in Burnley, and lacks the slightest touch of magic. The thing takes all of three minutes and reads with a curious lack of occasion. It all gets a bit boring and more is made of his attempts to back down a one-way street where he gets a ‘ticket'.

The main trouble is, I think, that he has made this Grand Tour to meet people rather than to see places, which was what the Grand Tours were all about, and he is not terribly good at capturing people on paper.

We have a fairly useless little chatter with Peter Ustinov (anyone who can make Ustinov boring needs treatment), a rather longer and perhaps more informative meeting with Harold Acton, a deeply tiresome one with a very tedious German film star.

We even have a sort of meal with Barbara Castle in what appears to be a self-service canteen in Brussels which gets none of us, including the author, anywhere, and then in Rome he stares at the Pope for an hour and a half and only remembers the man's shoes. Which seems a pity.

There is a good deal of chitter chatter about people as diverse as Sting, or Christopher Scaife and Lord Lambton, but we never get to know them, only hear muted mutterings about, really, not very much. However, in Gstaad he falls in with a garrulous laundress who fills him in with details which she gleans from the soiled linen she handles of the film stars, mercifully unavailable to our writer.

Mr Harty is no eagle, no hawk, swooping down on his delectable prey, tearing out the gut and the heart and making us see the cities and the places which he drifts through on this tour; rather he is a jackdaw, concerned with the glittering trivia.

We visit Brussels, Waterloo, Naples, Florence, Lucca, but you would hardly know it. In Milan we are never told that there is a cathedral of astonishing glory, but we do hear an awful lot of chat about a fashion designer called Armani, and the great fresco of the Last Supper almost goes unrecorded because the church in which it is painted was closed.

Well, that happens, but the great traveller on the Grand Tour goes back the next day, surely? Perhaps there wasn't time with all the TV people fussing.

But I found it irritating; as irritating as the fact that although we are taken to Oberammergau all that we ever get to know about it, or its extraordinary performance of the life of Christ, is that if you sit on the wooden benches in the theatre there you get bum-ache. And that's not enough, at least for me.

The best part of the book is the first chapter; funny, touching, shrewd, accurate and alive, full of wistful detail, but I have a sad feeling that we won't see this part on television. It's too good and it happened before the Grand Tour really got under way, which is a mighty pity.

However, the book is certain to sell well; people love to read ‘the book of the TV series' and it'll fill in some of the detail which
the camera may miss. Mr Harty tells us that teaching is his passion; well, to coin a phrase, after this ice-cream wafer has been read and digested, he ‘must try harder'. I am very certain that he will the next time.

Daily Telegraph, 2
April 1988

This, my first review, distressed Russell enormously. I was very shattered: I had not realized at that moment – or had forgotten – how cruel the printed word could be. And after all
my
experience with the media! He was at the time ill. I didn't know how ill. And he died shortly afterwards.

Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This?
by Marion Meade (Heinemann)

I can tell you one thing: I'd have loathed Mrs Parker and she wouldn't have gone a bundle on me either. Born Dorothy Rothschild in a New York suburb of a Jewish father and a ‘goy' – in her words – mother, she seems, according to Marion Meade's dauntingly researched book, to have left the womb bitching, biting and belittling until the day she died.

This is a brick of a book, like so many American biographies, when it could have been chiselled down to tile-thickness: none the less it's readable, takes no sides, and simply attempts to present to us a witty, unattractive lady with a deep grudge. What I fail to gather is precisely what made Dorothy tick? Why was she so disagreeable? Why the angst, the rage, the cruelty?

She had an ordinary, lower-middle-class suburban life with brothers and sisters and holidays by the sea. It can't have been that bad a deal. Yet clearly she detested her background and was never known to speak of it. As soon as she could, she married one Edwin Pond Parker II of excellent English stock, made his life hell, divorced him but hung on to the name.

Her mother died suddenly when she was five or six. A fairly normal business, but she was consumed with guilt that she had something to do with it. She had nothing to do with it at all. Her mother went over to the ‘other side' with a perfectly valid passport from the Coroner: ‘Artery disease'.