Lives in Writing (9 page)

Boorman’s army service was spent mainly in the Education Corps, teaching raw recruits at a Royal Engineers’ basic training camp. He was threatened with a court martial for questioning the legitimacy of the Korean War, but charges were dropped when he demonstrated that all his arguments were taken from
The Times
. At about the same time he met a vibrant, attractive young German woman, called Christel, who was working as a nurse in a TB sanatorium. They lived together after his release from the army and, when she became pregnant, married. It was to be a long-lasting and fruitful marriage, though strained by some infidelities on Boorman’s part which eventually brought it unhappily to an end. ‘Christel had been loyal and true, and I had not. Trust was lost. I lived on suffrance, closely watched. When I finally broke away, the severance was wrenchingly painful for all the family.’ But the saddest event in his life so far was the death of his daughter Telsche at the age of thirty-seven, from cancer. She was the eldest of his four children, and collaborated with him on some of his films.

Like many film directors, John Boorman learned his craft in television – not in drama, however, but through editing, directing and producing documentary programmes. He was an early recruit to ITN news, and then joined Southern TV, where he achieved unprecedented success with a regional magazine programme called
Day by Day
. Headhunted by the BBC in Bristol, he caused a stir with a series of films that candidly reflected the changing social mores of Britain in the early 1960s, and he joined a circle of lively young writers in Bristol that included Tom Stoppard, Charles Wood and Peter Nichols. It was collaborating with Peter Nichols on a film about the Dave Clark Five, designed to ride the wave created by the Beatles’
A Hard Day’s Night
, that gave Boorman his break in narrative movie-making.

As soon as he was launched into this new career, however, he abandoned the documentary bias of his TV work and exploited the superior technical and budgetary resources of feature films to make works of mythic resonance and – in due course – epic ambition. He was offered the chance to direct a
noir
ish thriller for MGM if Lee Marvin could be persuaded to act in it. Marvin promised to do so on one condition, which he indicated by tossing the script out of the window. Boorman rewrote the script, and filmed the story as if it was a bad dream, shooting each scene in a different dominant colour. When the studio heads saw the rushes they suspected he was insane and interviewed him in the presence of a psychiatrist. But
Point Blank
was a critical success, if not a commercial blockbuster, and in due course, like many of Boorman’s productions, became a cult movie.

The autobiography contains a memorable portrait of Lee Marvin, a Hemingwayesque character, incorrigibly macho, haunted by a traumatic combat experience as a Marine in the Second World War, and given to epic binges in which Boorman inevitably became embroiled, leading on one occasion to his being stopped in his car by an LA traffic cop with the immortal question, ‘Do you know you have Lee Marvin on your roof?’ (He did know.) In 1968 he teamed up with Marvin again to make the aptly named
Hell in the Pacific
, about an American airman and a Japanese naval officer who are washed up together on a tiny desert island in the war. Almost everything that can go wrong with a film went wrong in making this one and Boorman’s account is a classic of movie disaster stories.

Hell in the Pacific
was not a success at the box office, and neither was its off-beat, experimental successor,
Leo the Last
, though it won the Best Director prize at Cannes. Boorman was approached about making
The Lord of the Rings
, and did a lot of work on it, but the project, like so many film projects, fell through. (He pays a generous tribute to Peter Jackson’s eventual realisation of the story.) Boorman’s directorial career was beginning to languish: he badly needed a real hit. At this crucial moment he was asked by Warners to consider a novel by James Dickey that they had under option, called
Deliverance.
‘I read the novel with mounting excitement. I knew how to do it.’ Of course he did! It was all about a river. Four men take a canoe trip down a fast-moving river in a valley soon to be flooded to make a dam that will provide the electricity for their suburban homes. What starts out as a light-hearted adventure turns into a grim struggle for survival, as the group experiences first the pitiless power of the river and its rapids, and then the malevolence of the ‘mountain people’ who inhabit the valley’s heights. One of the party is drowned, another seriously injured, a third famously sodomised, and the fourth only survives by killing a man with a crossbow. Dickey, who had himself written a script, and retained some right to interfere in the making of the film, meant to celebrate this action as an assertion of manhood; Boorman wanted to end on a more ambiguous note, with the survivor haunted by his deed. Boorman won, but endured some awkward moments with the absurdly pompous Dickey in the process.

Warner were nervous about the prospects of a movie with no woman in it, but it was nominated for three Academy Awards (best film, best director and best editing) and the theme music alone, a simple duet for guitar and banjo conceived by Boorman, earned enough money to put the film into profit. Boorman was now a hot director. He was offered
The Exorcist
, but found the subject repellent and turned it down. Instead he made a didactic fantasy of his own called
Zardoz
, set in a future when developments in medicine have given men and women immortality. In lieu of a fee he took a share of the profits, of which there were none.
Zardoz
flopped. So did his next film,
The Heretic
, intended to be a kind of benign sequel to
The Exorcist
, which infuriated the earlier film’s fans, and pleased nobody else. Boorman quotes Pauline Kael against himself: ‘It’s . . . another in the long history of movie-makers’ king-size follies. There’s enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what the picture lacks is judgement.’ Again Boorman’s career was threatened with eclipse, and again he rescued it, this time with
Excalibur.
Though many critics were and continue to be sniffy about that film, it drew enthusiastic audiences world-wide.

And that has been the pattern of Boorman’s career as a director – always experimenting, always ambitious, always courting disaster, never afraid of going ‘over the top’. He frequently paid the price of failure for his ambition, but invariably bounced back. His imagination thrives on difficulties. He once defined film-making as ‘inventing impossible problems for yourself and then failing to solve them’. Many of his films have involved extreme physical risk, discomfort and danger for himself. The reason why the white-water sequences in
Deliverance
are so heart-stoppingly exciting and immediate is that the director himself spent many hours before and during the shoot immersed in the raging river. In preparation for making
The Emerald Forest
he spent weeks living simply with a tribe in the Amazon rainforest, like a scrupulous anthropologist doing fieldwork. It is all part of his self-image as a cinematic Grail knight, prepared to venture into unknown territory in the effort to bring back a transcendent movie.

Adventures of a Suburban Boy
is an effortlessly enjoyable read, containing many droll anecdotes which make one laugh out loud, but it is far deeper than the usual show-biz memoir. It is the autobiography of a man who takes himself and his art seriously and writes about both subjects with unusual eloquence and insight. There is an elegiac tone to its concluding section. Boorman ruefully acknowledges changes in movie-making (the digital technology with which one can create astonishing special effects just sitting at a computer console) that have made his kind of physical involvement in the process almost redundant, and reflects wryly that the tyranny of philistine studio executives has been replaced by the tyranny of philistine preview audiences, whose score cards often determine how films are edited and released. Not all the respondents are philistine though. One card he saw said: ‘John Boorman’s movies are unpredictable, subversive and crazed. Tell him to keep making them no matter what.’

UNTOLD STORIES
, ALAN
Bennett’s collection of autobiographical essays, family memoirs, diary extracts and other occasional writings was published in October 2005 to warm and widespread applause in the press, and by the end of February 2006 had sold well over 300,000 copies in hardback. That remarkable figure was achieved partly with the help of some brutal discounting by chain bookstores, online booksellers and supermarkets, of a kind that has destabilised the book trade in the UK and threatens to eliminate independent bookshops. However much one may deplore this phenomenon (and Alan Bennett himself publicly urged readers to buy his book from independents), as an index of popularity the sales figures cannot be gainsaid. Supermarkets know a good loss-leader when they see one. Alan Bennett is undoubtedly one of the most popular writers of recognised literary merit in England.

He first came to fame as one of the brilliant quartet of young Oxbridge graduates (the others being Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller) who created and performed
Beyond the Fringe
in 1960 in London, and subsequently in New York, a hugely influential show which may be said to have in some sense inaugurated the 1960s as a decade of youth-driven cultural revolution. (Tony Hendra, for example, has described seeing the revue as a life-changing experience which caused him to abandon his vocation to the Roman Catholic priesthood and to become a satirist instead, moving from England to America to become a founder and contributing editor of the hugely successful American magazine
National Lampoon.
) After
Beyond the Fringe
Bennett gave up the idea of becoming an academic historian and commenced a highly successful career as a playwright, screenplay writer, and occasional actor.
Forty Years On
,
Habeas Corpus
,
Single Spies
,
The Lady in the Van
,
The Madness of George III
and
The History Boys
are among the most acclaimed works of post-war British theatre. The last but one of these was also a much admired feature film, adapted by Bennett (but renamed
The Madness of King George III
, in case American audiences should think it was a sequel to movies called
The Madness of George
and
The Madness of George II
which they had somehow missed). Over the same period he wrote a large number of outstanding television screenplays, including the boldly original ‘Talking Heads’ for the BBC, a series of extended monologues, each delivered straight to camera by a single actor, some of which were later successfully performed on stage. He is, in short, a national treasure, and the popularity of his occasional prose writings, first harvested in the bestselling
Writing Home
(1994) and for a second time in
Untold Stories
, was both a symptom and a confirmation of that status. Together they constitute a kind of serial autobiography, which continues in the selected extracts from his diary published in the
London Review of Books
in the first issue of each new year.

These writings are enjoyed for two reasons in particular: because of what they reveal about the character of the author and because they make you laugh. The two things are connected, for Bennett excels in telling jokes against himself. A typical one in
Untold Stories
concerns a paper he gave to an Oxford historical society on Richard II, the subject of his postgraduate research; at the end he invited questions and after a long silence someone at the back of the room raised a hand and asked, ‘Could you tell me where you bought your shoes?’ But he also deals with serious, sad, painful experience of a kind which everybody faces sooner or later, like the decline and death of parents, and he does so with a very sure touch.

The first section of
Untold Stories
describes how his mother succumbed to severe depression shortly after she and his father retired to the country cottage they had always dreamed of. Bennett and his father took her to the mental hospital where she was admitted, and returned the same evening to visit her. A medical orderly escorted them to her ward:

He flung open the door on Bedlam, a scene of unimagined wretchedness. What hit you first was the noise. The hospitals I had been in previously were calm and unhurried; voices were hushed; sickness, during visiting hours at least, went hand in hand with decorum. Not here. Crammed with wild and distracted women, lying or lurching about in all the wanton disarray of a Hogarth print, it was a place of terrible tumult. Some of the grey-gowned wild-eyed creatures were weeping, others shouting, while one demented wretch shrieked at short and regular intervals like some tropical bird.

Bennett thinks they must be in the wrong ward, but his father

. . . stopped at the bed of a sad, shrunken woman with wild hair, who cringed back against the pillows.

‘Here’s your Mam,’ he said.

And of course it was only that, by one of the casual cruelties that routine inflicts, she had on admission been bathed, her hair washed and left uncombed and uncurled, so that it now stood out round her head in a mad halo, this straightaway drafting her into the ranks of the demented. Yet the change was so dramatic, the obliteration of her usual self so utter and complete, that to restore her even to an appearance of normality now seemed beyond hope. She was mad because she looked mad.

Dad sat down by the bed and took her hand.

‘What have you done to me, Walt?’ she said.