Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (32 page)

The book has the scope and intensity which we associate with the prose epics of Saul Bellow. At 6oo-odd pages, it also has something of a willed quality, like everything Burgess writes. 'I am very pleased to have written a long novel at last,' he says. Using the twentieth century as its canvas,
Earthly Powers
is about the powers of darkness, the way the non-human agency of evil finds its human forms: in the voodoo of a Malayan warlock, in the bestialities of Chicago gangsters, in Nazism and Mussolini's blackshirts -and, more obliquely, in the propagation of bad art, the artist's role being analagous to that of God. Burgess was brought up as an Augustinian Catholic and received his early education at the Xaverian College in Manchester. He is still a believer, though not a literalist.

'You've got to believe in something, in a moral order. I do believe in the forces of evil - I myself was subjected to black magic in Malaya. There is, for example, no A.J.P. Taylor-ish explanation for what happened in Nazi Germany. There's a very malign reality somewhere ... Of course, you never know why God singles people out for special treatment. Take Lazarus - pissed every night, screwed everyone, slain in a tavern . . .'

For the time being, Burgess's life is like most writers' lives, beset by anxieties ranging from the metaphysical to the domestic. 'My first thought when I wake up every morning is - My God. The kitchen! My wife, you see, doesn't go in for that kind of thing. It's a constant battle - the kitchen, I mean.'

I had met Burgess before: as a child of six or seven, when he visited my parents with the first Mrs Burgess. I have a faint image of a jovial, talkative man, consistently out-decibelled by his wife, The second Mrs Burgess, the translator Liana (she is currently turning the Malayan Trilogy into her native Italian) seems to be a woman of the same voluble genre. It is easy to imagine the babel of their apartment, where English and Italian vie for status as the international language.

At about five o'clock Burgess's son Andreas wandered into the restaurant. A heavy-lidded Latin, Andreas shook hands and addressed me in a piercing Scottish brogue. 'Well, Andreas,' said Burgess. 'The kitchen . . . How is it?' Andreas smiled and shook his head. Father and son made gestures of Neapolitan resignation and helplessness. Burgess shuddered. 'One more drink,' he said, 'and I'd better go and deal with it.'

Observer, 1980

Postscript:
A few more words about that lunch. We began with gin-and-tonics (two each), followed by a tremendous amount of cheap red wine. I did my best to keep pace with Burgess, who, by five o'clock, was drinking double brandies as if against time: three swallows, and then the glass held up for more. At six he ordered a
gin-and-tonic.
This ended the session, though it seemed for a moment that we were about to repeat it, or relive it. I would go on to endure an authentically frightening hangover which lasted for half a week. At eight in the evening on the day after the day after, I was still sitting in an armchair with a hand on my brow and saying, 'Dear oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear . . .' Whereas Burgess (I am sure) went home, did the kitchen, spring-cleaned the flat, wrote two book reviews, a flute concerto and a film treatment, knocked off his gardening column for
Pravda,
phoned in his surfing page to the
Sydney Morning Herald,
and then test-drove a kidney-machine for
El Pais —
before settling down to some serious work.

ROMAN POLANSKI

The interview took place in Paris in 1979. In 1978 Polanski fled America while awaiting trial on charges of raping a minor.

'When I was being driven to the police station from the hotel, the car radio was already talking about it. The newsmen were calling the police before I was arrested to see whether they can break the news. I couldn't
believe
... I thought, you know, I was going to wake up from it. I realise, if I have
killed
somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But. . . fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls -
everyone
wants to fuck young girls! No, I knew then, this is going to be another big, big thing.'

'It could never happen to me' is the sort of remark that Roman Polanski will never have cause to utter. If strange things are going to happen, he is the kind of man they will happen to. Despite his reputation as a fixer, an ecstatic, thick-skinned bully-boy, he has, in many respects, always been fortune's fool. When he talks enthusiastically, and perhaps a little sentimentally, about all the promise, flair and freedom of the Sixties, it strikes you that there is no more conspicuous victim of the abysmal ironies of that decade. For him the Sixties were years of high energy and achievement, ending (as, in a sense, they ended for everybody else) on 9 August 1969, with the bloody murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate. His period of recovery was then marked by constant, and hatefully insulting, stories in the press, explaining how Mr and Mrs Polanski had opened the door to their own nemesis (by experimenting with drugs, decadence, weird rituals, etc). It wasn't his first experience of inordinate suffering, and inordinate humiliation. And now, ten years later, he finds himself in an altogether different kind of mess.

I went first to his airy, Hockneyesque, definitively bijou flat, between the Champs Elysées and the Seine. There can be few smarter apartment blocks in Paris: Marlene Dietrich used to have a floor of it, and so does some deserving member or other of the Pahlavi family. I waited for a few minutes in the bookless drawing-room, Polanski's agile manservant asking me if I would prefer my glass of beer with or without a head of foam. I went with the foam, and never regretted it. Then Polanski strolled promptly out of his bedroom, wearing tailored jeans and a monogrammed blue shirt. At five foot four, and with great liveliness of gait and gesture, he seems to be about sixteen years old. This impression didn't go away, even after several hours in his company. It occurred to me that his considerable and well-documented success with women has a lot to do with that fact. Contemplating little Roman, women wouldn't so much sense the appeal of being worked over by a priapic, trouble-shooting film-director; they would just want to take the poor waif upstairs and have him sob himself to sleep in their arms.

Looking sixteen, of course, does not entitle you to go to bed with adolescents. Despite what Polanski says —
contra
Polanski — not everyone wants to fuck young girls. One cannot hide behind a false universality: one cannot seek safety in numbers. Most people who do want to fuck young girls, moreover, don't fuck young girls. Not fucking apparently willing young girls is clearly more of a challenge. But even Humbert Humbert realised that young girls don't really know whether they are willing or not. The active paedophile is stealing childhoods. Polanski, you sense, has never even tried to understand this.

'You drinking
beer?
he asked with routine incredulity. His voice is vaulting, declamatory, not only accented but heavily accentual in style.

'That's right,' I said. 'In his piece about you Kenneth Tynan says that you hardly drink at all. Is that —?'

'Ah Ken Tynan full of shit,' he said, turning and pacing round the room. 'I drink a lot of wine last night, as a matter of fact . . . But now I'm very
hungry?

We had lunch in a noisy German restaurant round the corner. Polanski eats as hectically as he talks. 'Here, have some barring — no harring,
herring . . .
This is lovely — you want some? . . . Here, I prepare you good little portion, some onion on top — there!' He is pointed at and murmured about by the other diners, and affectionately fawned on by the immaculate waiters. He is one of those people who can shout for service without giving offence: if he hollers for a beer it is because he must have that beer, and must have it now.

According to press reports, Polanski met with a cool reception in Paris after his escape from America in early 1978 ('I have not contacted him — and I'm not going to,' said Joseph Losey. 'A coward's way out. The ranks are closing against him,' said Robert Stack). Well aware of his catastrophe-prone nature, he is finding Paris a good place to keep out of harm's way. 'It's very grown-up here,' he says, adding, in one of the bursts of mangled eloquence that occasionally escape his rusty, staccato, always endearing English: 'I'm trying to extenuate those contrasts in my character that make me stick out as a sore thumb from my surroundings.' (Love that 'as'.) He is determined to return to America, despite the remote possibility of a 50-year jail sentence, for the alleged drugging and raping of the thirteen-year-old girl. 'But they have made me very welcome in Paris and I'm going to stay for some while. Unless something happens.'

After all, he was born here, in 1933.

The first few years of his life were relatively free of disaster. In 1936 his family returned to Cracow. As a child Polanski saw barricades being erected at the end of the street: the Nazis were closing off the ghetto. In 1941 both his parents were taken into concentration camps. Just before the ghetto was finally overrun, Polanski escaped through a gap in the barbed wire. 'One day, outside the ghetto, I saw people marching in a column, guarded by Germans. My father was among them. I walked alongside for a while but he gestured for me to run away. He survived four years in a camp - but that was the last time I saw him.' His mother died in Auschwitz.

Polanski's youth continued to be marked by near misses. He was brought up by Catholic peasants in the remote Polish countryside. Out blackberrying one day, he was casually shot at by German soldiers - 'like I am a squirrel or something'. Back in liberated Cracow in 1945, the only bomb dropped during one of the last German air-raids blew him through a lavatory door, injuring his left arm. At the age of sixteen, as an art student in Cracow, he was led into an underground bunker by a friend of a friend who proposed to sell the young Roman a racing bicycle. 'I always wanted a racing bicycle.' He described what followed very vividly, in his thoughtful anapests, leaning forward and parting his hair to show you the scars on his crown.

'I was walking in the tunnel, you know. He was behind me. He was behind me. I kept saying, "But where is the bicycle, sir?" Then I thought I get a sudden electric shock, thought I touch a cable or something - or I thought there was some other attacker down there. I couldn't
believe
the man was hitting me on the head.' But he was, with a rock, five times. Polanski's assailant, apprehended that day, had already committed three murders. When he staggered out of the bunker, Polanski had so much blood pouring from him that he still feels a tremor of dread every time he steps under a shower.

And, despite his multinational successes, Polanski's life has never shaken free of the grotesque and calamitous. Over the years at least half a dozen of his close friends and associates have met with violent and unlikely deaths — suicides, strange illnesses, a freak train accident. It is by now a cliche to say of Polanski that his films, with their emphasis on terror, isolation and madness, seem no more than a demonic commentary on his life. But such an impression is unavoidable in the light of the atrocious events at Cielo Drive in 1969. Polanski, you'd have thought, has endured enough for twenty lifetimes.

'Of course, my life has been very strange, full of strange things. But it does not look like that to me, you know — from my side. My life is just something I
live,
you see. Only when I stand back do I see how strange it has been.'

At one ironic remove, this is the character Polanski plays in his infrequent appearances in his own films. He has low regard for actors ('the intelligent actor is a rarity, almost a paradox') and has few pretensions about his own abilities in front of the camera: 'I only use me because I'm cheap and give no trouble. I'm so nice to work with, you know? I always do what I tell me to.' In fact, he is an actor of narrow range but perfect pitch: he has an unwavering feel for the comedy and pathos of vulnerability. In his two most memorable roles — as the jittery vampire-hunter in
Dance of the Vampires,
and as the effaced, wide-open Polish clerk in
The Tenant —
Polanski portrays, with authentic sympathy, the little man to whom strange things happen. In those films the little man half-expects strange things to happen to him, and responds to them with obedient, uncomplaining horror as long as they last. He seems to believe that if these strange things weren't happening to him, then other strange things would be happening to him instead.

I was reminded of this persona several times during lunch, most particularly when Polanski described his recent prison term in connection with the 'rape' case in Los Angeles. Reluctantly at first, later in a spirit of great hilarity, with painful whimpers of delighted recollection, he told me how his six-week incarceration began.

'When I arrived in the middle of the night, I couldn't get
in
to the goddamn prison! There were too many journalists and cameras there! And all the prisoners in yard because they hear it on the news, saying, "Hey, how y'doing, Planski!" But it was like a vacation, a sanctuary. It was terrific. I wouldn't mind to go back now, now I know what it's like. It is interesting to go on the other side, where bad people are. Full of
incredible
murderers! There was someone who kill sixteen people!' He nods, adding more quietly, and with resignation, 'That is the trouble - you never know when people going to
stab
you, you know? That's the only problem, is that you can just get killed any time.'

The quality of resignation, of stretched stoicism, was perhaps what drew Polanski to the character of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Called simply
Tess,
the latest Polanski offering opened in France late last year, with encouraging critical and commercial success. It is a respectful, perhaps over-faithful, certainly over-long and generally flawed piece of work. The difficulty of the film (as in another sense it is the difficulty of the book) concerns the character of Angel Clare, the supposedly adorable foil to Tess's swinish seducer, Alec d'Urberville. The point is that Hardy plays on these melodramatic contrasts (Angel strumming his harp in the attic, Alec glimpsed through flames carrying a pitchfork), while making it clear that Angel is more subtly despicable than Alec could ever be. Polanski was aware of the ambiguity, though I don't think he ever resolved it.