These disassociations are eternal human strategies and they are banal. What a fiction writer can do is show the historical forms they take at different times: how they are lived out day by day by particular individuals. And if we cannot prevent individuals believing whatever they like about others — putting their fantasies into them — we can at least prevent these prejudices becoming institutionalised or an acceptable part of the culture.
A few days after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, a film director friend said to me, ‘What do we do now? There’s no point to us. It’s all politics and survival. How do the artists go on?’
I didn’t know what to say; it had to be thought about.
Islamic fundamentalism is a mixture of slogans and resentment; it works well as a system of authority that constrains desire, but it strangles this source of human life too. But of course in the Islamic states, as in the West, there are plenty of dissenters and quibblers, and those hungry for mental and political freedom. These essential debates can only take place within a culture; they are what a culture is, and they demonstrate how culture opposes the domination of either materialism or puritanism. If both racism and fundamentalism are diminishers of life — reducing others to abstractions — the effort of culture must be to keep others alive by describing and celebrating their intricacy, by seeing that this is not only of value but a necessity.
Filming Intimacy
I am in a screening room somewhere in the suburbs of Paris, waiting for the film of my novel Intimacy to begin. A few months ago, during the shooting, I saw some of the rushes, but I have seen no cut material. Now the film is almost finished, with most of the scenes in their definitive order and a good deal of the music in place. The only missing scene is the final one, where the characters played by Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance meet for the last time.
The French director Patrice Chéreau sits somewhere behind me. There is a handful of people present, the editor and others connected with the film. But the room is big; people seem to disappear into the plush velvet of the deep seats. I forget they are there.
Although Patrice and I worked closely together at times, and the film was shot in English, the script was written by his own writer, a woman, in French. I had decided I’d spent long enough with the material and lacked the heart to look at it again. Nevertheless, the film will be something that a number of us — director, writers, actors, editor, cameraman — have made together. And after all the talk, I have little idea what it will be like; evaluating a film from the rushes is like taking a few sentences from a novel and trying to work out the plot. So it is my film but not mine. I made the characters and most of the story, but Patrice transformed, cast and cut it; and, of course, his style and voice as a director are his own.
Patrice arranged to come and see me in London a couple of years ago. He was shy, he said, and didn’t speak good English. My French is hopeless, but it seemed better to meet without an interpreter. Whether or not you want to spend a lot of time and energy working with someone you barely know is something, I guess, you can realise only intuitively.
Patrice explained that he wanted to make a film of Intimacy, which he had read in French. Also, he said he liked my stories, particularly ‘Nightlight’, collected in Love in a Blue Time. In this story a couple who run into each other by chance begin to meet once a week, on Wednesday afternoons, to make love. Somehow, they never speak; after a while they are unable to.
At that time I did not know Patrice’s work in the theatre, opera and cinema as a director and occasional actor. I had seen neither of the films for which he is best known internationally, La Reine Margot and Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, and had no idea of his impressive reputation in France. This made it easier for me to see him without enthusiasm or dismay. After we’d looked at one another for a bit — not unlike the couple at the beginning of the film, about to embark on something big, neither one knowing the ‘little things’ about the other — I said he should take what he wanted from my work and make the film he wanted to make.
It was easy to say. I didn’t quite mean it. Nonetheless, it seemed like a good way to start, and I knew, at least, that I did want to start. Later I thought, what can these two strangers, a gay Frenchman and a straight British-Indian make together, if anything? What is possible between us and what impossible? How far can we go? What will this do to me? It would be the first time I’d worked with a non-British director. Would there be anything particularly ‘French’ about Patrice, or, for that matter, ‘English’ about me? My instinct was that the French have a better visual sense than the English, though less narrative grasp. But this was really only a prejudice.
Patrice is, I suppose, ten years older than me and about the same size, with similar back problems. He is gentle, unpretentious and willing to be amused. He is modest but not unaware of his own ability. He is certainly less impatient and bad-tempered than me. He goes out more than I do. He is more decisive. I noticed that we tended to dislike the same things, which is always a comforting complicity.
In the end, I am not sure what it is that my imagination likes to do with him, but just looking at Patrice, or hearing his voice on the phone, cheers me up; he makes me want to try to be a better artist. He respects me, and I him, but not too much.
*
When I first started to write, as a teenager in the suburbs, I wanted to be a novelist. I thought that writing books in a room on my own was all I would do. The work was self-sufficient. For me, as a young man, that was the point. There were no intermediaries or interpreters — the reader just read what you wrote. Some people, I guess, become writers because they’re afraid of others or addicted to solitude. Perhaps they read a lot, or drew or watched television alone as children. Being with others might be the problem that isolation can solve.
However, when you are writing at last, the same questions appear repeatedly. Why am I doing this? Who is this for? Why write this rather than that? I’m sure people in other professions don’t have an existential crisis every morning. It’s as if you are seeking any excuse to stop. You can, of course, grow out of these questions, or tire of yourself and your own preoccupations. Or you can hope that collaboration will push you past them. A director will have different doubts and fears. You want to see how others work, and — why not? — be changed by them.
My first professional project was a play called The King and Me, produced at the Soho Poly theatre in 1980. It was about a woman’s infatuation with Elvis Presley, and was directed by Antonia Bird, who I knew from the Royal Court. Her enthusiasm, and the final production, made me feel that what I’d written had some objective merit. A couple of years later, working with the theatre company Joint Stock, I collaborated with the director Max Stafford-Clark and the actors we selected, to ‘make’ a play for the Royal Court — Borderline. I discovered how enjoyable it could be to write for specific actors. Writing new scenes and lines in the rehearsal room, it was possible, almost straight away, to see whether they worked. After, I found it difficult, and depressing, to return to my room and, alone, begin to generate material from scratch.