He is right; my compliance will do him no good. Most directors have plenty of that as it is. If we argue, both of us, along with our friendship, will survive.
In the end, when finishing the film, I know he will go his own way, which is all he can do. That is what I would recommend; it is what I would do. For me, it is enough that what has been accomplished was worth the effort and a pleasure. Whether anyone else will agree is another matter and up to them.
Mad Old Men: The Writing of Venus
Sometimes, if I am writing, and things are not going well, or if I am just bored, I will stop to read, until I want to write again. It is rare that I will read much fiction; the last thing a writer needs is another insistent writer’s voice in his head. So these days I read only on trains or planes, where I can get dreamy with a book away from others, and with nothing else to do, and no other obligations. Also, it is an increasingly rare pleasure to discover a writer one has hardly heard of before, a writer one instantly likes and wants to read more of, a writer who speaks to you.
It was on a long train journey that I first read Tanizaki’s novel Diary of a Mad Old Man. It had been sent to me by an American friend who knew I’d just read Tanizaki’s The Key. I had been told it was his best book, but I was keen to read other works. Tanizaki’s name might not mean a lot even to well-informed readers — he was a huge influence on Mishima — but his books have remained in print in most European languages.
Diary of a Mad Old Man, a novella, is the story of a dying man and his son’s wife, with whom he becomes infatuated, even as she treats him cruelly — and violently — at times. Other parts of the novel concern the kabuki theatre and the actors who work in it. It is not only a good noveclass="underline" had it just been that, I could have read it and put it down. But as I began to read, there was a surge of recognition: I had been seeking this for a while. In the three years since the last film Roger Michel directed from my work, The Mother, I had been considering a similar idea to Tanizaki’s, one I hadn’t been ready to write, not knowing how to approach it. The difficulty of beginning a new piece of work is often the difficulty of finding a point a view, a way into the story, a place to start.
I read Diary of a Mad Old Man quickly and didn’t read it again. It was not my intention to adapt the novel for film. This had already been done, and it seemed pointless to try to squash a work successful in one form into another. I would have to start again. But there was a lot in the story which appealed to me. Unlike Tanizaki, though, I was interested in another subject I believed I could use too: friendship between older men. One way to engage with another writer, to get closer to him than by mere reading, is to ‘write around’ his ideas, to develop them in your own register until the original becomes almost unrecognisable.
On most Fridays for years I have been having breakfast with a group of friends in Notting Hill. Occasionally, we would persuade a couple of younger women to join us. Mostly, nevertheless, it was only older men — actors, writers, theatre and film directors — people I’d known since I first began to work in London, in the mid-70s. One morning we were talking about sleep and how to induce it, a popular and important subject amongst the over-forties. We discussed sleeping pills and sleeping draughts, and then about how to overcome the inevitable addiction. One of my friends and I would then shuffle off to the chemist, where he would get his pills. This friend said he found our Friday mornings to be particularly relaxing, compared to the difficulty of the rest of his life. He suggested he’d be happy sitting in a coffee shop, like old men he’d seen in Cairo, discussing world affairs while drinking tea and smoking a hookah.
It seems like a good idea; but how satisfying would it really be? In his long autobiographical essay ‘In Praise of Shadows’, Tanizaki movingly tells us how he built his house. He speaks of a kind of Zen attentiveness; he wants to praise age, slowness, wandering, curiosity, and the infinite pleasures of aesthetic appreciation. As in his fiction, baths and toilets are never far from his thoughts. Tanizaki tells us he likes to listen to the ‘softly falling rain’ while sitting on the toilet.
It is an admirable essay in many ways, reminding us of the virtues of silence and of listening; of space, emptiness and patience. Interestingly, Tanizaki’s attitude towards the West at that time is not unlike that of some of the Muslim world today. The West represents the dangerous new: tradition and stability is being destroyed by an inferno of consumerism and postmodern sexuality. Tanizaki speaks of suffering ‘a severe nervous disorder’.
The attitudes expressed in the essay sit uneasily with the rest of his work; indeed, they seem to be at odds with it. To a certain extent this illustrates the falsity, or impossibility perhaps, of an autobiography, of the belief that one can say, ‘I am speaking the truth,’ and be sure that that is what one is doing. This assumes that ‘the truth’ resides in what one knows, rather than in that which one doesn’t. It might have to be admitted, then, that the ‘truth’ of an artist is more likely to be discovered in their fiction than in direct witness. In his ‘lies’, and in the relation between the characters, Tanizaki seems to get closer to the way things seem. Not only do his people not know anything about themselves for certain, they certainly don’t know who they will become; the more they try to control themselves, the more out of hand everything becomes. It is not insignificant that, after writing screenplays and directing a movie, Tanizaki translated into Japanese Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray — the story of a sexually obsessed man who is unable to remain true to the image he has of himself.
By the time he wrote The Key, Tanizaki’s work had been stripped down to the essentials of human interaction. He wrote: ‘Western writers are overrich in their production. The offerings of writers like Zola and Balzac are like a feast within a feast. Just looking at the menu is enough to make us melancholy and get our laxatives ready.’
The Key concerns a middle-aged, ordinary couple with an adult daughter who still lives with them. From the ruins of what appears to be a long dead marriage, something starts to stir. We like to believe — it is a common misconception — that erotic relationships only deteriorate, that there is nothing new that can happen between a long-established couple. This is something we are so certain of that it must be incorrect. A deep involvement may become so distressingly pleasurable that we might feel dangerously addicted. As such a relationship develops, distance might be required, as the relationship begins to feel dangerous, even incestuous.
The novel opens with a middle-aged man drugging his sexually cold wife in order to spend more time with her feet. The sexuality of both of them is in the process of being re-aroused by the constant presence in their house of their daughter’s fiancé. Here jealousy makes passion possible. As Lacan puts it, ‘The other holds the key to the object desired.’ Tanizaki doesn’t bother with social detail but provides only the most necessary information about the city and the characters’ social circumstances. And despite the fact that his characters are always medicating themselves — they are often sick, or imagine they are; no one is ever allowed to forget their body — his novels are frantic. In The Key, and in Diary of a Mad Old Man, the male and female characters, of whatever age, are too passionately involved with one another’s desire — and the satisfaction, humiliation and family complications which follow from it — to settle for the seemingly nirvanic existence their circumstances might allow.