Du Cote de Chez Greer
Germaine Greer had a go at Proust in an article in the Guardian over the weekend. Briefly, anyone tempted to read A La Recherche du Temps Perdu should get a life and find something better to do. Greer suggests “visiting a demented relative, walking the dog, meditating, or learning ancient Greek”. She has a lot of fun at the expense of his various translators but finally comes down on the side of CK Scott-Moncrieff who wrote the version I read when I was 23. (Or rather when I was 23, 24 and 25). There were 12 volumes in the Chatto and Windus edition and I can still remember sitting down to Chapter 1 of Swann’s Way and reading “For a long time I used to go to bed early…” The end was 1.25 million words away. I lived with it for over two years, a continuous rolling narrative running on in the background while I read other things, lived in different places, and began to think it was normal for sentences to run on for four or five pages in mountains of subordinate clauses. Stylistically Proust is a truly dreadful model for anyone with literary ambitions. But I can honestly say it was A La Recherche more than any other book that turned me into a writer. I began it as a reader curious to know what all the fuss was about. Two years later I reached the end and found in the eccentric binding of the Chatto edition page after blank page. I turned these empty sheets with mounting excitement in what felt like an unmistakable invitation. The last volume, Time Regained, is Proust’s justification for everything that has gone before and a statement of his artistic credo. I evidently finished it on the 20th January because on the last page I’d written the date – 20/1/77. Thirty two years later I can still quote embarrassing amounts of this stuff. (“An instinct religiously listened to amid a silence imposed on all other voices”. ) But it wasn’t these writerly epigrams that made the biggest impression. What genuinely shocked me about Proust was his reaction to the continually unrolling kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings and impressions that made up his inner life. He didn’t just acknowledge them, he took them seriously. This inner world wasn’t just real, or a subject worthy of attention but in his words “the most real of all things”. It was as if in this single act he’d validated my existence. I doubt I could have got that from walking the dog.
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Feeling the Heat
At six thirty this morning the temperature in the office was 23 degrees. I’m following the new regime. Windows open until the sun gets on them. Then close the windows and the blinds and work in the muggy gloom. It seems to help. Best of all is shifting the pattern of the working day. Getting up at six and getting to the desk early gives me a few hours before the heat becomes impossible. At this point I move to office space no 2 – the hammock. It’s not always easy to convince other people that lying in the shade in sunglasses and floppy hat counts as work but of course that’s pure short-sightedness on their part. The weight of mental labour that goes on between sips of cold fizzy water and the odd strawberry is at times so challenging I have to drop off for a while to recover.
The house has become very cosmopolitan with the arrival of lodgers from France and Spain. We’ve lost J, the rollerblading Czech, who left on Saturday. So it will probably take a few days for the place to find its new rhythm.
TBITR is back on track, but the complexity of the structure is making progress slow. Major re-write of the first act under way.
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The New Workspace
Ok, so it needs a little work. At the moment you take your life in your hands opening the door. On the plus side it’s a long way from the house at the bottom of the garden and there’s no chance of an internet connection. What more could you want? Well, a coffee machine, obviously. And a daybed. Apart from that, it’s perfect.
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The Thriller
I’ve finally got a draft of the thriller. It’s come out at about 75 mins which probably isn’t long enough. I’m tempted to send it straight off to D, but wiser to sit on it for a few days. I should enjoy this moment. It may be as good as it gets. It’s 1.30. I’m awarding myself the rest of the day off.
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Darwin and The Bluethroat
After watching yet another excellent doc about Darwin I started the day with a good idea. It ocurred to me that the screenplay for The Bluethroat currently languishing in the bottom drawer is, among other things, about the emergence of Eugenics – Darwinism’s dark shadow. It may be a bit late in the day to link it to the Darwin festivities but even so I’d be daft not to try and exploit this little bit of leverage. I phoned D who thought it was a fine idea. She agrees BBC 4 might be the place to start and has asked for a short pitch. Sent this off this afternoon – mercifully before the drumming started. (See below). So far The Bluethroat has been a stage play and two radio plays. If we sell this script the musical can’t be far off. Sing-along-a-Darwin. It might just work.
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Drumming for Beginners (i)
The girl’s school across the road has expanded into some of the houses along the street. The house immediately opposite the room where I work has become the music block. The bay fronted bedroom now houses a drum kit. The drummers get hot and open the windows. Result: boom-badda-boom-badda boom. The drums could have gone in a back bedroom overlooking the school but that would have disturbed the sweet things at their desks. I’ve now metamorphosed into Grumpy Old Git mode and I’m waiting for a call from the deputy head. Should be interesting.
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The Right Fuel
There are things you can do without when you spend a day at home at the desk, but coffee – and decent coffee at that – isn’t one of them. It gets you there in the morning, rewards you at lunchtime, and with careful timing can get you the perfect siesta. In my time I’ve plunged and I’ve filtered and I’ve stirred the grounds in an earthenware jug. But it wasn’t until the Gaggia arrived that my coffee bibing reached As Good As It Gets. Then of course there’s the added benefit of all the fiddling around needed to deliver the perfect shot with it’s crown of delicious crema. It all ran perfectly until about 18 months in the pump pressure dropped and my single shot took a couple of minutes to pour and the result was bitter and almost undrinkable. (Almost because clearly if this is the only coffee to hand then drink it you will.) The handbook said descale. So I descaled. It said clean the shower plate on the group head. I cleaned. Nothing made any difference. So I turned to the internet and lo and behold Google did what it was designed to do and saved the day. What I needed was a new seal for the group head. So wrapped up against the driving snow I set off for Norwich’s very own Gaggia shop only to discover they hadn’t got the parts and couldn’t get them either. So I phoned Gaggia who have possibly the world’s most irritating switchboard announcement explaining how valuable your custom is and if you hang on someone will surely get back from their holiday in Goa in the next few days and pick up the phone. I emailed Gaggia. Nothing. Back at Google things were looking up. A company improbably called Happy Donkey offered to put one of these seals in the post. I was so chuffed I got two. 24 hours later they plopped through the letter box and with this magnificent set of photographic instructions from Australia I replaced the seal in five minutes flat. Normal service has been resumed. After testing it under various conditions I now feel I’m strung with piano wire and just as soon as the caffeine lets go I’ll be back at the keyboard.
As for the siesta: it apparently takes 20-25minutes for the caffeine to get into the system. So the trick is to down a shot just before you drop off after lunch. Half an hour later you’re awake and raring to go.
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TBITR II
2009 and The Boy in The Room is moving slowly forward. Too slowly, but at the moment that’s the way life is. I’m in the strange position of adapting for the stage a radio play which wasn’t actually written in the first place. It ought to be straightforward but then if a radio play is any good it will have been conceived in radio terms from the outset – before a word of dialogue has gone down – and will have to be completely re-thought. You can’t just take a structure and a series of scenes that would have worked on radio and put them on stage. You’re filling different spaces, one aural, the other physical.
One of the big issues I had to sort out was what to do with the photographs, both the image at the centre of the play and the ones which line the walls at the various exhibitions. On radio this problem solved itself. The images would have looked wonderful because we would have been creating them ourselves. On stage it’s different. The central picture wasn’t too much of a problem. I clearly couldn’t mock up a photo of some kind and use a blown up version of that. It would have been far to literal and couldn’t have lived up to the expectations placed on it by the narrative. But what I can do is recreate it with actors. That’s going to work well. The difficult decision was what to do with the others. In the end I’ve decided to do without them. As Ivan pointed out “Art” only worked as a play because we never saw the picture that was at the centre of the story. So. No photographic images at all in a narrative laden with photographs and photographers. That decision freed me up at once. There will be plenty more to come.
I”m not at all sure I can solve all these problems. But writing the play at last is much more satisfying than trying to write a pitch that may or may not sell it to someone else. Sometimes you need to remind yourself what it is you do.
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Integrity 1, Income 0
Fuck. I’ve now been offered the perfect opportunity to admit the last entry was at best misguided and at worst, a load of bollocks. The BBC has turned down TBITR. Except that I’m not going to. I thought long and hard about taking the suggestion offered by the commissioner. In the end I decided he was asking for a different play and said no. So I can hardly complain if my own personal credit crunch has worsened over the last weekend. It’s probably a mistake to admit this in public, where my accountant might read it, but I’d do the same again next time.
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Asking the right question
When script editors, producers, commissioners, money-men or, as in one case I’d happily forget, the boyfriend of one of the business staff, responds to your work suggesting changes you always have choices. You can just do as they say and bend over (see Pirates and Mermaids below). You can dig your heels in, refuse to change a comma, and end up looking like a complete prat. Or you can do a whole lot of other things in between. A great deal depends on your opinion of the people making suggestions. In 20 years I’ve only once walked from a project – a film currently in production. And I didn’t do it lightly. Drama is always a collaborative exercise and if you go in expecting people to go along with your every creative whim then you’re going to have a short career. Particularly if the project in question wasn’t yours in the first place. But even as a hired hand you need to respect the opinion of the rest of the team and if you reach the point where this evaporates then it’s probably time to go.
So lets assume the person suggesting the changes knows what he’s doing but at the same time you feel that implementing them will fuck things up. The key here is to step back a bit. The question you need to ask is not, Am I going to make these changes? The question you need to ask is What is it that led this person to make the suggestion in the first place? What’s making him/her unhappy? If you can answer that question you can often find a solution that solves their problem and lets you hold on to your initial concept for the piece. Which is what I hope I’ve done for the radio play. The treatment has been redone as a result of the commissioners suggestion. I haven’t done what he suggested. But I think I’ve answered his reservations and what’s more I think the result is much stronger than the original pitch. So we all win. Or at least we will if he agrees and buys the thing.
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Tags: rewrites, treatment
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