Robert Harris on The Political Novel @ the LSE

In 2009 I reviewed Lustrum, the second of Robert Harris’s 'Cicero Trilogy', for the Financial Times. Praising Harris’s ‘distinctive excellence’, I wrote that he ‘understands politics and how to dramatise them: their necessary imperfection, their dependence on the embrace of lesser evils and shabby means that serve higher ends.’

Last night I went along to the LSE Literary Festival to hear Harris talk with Peter Kemp of the Sunday Times on the theme of 'The Political Novel' – an event organised in association with the Royal Society of Literature. Harris’s ability to discuss his working process, his view of the world and how he conceives his fiction is matchless in its assurance. As a huge Harris fan, and having spent the last few years writing and researching my own novel of politics The Knives (forthcoming from Faber this August) I could hardly have passed a more thoroughly engrossing ninety minutes. My notes from the evening are as follows:

1. In his early twenties, having been president of both the Cambridge Fabian Society and the Union, Harris contemplated seeking selection as a Labour MP. But he came to the view that the ‘modes of thinking’ for a politician and for a writer were too far apart, and that he preferred the latter. Having done that much hard thinking, though, he readily admits still to a ‘sneaking sympathy’, an ‘instinctive empathy’, for working politicians. He told the audience in tones of relief that it was some peoples’ jobs to get up in the morning and think about Brexit or the junior doctors, but not his.

2. He was shrewd and amusing about his early career path: how, post-Cambridge, having set himself on journalism, but having come from ‘the provinces’, he had no intention of going back there to serve a necessary Fleet Street apprenticeship; and so went for and secured a BBC traineeship. Later he was again acerbically funny in pointing out that, while his path through university and media would have made easy enough material for the sorts of English novels “that have been written by others” he felt this was inadequate material for good fiction.

3. In digression, some of his liveliest tales concerned his association, beginning at Cambridge, with the ‘controversial’ historian David Irving, who certainly knew that the so-called ‘Hitler Diaries’ were a forgery. I was reminded of Christopher Hitchens’ account of the kind of hair-raising ‘wit’ a writer will expose himself to if keeping Irving’s company.

4. Harris was fascinating on how his bestselling fictional debut Fatherland began as a non-fiction project, ‘a Baedeker guide to a world that never existed’, until he realised the freedom he needed to start making things and characters up.

5. Also v intriguing: his description of how, instead of Pompeii (2003), he nearly published – spent quite some considerable time on – a dystopian novel about an America whose politics fall under the sway of a Disney-like corporation. Clearly he chose well to jack that US-set book in and find another imaginative way to write about an empire under threat.

6. His two big tips for an aspiring novelist? 1) Have some sense of what your ending will be, where you are heading, even if you detour along the way. 2) The point-of-view of the narration determines everything.

7. An additional tip for the thriller writer: have a tight time-frame. Then shorten it.

8. Really fascinating for anyone who knows cinema (i): Harris talked about admiring and wanting as a novelist to emulate the film directing career of Stanley Kubrick, who, he felt, ‘could do any place.’ I suspect this wish is rather a common one.

9. Really fascinating for anyone who knows cinema (ii): Harris was very funny about his collaborations with Roman Polanski – to wit, how he sent Polanski the manuscript of An Officer and a Spy (the idea of a Dreyfus project Polanski had, after all, initiated), and then received copious notes on his prose from the maestro down the telephone.

10. Asked if he would contemplate a contemporary Westminster-set novel, comparable perhaps to the works of Trollope (which Harris ‘loves’), he admitted to some reluctance – that the Commons is no longer the most powerful legislator in the world as in Victorian times, that the drama and the stakes are just not the same. That said, he was surprisingly passionate – surprising even himself perhaps – when he talked of the drama he discerned in the ‘coded battle’ that had taken place in the House just the other day between David Cameron and Boris Johnson; and he evoked the ‘Shakespearean’ falling-out of the Miliband brothers and ‘what had happened to the Labour Party’ because of it.

11. Asked for his thoughts on political fiction that emphatically set itself on one ‘wing’ of a political argument, Harris was emphatic, saying that he felt for a novelist to try to ‘animate an ideology’ was a ‘fatal move.’ Though a Labour supporter still, he made clear: ‘I can’t believe that virtue is all on this side.’ This is as near as dammit a quotation from Trollope, and an eloquent gesture from one master of the form to another.

12. In my view Harris's early non-fiction works should be read just as keenly as his novels, for all that he has firmly chosen the latter camp now for his output. But at one point last night he looked a little wistful in remarking that his The Making of Neil Kinnock (Faber, 1984) is probably 'not much read these days.' It should be read by anyone interested in British politics - "now more than ever", perhaps. 

40? Forget it, Jake...

For the last 12 months me and my peer group/tiny circle of friends have been staring down the barrels of our 40th birthdays. One associate of mine actually said to me that, in his opinion, in this day and age, it’s really 50 that bears the gravity 40 only used to... We work longer, see, have our kids later, carry on carousing and playing with toys way past our teens and twenties, 40 just isn’t the staging post it used to be, three score years and ten is ancient history and all that…
Well, it’s a theory. But for each one of us the hour-glass is set up nonetheless, the sand doth run... I suggested to my friend, and he agreed, that the big birthdays are really an existential matter – one’s subjective inner sense of how far one has travelled to date, what one has achieved, what one feels oneself yet capable of – also, to some inevitable extent, certain significant other people’s estimations of the same, which may, frankly, determine how many more chances you get…
One inspiration for me is found late on in Roman Polanski’s memoir, where he describes his cautious, critical response to a script sent him in 1973 by Paramount’s Robert Evans, a script he liked but felt ‘simply couldn’t have been filmed as it stood.’ Polanski was sorry not to be more enthusiastic but his morale was low, after personal tragedy and a couple of pictures that hadn’t worked. Moreover, he writes, ‘I was also about to turn forty – a depressing moment in any man’s life.’ But he persevered with the script, took the meetings, resolved to do the movie. It was Chinatown, and it turned out, gosh, rather well. Indeed movies don’t come a great deal better. I guess the morals are, keep your nose to the grindstone, and don't be afeared to do something different.

New Esquire (May 2010): RTK on Polanski's The Ghost

The new Esquire has on its cover Jay-Z, which is good news, as I might now find out just who that guy is and what he’s all about. Within, my film column is about Roman Polanski’s movie of Robert Harris’s The Ghost, in which I found much to enjoy while also finding myself unable to get past one mountainous error, namely the drama’s daft imagining of a Blairesque Prime Minister played by Pierce Brosnan – 'Adam Lang', as Harris calls him, an international statesman shown to be utterly devoid of qualities. As I write in the mag:
"Pierce Brosnan unsurprisingly flounders in trying to fill this cursory outline of a person. In Harris’s novel, the ‘Ghost’ decides finally that Lang is just ‘not a psychologically credible character.’ Quite. But while Harris intends us to read Lang as a pliable phoney, all that comes across is Harris’s consuming hatred of Tony Blair, whom Lang resembles in every respect but for the ones that actually matter..."
Admiring John Rentoul’s political writings as I do, and finding myself mostly in agreement with him about the rationale for and legality of Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I suspect he would not be taken with my piece were he to read it, since he’s been vocal in his criticism of The Ghost and its makers (without having seen the movie); whereas I devote a fair few lines to my admiration of Polanski as a filmmaker, and attribute my overall liking for the film to it being so recognisably un film de Polanski.
As I say in the piece, it has ‘the quite inimitable Polanskian mood: a sense of creeping unease, of the slow-but-steady workings of fate, the unfussy, commonplace presence of evil in the world.’ Moreover, Ewan McGregor in the lead is ‘a classic Polanski hero in distress, naïvely courting trouble and yet, on some level, asking for it.’ And like so much of Polanski, The Ghost plays on the menacing theme of ‘the double’ – two men sharing a moral/physical resemblance and, possibly, a fate. Location-wise Polanski makes the North Sea island of Sylt ‘double’ as Martha's Vineyard, and it’s a great swap, because scenically the film has that mood evoked by Norman Mailer in his New England-set thriller Tough Guys Don’t Dance: the ‘cold sea air filled with the bottomless chill that lies at the cloistered heart of ghost stories.’ Those who treasure how Polanski shot the island of Lindisfarne in Cul-de-Sac will feel those embers warmed by The Ghost.
I must say, I don’t think Polanski undertook the filming of Harris’s novel on the grounds that he wanted to play his own part in dragging Blair up before The Hague. Rather, Polanski had been at work with Harris on a movie of one of the author’s earlier successes, Pompeii, but then the funding collapsed. As Harris tells it (or as reported by Michael White the other week) he then “offered [The Ghost] as an alternative to Polanski, who is not interested in politics. ‘This Gordon Brown, he’s schmuck, yes?’ was the limit of [Polanski’s] conversation.” That certainly sounds like Polanski’s diction, at least as Martin Amis once aped it in a famous appraising interview piece.

The People versus Roman Polanski

I wonder what LA's district attorney Steve Cooley thinks he's up to with the renewed pursuit of Roman Polanski; and I suppose we'll find out soon enough. Perhaps he thinks he's reminding us that justice never sleeps, even when, as in this decades-old case, the crime no longer has a plaintiff, the victim Samantha Geimer having moved on with her life. Perhaps, too, Cooley, a reputedly resolute and conservative ex-policeman, wants the world to know that Los Angeles is not merely a bolthole of liberal Hollywood types who want their excesses and turpitudes forever excused without retribution.

Cooley is reported by the Telegraph as saying, '[Polanski's] been trying to get it resolved on his terms but it's going to on the terms of the Los Angeles County justice system. Some form of justice will finally be done... He received a very, very, very lenient sentence back then which would never be achievable under today's laws." So what now? He wants Polanski to be sentenced anew with the power of hindsight, befitting the manners and mores of the 2000s rather than the 1970s?

Well, of course I can't know the lawman's mind, but I guess he feels the 76-year-old filmmaker has certainly made his own bed in that respect. Does he feel that the 42 days Polanski spent in Chino jail back in 1977, locked up alongside 'incredible murderers' (as the director once recalled to Martin Amis), cannot stand as adequate penal servitude for the crime? That the role played in Polanski's decision back then to skip bail by the capricious and dishonourable Judge Rittenband can be, essentially, overlooked? That, since the law and not the victim determines what punishment fits the crime, Samantha Geimer's opinions are immaterial? Again, on all counts, we shall see.

The Telegraph also reports that Cooley "is facing questions in California over the cost of pursuing Polanski when the state is having to release 40,000 inmates because of prison overcrowding." But I doubt that will perturb DA Cooley for one moment if, as it seems, he's a man who believes the sword of truth may indeed rust in its scabbard for however long it takes to get the blade out and the lopping done proper.

My own second-rate opinion, as you may have guessed, is that this is all a colossal waste of time and endeavour over a wrongdoing that was admitted to and paid for long ago.

The famous image of Polanski above is by and (c) Harry Benson.

Hercules Bellville 1939-2009

'That's a hell of a name. You got to live up to it, boy...'

Yes, Tough Guys Don't Dance again, but the usefulness and all-round sapience of that text is proven to me once more when I think about the sad passing of the superb (and superbly named) Hercules Bellville, who died last week. One might describe him as an International Man of Mystery, though this would be to miss his humour, and his candour, and the fact that when he was around he was so very present. But if you look for him on Google you won't find much to pin on his name, other than a list of glorious movie titles. I would like to have a picture of him here by this screed, looking like a Roman senator, but instead we must make do with something related to a picture he once made with his friend Roman...

I received the news of Hercules' death from a friend on the weekend, and was so able to enjoy Chris Auty's obituary in the Guardian as what I assume will be the first of many rich and splendid tributes to this marvellous man - rather than being stunned and upset by it as 'news'. In fact, I was able to be of some small service to Auty's writing inasmuch as I still have by my desk the weathered paperback of Roman By Polanski that I purchased back in 1985, and so was able to source Polanski's recorded remembrance of first meeting "a thin, gangling young man in a brown velvet jacket and bright pink tie ... very keen to break into filmmaking." This was Hercules, on the eve of the shooting of Repulsion, and his 'long, bony, elegant fingers' would be immortalised, uncredited, in one of the film's creepiest moments.

Perhaps because Hercules was Hercules, I had this info about him logged in my mental computer when I eventually had the good luck to make his acquaintance, at some point earlier this decade. My immediate impression was much the same as everybody else's - that here was a man of highly refined qualities, who knew an inordinate number of things, yet wouldn't be making a fuss about it. In terms of the intricacy of his vital relationships with some of the great filmmakers of our time, where to start unpicking the threads?

I can't say I knew Hercules well at all and yet he showed me the most extraordinary acts of kindness while I was at work on my book with Sean Penn, giving me bona fides and 'letters of introduction' that led to my sitting down in Los Angeles with Jack Nicholson (in his Mulholland Drive eyrie) and (separately...) with Anjelica Huston. I've no doubt that the consideration shown to me by both Nicholson and Huston on those occasions was on account of their doing a favour for their friend; and indeed, as an aside or prelude to the main business, both were very keen to share with me a few fond tales of Brave Hercules...

On the Penn project Hercules also, without fuss, put me together with Bob Rafelson and James Foley, meetings that meant a great deal to me. When subsequently I tried to thank 'Herky' (as I never presumed to call him), his response was a gruff, instinctively gracious, 'Oh, not at all, we all have to help each other out...' And so I assume someone must have helped him too, way back when - or else, he just had these gifts of good fellowship installed in his character from birth.

The last time I saw him was maybe late 2007, in a meeting at Recorded Picture Company, ostensibly about a screenplay of mine that had been doing the rounds, though I soon realised Hercules had really come to sit in with his 'development' colleague primarily in order to rag me about what he reckoned to be a highly unsuitable cover that Faber and Faber had stuck on a book I had edited, authored by another of Hercules' many good friends. His taste was so impeccable that I couldn't quarrel - it was just much more endearing that he felt the point of principle ought to be made, in the spirit of friendship, and of aesthetics. Those gifts of his again... which he clearly exercised daily, and which a great many people will be sorely missing as of now and henceforth. I trust there will be a tremendous party thrown in his honour sometime soon, and I imagine the list of attendees will be luminous.

Roman Polanski - Wanted and Desired: BBC4 Monday Oct 13th, 10pm

I'm pleased to see the much-admired Polanski doc airs on BBC4's Storyville strand next Monday. The blurb goes likes so: "Thirty years ago, Roman Polanski was convicted of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. After serving 42 days in prison, he fled the US and has never returned. Roman Polanski - Wanted and Desired reopens this complex and controversial case and explores what happens when one of the world's most famous directors gets trapped inside one of his own movies."

I just now re-read the chapter of Polanski's memoir Roman wherein he revisits the sexual episode with the young girl during a Vogue Hommes photo-shoot; his subsequent arrest, to his apparent surprise; those 42 scary days he spent in Chino jail on the orders of the curious Californian Judge Rittenband; and his flight to London and then Paris once he realised that further and protracted punishment might be in store.

So I'm curious to see how the doc tells this tale. I'm aware Rittenband is a controversial figure; also that the girl, now a woman, who has forgiven Polanski, is nonetheless considered a victim of a grave assault by those who have studied the police reports.

The only thing that bugs me about that blurb above is the stuff about Polanski 'getting trapped inside one of his movies', which piles into an especially high load of old media horseshit about Polanski. They first said that in 1969, after Charles Manson's ratbag hippie acolytes murdered Polanski's pregnant wife, and why? Because he'd made Rosemary's Baby. It's slovenly journalism that exhibits a strange and sudden newsman's piety toward the supernatural. Does it work in reverse too? Is Polanski 'trapped' inside The Pianist since the Nazis murdered his mother in a concentration camp?

Anyhow, we shall watch and see...

Roman Polanski's Tess revisited

The BBC are running their new version of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbevilles, which is a perfectly natural and interesting thing for them to do given the public's liking for grand old books well-mounted, and this sorry tale in particular. Gemma Arterton, about to take her bow as this year's Ill-Fated Bond Girl (as well as the face of a new Bond Girl fragrance) takes the lead. I caught a few minutes the other night and it all looked fine and affecting enough. But the age you are counts when you come to these things, doesn't it? Back in 1979 aged 9 I was desperate to see Roman Polanski's big-screen Tess, just because of the utterly indelible impression made on me by its poster featuring Nastassja Kinski, who definitely at that time eemed to me the definition of an angel on earth. I eventually got to see the film a couple of years later on video, and it haunted me, as the saying goes. I only had an idea, albeit a fascinated one, of who Polanski was. It took me another year or so to find his memoir Roman and learn that Tess was a book Sharon Tate kept by her bedside and urged upon her late husband; that his version was a form of uxuriousness, a debt of love; and that Polanski never needed to be told that the world is cruel. So yes, Kinski's beauty was a big factor in luring me to Tess the movie, and I became her dogged fan over the next 5 years as she appeared in about 43 movies, of varying distinction. But Tess was also the start of my love of Polanski, and the near-ancient sense of fatalism and sadness that underlies his work. He was the right man for Tess, whatever they said at the time.