William Boyd - The New Confessions

I watched Georg at work with real fascination. Nita Jungman slept; the cameras turned three feet from her face. Georg reached into his icebox where he had been chilling a butterfly. The freezing befuddled insect sat on his blunt fingertips, wings opening and closing very slowly. Georg took a sip from his cigar, pursed his loose lips together and blew a thin gentle jet of smoke onto the butterfly. The creature, irritated, could just manage a groggy two-foot flight. One hoped, naturally, it would head for the alluring peak of Nita Jungman’s pretty little retroussé nose. It was all a matter of nice calculations of correctly chilled, thus unenergetic, butterfly, and direction and velocity of cigar smoke goad. On this particular day Georg got it right three times with five butterflies. The entire studio broke into applause. Georg himself was proudest of a scene that you will probably remember in Heinrich Bern’s Deception . In it Georg persuaded a large housefly to visit every feature of the villain’s face (Rex Ermeram in his greatest role) by using the ice trick and by laying on with a pinpoint a tiny path of honey from demonic eyebrows to hooked nose, from leering lips to saber scar. Georg once told me, with passionate earnestness, that the single most important factor in any German man’s life was the freedom to smoke undisturbed in every corner of his house.

And so 1924 ended and I was still in Berlin, poorer and no further on with my career. In the New Year, Sonia wrote begging me to return for the birth of our second child and informing me of the shocking news that her father had secured me a position in his old pharmaceutical supplies company as trainee salesman. It was just at this time that I started work at the Hotel Windsor. I sent most of my first week’s pay home, said prospects were improving (I did not specify) and that the baby, if a boy, should be called Adam, and if a girl, Emmeline, after my mother.

I had not been entirely idle. Karl-Heinz and I had translated my script of Love’s Sacrifice and so far it had received only two rejections. Karl-Heinz said he would like to play the hero and I instantly agreed. Thus simply a professional association was added to our friendship, which was to survive the most hazardous traumas and ordeals.

Karl-Heinz too was knowing more success. He had acted in his first billed role as a shrewd detective investigating the disappearance of a lodger in a boarding house (I can recall nothing more of this film, which is remarkable only as Karl-Heinz’s debut). On screen he had an enticing, eye-catching impact. There was something latently unruly about him, a sense of good behavior only just being preserved with considerable effort. The Jahrbuch der Filmindustrie 1925 described him as “a most interesting find.” More offers of work came in. Karl-Heinz lent me money, some of which I sent on to Sonia.

Then, just before I finished my stint as Ulrich Pfau’s replacement, events began to move and my life to change. It was March and I was impatient for spring. I had been in Berlin for over four months and was feeling oppressed by its near-gray massiness. Karl-Heinz’s modest success made me conscious of my own frustrated stasis. I was in a bad mood, further irritated by a letter from Sonia that morning informing me that my second son had been born ten days previously and that his name was to be Hereford. Apparently there had been Herefords in the Shorrold family “for centuries.” (I quote. “You’ve heard of Hereford the Wake,” Vincent Shorrold proudly said to me later; “we go right back to him.”) As I paced up and down outside the Windsor I grew steadily more depressed. “John James Todd,” I said to myself, “accompanied by his two sons, Vincent and Hereford.” No, really, it was too appalling! Again I suspected the sly influence of Vincent Shorrold.

Just before my shift was up, at about four o’clock, a taxi pulled up in front of the hotel. I opened the door and Karl-Heinz got out. He was wearing a fawn overcoat with a fur collar. He put on sunglasses and warmed his hands on my blazing coat.

“Most amusing,” I said.

“We have a drink when you finish,” he said. “I’ve got a present for you. See you at the English Bar.”

The English Bar was on the Unter den Linden, in the passageway. It bore no resemblance at all to any hostelry in England, but Karl-Heinz thought it was a treat for me. When I arrived he was in the middle of a meal. He was still wearing his coat. I ordered a half liter of pilsner.

“Like the coat,” I said.

“You want some?” He pointed at his plate. “I pay?”

“What is it?”

“Smoked ham cooked in champagne. Delicious. With a radish sauce.”

“Tempting, but no thanks. What are we celebrating?”

“I got a job. Fantastic. Realismus Films. A. E. Groth directing. Diary of a Prostitute . I’m getting …”he considered it. “Five hundred dollars.”

“Are you the prostitute?”

“And I got one present for you.” He smiled and handed over a book wrapped in brown paper. “It’s by the same fellow as in Weilburg. You know — Rousseau.”

I read Julie, or The New Héloïse in two days with an effort directly proportional to my mounting dismay and disappointment. The turgid rhetoric, the lachrymose posturing, the relentless rhapsodies, were bitterly disillusioning after the never-to-be-forgotten exhilaration of The Confessions . For a landmark in the history of human artistic endeavor, and the signal for everthing we know as Romanticism to begin, it was extraordinarily hard going.

I find it hard now to explain why I did certain things then. I was only twenty-six years old, but the war had provided me with several lifetimes of experience. I was constantly on the verge of brilliant ideas, or at least I felt I was, and that feeling can sometimes be as important as the ideas themselves. So why, after that reaction to the book, did I decide to adapt it as a film? I had no honest explanation. It simply seemed the right thing to do. So I did it.

I wrote the script of Julie in seventeen days. I updated it to the present but kept the essential simplicity of the story. Saint-Preux — sensitive, melancholy, heart driven — is tutor to the beautiful young blond Julie, who lives in an idyllic château. They fall in love. Julie and Saint-Preux independently confide in Julie’s friend Claire (sprightly, dark) and she makes sure that the two soon know of their mutual passion. Overwhelmed by their feelings, Julie yields herself to Saint-Preux. They make love. Then Julie is stricken with remorse and guilt. She recoils from Saint-Preux and, distraught, marries an old codger called Baron Wolmar (her father’s initial choice.) Saint-Preux, suicidal, heads for the fleshpots of Paris. In despair, he decides against taking his life when he receives a letter from Julie saying that even though she is married, Saint-Preux will always be close to her heart.

Wolmar — prudent, sagacious, a philosopher of the human spirit — who knows of Julie’s past relationship with her former tutor, invites him (Saint-Preux is on the verge of nervous collapse) to come and live in their household. It is a profound and tormenting trial, but somehow Julie and Saint-Preux remain virtuous. The Baron Wolmar announces he is going on a long journey and leaves the two behind. Julie and Saint-Preux suffer a terrible ordeal of temptation and frustration, but Julie does not succumb, she remains faithful. Then, tragically, she has a fatal accident. On her deathbed she informs Saint-Preux that she has always loved him. Cut to Saint-Preux’s stricken face. Julie dies. The end.

It was, I think, a good piece of work and the story was no more impossible than any other drama currently being made. Karl-Heinz loved it and it was he who suggested we take it to Realismus. I thought this was frankly a waste of time, but Karl-Heinz insisted there was some logic in his idea. He was currently filming Diary of a Prostitute; Realismus had a certain vested interest in his career and he had access to the head of the company, Duric Lodokian. I agreed to give it a try and he took the script of it with him.