William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

There is a conspiracy theory bandied about amongst screenwriters that runs along these lines. The writer — the script — is so vitally important, is so crucial in the making of a film that if writers had artistic and industrial influence commensurate with that importance then they would effectively be running the show. So, keep the writers down at all costs, pay them peanuts, set them against each other, denigrate their creative role, grant others the title of “auteur,” anything, anything to prevent them realizing that the real power lies in their hands.

Paranoia? Well, a year or so ago, Robert King, a screenwriter in Hollywood, had the bright idea of analysing the Fall/Christmas Movie Preview in the Los Angeles Times. Of the 114 movies cited in the preview the screenwriters were credited six times. The directors were mentioned 114 times. King also studied six months of film reviews in the Los Angeles Times and discovered the following fascinating statistics. Where a film received a bad review the screenwriters were blamed 61 percent of the time; directors only 21 percent of the time. Where a film was deemed a success, however, screenwriters were praised 33 percent of the time, directors received the plaudits 45 percent of the time. Bad movies, the conclusion would appear to be, are the results of bad scripts — brickbats to the screenwriter. A good film, however, is down to the director.

When the Oscar nominations were announced this year a deal of British attention was focused, naturally enough, on Four Weddings and a Funeral. I did my own straw poll, á la Robert King, of how the nominations were covered on the news that evening. Now, the one and only and undisputable begetter of Four Weddings is the screenwriter, Richard Curtis. It was his idea, he invented the story, he created the characters long before his fellow collaborators came together to make the finished film. And quite rightly Richard Curtis was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. However, this fact was not mentioned on any of the early or late evening news coverage on BBC or ITV. It did not make it on to the Teletext or Ceefax list of nominations. Here was a great British success story, trumpeted and bruited abroad for months, for which its creator had received the ultimate accolade. Anyone interested? News at Ten, Trevor MacDonald, saw the day’s sole mention of Curtis’s achievement. Amidst all the Forrest Gump fanfares and Hugh Grant’s bitter disappointment some editor at ITN had finally decided it was worth reporting. Four Weddings was “also nominated in the category of Best Original Screenplay.” Were we to hear the writer’s name? No. As far as my researches revealed the name of the man who created the most successful British film ever, never even rated a mention on the day he was nominated for an Oscar.

Am I overreacting? A little. This is standard stuff, and screenwriters are wryly and reluctantly accustomed to this level of routine neglect. But it is symptomatic of a wider attitude, it seems to me, and that is why writers everywhere, in whatever medium, can derive a little satisfaction from the Writers’ Guild’s negotiating savvy last week. Shortly after the day of the Oscar nominations I went into one of London’s best bookshops to buy a published screenplay. In the film section I read the sign on the bookshelf. SCREENPLAYS LISTED A-Z UNDER DIRECTOR. There is more work to be done.

1993

“This novel,” Evelyn Waugh said about Brideshead Revisited, “lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into the unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers.” It’s not difficult to understand the novel’s abiding popularity: nostalgia for a vanished era, deep sentimentality, saccharine romance among aristocratic types — many of the ingredients of the contemporary best-seller. It’s Waugh’s best-known book, but in many respects it’s his worst, and problems arise when it’s seen in the context of his work as a whole. How could Evelyn Waugh, one of the great English novelists of this century, write this sort of rubbish?

The languor of Youth — how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth — all save this — come and go with us through life.

How also could he construct such a broken-backed plot; labour so clumsily with the techniques of first-person narration; abandon an excellent leading character for one of the most lifeless heroines in modern fiction?

Waugh himself, when he came to revise the book in 1959, was not unaware of its deficiencies, and the preface he wrote for the new edition represents an unmistakable demotion. The Magnum Opus, as it was known in the writing, becomes just a souvenir of the Second World War. But Brideshead Revisited can’t be dismissed as an aberration. It’s too large a book and its central position in Waugh’s career means it can’t be ignored.

Waugh’s novels divide themselves fairly neatly into two groups. On the one hand there are the comedies — with their naive or roguish protagonists — such as Decline and Fall, Scoop, Black Mischief and The Loved One. On the other are A Handful of Dust, Work Suspended, Brideshead Revisited, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and The Sword of Honour trilogy. It’s on this last category of novels that Waugh’s status as a major novelist rests. They all contain examples of his comic genius but they are supplemented by an element which is best, though simply, described as autobiographical.

Waugh drew heavily on events in his own life to furnish himself with the necessary raw material for his fiction. In almost all his novels, even the most outrageously comic, this transposition can be detected with little effort — a procedure considerably aided by the publication of his letters and diaries. The egregious Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall is a faithful portrait of a master at the prep school where Waugh taught. The bizarre evangelist Mrs Melrose Ape in Vile Bodies is Amy Semple McPherson. Scoop is a thinly fictionalized version of his travel book Remote People. Most famously, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a case history of his own paranoia. And so on. The image of Waugh as a beleaguered Tory squire tends to obscure the modernity of his fictional approach. In almost all cases the fiction remains very close to the source.

This is not to deprecate Waugh’s genuine imagination or great talent. All novelists — all realistic novelists — make the same transference, but some rely on it more heavily than others. In Waugh’s case, it seems to me, there is less pure invention than we might normally have supposed. The kind of world he described in his fiction wasn’t one he had to experience imaginatively: its elements lay dispersed all around him.

If this premise is acceptable it allows a more precise idea of the kind of novelist Waugh was (he is not like Dickens, for example) and it also makes a reading of Brideshead Revisited a little easier to achieve.

To summarize as briefly as possible, the novel consists of a sustained recollection on the part of the narrator, Captain Charles Ryder. It opens during the Second World War. Charles’s battalion is billeted in the grounds of Brideshead Castle and his arrival there prompts a long reconsideration of the relationships he enjoyed with its one-time occupants — the aristocratic, Catholic Flyte family — during the 1920s.

At Oxford Charles meets and is taken up by the dreamily eccentric Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the family. Charles is soon introduced to its other members and spends increasing amounts of his time at Brideshead. He is utterly captivated both by Sebastian and by the house itself. But, as Charles is drawn closer into the family, he and Sebastian drift apart. Sebastian evolves into a self-destructive alcoholic, finds life at home impossible and moves abroad.