Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  Writers, writers!

  We walked through the courtyards of the Presidential Palace, where even at that hour, perhaps, Husak was enjoying or suffering his last lunch as President, and over which flew the presidential flag with its motto which, on this day, could not have been more ironic, more Delphically barbed: ‘Truth Shall Win’.

  Igor insisted on coming to the airport to see me off. With events just beginning on Wenceslas Square, this seemed a considerable sacrifice. Perhaps he shared the ‘secret wish’. Did Wolf have—would he, could he, ever have that wish?

  Later, on the phone, Igor told me he’d gone back and caught the last of it: he ‘couldn’t resist’.

  A television in the airport concourse showed pictures of the jubilant crowds. The plane left on time, minutes after the President’s resignation. There were several Czechoslovaks on board and I wondered how they felt, to be flying out of their country on the day of its deliverance.

  Jirí Wolf, Prague, December 1988.

  FILMING THE FENS

  NORFOLK AND TWICKENHAM, 1991

  The days are gone, if they ever really existed, when to have a novel adapted for film was like being touched by the gods. And anyway the gods can have a clumsy touch. For every successful movie adaptation—however one defines that—there are lists of clunkers that must have made the authors shudder. The analogy should really be the other way round. The books come first and it’s the authors who are the gods to whom the film industry, with a massive inferiority complex about its own creative initiative, has to come beseeching. But try suggesting that to the film industry. And it’s certainly not how it feels to the godlike but perhaps near-destitute author when the movie people knock on the door. The instances of authors being launched into the stratosphere by a movie adaptation are rare. Among my own author-friends, Michael Ondaatje is the outstanding example, but I’m not sure that I envy Michael. Anthony Minghella’s hugely successful film of The English Patient put into worldwide circulation oceans of copies of Michael’s book, but in the long run it also swamped it. Minghella, to his credit, made a good film of a novel that was by no means an obvious or easy choice for adaptation, but the book is more wonderful than the film, though it’s now very hard to extricate it from the film’s phenomenal success. It’s even harder to extricate from the film the other work of a writer who, by the time The English Patient was published and won the Booker Prize (another fact that the film has rather made forgotten), had already published two other superb novels and a memoir. And how many people, if they equate the words English Patient with a book or an author at all, would know that Michael Ondaatje has also written almost a dozen volumes of poetry?

  When Jeremy Irons put himself up to star with Meryl Streep in Karel Reisz’s film of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, it was clearly going to be a big-number production of an already highly successful novel. When, ten years later, he agreed to star in the film of Waterland, something he very much wanted to do, it was clearly going to be a low-budget operation which, but for Irons’s participation, might never have happened at all. I’m not sorry that the filming of Waterland was a modest undertaking (of a difficult task) or even that the film wasn’t a great success. It certainly didn’t swamp the book for me (a rather water-filled book anyway), and, looking back, what I feel is that, despite an inauspicious start, I had a good time during the making of it which I might never have had if it had got the really big treatment—or, of course, if it had never been filmed at all.

  I’ve been generally lucky with the movies. I’m, manifestly, not a purist: I let my work be filmed, though I try to be careful in doing so. I’ve taken the gamble three times and it’s twice paid off, at least in forging friendships and giving me some good memories. A film was once made of my second novel, Shuttlecock, which, happily for me and for the world, never got released in the cinema. In fairness, it began as a perfectly sincere and serious project—a film-maker’s vision—then turned into a lesson in how, along the rough road of development, compromise and an expedient artistic blindness can set in.

  While it’s true that there’s no correlation between the merit of a film and the amount of money spent on it, it’s also unfortunately true that many low-budget films that struggle to find funding succumb to a basic corruption: the object of the exercise becomes, in the end, not to make a film that’s true to the original source, but just to make a film. Pure intentions turn into corner-cutting. No career points will be earned by a movie that doesn’t get made. Shuttlecock got made (and I’ve always thought it could make a terrific film), but it soon went to what I imagine is the rather large graveyard of duff movies. It starred Alan Bates, who may occasionally turn in his grave because of it.

  The films of Waterland and of Last Orders were more benign experiences, and in the case of Last Orders—of which there is more in a later piece in this book—the result (though you’re always going to feel that the film isn’t ‘your book’) was as good as any author, in a world in which travesties are regularly committed, can reasonably expect. There was the bonus, too, of a wonderful cast. If someone had said to me long ago when I went to see David Hemmings as a baby-faced Sixties idol in Antonioni’s Blowup that one day he’d star (without the baby face) in a film of a novel written by me, I’d have said that pigs might fly. Sadly, David Hemmings is no longer with us, but I hope that, in his grave, he has the occasional smile over Last Orders. He certainly enjoyed it while it was being made.

  To come back to the film of Waterland. So ungodlike was my role that I knew very little about what was happening—I’d been assuming nothing would happen—until about a fortnight before the filming began. But suddenly everything was happening. A script had been written, a director had been found and a cast and crew had been assembled on location in Norfolk, where the cameras were starting to roll. Would I like to come and take a look?

  It was only when I did go and look and talk to some key people that I discovered certain things that might have made a more wrathfully godlike author throw a fit. For example, that large chunks of the novel which are set in Greenwich (London, England) were to be transposed in the film to—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And that while Jeremy Irons as Tom Crick would retain his Fenland childhood (hence we were in Norfolk), he would mysteriously become in later life a teacher in a mid-American school.

  Looking back, I can see I was naive, as writers can be when first dealing with some dimension of their profession that’s additional to the main one of just writing. When you first learn that a book of yours is going to be translated, you don’t immediately think that it might be badly translated and turn out to be a permanent misrepresentation of your work. You’re just delighted. My detachment from the actual process of adapting Waterland (while I got on with my real work) was all very fine, but I could and should have done more checking up; I should have had more scrutiny over the script.

  Now here I was encountering the movie business at its crassest. But Stephen Gyllenhaal, the (American) director, and Jeremy Irons didn’t seem crass. They seemed like intelligent people. And Jeremy Irons, who told me he loved my novel, surely wouldn’t have chosen to act in a film that would just take cynical liberties with it. Surely he and his wife, Sinead Cusack, wouldn’t have chosen not only to act together but to play husband and wife for the first time on screen (that’s acting, but it’s also rather personal) in a film which they thought would have no integrity or heart.

  Though writers can certainly be innocent when they emerge, blinking, from their studies into some not wholly authorial zone, I think film-makers can be oddly innocent too (though it’s not the standard perception), even rather winningly so. Innocent, I mean, in their easy exercise of the assumed licence of film—in what they can get away with or just choose to do. Somehow, films can perpetrate things which would never be forgiven in a book. Writers, who only have to worry about what gets from their heads onto the page and so into the reader’s head (only that!), spend a great deal of time, I believe, wondering about what they can get away with o
r just convincingly, effectively do. They develop a complicated instinct in this area which is anything but naive. And maybe this is one reason why in the literary world at large cunning and circumspection aren’t at all unknown. Filmmakers, perhaps because they have so much bigger and louder logistics at their disposal, seem able to make the crudest intellectual decisions with blithe and ingenuous confidence. I once had a conversation with a good writer-friend who’d done a great deal of work for the screen, in which the question arose whether movie people were nicer or not than book people. My friend, with the weight of experience, came down on the side of movie people. ‘I like movie people,’ he said. ‘They stab you in the front.’ And sometimes, it seems to me, they can do so without even knowing they’re stabbing you.

  Anyway, I didn’t throw a fit. I winced and bore it stoically. And, on the whole, though I wish a better film had finally emerged—a film that hadn’t distorted basic elements of the book and a film that, as film, had lived up in all parts to the real strengths and sensitivity it had only in some—I’m glad I didn’t kick up a storm. Whether or not I’d been calculatingly kept in the dark until this point, it was clear to me that even the most almighty tantrum couldn’t reverse a process already under way.

  If I’d marched off the set there and then, I’d have certainly missed some absorbing days, not only in Norfolk, but later on when the filming moved to Twickenham Studios, conveniently close to home for me. By an irony that, if my frame of mind had been different, might only have been galling, the interior scenes for the wholly spurious Pittsburgh household later in the story were shot in a house in south London just a fifteen-minute walk from where I live, and the American classroom scenes, with an imported cast of American teenage actors, were shot in an old school almost as near to my own door. I might have asked Stephen Gyllenhaal not to rub it in. But by this stage he and I were friends and I’d become something of a cinephile, a regular visitor at Twickenham, popping in to see what was happening and spending time afterwards with Stephen in the editing rooms or in the Chinese restaurant across the road, drinking and talking the whole thing over.

  When directors are in the midst of making a film they live and breathe the whole process and you sense their need of some special interlocutor who can externalize a constant, obsessive interior conversation. When it’s your book they’re filming and when you’re in the presence of a genuinely creative effort, it’s not difficult to throw in your own measure of assistance. Despite that transatlantic aberration (and certain other strange aberrations in its handling of time), the film certainly wasn’t made in a cynical or unconscientious way. In Norfolk, the director of photography, Robert Elswit, produced some haunting images of the novel’s authentic locale and I watched several actors getting uncomplainingly very cold and wet in the cause of recreating my book.

  I was genuinely sad when the shooting finished—or, rather, when it moved to America. I felt the best bit for me was over, and I was oddly uninterested in the final product. I missed going to Twickenham, or, more precisely, I missed the frisson of going to a present-day Twickenham but only, in a sense, to go to the Fens, to a lock-keeper’s cottage in the 1940s. For me, it wasn’t just visiting, but revisiting too.

  Stephen flew back to California (via Pennsylvania), but we’ve kept in touch and have seen each other from time to time since. He’s more than once invited me to Hollywood. I think Twickenham’s more my sort of place. In recent years he’s acquired a secondary kudos as the father of two ever-rising film stars, Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal. One of the junior stars of Water-land, Ethan Hawke, went on to his own fully risen stardom and to become a writer as well—it can work the other way round. One day I received a copy of his first novel. The younger Maggie Gyllenhaal had a very minor part in Waterland, in one of those perfidious Pittsburgh scenes.

  And it can be revealed that the author also had a part in Waterland—about two seconds’ worth, heavily disguised in Edwardian costume and moustache, playing a drunk. Definitely no thoughts of stardom, but another form of clandestine revisiting. Several years later, when Last Orders was being filmed, its director, Fred Schepisi, would also rope me in to being an extra. In one of the early scenes in that film, in the Coach and Horses pub, extremely discerning viewers may notice a certain figure in the background, propping up the bar. A clear case of typecasting, I think.

  With Stephen Gyllenhaal and Jeremy Irons, Norfolk, 1991.

  MAKING AN ELEPHANT

  SYDENHAM, 1922–92

  My father died in 1992. I wrote this memory of him, which also took me back to some of my own earliest memories, more than ten years later.

  Making an Elephant

  The death of a father is, in most cases, an inevitable passage of life. If you’re a novelist, however open-mindedly or unwittingly you start out, you know that certain big personal events must one day be accommodated into your work. There will, for example, be the novel you write after your father’s death. It won’t be about his death or even about him, but it can’t help but be informed by his death.

  He had a battery of first names: Lionel Allan Stanley. Fortunately, he liked to be known as Allan or simply Al. I never heard the word Lionel pass his lips. He was born in London in the early 1920s and brought up in Lower Sydenham, SE26, in a street optimistically called Fairlawn Park. I’d never been there, but after he died I went, on a sort of a pilgrimage, to see where he’d come from. A little, squat, terraced house, like thousands of others, but distinguished by its standing at an odd slight angle to the house next door and by the fact that, though occupied, it was spectacularly neglected. The tiny front garden was a seethe of creeping ivy, and seated on or sinking, rather, into the vegetation were two immobilized, rusting cars. They filled the cramped space between front window and street. The ivy had taken hold and was creeping up into the wheel arches.

  I was strangely relieved—elated even—by this conspicuous dereliction. The place wasn’t just ordinary and anonymous. It was singled out, even by that crooked angle, from its unremarkable neighbours, and that ivy and wreckage (I’ll never know the story) were like some mock-portentous, tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of mortality and the grave.

  Lower Sydenham. The name embodies more than one kind of stratification. Sydenham is a long straggle of a suburb ascending a hill. As you climb you go up in the world in both senses, or at least in my father’s day you would have done; the gradations have blurred now. At a certain point, up from the railway station, things become leafy, comfortable, sedate. You pass the church, and the house where Shackleton the polar explorer lived. The top of the hill is where once stood, like some acme of human aspiration, the Crystal Palace.

  When my father was still young, a teenager from the bottom end of Sydenham, he met my mother. Her family, which hadn’t originated in Sydenham either, inhabited its middle slopes and in due course, after one house was bombed, would move further up.

  I vividly remember, though it’s gone now, my maternal grandparents’ house, just off Westwood Hill—a tall, singular, spooky structure with massive steps, like a museum entrance, leading up to the front door. It stood in an odd, thin, isolated triangle of ground where two roads merged. The pinched ground-plan and the roots and shade of the trees that lined two sides were the bane of my grandfather’s gardening.

  As well as a persevering gardener, my grandfather was a haphazard collector of curios, and the house was dotted with strange little articles, some hidden away, the exact significance of which I never really knew. On a small round table in the hall was a wooden model of Drake’s ship the Golden Hind. How it had sailed into the house or what it represented for its occupants was a mystery. Kept in a drawer, there was a watch that had supposedly belonged to another polar explorer, Peary. Inside my quiet-mannered grandfather, perhaps, was the soul of an adventurer.

  I now own the glassily polished mahogany dining table that was my grandmother’s pride and joy and that when not in use would be ceremonially draped, like a catafalque, with a heavy maroon-velvet cove
r. It too had made the journey up the slopes of Sydenham. When a flying bomb had fallen almost directly on the previous Sydenham house, with my grandparents, my mother and a dog (never to be seen again) cowering inside, my grandmother said two things after the dust and shock began to settle. First: ‘Are we all all right?’ Then: ‘And how’s my dining-room table?’

  What I most remember about the house was its altitude. A cavernous stairwell took you up and up. There may have been only three or four flights, but I was very small, and they seemed to go on for ever and to climb through zones of increasing dread. It was a sort of grim challenge to mount them, all alone, to the top, but at the summit was a reward, a strange little perch. There was a landing with a window, next to a garret-like spare bedroom, and on the landing was a table and chair, and on the table an archaic typewriter.

  My grandfather worked for the Oliver Typewriter Company. Why this particular machine, with its stiff epaulettes of spokes, was placed where it was is something else I’ll never know, but it drew me magnetically, via that climb of terror. I was allowed to sit there with some sheets of paper and thump away. God knows what at that age I would have bashed out, but it kept me happy, if not exactly quiet. I’d forget, behind my back, the ordeal of the stairwell.

  And from that landing you could look down, over the tops of trees, on a whole vista of Sydenham. Round the corner, past some grand Victorian villas, was Cox’s Lane, surprisingly rural in appearance, with a clapboard cottage or two, a reminder of how Sydenham was once, like so much of London, just unsuspecting countryside colonized by the gentry. Next to Cox’s Lane was Sydenham Wells Park, one of the lesser-known London parks, but with hidden charms. A little stream (from the ‘wells’ themselves) wound through one corner of it, feeding a duck pond, beside which my father, aged perhaps eight or nine, was once photographed, a swan in the background.