My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Ismail liked to surround himself in myth. A Muslim, he was, he used to claim, conceived in a Hindu temple on the banks of the Ganges, and was born – he said – on Christmas Day in Mumbai in 1936. His businessman father sent him to New York to study business administration, but his passion was always for film: he was Oscar-nominated for his first short, The Creation of a Woman, but he discovered his real destiny as a film-maker when he met James Ivory, another aspiring director, in 1962.

  They were wildly different as individuals, but instantly formed the potent personal and creative relationship that lasted over forty years. Their early films were made in India; when they started making films in America, their first hit was The Europeans (1979). It was a slow journey to success, but they were both absolutely certain about the sort of films that they wanted to make: literate, visually ravishing, exquisitely acted. Jim, in particular, had a fascination with the minutiae of social behaviour; Ismail had had an opportunity to study the Raj and its manners at close quarters. In some ways, they found their perfect subject in the Edwardian English middle classes, in Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, of course, but above all in the novels of E. M. Forster, whose concern with connecting decency and order with true passion was what Merchant Ivory were all about.

  And they took extraordinary risks. I had never expressed to Ismail or anyone the slightest desire to direct a film. But he had decided that it was time that The Ballad of the Sad Café should be shot, and that I, as one of his extended family, was the man for the job. And so, eighteen months or so later, Ismail and I found ourselves standing in front of a screen in Berlin after the first showing of the film. We were being booed. Now, there is no booing quite like German booing; it’s so thorough. But Ismail beamed broadly, as if he were receiving a standing ovation, and went off in triumph to supper, where he expressed nothing but optimism for the film’s success. As it happens, it was never really liked, a strange film from a strange book, about the love of a giantess for a dwarf, but to the end Ismail expressed genuine and admiring affection for it, as he did for all Merchant Ivory films, by definition.

  Glamorous, immensely handsome (as a young man he was voted among the five most handsome men in India), exquisite in his manners and passionate in his enthusiasms, he longed all his life to connect all the things and all the people he loved. My final memory of him is of a golden, dusty twilight in Austin, Texas, on the set of The Ballad of the Sad Café. He had somehow brought to that dry, isolated place a consort of superb Indian musicians, who sat on the verandah of Miss Amelia’s broken-down café, joyously improvising their glittering ragas, and Ismail, seated in the front row, turned round to beam at the little audience of actors – Vanessa Redgrave and Rod Steiger and Keith Carradine – of extras and crew and designers and me, all of us woven together in perfect happiness, any thought of financial injustice or temperamental harassment banished. That was Ismail’s genius, bringing together cultures and individuals, different worlds and philosophies, the British and the Indian; the English and the Italian; the American and the European; the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes; the dwarf and the giantess; himself and Jim: always connecting.

  The Ballad of the Sad Café was shot in 1989. But already in 1986, my career as a director seemed to be taking over from my life as an actor. After The Passport I directed my old friend Angus Mackay in an oddly haunting little play called Nicolson Fights Croydon, which we put together from Harold Nicolson’s diaries and letters. It concerned his unexpected but successful candidature for the seat of Croydon East on a Labour Party ticket, done in a theatre so small that we were able to do it without using any stage lights at all, using only local light on the set – a table lamp, the light in the wardrobe, the shaving light and so on. It resulted in a kind of hyper-realism, and cast a curious spell, helping to make Angus uncannily convincing as Nicolson: his son Nigel came to see the play and said that he had felt unnervingly as if he were in his father’s presence again. (Nicolson’s old friend James Lees-Milne came too. ‘V. well done,’ he wrote in his grumpy diary. ‘Resemblance to H not bad, though he was too smartly dressed and unable to catch H’s slurry voice.’) Having now directed three small-scale plays (plus Amadeus in Mold), I took a very deep breath and took on The Infernal Machine at the Lyric Hammersmith with Maggie Smith as Jocasta. Robert Eddison played Tiresias, Lambert Wilson Oedipus. I had translated the play while acting in A Room with a View in Florence, happily immersing myself in the work of a desperately unfashionable writer for whom I feel great affinity. The following is a piece I wrote about Cocteau for the programme of Sean Mathias’s very successful production of Les Parents Terribles.

  Jean Cocteau is one of those few creative artists who seem more substantial after his lifetime than during it. Now that the noise of his tireless self-advertisement has died away, he can be seen to be both more impressive than, but also quite different to, the star of a thousand photo-calls who alternately vexed and charmed his contemporaries. Never was a writer more omnipresently public (unless it be George Bernard Shaw, who in some unexpected ways he rather resembles): Cocteau talking about his work, Cocteau writing about his work, Cocteau posing in front of his work, Cocteau, like a Zelig of the arts, present at all the important events of the twentieth century, clinging proprietorially to the great man or woman at the centre of them. We know, it seems, everything about him: his views, his vices, his romantic passions, his religious aspirations, his sexual fantasies. He concealed nothing; he made art out of his impulses and his experiences almost as they were happening, clothing them in gorgeous verbal garments which were nonetheless quite transparent. He is everywhere in evidence in his own work, which, like Goethe’s, consists of autobiographical fragments, barely transmuted. He was perfectly frank about this: Yvonne in Les Parents Terribles, he said at the time, was an amalgam of his mother and Jean Marais’. Not only do we know all about him, we are on first-name terms with him, too: his signature – that spindly ‘Jean’, with a star dancing above it, or beneath it, sometimes trailing behind – is written all over the work, quite literally, as often as not. And yet, by a paradox that he loved to enunciate, the more we know of him, the more invisible he becomes. ‘Jean’ was, of course, a mask, or rather a series of masks, designed to liberate his impersonality. It was a means of making himself a vehicle for inspiration. ‘Acute individualism is the highest form of collaboration.’ He was curiously available to being taken over completely by a more potent individual, whether a lover or a fellow artist. He was compulsively drawn towards great creative figures; in their presence he became an unashamed groupie. His offerings to them – the scenario of Parade for Picasso and Satie; the text of Oedipus Rex for Stravinsky; numerous scenarios for Diaghilev – were naked attempts to ingratiate himself with them, but equally to allow himself to be suffused with the source of their inspiration. The somewhat equivocal response of these great ones to his advances did not faze him in the least. ‘To admire is to efface yourself. To put yourself in someone else’s place. Unfortunately so few people know how to get outside themselves,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘In the presence of certain performances, I no longer exist. To be what I see and hear.’

  Aesthete and dandy though he seemed, the supremely sophisticated master of the calculated pose, he worked desperately hard at preserving his spontaneity, his amateur’s love of the medium. This enthusiastic innocence is at the heart of everything he ever did, a sort of dazzlingly complex naïveté, mingling grave myth with fun and nonsense. It is the work of a wise and witty adolescent determined to reveal his insights and himself in as many ingenious ways as possible, expressing his relatively simple experience polysyllabically, prestidigitatiously, and sometimes preposterously, but never failing to bring an affectionate smile to our lips, while what he says somehow sticks in our minds. The innocence is partly a side effect of his spontaneity: for all its self-consciousness, both his writing and his drawing are instinctive and unrevised: ‘If tempted in the least to think, to try to make a correction with the aid of his reason – he w
as sure that his drawing would be a failure, that it would not live that life of its own without which a work of art is not a success,’ wrote Edouard Dermit of his graphic work. Entirely untrained in any medium, Cocteau made himself into a uniquely responsive conduit: ‘Only intensity matters. Talent – either you have it or you don’t. Intensity must be our one study.’ He even dismissed his own cleverness. ‘Intelligence has been granted to me in the form of intuition and sudden flashes. Which makes me seem intelligent though I am no such thing. Which gives me the disadvantages of intelligence without the advantages. I am not bright enough and I have the reputation of being too bright.’ His acting out his life as a piece of theatre proved to be a cunning diversionary tactic: all the while, he was consciously shaping himself to receive messages from the unconscious. Stopped dead in his poetasting youth by Diaghilev with the fierce command ‘étonne-moi’ – ‘astonish me’ – he accepted that it was an artist’s task to disturb, not merely to divert. Parade, Le Boeuf sur le toît, Le Potomak, accordingly outraged and baffled contemporary audiences. He became the personification of the avant-garde. It was another jolt, this time from his young lover and protégé Raymond Radiguet, that taught him that the systematic pursuit of novelty was as deadly as stale repetition, and that existing forms were apter vehicles for poetic truth. It was Radiguet’s sudden death from typhoid at the age of twenty which gave Cocteau’s life as an artist one final decisive new direction: he became an opium addict, nearly killing himself but at the same time putting him directly in touch with the deepest levels of his subconscious. Under its influence he created many of his most characteristic works: Orphée, Le Sang d’un Poète, La Machine Infernale, Opium (of course) and Les Parents Terribles, which was written in eight drugged days.

  The surprise is that Cocteau’s work itself proves on examination to be filled not only with invention, fantasy, paradox and pain, but above all with innocence, and its concomitant, mystery. It is typically Coctelian that he should see his opium habit as a route to innocence. ‘Children carry a natural drug within them… all children possess a magic power of changing themselves into whatever they want. Poets, in whom childhood is prolonged, suffer greatly from the loss of this power. This, no doubt, is one reason poets resort to the use of opium.’ Perhaps, as Maurois suggested when welcoming him to the ranks of the Académie Française, Cocteau’s personnage had protected his personne. The bobby-dazzling style was not meant to distract from a lack of content, as it had often seemed at the time, but to lure the audience into an intuitive state where they might experience awe and deep tenderness. The torrent of language is a sort of cataract out of which springs a rainbow. The language itself rarely tells us what he is saying. Another paradox: the great manipulator of words, stringing them together dexterously like beads on a necklace, was only interested, finally, in the ineffable. It is the final and cleverest cleverness of this very clever man that behind the glittering surface of his work was nothing; or rather, nothing that could be expressed in words. ‘Often young foreigners write to poets apologising for reading them so badly, for knowing our language so poorly. I apologise for writing a language instead of simple signs capable of provoking love.’ On another occasion, striking the same suddenly grave note, he defined poetry as ‘a machine for manufacturing love’.

  ‘From the age of fifteen,’ he said, ‘I’ve never stopped,’ and it is this sense of perpetuum mobile that is the overwhelming impression made by his life and work. He turned his hand to every conceivable form: plays, films, novels, verse, philosophy, theology, drawings, sculpture, murals, paintings, fashion design, stage design, opera libretti, ballet scenarios, masks. He described all this vast output with one word: poetry. It was poetry of film, poetry of painting, poetry of theatre. Not poetry in the theatre; poetry of the theatre, Cocteau insisted. Nor did he speak of texts, but of pretexts: the structure of words, characters and situations was merely a device, like Eliot’s bone which the burglar gives the dog while he opens the safe, to occupy the conscious mind and facilitate the release of the unconscious. It was natural that he should reach for myth in trying to engage with those secret areas of the human heart, but for him myth was not confined to the Olympian gods (though they fascinated him too); there were divine creatures nearer to hand. It may be said of Cocteau that if he reduced the gods to boulevardiers, he made up for it by apotheosising the boulevard.

  He was in love with the theatre from the earliest age, with an almost morbid sense of its power and splendour: ‘Since childhood and the departure of my mother and father for the theatre, I have had red-and-gold sickness. I’ve never got used to it… as time goes by, the theatre in which I work loses none of its prestige for me. I respect it. It intimidates me. It fascinates me. I split in two when I am there. I live there, and I become the child that the ushers admit to Hell… the theatre is a furnace. Anyone who doubts that will be consumed by it in the end, or go up in smoke on the spot.’ His view of the denizens of the stage was essentially heroic; heroically childish. ‘I see the actor or actress exhaust himself for us and lose – like an animal fatally wounded by destiny – this pale blood of the boards, lose it and hold it with full hands, hold it in and “hold” until the final bow on which the curtain falls, each evening, like the guillotine. The crowd adores them, hates them and longs for them to stumble, and to enjoy them, it is necessary to cultivate and rediscover the childhood that poets prolong to their death and that grown-ups in the town boast of having lost.’ His sacred monsters, with whom he wished to be associated in life and whom he delighted to depict, were equally heroic: ‘the thing that distinguishes them from others, that makes them stars, derives less from any striving for uniqueness than for a struggle against death, and that pathetic struggle gives them greatness – differentiates them from simple caricatures to just the same degree that that gentleman over there, carrying a parasol and walking along with tiny footsteps, is different from an acrobat who does exactly the same thing on a high wire.’ Cocteau could scarcely have invented a more precise image of himself, though perhaps his essentially paradoxical existence, in which nothing is as it seems, is even better summed up by a little aphoristic tale he called Surprise at the Court of God: ‘A little girl steals some cherries. Her whole long life is spent making up for this fault with prayers. The devout old woman dies and goes to heaven. GOD: You have been chosen because you stole cherries.’

  As I looked round the extremely colourful cast of The Infernal Machine on the first read-through, I had an odd premonition that it was going to be a nightmare, but that it would be worth it. Right on both counts. Rehearsals, technical rehearsals and previews were riven with problems from beginning to end, but, as in backstage movies, everything came wonderfully right on the first night. The reviews were splendid, Bruno Santini’s superb sets, which had been such a source of despair to the technicians, finally worked triumphantly and Maggie gave a masterly performance which in the last act ascended to the sublime. Even Cocteau came out of it very well, though Lambert Wilson’s father, the late Georges Wilson, French actor and director, wondered when he came to see the show whether it was a good idea to have a homosexual production of a homosexual play. Whether it was or not, on the strength of it, the producer Bob Swash, by one of those leaps of imagination that are rarer and rarer in today’s theatre, asked me to direct the West End premiere of Willy Russell’s masterpiece, Shirley Valentine, the best one-person play I know of, its greatness consisting precisely in its being a play and not merely a show. Pauline Collins inhabited Shirley to the last wrinkle of her nose. But it was by no means a foregone conclusion: at the last run-through in the rehearsal room Willy had said, ‘She’s good, but she’s not Shirley.’ I said: ‘Wait till we get into the theatre, Willy.’ At the technical rehearsal, it was immediately apparent that Pauline was no longer playing Shirley; Shirley was playing Pauline. After the first night in London, it was impossible to get through the foyer because of the queue of very distinguished ladies waiting to get into the loo so they could repair their
make-up. When we did the play on Broadway, women openly broke down in the stalls, while their husbands turned sternly away, lips aquiver.

  I had been away from acting for some time, so, as if to make up for it, I took on a part for which vast amounts of the stuff were required: Goethe’s Faust. All of it. This piece, written at the time (1988), focuses heavily on the physical demands of the part, no doubt precisely because I had not acted for so long.

  I haven’t been on stage for two and a half years, since Kiss of the Spider Woman at the Bush. I am rediscovering how relentlessly physical it is. By contrast directing, writing and acting in front of cameras, which have occupied the last couple of years, are all quite unhealthy. Writing, apart from the pacing up and down and long walks to clear the mind, keeps you hunched in front of the typewriter, with fingers bleeding – the only two I use, anyway – and vice-like tension in the shoulders and upper arms. Directing breeds apoplexy. I used to think that people became directors because of the power. I have since discovered that the essential experience of directing is impotence. To sit through a performance at which things are going wrong is crucifixion. When lights, machinery or actors fail, you want to stand up and scream, but you must sit through it all motionlessly, digging holes into your palms, eyes rolling, as strangulated moans escape your lips. It was this sort of thing that gave me a hiatus hernia earlier in the year. As for movie acting, the early hours, the hazards of the location, and famously, the waiting, interminable hours of just sitting around, turn you into a greedy zombie, forever snooping around the catering van, snaffling cakes and biccies, and drinking yourself into your early bed. Acting in the theatre, by contrast, demands, and gives, health. A part like Faust – what am I saying? There are no parts like Faust – demands the tone and stamina of an athlete, and you learn to handle yourself as carefully as an athlete does.