A screenwriter’s lot is not a happy one. You write all those scripts, most of which never get close to being made; you must deal with dim, philistine producers and deranged, egomaniacal directors who don’t necessarily know what they want but know that what you have written is not what they want; you must watch in impotent silence as idiot actors abandon your lines altogether and start ‘improvising’; you take the blame if the film is a turkey and see others take the credit if it’s a huge success; and you enjoy almost no respect from anyone else in the cinematic food chain, as you are only a writer. And what for? Only vast riches and the occasional Oscar nomination if you are very lucky, and the chance to direct your own script if you are even luckier than that.
I think it’s the lack of respect that gets me. Frederic Raphael won an Oscar for Darling (at the age of just 34), wrote countless novels including The Glittering Prizes, memorably rewritten by him for TV, and Richard’s Things, another splendid series from television’s golden age. Now in his mid-seventies, he is still working and having films made, but unlike his near-contemporaries Michael Frayn, Simon Gray and Alan Bennett, he has rather disappeared from view. They, of course, write plays, novels, scabrous diaries and door-stop volumes of faintly camp meanderings, while Raphael has long concentrated on the scripts, and in our culture screen- writing simply doesn’t have the same cachet. It must be very galling.
And it may be why he has taken to publishing volumes of his old notebooks, written 30 years ago, at the height of his fame and, one might guess, productivity. The present volume, the third, covers the years 1974 to 1976, during which Raphael wrote several films and both manifestations of The Glittering Prizes. And yet he also had the time and energy to write sometimes thousands of words a day annotating his life, describing people he had met, passing trenchant opinions on pretty much everything and jotting down ideas and epigrams for later use. Did the man never sleep?
Clearly not, for this is a wonderfully bracing read. ‘I go each morning to see Alan Pakula. It is curious how unreliable are the expressions of the bearded.’ I wish I had written that sentence, and many others. One Christmas in Hollywood: ‘The decline of England is not regretted; it is hardly noticed out here. Nothing that the British export is much wanted, except John Schlesinger and cashmere. There was little conversation. What witticism can thrive in the world of the frisbee?’ You could call him a grumpy old man, except that he was 43 when he wrote this: ‘A hippie said to me, “Hey, man, what island is this?” They rejoice in being no one in particular in no particular place.’ I have a good friend who went on hippie trails at about that time. He is 56 now, and nearly as grumpy as FR. Nothing much changes.
Raphael is an unashamed highbrow, a snob, an aesthete, a sensitive man lost in an insensitive world. As a diarist he occasionally rambles, and the sheer profusion of epigrams can become a little wearing. He is also overfond of Clive James-style wordplay, the sort that disappears into nothingness if you think about it for more than a few seconds. But if you can forgive him his indulgences, the richness and energy of the writing will surely carry you through. ‘In the Dining Inn for breakfast, I sat at the counter next to a big woman with hair recently decurlered into hollow sausages on her head. She wore no make-up and a cigarette.’ That’s worthy of Chandler. He was another furious screenwriter.
Not wholly surprisingly, Raphael reserves his most brutal judgments for directors. On Peter Bogdanovich: ‘He decided to make [Daisy Miller] exactly as it stood; he crammed James’s words into Cybill Shepherd’s mouth like fish into a letterbox.’ On Peter Hall: ‘He has refurnished almost every aspect of his life but he cannot conceal the net curtains of his gentility.’ Go on, tell me you don’t want to read this book, and I won’t believe you.
Seven per cent of zebra finches stutter. So did Moses, Demosthenes, Aesop, Churchill, Darwin, Nietzsche, André Malraux, Marilyn Monroe, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Charles I, George V1, and Lewis Carrroll. So do Margaret Drabble and Marc Shell, the author of this comprehensive, learned, even playful book. And so, declaring an interest, do I. Many stutterers are left-handed, they don’t stutter when they sing (although Monroe pretended to), make love, or, usually, when they speak another language (I do in Chinese). Stutterers try to disguise their handicaps, hemming and hawing like James, speaking slowly and thickly like Darwin. Some speak extra fast. Some are often silent, others gabble away. As with death, non-stutterers rarely mention stuttering to stutterers. Few stutterers are women. There are 50 million stutterers worldwide, three per cent of all children and one per cent of adults. Stutterers often see a difficult word or sound looming and sideslip to a tactically different one; this doesn’t always work, although it’s useful to have a big vocabulary. There are heaps of theories about why people stutter and there have been many ‘cures’, including tongue-slicing and, in my school, slipping your hand into your trouser pocket and writing the damnable word on your leg with your finger. Many of them, us, wonder whether we are basically just stutterers or people who stutter.
The creator of this Aladdin’s cave of stuttering, Marc Shell, professor of comparative literature at Harvard, appears on the cover of his book, a vulnerable little boy wearing a cowboy outfit and recovering from polio. He says near the end, ‘What is all but unique about the stutterer’s world is the individual loneliness and non-communal aspects of his contingent, unpredictable and anxiety-producing inability to talk fluently.’ He points out that unlike another group with a communication handicap, the deaf, stutterers do not have a language of their own. Deaf people, he adds, do not need to use spoken language in order to express themselves; stutterers do.
He quotes another stuttering authority on stuttering: ‘I am obliged to speak. It is not what is to be said that makes the stutterer hesitate, but that it must be said.’ Wallop! After over 70 years of stuttering, although much less than 55 years ago (once a stutterer, always a stutterer), that hits the bull’s-eye: having to say something when, unlike being under arrest, you have no right to silence.
Shell is endearing, as his photograph shows, and like all stutterers he is hawk-eyed and dog-eared, ever on the alert for that slight slip of the tongue, that tiny hesitation that betrays a fellow-sufferer-stutterer. When he was a child he heard Marilyn Monroe singing on the radio and guessed that she stuttered. She didn’t actually stammer when singing, but she imitated it so well that he rumbled her. Later he heard her singing in the movies and saw that she ‘emphasises two habitual strategies of the stutterer. Both tricks are written up in stutter manuals of the period.’ That is, she substituted an easier word for the obstacle she sensed coming at her; and when she spoke, she glided into a breathy singsong, that oh-so-seductive voice that knocked you flat, for example, in Some Like It Hot. Arthur Miller confirmed to Shell that his ex-wife stuttered.
Somerset Maugham, a stupendous stutterer, was also, like Marc Shell (I suspect) and me, a fluent speaker; his stratagem when the awful moment loomed was to ‘stop midsentence, showing no externally detectable signs of inner conflict’. One astounded listener noticed that the great man stood still, with only his fingers trembling. Then he said:
‘I’m just thinking of what to say next; I’m sorry to keep you waiting’ and became silent once more. [Finally] he finished the speech in style, remaining imperturbable throughout the ordeal.
Unhesitatingly, I say bravo!
When I was a child I was taken to an all-negro (as we said then) movie called Green Pastures. Much of it took place in Heaven, with an awesome God dressed in a black frock coat like an evangelical preacher. There were many Bible scenes. In one of them, I was fascinated to observe, Moses stammered dramatically, and, lucky him, his brother Aaron spoke for him. Marc Shell — a daring fellow — wonders if God stuttered, because at the burning bush He asks Moses to speak for Him. Shell is curious: ‘Moses is not a person who speaks well. Presumably, an omnipotent God could cure Moses of his speech impediment.’ After all, he observes, the Bible is full of such cures. Shell is also ingenious: ‘God, as a ventriloquist, needed a spokesman because He was unable to speak directly to the people.’ Now comes a spectacular Shell-riff:
When the stutterer Moses hints that God should find Himself another dummy, the ventriloquist God, Himself something of a stutterer, suggests that Moses become a ventriloquist and find himself a dummy of his own. Enter the Hebrew-speaking Aaron.
This is the origin of the term Lord-keeper. Charles I had one. He admitted, ‘I am unfit for speaking. I mean to have my Lord-keeper speak for me in most things.’
Seven per cent of zebra finches, whose parents don’t do this, repeat syllables in their song several times, ‘altering syllables, deleting them, or inserting new syllables’. These individual songs are not learned, Shell says, and he shows us sonograms exhibiting the normal songs of zebra finches and those of the stutterers. As he fabulously adds, ‘Stutterers such as myself immediately underst-underst-underst barely recognise such stratagems when we hear them in the field But the sonograms are clear.’
But while stuttering may be a burden and an agony, as Shell underscores it has its compensations. Many stutterers, Darwin, Henry James, Malraux, Updike, Maugham, Drabble, and Marc Shell himself, became writers. So did I. You could say we found our voices.
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