Ways of Escape

  Length has always bedevilled me. My early novels as a rule fell a long way below those seventy-five thousand words which publishers used to consider a minimum length. Just before we were to start rehearsing The Living Room (a play written off-and-on over three years, which I had sent to Donald Albery under the mistaken impression that he was a theatrical management – however, he became one in order to produce the play), we received an authoritative timing of one hour and a quarter. There was general despondency – for it was impossible to enlarge the play. However my own timing of one hour and three-quarters after all proved more correct and by raising the curtain a little late, by imperceptibly (to those in the bar) increasing the interval beyond a quarter of an hour, it was possible to pass the minimum two hours which to a theatrical management remain as necessary as seventy-five thousand words once were to a publisher.

  Thanks to Dorothy Tutin and Eric Portman, and Peter Glenville, the director, The Living Room was a success, but to me it was more than a success. I needed a rest from novels. I disliked the drudgery of film writing. I had discovered what was in effect a new drink just at that period when life seemed to have been going on for far too many years. At the end of this first experience of the theatre I found myself writing with an excitement which I still feel:

  ‘The novelist works alone: he is lucky if there is one other human being with whom he can discuss a problem or try out a difficult passage. Even the screen writer in my fortunate experience works with only one other man, the director, but so soon as the shooting script is completed he is excluded from the act of creation. Unless a crisis arises in the studio and the director needs his presence to rewrite a scene, the author is a forgotten man who emerges again, a bewildered figure watching the rough cut, clearing his throat nervously at new lines that are not his, feeling a sense of guilt because he is the only spectator who remembers what happened once – like a man who has witnessed a crime and is afraid to speak, an accomplice after the fact. There had been, of course, moments of great interest in learning the new craft of film writing, but so often the excitement of creation was confined to the preliminary idea, sketched at a dinner table, and lost again in the many rewritings, the first, second and third treatment, the first, second and third script. The screen is not there – like the page of foolscap – on which to test an idea; nor is there a stage from which the author can hear his lines brought to life or exhibited in their deadness. When the lines are at last spoken on the studio-floor the author is not there to criticise and alter. Another hand (earning, I suppose, a smaller salary and perhaps more easily controlled by the director) plays with his work. My own experience of screen writing has been fortunate and happy, and yet with what relief I have gone back afterwards to that one-man business, to the privacy of a room in which I bear the full responsibility for failure.

  ‘But – the fact remains – one must try every drink once. I had imagined that to write a play and to write a film would be very similar: the author, even though he could not be excluded from rehearsals, would be an unwelcome stranger lurking ashamed in the studio. A film studio – when you are allowed to penetrate it – has the callow comradeship of a great factory: signs, lights, clappers, cranes, and behind all the façade of Christian names (the union must be kept happy), the hierarchy of canvas chairs. I had not anticipated the warmth, the amusement, and comradeship of the theatre. Above all I had not realised that the act of creation, as with the novel, would continue for long after the first draft of the play was completed, that it would extend through rehearsals and through the opening weeks of the tour. It is for the act of creation that one lives, and after the author has returned from tour, how empty the hours are, the telephone rings seldom – couldn’t we have delayed launching a little longer for the sake of the fun? I suppose that every author feels this, and that is why he writes another play.

  ‘There had been the excitement of acceptance, the excitement and frustrations of casting, the grim interest of auditions when every line became more leaden, the first reading with the complete cast, the conferences and changes over coffee, the delight of working with players interested not only in their own parts but in the play as a whole (a film actor is hardly aware of what happens when he is not on the set), nearly a dozen lively informed intelligences criticising and suggesting. But this becomes a fading memory as the lights go out on the first audience who are probably not either lively or informed, who have not worked on the play morning, afternoon and evening for many weeks, who don’t know yet what the play is about and whose response is therefore conditioned by the momentary effect and not by the mood of the last curtain. Then one uncovers the unexpected laughs in the wrong places, the laughs legitimate but over strong, the coughs that indicate a failure in tension. For a night the writer may be discouraged, but how fascinating it is, when he has cut out this line here or altered that action there, to return the next night to the theatre and see – as with the novel he can never see – the effect of his changes, the laugh killed, the laugh modified, the apparent improvement in the epidemic of colds.

  ‘One newcomer at any rate was very happy in the theatre, in the deserted stalls at rehearsals, at the note-takings on the stage after performances, in the corridors and bars and dressing-rooms: the theatre even brought certain bizarre experiences which the cinema had never offered: a struggle on an Edinburgh hotel floor at two in the morning with a breeder of prize bulls, a long session with a stranger whose gratifying response to the play, I found too late, had been conditioned by his stay in four different lunatic asylums from the last of which he had temporarily escaped (our conversation in the hotel lounge was cut short by the arrival of the warders) – these, I suppose, are the everyday experiences of going on tour.

  ‘I had tried a new drink: I had liked the flavour. How I wished my glass was not empty and that it was not time to go.’

  So I approached the bar again to order another drink. Too soon perhaps after the first. No play was pressing on me from the unconscious. I deliberately took one of my abandoned novels (I had written a few thousand words of it in 1946) and fabricated The Potting Shed. I am fond of the first act – that is about all I can say. The material proved intractable. I was to make a better attempt, in my own opinion, to draw a ‘hollow man’ in A Burnt-Out Case. The intractability of the last act showed itself during the production in America where I rewrote the last scene unsatisfactorily against time, at rehearsals; then with the London production I went back with equal dissatisfaction to the original. I think my main objection to the play was the old Aristotelian lack of unity – five scenes and three sets. I have met many a director who has told me: ‘Write what you like, in as many scenes as you like. Treat a play as loosely as a film. It is my job to find a way of putting it upon the stage.’ But I don’t want a producer’s play – I want an author’s play, and anyway there is a fascination in unity, in trying to work in what Wordsworth called ‘the sonnet’s narrow room’.

  The strain of writing a novel, which keeps the author confined for a period of years with his depressive self, is extreme, and I have always sought relief in entertainments – melodrama and farce are both expressions of a manic mood. So with my third play, The Complaisant Lover, I sought my usual escape – only to find as I reached the final curtain that the depressive mood had contributed almost as much as the manic to the piece. Perhaps that was why I had so full a sense of enjoyment in the writing. I have never worked with less feeling of conflict between two moods, and perhaps I can be forgiven for defending the play, out of gratitude. It arrived suddenly one spring day in the country at the turn of a road and it moved with dreamlike quickness – four months at most – towards birth. Later, when my fourth play, Carving a Statue, was struggling with all the accustomed difficulties to be born, I regretted the twilight sleep of that spring and summer; all the more when the new birth proved to be an abortion. Never before have I known a play so tormenting to write or so fatiguing in production as Carving a Statue. I was glad to see the end of it, and to that
extent I was grateful to the reviewers who may have accelerated the end. At the age of sixty there was no reason to work, except to earn a living or to have ‘fun’. This play was never fun and I earn my living in another field.

  All the same the faults the reviewers found in it were curiously different from the faults I find, which are harder faults to defend, and I may be forgiven perhaps for not pointing them out. I was accused of overloading the play with symbols, but I have never cared greatly for the symbolic and I can detect no symbols in this play; sometimes there is an association of ideas which perhaps the reviewers mistook for the symbolic – the accurate use of words is difficult, as I know from my own experience as a theatre reviewer, when one writes against time.

  I remember that when my film The Third Man had its little hour of success a rather learned reviewer expounded its symbolism with even less excuse in a monthly paper. The surname of Harry Lime he connected with a passage about the lime tree in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The ‘Christian’ name of the principal character – Holly – was obviously, he wrote, closely connected with Christmas – paganism and Christianity were thus joined in a symbolic dance. The truth of the matter is, I wanted for my ‘villain’ a name natural and yet disagreeable, and to me ‘Lime’ represented the quicklime in which murderers were said to be buried. An association of ideas, not, as the reviewer claimed, a symbol. As for Holly, it was because my first choice of name, Rollo, had not met with the approval of Joseph Cotten. So much for symbols.

  Other reviewers, because the word God frequently crops up, thought that Carving a Statue contained that dreaded thing, ‘theology’. Theology is the only form of philosophy which I enjoy reading and if one of these reviewers had ever opened a work of theology, he would have quickly realised there was nothing theological in this play.

  What was it about then? I have always believed that farce and tragedy are far more closely allied than comedy and tragedy. Carving a Statue was to me a game played with the same extremes of mood as The Complaisant Lover. The first act is, almost completely, farce: the sculptor was based on Benjamin Robert Haydon, who was obsessed – to the sacrifice of any personal life – by the desire to do great Biblical subjects, already, even in his day, out of fashion. You cannot read the diaries of Haydon without realising that he had a true daemon and yet he had no talent at all – surely a farcical character, though he came to a tragic end. In my story, as I intended it, the artist lost even his tragic end – no Tom Thumb was capable of shattering permanently his dream and driving him to the saving bullet. He had a greater capacity to recover than poor Haydon. Alas! The principal actor saw the play quite differently from me. He believed he was playing Ibsen.

  I thought then that I would never write another play. I told myself it was not worth the candle. I was wrong, of course: The Return of A. J. Raffles was put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company and I found again the pleasure of rehearsing, and I am writing these words in the interval between yet more rehearsals of a farce called For Whom the Bell Chimes. The fate of the play is not important – the fun of testing the spoken word, of cutting and altering and transforming, of working with a group, of escaping solitude is everything.

  2

  Soon after the war ended, my friend Alberto Cavalcanti, the Brazilian director, asked me to write a film for him. I thought I would write a Secret Service comedy based on what I had learned from my work in 1943–4 of German Abwehr activity in Portugal. I had returned from Freetown – and my futile efforts to run agents into the Vichy colonies – and been appointed to Kim Philby’s subsection of our Secret Service, which dealt with counter-espionage in the Iberian peninsula. My responsibility was Portugal. There those Abwehr officers who had not been suborned already by our own service spent much of their time sending home completely erroneous reports based on information received from imaginary agents. It was a paying game, especially when expenses and bonuses were added to the cypher’s salary, and a safe one. The fortunes of the German Government were now in decline, and it is wonderful how the conception of honour alters in the atmosphere of defeat.

  I had sometimes thought, in dealing with Portugal, of how easily in West Africa I could have played a similar game, if I had not been content with my modest salary. I had learned that nothing pleased the services at home more than the addition of a card to their intelligence files. For example there was a report on a Vichy airfield in French Guinea – the agent was illiterate and could not count over ten (the number of his fingers and thumbs); nor did he know any of the points of the compass except the east (he was Mohammedan). A building on the airfield which he said housed an army tank was, I believed from other evidence, a store for old boots. I had emphasised the agent’s disqualifications, so that I was surprised when I earned a rating for his report of ‘most valuable’. There was no rival organisation in the field, except SOE, with whose reports mine could be compared, and I had no more belief in SOE reports than in my own – they probably came from the same source. Somebody in an office in London had been enabled to add a line or two to an otherwise blank card – that seemed the only explanation.

  So it was that experiences in my little shack in Freetown recalled in a more comfortable room off St James’s gave me the idea of what twelve years later in 1958 became Our Man in Havana.

  The first version written in the forties was an outline on a single sheet of paper. The story was laid in 1938, in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a reasonable enough setting for espionage. The English agent had nothing at this stage in the story to do with vacuum cleaners, and it was the extravagance of his wife and not his daughter which led him to cheat his service. He was a more besotted character than Wormold in Our Man in Havana and less innocent. As the 1939 war approached, his enemies, like Wormold’s, began to treat him seriously – the local police too. The incident of the misused micro-photographs was already in this draft. Cavalcanti, before we started work, thought it necessary to get clearance from the censor, and he was told that no certificate could be issued to a film that made fun of the Secret Service. At least that was the story he told me. Perhaps he invented an excuse because he was not enamoured of the subject.

  The story remained at the back of my mind, submitting itself to the wise criticism of the pre-conscious. In the meanwhile I had visited Havana several times in the early fifties. I enjoyed the louche atmosphere of Batista’s city and I never stayed long enough to be aware of the sad political background of arbitrary imprisonment and torture. I came there (‘in search of pleasure for my punishment’, Wilfred Scawen Blunt wrote) for the sake of the Floridita restaurant (famous for daiquiris and Morro crabs), for the brothel life, the roulette in every hotel, the fruit-machines spilling out jackpots of silver dollars, the Shanghai Theatre where for one dollar twenty-five cents one could see a nude cabaret of extreme obscenity with the bluest of blue films in the intervals. (There was a pornographic bookshop in the foyer for young Cubans who were bored by the cabaret.) Suddenly it struck me that here in this extraordinary city, where every vice was permissible and every trade possible, lay the true background for my comedy. I realised I had been planning the wrong situation and placing it at the wrong period. The shadows in 1938 of the war to come had been too dark for comedy; the reader could feel no sympathy for a man who was cheating his country in Hitler’s day for the sake of an extravagant wife. But in fantastic Havana, among the absurdities of the Cold War (for who can accept the survival of Western capitalism as a great cause?) there was a situation allowably comic, all the more if I changed the wife into a daughter.

  Strangely enough, as I planned my fantastic comedy, I learned for the first time some of the realities of Batista’s Cuba. I had hitherto met no Cubans. I had never travelled into the interior. Now, while the story was emerging, I set about curing a little of my ignorance. I made Cuban friends, I took a car and travelled with a driver around the country. He was a superstitious man and my education began on the first day when he ran over and killed a chicken. It was then he initiated m
e into the symbols of the lottery – we had killed a chicken, we must buy such and such a number. This was the substitute for hope in hopeless Cuba.

  Destiny had produced this driver in a typically Cuban manner. I had employed him some two or three years before for a few days in Havana. I was with a friend and on our last afternoon we thought of trying out a novelty – we had been to the Shanghai, we had watched without much interest Superman’s performance with a mulatto girl (as uninspiring as a dutiful husband’s), we had lost a little at roulette, we had fed at the Floridita, smoked marijuana, and seen a lesbian performance at the Blue Moon. So now we asked our driver if he could provide us with a little cocaine. Nothing apparently was easier. He stopped at a newsagent’s and came back with a screw of paper containing some white powder – the price was the equivalent of five shillings which struck me as suspiciously cheap.

  We lay on our bed and sniffed and sniffed. Once or twice we sneezed.

  ‘Do you feel anything?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  We sniffed again.

  ‘No lift?’

  ‘No lift.’

  I was of a more suspicious nature than my companion and I was soon convinced that we had been sold – at what now appeared an exorbitant price – a little boracic powder. Next morning I told the driver so. He denied it. The years passed.