Daniel Martin (35 page)

I remember, as a boy, putting the familiar old poser to my father: If God created the world, why did he allow evil in it? I received the familiar old answer: so that man may be free to choose between good and evil and then, with Christ’s help, show moral perfectibility. This pat solution to the conundrum did not really satisfy me. Perhaps an already budding scenarist sensed that an appallingly over-length script had been written for the job; and an embryo cynic certainly wondered why the system could not have been planned to provide at least an equal power of choice, and of will, in the victims of it.

At the time I asked the question I was like every other middleclass child, educated to see life in terms of success in examinations and games; but the other two great principles of the then English middleclass view of life, that only cads cheat, that sportsmanship is next to godliness, were foolishly instilled in us as overriding controls even more rigorously than the laws and techniques of the lessons we studied and the games we played. It was handing us a balloon in one hand and a sharp pin in the other. Sooner or later the two were bound to make contact—and of course have made resounding contact all through English (and American) history, as time and time again the distended belly of social injustice has been lanced by the fair-play fanatic on the central committee of the national psyche.

Abbots’ bellies and arrows out of secret leaves… during a brief spell between contracts in the early 1960s, I tried to write a script purely to please myself on Robin Hood. But I committed the cardinal error of making my (largely invented) version grimly realistic and unromantic. It failed signally to get off the ground; no one I showed it to liked it. Just as I failed at the time to see its true bearing to my own past, I had failed to see why we have turned this archetypal national myth, perhaps the only one, outside the Christ story, that literally every English person carries in his mind all through his life, into a matter for afternoon TV serials and the sides of breakfast-cereal packets; for the Walt Disneys and Errol Flynns of this world. It is a myth based on hiding, and therefore we have hidden its true importance ever since it first balladed and folk-rumoured its way into being though even that genesis, from a people, not a single mind, gives the real game away. It is too profoundly about being English not to need endless camouflage, belittlement, relegation, good-humoured contempt… for eternal children, not contemporary adults.

It is also a good deal more relevant to the general artistic experience than the fashionable parallels drawn by some English and American novelists with the Creator of my first paragraph. If there is a God, he or she (or it) must be supremely and chillingly unconcerned about a number of things to which individual thinking and feeling specks of matter rightly give priority pain, equality, justice, and the rest. The only sustainable divine parallel is with a completely aleatory artist, who composes his work on purely random principles, and who therefore does not compose it at all and even then this hypothetical God is evidently playing with such infinitely more complicated dice that the analogy is worthless.

The one principle the ordinary writer tries to abolish from his work, at least in the finished text, is precisely that of randomness. He calculates, plans, strives where the great question-mark is indifferent and leaves all to hazard; and his final, revised product is in intention as rigid and preconceived as a piece of machinery or an architect-designed building. Nor is he creating ex nihilo, but out of pre-existent memory-stores and experience; so he is rearranging or inferring, even when he writes about what has never happened or even what will or can never happen.

Much more significant is the desire to create imaginary worlds other than the world that is the case a further matter in which the God of the theologians seems personally not interested. This desire, or need, has always been strongly linked, at least in my own experience, with the notion of retreat, in both the religious and the military sense; of the secret place that is also a redoubt. And for me it is here that the Robin Hood or greenwood myth changes from merely symbolizing folk-aspiration in social terms to enshrining a dominant mental characteristic, an essential behaviour, an archetypal movement (akin to certain major vowel-shifts in the language itself) of the English imagination.

I can illustrate it in a very different way, once more with my father’s help. He had another minor theological interest (as with Dissent, based on disapproval, not sympathy) in the Oxford Movement of the 1830s; and I remember Keble and Newman and the other flirters with Rome received particularly black marks for that very singular, and very English, part of their heterodoxy, the theory of reserve: the necessity of hiding inner religious mysteries and feelings from the vulgar. To my father this showed the inherent jesuitry of Rome; but coming from a man with such a hatred of ‘demonstration’ and ‘enthusiasm’, who indeed in most daily matters was a perfect embodiment of the theory he so disliked, it was not convincing. Misled by externals, he had simply failed to see how quintessentially English the Oxford Movement was.

I experienced this retreat (or reserve) much more strongly when I wrote plays, but it had continued with my occasional original scripts; and though it became a very tenuous concept with other people’s themes, such as the one I was currently engaged on, even there it existed for as long as the treatment remained partial, fluid, still malleable. I might complain, but I also knew it was in many ways the most enjoyable time, and precisely because of this necessary aspect of retreat, of secrecy… as one might feel to be the first man ever to set foot on a desert island, a new planet. No one else had yet been there, however stale the place might turn out to be when it was finally thrown open to the world.

Many years ago I chanced on an English translation of one of the most fascinating of all self-revealings in European literature: that strange Frenchman Restif de la Bretonne’s masterpiece, his romanced autobiography, Monsieur Nicolas. There is a passage in the early part of the book, where he is describing his peasant boyhood in a remote Burgundian village in the 1760s, that entranced me when I first read it, and which has ever since given me a label for, and a key to, this inward retreat.

He tells how one day, his father finding himself without his usual shepherd, he was allowed to take out the family flock; and how, wandering with it, he came on a secret valley in the hills behind the village. He had never heard anyone speak of it before; it was miraculously lush, green, secret, and full of birds and animals… a hare, a roebuck, a pair of wild boar mating. A hoopoe, the first he had ever seen, flew down and began feeding in a tree of wild honey-pears. He felt these creatures were in some way tamer and more magical here than outside, so that he had a sense of trespassing. But it immediately became ‘his’ valley in his mind; he returned there, built a little monument of stones, cooked picnic meals over a fire; and even consecrated the place in another entrancing passage with a gathering of other young shepherds and shepherdesses, feeling ‘the state of man before kings and laws and prohibitions’. Using a dialect word of the region he baptized the place simply la bonne vaux: the valley of abundance, the sacred combe.

Restif’s is, in fact, a quite uncannily close premonition of a vision the English associate more readily with the Samuel Palmer of the Shoreham years: of a place outside the normal world, intensely private and enclosed, intensely green and fertile, numinous, haunted and haunting, dominated by a sense of magic that is also a sense of a mysterious yet profound parity in all existence. Of course it recurs again and again in literature and art, in one form or another, from the sublimities of the Garden of Eden and the Forest of Arden to the 1930s hokum of James Hilton’s Shangrila. But perhaps because my discovery of Restif’s life, mind and sensibilities (his eroticism, his acute sense of presentness and pastness and his instinctively cinematic eye also appealed deeply) was, despite the language barrier, one of those experiences that go well beyond the literary and objective into something like the finding of a lost parent, a lost elder brother, perhaps because Monsieur Nicolas has mysteriously failed to gain its true place among the other great autobiographies of European literature, and so outside France remains in itself something of a secret, my own favourite Quarlesian emblem for this phenomenon remains la bonne vaux.

It is this, the sacred combe and all it stands for, that explains why I was losing patience with my profession; and also, far more profoundly than the earlier reason I gave, why the cinema has never had patience at all for the English.

The film cannot be the medium of a culture all of whose surface appearances mislead, and which has made such a psychological art of escaping present, or camera, reality. For us English the camera, a public eye, invites performance, lying. We make abundant use of these appearances in our comedy, in our humour; socially and politically; but for our private reality we go elsewhere, and above all to words. Since we are so careful only to reveal our true selves in private the ‘private’ form of the read text must serve us better than the publicity of the seen spectacle. Furthermore the printed text allows an escape for its perpetrator. It is only the spoor, the trace of an animal that has passed and is now somewhere else in the forest; and even then, given the nature of language, a trace left far more in the reader’s mind (another forest) than outside it, as in the true externally apprehended arts like painting and music.

With filmmaking our real ‘block’ is our secret knowledge that any true picture of the English must express what the camera cannot capture: the continual evasion of the inner self, the continual actual reality of saying one thing and thinking another. Or one might reverse the proposition: no novel about the English that can be successfully filmed is a true picture of them. The eternal bar is that the elusive and eluding nature of the English psyche is profoundly unsympathetic to visual representation; and our baffled inability to make good films about ourselves, or to produce artists of the stature of a Bergman, a Bufluel, a Satyajit Ray, springs very largely from that.

I had in any case nurtured a deeper and less local quarrel with the cinema and its child, television. All art is a surrogate for the individual imaginations of its audience; but these two are beyond that role now, and into that of usurpation. They sap and leach the native power away; insidiously impose their own conformities, their angles, their limits of vision; deny the existence of what they cannot capture. As with all frequently repeated experience, the effect is paradigmatic, affecting by analogy much beyond the immediately seen—indeed, all spheres of life where a free and independent imagination matters. The much-proclaimed ephemerality of television is no consolation; one might as well argue that since no one cigarette can in itself cause cancer, smoking holds no danger.

In short, and in spite of their vaunted virtues as disseminators of Popular art and instant democracy, I had long begun to smell something rotten in the state of both these dominant media; a little, perhaps, as an otherwise dutiful German official might once have begun to wonder about the Nazi Party. I had begun to see something ominously stereotyping, if not yet positively totalitarian, in the machine and its servants. Somewhere the cinema, like television, was atrophying a vital psychic function: the ability to imagine for oneself. But, just as there were no doubt many Germans who did not like the Nazis, yet felt treachery to their country a worse crime, I had for years blinded myself to these feelings, and to a great extent because I was not their victim. It was illogical, to say the least: because Dan was proof to the drug, he could allow himself to go on manufacturing it. But he had found other reasons too.

As every Marxist critic has pointed out, this withdrawal from outer fact into inner fantasy is antisocial and inherently selfish. Every artist lives in an equivalent of my old Oxford room, with its countless mirrors; and just as something in the cinema, its community art aspects, the comparative quickness of the creation period, had at the beginning seemed healthy away from masturbation into copulation, in the terms the industry so cherishes the same something had in the end increasingly starved me of this solitary pleasure in retreat, in re-entering la bonne vaux… and perhaps made me seek compensation in other forms of retreat, of the kind Jane had suggested to Caro.

I knew it was far more this that was driving me towards the idea of a novel than any intrinsic love of the form. As a reader, drama and poetry had always meant much more to me. I simply sensed a far greater capacity for retreat in fiction. In Robin Hood terms I saw in it a forest, after the thin copses of the film-script… and a risk. So much of the work I now did in the cinema was guaranteed from the start. Only too often the money had been there, the studio will was there; and the process was almost automatic, even in its occasional snags and disappointments.

I had had a sequence in the Robin Hood script that I see now was more prescient than I realized at the time. As a relief from the action and barbarity of some surrounding episodes, I imagined a summertime when the living grew fat under the greenwood tree (the quintessence of la bonne vaux is its transience), and the morale of the band disintegrated; when what began as something lyrical and idyllic turned slowly sour, when the outlaws in nature became the outlawed by nature, self-indulgent and lazy, as privileged in their way as the privileged men outside they had first taken to the woods to escape. This had perhaps lain obscurely behind my feelings about Barney and his world and my own, by extension: of a privilege gone sour, habitual, conditioned. We had allowed an elision from hating our own twentieth-century Sheriffs of Nottingham, our society, the way the world was going, into being content merely to retire to the sidelines.