What I saw with Doctor Forrest in Barcelona...

Photo by Clara Gabrielli

The special treat of seeing one of my books translated into a foreign language always gives me a unique commingled feeling of sophistication and idiocy: it is, after all, quite a thing to get to this age and see your name on the cover of a book you can’t read. 

My chief emotion in this case, though, is just huge gratitude that my gothic novel The Possessions of Doctor Forrest has been rendered into Spanish most elegantly (as Las posesiones del doctor Forrest) by Alba Editorial of Barcelona, as part of its Novela Negra imprint. The cover alone, with a shiny spot-finish on the sinuous serpent, is undoubtedly a thing of evil beauty. And this publication has renewed an association with Alba begun in 2001 when they also put out in Spanish my book on Dogme 95 (as El título de este libro es Dogma 95.)

I owe a huge thanks to Idoia Moll and the house of Alba for hosting me so generously in Barcelona last month to tie in with publication. I was interviewed by a number of journalists at Alba’s wonderful offices, where I admired the great range of their publishing, embracing both the best of the contemporary plus a great array of the classics; I toured the famous Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, which is everything that I heard it would be and more; and I signed books at the renowned Negra y Criminal bookstore. A great swathe of wall-space at Negra Y Criminal is generously decorated to record visits paid by some of the great names of crime and mystery fiction. (I was honoured, then, to take my turn at the time-honoured custom of posing in one of the shop’s branded tee-shirts.)

The longest and most detailed of the interviews I did was probably that with Begoña Corzo of La Vanguardia, for which we were accompanied by the photographer Clara Gabrielli. I really enjoyed our wide-ranging conversation, and am quite happy to have been described as a fellow of ‘muchas caras’, likewise to read that ‘como el doctor Jekyll, este inglés grandote y afable se ve poseído por personalidades intermitentes.’

The special pleasure for me of this interview was that we walked together to the headquarters of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Catalonia, originally the seat of the Reial Collegi de Cirurgìa de Barcelona (Royal College of Surgeons of Barcelona). We then conducted the bulk of our discussions in the rich, red and resplendent surroundings of its finely preserved 18th-century anatomical theatre, named the Sala Gimbernat after the great surgeon and anatomist Antoni de Gimbernat (1734–1790). The minute I walked through its doors, you can imagine, I was in a kind of heaven - and very happy to pose for Clara Gabrielli’s camera with my brow tilted and hands strategically placed on the marble dissecting table (as above.)

In the Sala Gimbernat of Barcelona's old surgical college, March 7 2013. Photo, Clara Gabrielli.

I must say all of the journalists I met in Barcelona was terrifically well-informed and very courteous and it was a pleasure to talk to them: Josep Lambies from Time Out Barcelona, whose write-up isn’t online; Albert Cano of La Opinion a Coruna, who I’m very pleased to say reported me as ‘culto y con capacidad para reírse de sí mismo’; Rosa Mora of El Pais, with whom I had a useful discussion about what Doctor Forrest has to say on public and private healthcare; and a woman from Regio 7 whose name now eludes me but who was most kind in the piece she wrote.

So I consider myself very fortunate - a writer's life is good indeed when one can be treated so well and with such warmth on account of having written a book about the guileful means by which the Deceiver exploits one man’s damnation so as multiply the sum of misery in the world... May I be so lucky again.

The Great Gatsby & Baz Luhrmann's green light

It’s rare indeed that I find myself quite so far ahead of the pop-cultural curve... but for anyone seeking insight into Baz Luhrmann’s new film version of The Great Gatsby in advance of its Cannes premiere, I can direct them to a long interview I did with Mr Luhrmann for the newly published Picador film tie-in edition of Fitzgerald’s novel.

The pilgrim will find much of interest in Luhrman's reflections, I feel – about the influence on the director of Francis Coppola and Joseph Conrad, also of a journey he took on the Trans-Siberian Railway; on Luhrmann’s compendious research into Fitzgerald’s world and that of the novel; on the bold structural choices he and Craig Pearce made for their screenplay; on his musical collaborator Jay-Z’s opinion of Jay Gatsby’s character; of what Gatsby has to say of its time and to ours; and more.

Our conversation was a privilege for me in more ways than one: on top of his creative accomplishments Mr Luhrmann is a hugely eloquent and engaging speaker, witty and charming, free of airs and, I should say, a gentleman, too. His movie is very keenly awaited, of course. But I’m very struck by what I’ve heard and seen, and I’m certainly wishing this Gatsby all the very best, old sport.

This is how our conversation wound round to its conclusion:

RTK: In their famous interview Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut agreed there was a problem about turning great books into films because the books were already masterpieces, made out of words, which pictures couldn’t emulate. Clearly, having made 'Romeo + Juliet' you’re happy to work with classic texts. But do you feel there is something about 'Gatsby' that you have to try to be ‘faithful’ to, to satisfy the book’s admirers? Or are you content to say to audiences, ‘This is the way I see it...’

Baz Luhrmann: Of course I hear that perspective. But there have been some pretty good cinematic goes made of some great books... There may be people out there with large pieces of wood counting down the days until the movie is out so they can come and hit me... ‘How dare you?’ And I understand that, and I don’t take it lightly. Nonetheless – I love the book too. And I always think great literature is there to be interpreted in many different ways, in different times and by different people – for example, I look forward to the next person who does a 'Romeo and Juliet' movie different to mine. To me, what defines greatness in literature, culture, of any kind, is that it’s able to move through time and geography, it can play in any country and continues to play in any era. And that’s true of 'The Great Gatsby'...

Another thing I must say about this Picador edition is that it’s quite a thrill for me to have some of my words – be they very simple ones – bound up between covers with those of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and a novel that I, like millions of readers, think of as one of the most brilliantly achieved in English.

It has a special little nostalgia for me because I studied Gatsby for the A-Level English Lit paper I sat back in the summer of 1989. I have before me, in fact, the A-format Penguin paperback that was my text at the time: unusually zealously annotated with pencil-scribbles, a source of amusement to me today, for as long as no-one else gets to see them. I’m reminded, for one thing, that the 18-year-old Me was strongly persuaded of Wilde’s maxim that only shallow people fail to judge by appearances. I don’t think I would want such a judgement levied today – or not on myself, at any rate.

I would, though, stand by the pencilled ‘Genet!’ that I put beside Nick Carraway’s early description of Tom Buchanan’s ‘cruel body’, an interesting way for one guy to look at and describe another guy’s figure. Gatsby is often thought of, or remembered, as a romantic book, as a love story. And yet the ostensible love object, Daisy, is really not such a nice girl – unworthy of all the fuss, you might say. And so the ‘romance’, finally, lies more in Jay Gatsby’s outsized illusions about her and the world (for which he constructs his dazzling facade of a life, and then throws that life away.)

Or does it? Is the biggest romantic crush in the book actually the one Nick Carraway has on Gatsby, in whom he finds ‘something gorgeous’ (above and beyond his pink suit), even after all the shows of ostensible disapproval...? This theme of latency has been explored in more recent criticism of the novel, I believe. I don’t say I go along with it. I only note it.

Sam Shepard, and qualities past compare

Shepard & Lange by Bruce Weber, 1984

I wish someone had told me Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange broke up, because I’m nearly sure that, oh, thirty years ago or whatever, their getting together was the chief reason I started to believe in romantic love. Of course you have to grow up sometime, and I’d have missed a big point about Shepard’s celebrated writing if I clung too close to a comforting shadow. But then you may perhaps recall the special allure of the Shepard/Lange story.

Circa 1981, he was married, but not happy. (In a poem of the period he wrote feelingly, ‘I’ve about seen/ all the nose jobs / capped teeth / and silly-cone tits / I can handle // I’m heading back to my natural woman.’ This was reproduced in a book to which we will shortly turn, and next to a photo of his first wife...) As for Lange, she had a daughter (named Shura!) from another relationship (with Mikhail Baryshnikov!). But then she and Shepard crossed paths, and that was that. ‘No man I've ever met compares to Sam in terms of maleness’, Lange was quoted a few years down the line. Patti Smith, a former Shepard flame, had formed a similar impression: ‘He was just everything that one could want... he had this animal magnetism. It was almost visceral... He was born for rock n' roll.’

That’s a very high bar to set in terms of ‘maleness’; and I just can’t think of a man who wouldn’t be impressed by these estimations, coming from such estimable women. But here’s what really got me dreamy about the Shepard-Lange fandango. In an interview he gave to The Face around 1984 – which took place in some diner, likely close to the locations for a movie he was making with Lange called Country – the reporter recorded Shepard noticing Lange pass outside the window, maybe 20 yards or so away, whereupon he pushed open a slat in the window (one of those windows, see) and shouted for her to come over and give him a kiss. Playfully she fended his request away for some moments, but he kept imploring, unabashed, and at last she sashayed his way, and he tried to lean out the window, only those damn slats proved too obstructive. So Shepard spend a minute or so wheedling a slat right out of its frame. So he could lean out and Lange could give him a kiss. Which she then did.

Now, we should all have that kind of relationship: it’s what God wants.

As late as 2010 Shepard was telling the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr that he and Lange’s relationship was ‘tumultuous’: ‘Yeah, well, we're definitely an incredible match. But, you know, not without fireworks… although at this point, you know, she's the only woman I could live with... What other woman would put up with me?’ Now it appears as if the relationship may well have been over when that interview took place. Must all things change, et cetera?

I found out this distressing news from googling about after reading a Paris Review interview with Shepard about his craft, which, like every Paris Review writer’s Q&A I’ve ever read, is utterly superb and constitutes a lesson in how and why to write.Shepard, it has to be said, is a more striking and compelling figure of a man – has led a rather more intriguing life – than the average scribe; and it’s a very easy thing to get pulled into his laconic, reticent telling of the way he’s gone about things.(Consider, too, this fine Details interview with Jeff Gordinier in which Shepard's  very succinctly right reflection on what age will do (‘It’s crazy, you know. Time is just nuts’) leads him without fuss into an anecdote about resuming his friendship and working relationship with Patti Smith, including a recording of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on which Shepard played guitar, which is quite a thing.)

In fact, the more I think about Shepard, the more I feel as if he’s been – if not everything to me – then a very great many things.

(i) Frances (1982) was one of the first grown-up movies I saw, and aside from being generally impressed by its grit and pathos, I felt about the 'chemistry' between Shepard and Lange the way people talk – and I appreciate but don’t see – about Bogart and Bacall (since Bogart was no pin-up, whereas Shepard in his prime looked... well, like Patti Smith said.) The Right Stuff (1984) drove this 'attractiveness' thing home. Of course Shepard has offered many great variations on why he never felt like being a movie star, turned down umpteen big films, quite often because he ‘couldn’t be bothered to take his shirt off.’ We should all be so lucky to be so unbothered.

(ii) When I was 13 I had a car-windscreen sticker stuck onto my schoolbag that read I ❤ Paris Texas: arguably the ineffective and yet greatest piece of movie marketing ever attempted. (Bravo, Palace Video.) And I can’t say the lads in the schoolyard were very impressed. But I really did love Paris Texas: adapted by Shepard from his book Motel Chronicles, and possibly the first ‘art movie’ I ever saw, and the one that sort of instructed me in the near-mesmerically uneventful rhythm of those kinds of pictures. One sort of knew it had been made by a foreigner, which also seemed to explain the presence of Nastassja Kinski. Yet it was equally clear to me that it was a Western; and that may be why for a few years I preferred Paris Texas to the kinds of Westerns that had cowboys in them.

(iii) On account of this Paris Texas love, I went out and bought my own copy of Motel Chronicles, possibly the first book I owned from the imprint of Faber and Faber. Young people have always got besotted by America because of its art, even terse and tough and non-ingratiating art such as Motel Chronicles, because wide open spaces under big skies where still one can connect nothing with nothing have their very own poetry. Motel Chronicles had that effect on me. (A dozen or so years later, once I had the extraordinary good fortune to be published by Faber and Faber myself, I learned about the key role in all this of the influential figure of Walter Donohue, who had worked with Shepard on the Paris Texas script, overseen the picture’s green-lighting at Film Four, and acquired Motel Chronicles for Faber once he took up an editor’s chair there. Like many things to do with Mr Donohue, that is another story. The main point is that a link to Faber must have been quite important for Shepard – because they published his hero, 'Mr Beckett'.

(iv) The first Shepard plays I saw were filmed versions, beginning with True West, on television, starring the Chicago Steppenwolf boys, Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.(Shepard has called Malkovich – and I agree – ‘one of my favourite actors on stage because he is so outrageous. I mean, he just doesn’t give a shit.' And True West could instruct a young man how to write a play, if not necessarily a good one. As Shepard says of the play’s brothers: ‘I mean, basically they’re the same person. It’s just a split. I just wrote ’em as two characters, but they’re basically two conflicting parts of one person...')

Then came Robert Altman’s theatrical film of Fool for Love, which, you can see even by this trailer, wasn’t particularly good. But then Shepard was never sure about the play, which was sort of about him and Lange: ‘More than anything, falling in love causes a certain female thing in a man to manifest, oddly enough’, he told Paris Review. ‘I had mixed feelings about it when I finished. Part of me looks at Fool for Love and says, This is great, and part of me says, This is really corny. This is a quasi-realistic melodrama. It’s still not satisfying...’

(v) The play of his I finally got to see on stage was Lie of the Mind, around 1987, at the Royal Court. It’s 25 years ago now but I can still see and hear in my head the stunning coup de theatre where Beth (Miranda Richardson), beaten half to hell by her husband and comatose since, sits up in her bed with a terrible shriek.

(vi) The first exchanges I had with Sean Penn over my effort to persuade him to approve my writing a book about his life and work were in autumn 2000, while he was rehearsing Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss in San Francisco, with Nick Nolte and Woody Harrelson. Sean raised his eyebrows when I told him the book might take as little as three months of his time, if it were done with passion. Three years later I was still dogging him around Marin County... And round that same time Harrelson explained to me why autumn 2000 was a testing time for Shepard, who had been drinking too much for a while, an illness that beset his father and which, by all those references to ripple wine in Motel Chronicles, the reader might have feared. This is what Harrelson said:

'Sam was going through some stuff. Within a week into it, Sam doesn’t even come to rehearsal. We all come in, he’s not there. Comes in the next day, he’d had some major deal with his heart... And the doctor’s told him he can’t smoke any more cigarettes, but – but [laughs] – a glass of wine in the evening can help to thin the blood, you know? Well, he didn’t know who he was dealing with... The good thing about Sam, even though he was smoking cigarettes like a fiend, he wasn’t drinking. Well, once the doctor opened that door for him, it was a whole different ball of wax...'

(vii) A musical score for Henry Moss was composed and performed on the stage by T-Bone Burnett, the brilliant songwriter-musician-producer who can even be forgiven for turning Bob Dylan on to Jesus. Back then I’d loved Burnett’s contributions to records like Elvis Costello’s King of America and The Golden Palominos’ Blast of Silence without putting down the money for his solo albums. The one I finally bought, quite recently, was The Tooth of Crime, a set of songs that he wrote originally for a mid-1990s staging of Shepard’s play about a war of style between two rockers young and old, Hoss and Crow. It’s a wonderful record and it puts you strongly in mind of the moods in Shepard’s work. This song is 'Dope Island.' 

(viii) And now it turns out that a whole new record of songs has been released, inspired by Motel Chronicles. It’s by The Dark Flowers and called Radioland. The Dark Flowers are a loose ensemble and for this project they’ve enlisted vocal talents ranging from Jim Kerr of Simple Minds and Peter Murphy, once of Bauhaus – bands I listened to before I even saw Frances – to Dot Allison and Catherine AD, whose work is held in high regard around this parish.

(ix) There’s a view that over the last 20 years Shepard has acted in more movies than have been useful to his productivity as a writer. Though I don’t think Shepard takes that view himself, and I am not qualified to comment. I do wish I had seen States of Shock, written around the time of the first Gulf War, and The God of Hell, which was timed for that year’s US presidential election. Maybe the chance will come again. I wouldn’t want to just read them, that’s for sure.

(x) In 2009 Shepard gave Paris Review some new vignettes in the style of Motel Chronicles, including the one known as ‘the one about Shania Twain.’ His voice is inimitable.

(xi) In 2010 he told Carole Cadwalladr: ‘The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness. All this stuff is happening. And yet it is not what you are after as a writer... there's this feeling… what is it, then? And, I guess, it's the writing itself which is important.’

(xii) And right at the front of this extract from a PBS documentary (below) we return to where it probably all began for Shepard, and where, as it happens, Shepard began for me, and for so many people: Shepard on his father, from Motel Chronicles.

Randy Newman and his audience

In April this year Randy Newman will enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the company of Rush, Heart, and Public Enemy. (Custom has it that acts who are still alive perform at their induction: ‘I sure wouldn't want to follow any of them’, Newman told Rolling Stone, no doubt sincerely.) Newman has earned his place in that pantheon, for sure, and he knows it, and has always been clear-eyed about why the recognition has taken so long. ‘Rock critics are very Bolshevik’, he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999. ‘If you use the wrong chords, like any that aren’t in Led Zeppelin tunes, then forget it.’

It’s relatively recently, thus rather belatedly, that I began listening to Newman’s music – that is, buying the records of his well-regarded songs, as opposed to overhearing him on the musical scores of Pixar films that my children watch. And I say 'belatedly' because Randy Newman is meant to appeal to people like me. Y’know the type, (if you’ll forgive a slip into cod-Newman vernacular) – kind of liberal people, who got they’sel some culture, and a college education, so they think they smart.

Yes, a big part of Newman’s appeal is his sly, searching address to questions of history and politics, often with a grand reach, if always in an American accent. He tends to deal in mordancy and irony, his apparent concern with the sheer badness of the world, the human animal's compulsively appalling behaviour. The tone tends to be lamenting; and wherever he seems to exult, you sense he intends you to shudder in discomfort. With an artist as brilliant and productive as Newman it's well-nigh fruitless to pass some political-propriety meter over the work and ask ‘Which side is he really on? What does he really feel?’ The songs thrive on ambiguity and contradiction like art is meant to, and even when Newman is going all-out to be cold and unfeeling – and he usually is – still, you’re meant to feel it.

It does take a sort of genius to attempt, with affection, a refutation of Marx – as Newman does in 'The World Isn’t Fair' – by twinning a music-hall jaunt through young Karl’s intellectual formation with Newman’s own well-heeled, late-life, ageing-dad experience of taking his kids to a new school and marvelling at the yummy mummies (‘just like countesses, empresses, movie stars and queens’) who are squired by ‘men much like me / Froggish men, unpleasant to see / Were you to kiss one, Karl / Nary a prince would there be.’) This clip isn't the best for sound quality, but you get a lot about Newman's gift for being the seemingly reluctant raconteur from his longish spoken intro.

Newman’s pride in his own achievement with that song is clear in this quite brilliant interview with Paul Zollo, which should be read by anyone with an interest in the craft of songwriting and scoring. If Newman considers The World Isn't Fair to be 'about the best song I ever wrote', still he's instantly self-critical about its construction ('It’s like one long verse. It doesn’t get to a tonic, or something. It never stops...). But he also comes around to telling Zollo pretty clearly what he really feels about it, such that maybe not a great deal more needs saying:

"It’s a giant subject in as few words as could be done... The guy in “The World Isn’t Fair” is interesting as a character. He’s glad. It’s me. I’m glad the world isn’t fair. I’m glad that Marx was wrong. In a way, you know. I’ve been very lucky. And yet, I’m not that happy about it. [Laughs]" 

Here's what I would add. One bonus of coming late to the Newman oeuvre is that I can pick and choose from recorded versions of the songs just as if I was some Wagner buff deciding whether Solti's Ring is more worthy of my £24 than Karajan's. A couple weeks ago (sorry, Newman cadences again...) I downloaded a range of his tunes from across the pair of sets he released in 2011: Live in London, recorded in 2008 at the LSO St. Luke’s, where Newman was backed by the BBC Concert Orchestra; and Volume II of The Randy Newman Songbook, in which he revisits his old tunes in the studio on solo piano.

Why Live in London, not, say, Paris, New York, Amsterdam? As ‘Rand’ told Rolling Stone, ‘I'm always surprised when I go to England and they think so highly of me in terms as a writer.’ They certainly do. There’s a fair bit of delighted crowd noise on the record, rightly so, though I find one could wish people didn’t feel the urge to emit a showy kind of laugh at Newman’s mordant zinger-lines, much like the way the National Theatre crowd still pretend to crack up at Shakespeare’s comedies.

When, for instance, Newman plays 'A Few Words in Defense of Our Country' from 2008 – in which he laments the waning American imperium, and makes a carefully derisory defence of the outgoing Bush presidency against its worldwide detractors by dint of some arch references to a few more atrocious leaders from the annals – well, you would expect a London audience to lap that up, and they sure do. But I suppose it's part of the pleasure of the night out - the ticket price and the babysitter and all that - and Newman plays up to it. As he told Zollo: 

'If you’re offensive and it isn’t clear that you’re joking or it isn’t clear that you know what you’re doing, you lose the audience. People in my audiences at shows know I’m joking. But a lot of people don’t get the joke.' 

So it's important to Newman's audience as to him that they stay on the right side of 'the joke'. Updating his very astute appreciation of Newman in Mystery Train back in 1975, Greil Marcus agonised somewhat over the success Newman achieved with his Good Old Boys record and the subsequent concert tour in which he delighted a growing audience. Performance and acclaim, Marcus thought, coarsened one’s feeling for the fineness of what Newman had achieved on record. ‘A Wedding in Cherokee County’, about the impotence of a backwoods farmer, evoked not winces but laughter from a crowd who’d paid their money and wanted their wicked fun. And Marcus saw Newman complicit in this, not just by how he put the song across but in his droll spoken preambles: 'He promised that the song was a joke, that its characters were jokes, and that their predicament was something those smart enough to buy tickets to a Randy Newman concert could take as a freakshow staged for their personal amusement.' 

Would Marcus be so tough on Newman and his audience today? Maybe so, maybe not, since we are, let's face it, all a little bit older. Anyhow, don’t get me wrong, I still relish Newman's brilliant tunes, whoever's chortling all over them, and I’m glad I bought these new downloads, and Live in London is really swell, the orchestra are terrific. But if I had to take one disc to the desert island I would spend the £11 on the Songbook Volume II. The one off that I keep playing is 'My Life is Good', which typifies one Newman style, as defined by Robert Christgau, of 'targeting a privileged class that explicitly includes the artiste.' This clipped version below is from younger days, but he plays it much the same as on Songbook Vol. II. And of the barroom whoops that greet his mordant zingers? All I'd say is that they sound a little more agreeable coming from a smaller audience...