About the Book
The first volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, Personal Terms, was greeted in the TLS as 'a small masterpiece'. With the publication of Cuts and Bruises, the third volume, we can see the sequence unfolding into a major literary achievement.
Cuts and Bruises concerns the 1970s, during which Raphael travelled widely (not least to Hollywood, which yields a mordantly sweet and sour account of figures such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and John Schlesinger) and wrote the acclaimed television series The Glittering Prizes. Raphael is only incidentally concerned with the world of the famous, though, and has little interest in 'names' and gossip except to notice the discrepancies between public and private faces and to convey the texture of life around him. Greece remains an abiding passion, and the conduct of Greek friends during the last months of the Colonel's tyranny leads to surprising reflections on exile and return.
Raphael's notebooks, never intended for publication, are exercises in candour, precise observation and wit. Cuts and Bruises adds to the growing impression that Raphael is creating an engrossingly readable, stylish and enduring chronicle of his times.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1974
1975
1976
Index
About the Author :
Frederic Raphael was born in Chicago in 1931 and educated at Charterhouse and St John’s College, Cambridge. His novels include The Glittering Prizes (1976), A Double Life (1993), Coast to Coast (1998) and Fame and Fortune (2007); he has also written short stories and biographies of Somerset Maugham and Byron. Frederic Raphael is a leading screenwriter, whose work includes the Academy Award-winning Darling (1965), Two for the Road (1967), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), and the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The first volume of Personal Terms was published by Carcanet in 2001, with subsequent volumes in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2013. The Times Literary Supplement said, ‘Aphoristic, lapidary and sumptuously reflective by turns, Personal Terms is a joy to read both for Raphael’s prose and mental powers. It is a work of iridescent intelligence, seductive charm, urbane temper and unflagging delight…’
Review :
Marcus Berkmann, The Spectator
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 a 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, hehas 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 ofhis 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 every thing 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 screen-writer.
Not wholly surprisingly, Raphael reserves his most brutal judgements 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 a 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.
'What does it feel like to be the most famous man in London?'Bernard Levin asks Raphael in this third volume of his muscular diaries, covering 1974-76 and the height of the author's celebrity from The Glittering Prizes, his television drama series.Passing judgement on endless arts and media faces such as the young Martin Amis (wearing his pop-novelist celebrity quietly, like 'Gary Glitter in mufti'), Raphael keeps one eye on life's greasy pole and the other on the eternal verities, writing aphorisms and producing critiques on the likes of Proust.His sense of himself as an almost continental-style intellectual gives him something of an outsider's eye on England: 'When the English pay tribute to the arts or to scholarship, they do it with the eloquence of an Arab toasting Zionism'
