William Goldman at his writing desk, 1987
From these two ideas emerged a compulsive story which climaxes in a torture scene which has put a generation of filmgoers off going to the dentist. The marathon-running student, Dustin Hoffman, has his teeth drilled without anaesthetic by Laurence Olivier, the former Nazis SS dentist at Auschwitz, who repeatedly asks the clueless Hoffman, ‘Is it safe?’
Goldman may insist that a walk along New York’s 47th Street gave him the germ of his story, but the point is any one of us could have been walking along that street and noticed the tattoos. Only a very few are able to carve a story out of the scene. It’s a bit like Michelangelo contemplating his block of marble – his genius is what he takes away, revealing the statue of David inside. Goldman has a mind that makes stories.
If you read through the movie trade magazines, there’ll always be a page somewhere advertising a piece of software or a seminar or a course that claims to teach you how to write. You can actually buy an application for your computer that supposedly allows you to build a story. It’s as if you can break down a story into a knowable, quantifiable entity that can be proscribed and created according to a formula. William Goldman reckons if it were possible to pre-programme a successful story, we’d all be doing it and making a fortune. Just look at the success of the film The King’s Speech.
‘There’s no logic to it. I mean, who in the name of God thinks there’s gonna be a successful worldwide movie that wins every honour about a king who has a stammer? It’s the worst idea I ever heard but, guess what, it was a fascinating story and it works.’
Casting is surely a vital element in the sense that it can completely alter the way you see the story. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the most commercially successful of all the films Goldman has written screenplays for. It got him his first Oscar as well as establishing the buddy movie genre. The winning combination of actors Paul Newman and Robert Redford as the eponymous Wild West outlaws was obviously a factor, but Goldman insists that it was a piece of luck. The part of the Kid was supposed to have been played by Steve McQueen, who along with Newman was the biggest movie star in the world at the time. But they couldn’t agree on the billing – literally the size and positioning of their names – so McQueen pulled out. Jack Lemon was offered the part but declined because he didn’t like horses. Warren Beatty turned it down, as did Marlon Brando, who ‘disappeared off with the Indians’. So finally they got Robert Redford. ‘But who knows, if we’d had McQueen, if it would have been different. I don’t know, it might have been better, it might have been worse.’
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid won Goldman his first Oscar
Very little was known about the real-life characters Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Goldman spent years researching their lives before he wrote his screenplay, in which the two men run away to Bolivia.
‘When I tried to sell the movie, a guy in a major studio said he would buy it if they didn’t go to South America. And I said, “But they went to South America.” He said, “I don’t give a shit. All I know is that John Wayne don’t run away.” And I’ll never forget that sentence, “John Wayne don’t run away.” ’
Goldman’s experience suggests that, although the basic plotlines of stories are universal, our idea of the hero has changed. There was a time when heroes were heroes and, like John Wayne, they didn’t run away. What Goldman and his generation did in the late 1960s and early 1970s was to add a new twist – that you could have a hero who is self-deprecating and flawed and not made of granite.
Goldman remembers the thrill of discovering Homer as a child, immersing himself in the tales of the siege of Troy. And then reading Cervantes as a student and flinging his book across the room in a rage when Don Quixote dies. He’s almost apologetic in his admiration of these authors.
‘I’m gonna say something stupid … they were great at story. They really had fabulous stories to tell.’
Ulysses
Irishman James Joyce is acknowledged as one of the great and most original voices in world literature, but to many there’s an aura of impenetrability about his work that puts them off. Stephen Fry’s Desert Island book on Radio 4 was Joyce’s novel Ulysses and he urges anybody who’s never read it – or tried to and thought that it was too difficult – ‘just to let themselves go and swim into it, because, apart from anything else, there were never more beautiful sentences in any single book’.
Ulysses chronicles the journey of the middle-aged Jewish Dubliner Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin on an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. To a small but passionate group of devotees, an obsession with the book manifests itself in a rare literary curiosity: Bloomsday. Bloomsday is celebrated every year on 16 June, all over the world, often recreating events from the novel. In Dublin it’s frequently experienced as a lengthy pub crawl.
David Norris, a senator in Ireland’s parliament, the Taoseaich, is a hugely enthusiastic Joycean and Bloomsday participant. He explains why 16 June was so significant to Joyce and his wife Nora.
‘I didn’t know Joyce, I didn’t know his wife Nora, but I knew all their friends very well and I remember Maria Jolas saying that in the thirties in Paris, when Bloomsday was mentioned, Nora would adopt an insouciant look and she said, “That was the day I made a man out of Jim.” ’
So why is Ulysses lauded so highly? Partly it’s the style, the content, and the language, which is a tour de force that has never been matched since, but it’s also the humanity of the characters. The genius of the book is that Joyce manages to take examples of Homer’s epic adventures of Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) and find in a single day in Dublin a modern equivalent of the Sirens and the Circe and the Oxen of the Sun. Not only that, but each chapter that represents one of those eighteen adventures has its own colour, atmosphere, smell and linguistic style. The novel contains everything in human life, including public masturbating and use of the c-word that caused it to be banned in the UK until the 1930s. (It was published in Paris in 1922.) It also confronts issues that we now consider to be very urgent and modern, like racism.
The primary beauty of the novel is the hero, Bloom, who is warm, frail, silly and loveable, and yet he’s bullied, treated badly, whispered about behind his back. Another wonderful thing about him is that he’s so at home with the workings of his own body. The first time you meet him he’s having a crap. Joyce describes him shitting and pissing with the same casual exactitude with which he describes him thinking, and it’s all treated as part of a continuum. And the character of Bloom, this extraordinary man who we follow over the course of twenty-four hours, grows and grows in stature and warmth and dignity. He becomes a hero out of the most ordinary material imaginable.
David Norris thinks that part of the genius of the book is in its detail. Joyce didn’t just invent one day, he investigated and researched that one day in minutest detail. So on that 16 June in 1904, there was a particular horse race that was run, and there was a particular jockey and there was a particular time when the odds on the betting were such and such. And he put that in. He mapped that day completely, perfectly, and Norris believes that’s part of the obsession we have with the book to this day. Joyce renders reality with words in a way that a painter can capture the essence of something with brush strokes. Ulysses pioneered what became known as the stream-of-consciousness novel, or in Joyce’s case, the irrational hiccups of human thinking.
Norris adds: ‘Few writers have had more grace and splendour in the way they write. It is just simply beautiful.’ He tells the story of Joyce’s great friend, Frank Budgen, who met Joyce in a café in Zurich one day and found him looking rather pleased with himself.
James Joyce, one of the most original voices in world literature
‘Good day’s work, Joyce?’ said Budgen.
‘Oh yes’, said Joyce.
‘Write a chapter, couple of pages, paragraph, a sentence?’
And Joyce replied, ‘I had the words and the sentence yesterday but I got the order
right today.’
As Joyce said himself in Finnegans Wake, it’s about getting ‘the rite words in the rite order’. But what’s probably surprising for those who have been put off reading Ulysses because they think it’s too difficult or obscure (which is true of his last work, Finnegans Wake) is just how much Joyce uses the rhythms and idioms of the street and pub. He had an uncanny ear for the overheard remark.
Norris laughs. ‘Every kind of Dublin saying, like “the sock whiskey” for sore legs, for instance, is in it. Joyce collected these things, and I often think that subsequent writers must have thought it terribly unfair competition, because Joyce was so terribly greedy; he left nothing behind for other people.’
He was, to be sure, a hoarder of linguistic treasure.
Davy Bryne’s pub is one of the many that grace the pages of the book. Over delicious grilled liver providing an olfactory accompaniment altogether fitting in a novel so keen to that sense, Norris reads out a passage from the opening scene where Bloom is preparing breakfast for his wife Molly.
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish, the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palette a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen, but out of doors, gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.
The lilt of David Norris’ accent adds something to the already lyrical cadence of the writing. Does this Irishness lend to the English language another quality which has helped make Hiberno-English writers so successful? He believes it’s because of their discomfort with English. Joyce says, ‘My soul frets in the shadow of your language’ (meaning the English language). Norris cites a book by Father Peter O’Leary, in which he describes hearing two children talking in the period of the famine. One child says to the other, ‘I have no language now, Sheila.’ ‘Why, what have you got?’ she asked him back, and he says, ‘I have only English.’ And English was, of course, the language of emigration, of administration, of logic and calculation and bureaucracy, whereas Irish was the language of creation, the imagination, improvisation. You find this kind of exuberance in the Irish language, and that cannot be eradicated. So it’s as if they’re speaking Irish in their mind and translating it into English; and it’s that exuberant creative side that is the classic Hiberno-English sound.
Norris adds: ‘We tend to be a bit subversive and we’re subversive in language too; and people will deliberately use a form of a word that they know is wrong, but the sound of it appeals to them a little bit more.’
Yeats
Declan Kiberd and Barry McGovern are sitting in O’Neills Bar on Suffolk Street, a stone’s throw from Trinity College Dublin, where Samuel Beckett studied. Kiberd is Professor of Hiberno-English Literature at neighbouring University College, Joyce’s alma mater, and McGovern is an actor, a stalwart of the Abbey Theatre, who created a wildly successful one-man Beckett show. Over pints of Guinness – what else? – the conversation heads into the rich waters of politics and language. Kiberd is a champion of W. B. Yeats.
‘I would say the greatness of Yeats was that he took up the oral energies of the people just when the Catholic middle class were trying to transcend them and cast them to one side, and he said no, these are beautiful and they’re important. He invented really the modern idea of Irishness and Ireland, and the brilliance of Yeats is that he was both the Irish Shakespeare and its Derek Walcott all rolled into one.’
Kiberd warms to his theme that Yeats was the creator not only of some of the most memorable and patriotic poems, like ‘Easter 1916’, but also of a cycle of plays that invented Ireland in the same way that Shakespeare’s Tudor plays created the idea of England. But he was also postcolonial Ireland’s foremost critic, becoming extraordinarily sceptical of and disillusioned with the very country he’d helped to create. Kiberd is convinced that the Bardic idea is probably an essential role for any great writer: you don’t just praise the chieftain on good days but you are honest enough to speak the truth and say when things are not being done right.
‘And for me that’s the magnificence of Yeats, that he was both a tremendous Irish patriot and an absolute auto-critic.’
He believes that Ireland has represented itself through its writers. He tells the story of Oliver Gogarty, a member of the early Irish Senate, who stood up one day and said to the other Senators, ‘We wouldn’t be here today in a Senate of an independent Ireland, were it not for the poems of someone like W. B. Yeats.’ He was affirming that the word can become incarnate, can become an action.
W. B. Yeats captured the essence of Irishness
Easter 1916
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born …
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
It becomes becomes clear in this Dublin pub that an unselfconscious delight in ideas and language are at the heart of good storytelling. There’s a great story Yeats picked up in Sligo about a man who went to a cottage and asked for a bed and breakfast, and they said, ‘Sure, but you have to tell us a story in return.’ And he had no story, so they kicked him out. He went to the next cottage, and they said, ‘Yes, you’re welcome, but tell us a story.’ No story, so he was booted out the door. So he went to a third house and he complained bitterly and described in detail his treatment in the other two houses. So the description of how he was treated for not having a story became the story itself, and he was taken in.
While it’s a particularly Irish story, it’s also a universal that any culture can understand and appreciate.
‘You make your destitution sumptuous, and that’s what Samuel Beckett did and why in some ways he is perhaps the central voice of this culture,’ Kiberd concludes.
‘In the last ditch,’ he concludes, quoting Becket, ‘all we can do is sing.’
In many ways it was a serendipitous time to be an Irish writer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – comparable, perhaps, to being an English writer in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Just as Ireland created linguistic gold out of the cataclysmic changes after the Hunger, there’s something about the language in Elizabethan England that was growing and developing as the country found itself: the King James Bible, the outpouring of plays, the new words that were emerging and a new confidence and boldness in using them. And then, of course, there was Shakespeare.
Shakespeare and the Three Thespians
Imagine you could go back 400 years or so to wander the streets of Elizabethan London. You might pop into a tavern, hoping to bump into Shakespeare or Marlowe or Jonson or Webster, and watch as they drank and talked and scribbled, or go to the newly built Globe Theatre in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames and pay your penny to stand with the other ‘groundlings’ in the pit in front of the stage and experience for a few hours that extraordinary flowering of language and theatre that the world has never seen since. Shakespeare might be there acting in
one of his own plays; and – it being 1600 – the performance on stage that night might well be his latest work, Hamlet.
There was a sort of explosion of words taking place in early modern English in the sixteenth century. What Shakespeare did was to give style and structure to the language, to mine its rich seam and to add to its vocabulary. He invented, or was the first to put in print, around 3,000 new words. You may think you don’t know any Shakespeare but of course you do. Expressions like in one fell swoop and it’s not the be all and end all; or make your hairs stand on end, cruel to be kind, method in his madness, too much of a good thing, in my heart of hearts and the long and short of it. Eaten out of house and home, love is blind, foregone conclusion – the list goes on and on, and they’re all creations of Shakespeare. Clichés today, perhaps, but genius.
Someone (Stephen Fry, as it happens) once wrote that as theatre is a rhetorical medium and film is an action medium, so the perfect film hero is Lassie. The hero doesn’t need to speak. The boy’s on the cliff edge, Lassie looks, Lassie grabs the trouser leg, pulls the boy back … you just watch the action unfold. And the perfect theatrical hero is Hamlet, because everything is expressed in language, absolutely everything. It’s rhetoric, and he does it like no one else on earth. Hamlet explores sex, life and death, hope, revenge and despair. He’s utterly contemporary.
The Globe Theatre, c.1600
For this reason, the role of Hamlet is seen as the ultimate test for an actor, a theatrical Everest. The character is so full of complexities and the play itself is so well known that sleepless nights are spent worrying about how to bring something new to some of the most quoted lines in literature. A roll call of theatre greats have played Hamlet – John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellan. Three actors who’ve all taken the part of the Prince in the last decade talk about the role: Simon Russell Beale played the student prince at the National Theatre in 2000 to rave reviews; David Tennant, best known as BBC TV’s Dr Who, was Hamlet in a Royal Shakespeare production in 2008; and Mark Rylance has played Hamlet three times – first as a teenager, then with the RSC in 1989 and again at the Globe Theatre in 2000.
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