William Nicholson's Blog, page 8

Just sent off the final tweaks to the screenplay for BREA...

Just sent off the final tweaks to the screenplay for BREATHE before it goes out to actors. It’s the true story of a man who lives for thirty years with a machine doing his breathing for him. Andy Serkis is to direct – very different territory for him from hobbits, which is what makes it exciting for all of us. A small film, but it should be extremely powerful. If we get the right cast.

Saw ROOTS at the Donmar the other night. Really impressive play, with all the strengths of the best Chekhov. Almost thirty years ago, when SHADOWLANDS first appeared on television, Arnold Wesker sent me a card of congratulations that got snarled up in the BBC’s correspondence section, where someone was too ignorant to recognise his name. It got to me eventually, and I’ve always treasured it. He’s a superb writer. Jessica Rayne is astonishing in the lead part.

Now on with work on my screenplay for TUTANKHAMUN.

Guardian article link

I think this link leads to my article.

Bad Sex Award

An extract from ‘Motherland’ has been nominated for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award. As you can imagine, I think this is nonsense, but at the same time I welcome the opportunity to open a discussion about sex writing in novels. I’ve written an article that’ll be in the Guardian tomorrow, Saturday November 23, that articulates my views – if I knew how to I’d attach a link, but I don’t. Even this website blog is new to me as of today. A good moment to start, I guess.

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Motherland: Guardian Review

 

“Nicholson is a deceptively simple stylist but Motherland is a profound and moving novel; a tender and compassionate meditation on love and God and duty and how to be good.”

Read the full review of Motherland on the Guardian website…

Motherland

UK publication February 2013 and US publication May 2013

 

Sunday Times January 1 2012

Click here to read the full article

 

 

The Golden Hour

Maggie and Andrew are lovers who live apart – Maggie in the country, Andrew in London. When Andrew is offered a job close to Maggie, moving in with her is the next obvious step. Or is it? Moving in together leads to marriage. Is this the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with?

Maggie panics. Andrew is devastated. But when he turns the tables on her, Maggie begins to see him rather differently.

Meanwhile Maggie's Sussex neighbours are living through their own intense dilemmas. Henry's midlife crisis is exacerbated by a plague of rabbits in his garden, but hiring petty criminal Terry to extend the fencing turns out rather badly. Henry's wife Laura is secretly adored by her brother in law, Roddy. He hovers in the wings for the moment to declare himself; while screenwriter Alan's efforts to convert a Grade II listed outbuilding to a workspace are thwarted by a maddening local planning officer – Maggie.

The stories of these and other characters entwine in a continuous dance over seven golden days of high summer. It is a human kaleidoscope that perfectly captures how familiar yet strange, passionate yet mundane, painful yet comic our everyday lives can be.

Article on CRASH for The Times, October 6th 2010

Some writers begin with an image, others with a single provocative sentence. In my own case it's most often an emotion. 'Shadowlands' began with the fear of commitment. My work on 'Gladiator' began with the need for love to reach beyond death. My new play, 'Crash', began with a feeling of bewildered anger. I remember the trigger moment perfectly. It was a headline in the Financial Times of March 21 2009: Anger erupts on both sides of the Atlantic – Mounting fear of talent exodus from big names – Banker fury over tax 'witch-hunt'.

This 'banker fury' gave rise to an answering eruption of anger in me. How come they don't get that they're the muggers here, not the victims? And they still don't get it, even today. Two weeks ago at a City gathering to restore 'values and trust' the Chairman of Barclays claimed that the City had become a 'scapegoat' for the public's anger. A scapegoat is an innocent creature made to bear the blame or the sins of others. But the bankers are not innocent. Their behaviour caused this crisis. Their refusal to show contrition, let alone to make some kind of amends, so enraged me that I began to suspect my own response. What was I so worked up about? Was it just envy? It felt like something more righteous, as if some deep sense of justice had been affronted. After all, the crisis we call the credit crunch has caused our economy to contract and our national deficit to balloon. Next Wednesday, coincidentally on my play's opening night, we'll learn how we're going to pay for it, in cuts to our services and increases in our taxes. At the same time, the City is preparing to hand out bonuses totalling £7 billion – back to the levels of 2004.

I remember 2004. I remember the golden years when house prices rose and rose, and the brightest and the best took their Oxbridge Firsts into the City, and a new superclass of financial overlords were rewarded with wealth beyond imagining. We wondered a little what could make them worth so much. We were assured that they were the engine of wealth for everyone. They were the geese that laid the golden eggs. Until one day they laid a very big, very bad egg. Imagine our surprise! It turned out the overlords had screwed up, and had made us all poor.

Only then did it dawn on me that I'd fallen for the old Scott Fitzgerald fantasy, that the rich are different from you and me. Without ever exploring my assumptions, I had come to believe that anyone who could make such stupendous sums of money must be brilliant in a way I couldn't even conceive. Why didn't I question this years ago? Why didn't I remind myself of my university contemporaries who had gone into banking, and reflect that they hadn't seemed unusually clever at the time? But I was too dazzled by the sheer scale of their wealth. Somehow it's a really hard notion to get your head around, that someone can become extremely rich for no very good reason at all.

Back then, in March 2009, when I felt the first stirrings of anger, my immediate need was for an outlet for my emotions. I wanted to stage an imaginary confrontation with a banker, force him to justify his wealth, and then demolish his arguments. As the writer I would be in control of the encounter, and so of course I would win. Then maybe I'd feel better.

It seemed to me that the right medium for this was the stage, following in a long and honourable tradition of polemical plays. But even as I muttered and frothed, I knew I would have to get better informed about my subject. So I began the process of examining the whole issue more deeply.

First I had to plunge myself into unfamiliar territory, the world of finance. I read a number of excellent books, and I tracked the ever-unfolding story in newspapers and magazines. In the beginning I think I assumed that the world of modern finance would be beyond me, as, say, higher mathematics is beyond me. This was the last knockings of my belief that highly-rewarded bankers are exceptional people. But quite soon I found I was able to grasp the outlines of the crisis. So many experts and insiders have written about it that anyone can master the credit crunch, given the will. If you only have time for one book, I recommend Michael Lewis's 'The Big Short'.

What you will learn, as I learned, is that the people running the banks didn't understand their own complex financial instruments, the sub-prime mortgage-backed assets. That they never examined their contents. That they sold them on at great profit to themselves without regard to the contagion of bad debt. That the ratings agencies colluded in this trade in disguised junk. And that no one wanted to be left out while the good times rolled.

Slowly I came to realise that the bankers were neither wicked nor stupid. They were just doing their job, seeking the highest short-term return available. They didn't ask about the content of the CDOs they were selling, or about the systemic effect of their trades, because they didn't need to. They were not rewarded for sustaining the world's financial system. They were rewarded for making money right now.

I began to feel what it must be like to be an investment banker. Every minute of every day you're under immense pressure to deliver results, results as good as or better than your competitors. These pressures come from all of us, the great mass of small investors who demand that our savings and pensions go on growing. I learned from Michael Lewis's book that there were a few who foresaw the crash, but they were strange and solitary and exceptional. You have to be exceptional to stand out against herd wisdom. And so I came to the simple obvious conclusion: most bankers are not exceptional people. Why did we ever think they were?

Because they earn so much.

This then became the heart of the play I was starting to write. Not an attack on the greed of evil bankers after all, but the far harder question: what are any of us worth?

An economist will tell you that pay is determined by the market, not by some higher notions of social value. I accept this. I see no feasible method of stopping banks paying their high-fliers huge bonuses if it's in their interests to do so. Whatever taxes or regulations we devise, they'll find a way to reward their stars.

But there is another approach. Bankers demand and get such absurd rewards because it's the only way they know how to measure their level of respect. The problem is more cultural than financial. How can we show as a society that we respect most those who contribute most, rather than the merely rich?

I wrote my play as one tiny push in this direction. It still features one big speech which contains all my anger intact. But as the characters came to life they took unexpected turns. The final coup de theâtre – an actual crash – was no part of the original plan. So despite writing both sides of the argument, I'm not at all sure any more that I've won.

Writing a play is one thing. Getting it staged, particularly an ideas play, is something else. My play went the rounds of the managements, and twice came near to acceptance, but both times the producers backed away. Time was passing. I feared my subject was already out of date. Then, early this year, I learned that the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds was interested.

Since then I've done a great deal of work on the text, and the subject matter has grown more not less topical. 'Crash' is designed to play its part in a needed public discussion: have we gone too far in our worship of wealth? Have we allowed money to become the sole measure of worth? Perhaps the bankers are both muggers and victims – guilty scapegoats onto whom we load our sins.

Our punishment is that we now face many years of painful austerity. The very theatre that will give my play life, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, is sustained by public subsidy. In this new world of cuts, who knows what future it faces? On Wednesday afternoon George Osborne will put us all out of our suspense. And on Wednesday evening my play will open.

Essay written for The Daily Telegraph at the time of publication of The Trial of True Love

I strapped the rolled-up tent onto the back of my bicycle. My girlfriend took the two sleeping bags, and the picnic went in her bike basket. The sun was setting. We pedalled off across the Fens to a remote river where, on a recce the previous day, I had found a small tree-covered island reached by a plank bridge. Here on a patch of fern and brambles screened by trees we pitched our tent, and zipped together the two sleeping bags to form one double cocoon. We ate our picnic as night fell, and undressed, and crawled into the nest we had prepared. In this manner, at the late age of nineteen, I lost my virginity. I was passionately in love. I remember it all vividly, and with lasting gratitude, for all its discomforts. The ground beneath the sleeping bag was stony and we were unable to sleep. In the small hours a bird-scarer began firing, mimicking a shot-gun. We thought hunters were approaching, and shouted to them not to shoot us. At dawn, chilled and exhausted, we folded our tent and crept away. But we had been alone together on my first night of love, and for me that was enough.

Over the months that followed, this first and most intense love affair slowly disintegrated, as such things do. My dread that my girlfriend would leave me scratched away at our happiness until there was nothing left to keep us together. When she did leave me, gently and with care, I suffered appallingly, and for a longer time than I had been happy; but I was not surprised. My need had been so intense I would have left myself, if I could. I was young. It was my first love. I can forgive myself my immaturity. But I think, looking back, that a lesson was learned then which it took me twenty long years to unlearn.

My subject is falling in love. I've been revisiting my younger self and my former love life because I've been writing a novel about those long-gone days. To help me in my research I have a time capsule of my hopes and dreams of that time in the form of an earlier novel, written by myself at the age of thirty. This novel, called Amator, took as its subject a young man who falls in love at first sight. He pursues the elusive object of his passion and finally wins her. It was never published. I re-read the yellowing typescript, and found on every page the truth of which its author had been unaware. The story was an exercise in wish-fulfilment. My younger self longed to fall in love again, but, finding it wasn't happening, fell in love in a story.

I begin to see, when I look back, an organic relationship between my love life and my sleeping arrangements. The tent on the island was memorable but unrepeatable, much like that first overwhelming love. Later, when I bought my own flat in west London, I created a different sort of nest in the roof-space. I did this for sound financial reasons. I had no capital, and had bought the flat on an 80% mortgage and a 20% bank loan. The combined repayments exactly equalled my monthly pay cheque. So I let out the two bedrooms to friends, and installed myself in the roof space. I did all the work myself: cut the hatch, boarded over the joists, ran an extension lead for power and light, nailed fibreboard to the rafters, and constructed a vertical ladder for access from the passage below. There was room for a double mattress, but not for a bed. I could stand up, but only in the middle.

Here I lived and conducted my love affairs for three years, while I paid off the bank loan. As a love nest it had advantages and disadvantages. Any girl who followed me up the ladder and sat cross-legged beside me on the mattress could have been under no illusions as to my intentions. At the same time the whole arrangement was so flimsy, so temporary and un-serious, that it negated any prospect of commitment. My attic was both a come-on and a retreat. Girlfriends shared it with me, but they never moved in. There just wasn't room.

The metaphor and the reality converged one unforgotten night when my then-girlfriend got herself drunk in order to tell me my faults. She did this so thoroughly, goading me so far beyond endurance, that I began shouting at her to get out. She refused. Only then did I discover that you can't push a grown woman down a hatch. I tried; but it can't be done. My refuge had turned into a trap.

The burden of her attack on me was that I pretended to be a caring sensitive person with a genuine capacity to love, but in fact I was a bastard. I had no real feelings at all, and only used her for sex, and would be punished for this by spending the rest of my life unloved and alone. This seemed all too likely to me; which is why I reacted with such violence, and tried to push her and her malign prophecy down the hatch.

My more considered response to her accusation would have been that I too had deep feelings; that I was eager to mobilise them in a fully committed love affair; but that to do that, I had to fall in love. However, I didn't say any of this. I just shouted, 'Get out! Get out!' She shouted back, 'Go on, hit me! You know you want to!' I did want to, but I didn't hit her. Nor did I offer my excuse. How do you say, 'I like you but I'm not in love with you?'

I had got myself into this mess because I was giving out the wrong signals. I was aware that this was happening, but didn't know what to do about it. It was the only way I knew how to behave. Each time I met an attractive young woman, I found myself unable to believe that she in her turn might be attracted to me. So instead of risking some simple trial of physical contact, I talked. I would ask her about her love life, and learn all about her unsatisfactory boyfriends, and make intelligent remarks that showed how well I understood what she was going through. She would be flattered by my interest, and touched by my insight, and would part from me at the end of the evening thinking that this might be the start of something special and lasting. As for me, all I wanted was an affair.

It was a form of breach of promise. And yet, even as I presented the misleading front of an honourable young man, even as I dodged commitment and caused needless hurt, I was longing to fall in love. Now, thirty years later, I think I understand the curious contradictory processes that were at work within me.

I was raised in a Roman Catholic home and school, and inculcated with a strong moral sense. By my twenties the scaffolding of faith had fallen away, but I remained, in my own eyes at least, a moral individual. I sought to tell the truth, and not to exploit others for my own ends. I no longer believed that sex should be confined to the exclusive commitment of marriage, but I did believe that sex was properly part of a loving relationship, and that sex without love was a form of exploitation. The unexplored assumption here was that women wanted love, and accepted sex as an expression of love, but did not want sex on its own. Men, I knew, worked differently. Men wanted sex any way it came. But I was a nice young man, and I understood that the nice young women I met wanted real relationships, which meant that I must feel real feelings for them. My first love affair had followed just this pattern. I had fallen in love. That was how it was supposed to be. Now I must fall in love again.

In effect, I believed that there had to be love, or at least the chance of love, to deserve the sex. This was where it all went wrong. Eager for sex but forbidden to treat women as sex objects, I formed emotional relationships that then became sexual. The understanding each time, never expressed aloud, was that this affair could well be the one that goes all the way. But I always knew it was not. I should have issued a warning: 'I love being with you, but in ten weeks' time I'm going to end our affair.' But such things are unsayable, and so I said nothing.

How could I be so sure that this was not the one that would go all the way? Because I hadn't fallen in love.

From time to time I came close, but the women I fell for were always just a little out of my reach. It's so obvious now that I was caught in the Groucho Conundrum; but I didn't spot it for years. Groucho Marx famously said, 'I wouldn't join a club that would have me as a member.' The romantic version goes: 'I could never fall in love with a woman desperate enough to fall in love with me.' I was excited only by women who showed an interest in me, but then turned away. My bursts of passion went safely unreciprocated. However, because they occurred I was fooled into thinking I could still fall in love. All I needed, I supposed, was the right woman.

I was not altogether stupid. I knew that I was capable of falling in love with a woman who was wrong for me in every way, and that it could all end in disaster. But I wasn't troubled by the prospect. Not everything works out. I wanted at least to start an affair by being in love, because then I was equally at risk. There's something fine, something noble, about the act of falling in love: a discarding of protective covering, a blithe willingness to put yourself in the way of harm. The image of myself in love was intensely attractive to me, and not only because it resolved the dilemma of sex. True love brought with it the deepest bond, a companion for life. Of course I wanted that too.

That was how far I'd got when I wrote the novel about falling in love that I called Amator. I remember telling the plot to an attractive young woman I'd recently met, all through a romantic dinner, using it as a means to foster intimacy. The strategy was successful. We enjoyed a short affair. But I was not in love (she had neglected to make herself unavailable) and true to my pattern, the affair trickled away in a few short weeks.

Not long after this time I began to question my single pre-condition for true love: this act of falling in love. While working on my failed novel I'd come across a passage in a letter from the poet Rilke, which I copied out and pinned over my desk:

I sometimes ask myself whether longing cannot so stream out of a man, like a storm, that against it, in opposition to this outgoing current, nothing can reach him.

I had been longing and failing to fall in love for years. Could the two be connected? Could my own desire to fall in love itself be the obstacle that prevented me from loving? And if so, was this what I really wanted? For the first time I contemplated the possibility that my actions revealed more than my intentions: that I did not really want love at all. The more I pondered this, the more it began to seem to me that I had raised a high fence of demands and requirements with the sole purpose of shutting out the chance of love. My desire to fall in love had become my fortification against love.

Why?

The old answer: fear. Fear lies at the heart of my story. Fear of being hurt. Fear of bearing the burden of another person's happiness. Fear of being smothered by another person's needs. Fear of inflicting pain. Fear of being told I'm cruel and selfish, and fear of it being true.

So many fears. Better to make only small promises. Better to create only modest expectations. Never send flowers. Never say, 'I love you.'

Was this cautious milk-and-water lovemaking to go on for ever? No, I answered myself, clinging to the last shreds of my old faith, because one magical day I would fall in love. So went the protective illusion. One day an overwhelming passion would uproot me like a hurricane, and sweep away all my doubts and fears. Then at last I would give all I had to give, my heart, my future, without reserve, because I would have no choice in the matter. It would be beyond my power to resist. And so I would bear no responsibility for the outcome.

That was what I wanted: no choice, no responsibility. A thunderbolt from a blue sky. But stubbornly, it refused to happen.

In time, making the same mistake over and over again wears out even the most dedicated self-destroyer. There came a day when I took further stock of my life and asked myself a new question. How would it be, I said, if instead of seeking to fall in love I sought only to be happy? Who then would I want to be with?

I knew the answer at once: the former girlfriend to whom I'd told the plot of Amator. She had remained a friend, rather to my surprise. She liked me, and saw no reason why we should be strangers just because we were no longer lovers. She went on including me in her social gatherings, and I found myself getting to know her far better than when we had been a declared couple. Nothing was now expected of me, and I felt at ease in her company. In fact, it struck me, I felt happy with her.

Could such a gentle emotion be the basis for true love? It seemed unlikely. But I began to see more of her, all in the way of friendship. The more time I spent with her, the more I came to admire and value her. I allowed myself to think of her in a quite new way, as someone I could picture myself living with for a long time.

Then one day she mentioned that she was going ski-ing with a man called Rupert. I was stunned. Who was Rupert? Would they share a room? Of course they would share a room. It's so much cheaper. They would push the twin beds together. Love would blossom in the snow. She would ski out of my reach just as I was beginning my cautious approach.

This was all it took to propel me into action. I counter-proposed that she join me on a Greek island holiday in the spring, and she accepted. It shames me to admit these petty details; but actually I don't care. Something had to give. She still went ski-ing with Rupert, but Rupert, it turned out, was gay.

Our love grew slowly and steadily from such foolish beginnings, in the only way I now believe love can grow: not by the striking of thunderbolts, but by ever deepening knowledge, and trust in each other, and mutual gratitude. We've been married now for seventeen years, and I know I'll love her till the day I die. We have three children who'll one day soon begin to make their own mistakes in love. But at least they'll know that their parents got it wrong before them, and still ended up happy.

As for the unpublished novel, it seemed to me that I had half a book – the passionate dream of love – and that I could add the other half – the hard-earned reality. So I re-wrote it from top to bottom, and let my younger self battle it out with my older self, and found it was a more equal fight than I had expected. It's now called The Trial of True Love, and it's just been published. Better late than never.