I am thrilled to have the author Robert Graham write this guest post for my blog about this amazing book.
THE FILMS BEHIND THE FORMER BOY WONDER
Robert Graham
“My purpose in reading,” John Updike wrote, “has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal.” I steal and I almost always have. I’ve learned that all artists do – and that it isn’t cheating. A few novels, including Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes were models for The Former Boy Wonder, but as I worked on my novel I was also influenced by films.
John Schlesinger’s film version of Billy Liar fed into my novel because of the resemblance between Billy Fisher and my own protagonist, Peter Duffy. Peter is a daydreamer, and as I thought about the best way to realise this I was drawn back to Billy, the daydreamer’s daydreamer in British fiction. In Keith Waterhouse’s novel, the hero’s fantasy sequences are set in Ambrosia, the imaginary world in which Billy is a conquering hero. The first begins:
By rights, the march-past started in the Avenue of Presidents, but it was
an easy thing to shift the whole thing into Town Square. My friends had
vantage seats on the town hall steps where no flag flew more proudly
than the tattered blue star of the Ambrosia Federation, the standard we
had carried into battle.
Billy Liar’s fantasy sequences are in prose, like the rest of the novel, and the narrative flows seamlessly in and out of them. In the film version, the visual nature of the medium, the high production values and the design, costume, settings, and props of the fantasy sequences make them stand out more emphatically from the rest of the film, from the real world of a Northern English town in the early ‘60s. The Ambrosia of the film is more dramatic and more distinct from its reality than is the case with the novel.
In the earliest drafts of The Former Boy Wonder, Peter, (who is a serial fantasist and admits at one point that “a fact could come up and slap me in the face with a freshly caught trout and I still wouldn’t get it”), had regular flights of fantasy about what it would be like when he was reunited with Sanchia, his first love. Each was about half a page, and they were in the same discourse as the rest of the novel, prose fiction:
I smile at the memory of Lucy and Jack [his wife and son] waving
me off at Piccadilly.
‘It’s for the best,” Lucy says. ‘We haven’t been happy together for a
long time. And did I say? I’m seeing someone. Sheldon, actually. He’s
made you some lunch for the journey: So, you don’t have to worry about
me.’
‘That’s right, Dad,” Jack says. ‘It’ll be great. I’ll go to university in
London, and you and I can see each other all the time.’
During the redrafting process, I rewrote these fantasy sequences as screenplays, and presented them in the industry–standard font: Courier. They now had a different appearance from the rest of the novel, looking as they do like this:
INT. PICCADILLY STATON, MANCHESTER.
LUCY and JACK are on the platform. PETER has one
foot on the train and a suitcase in his hand.
JACK (excited):
It’ll be great. I’ll go to university in London,
and we can meet up every week.
LUCY:
It’s for the best. We haven’t been happy for a
long time. And did I say? I’m seeing someone, so
you don’t have to worry about me. It’s Sheldon,
actually.
[Holding up a small gift bag and handing it to
him.]
He’s made you some goats’ cheese filo parcels for
the train.
I hoped these changes would accentuate the difference between reality and fantasy as much as Schlesinger’s technique achieved the same in the film of Billy Liar.
Francois Truffaut’s series of autobiographical films helped me write a young man in love, but it influenced The Former Boy Wonder in other ways, too. Like Peter Duffy and Billy Fisher, Doinel is a romantic and a daydreamer. I didn’t base Peter on Antoine but seeing the similarities between them deepened my understanding of my protagonist. “’Antoine Doinel was Romeo, in love with the idea of being in love,’” Peter says in the later stages of The Former Boy Wonder and goes on to declare:
“Being in love with the idea of being in love is normal when you’re an
adolescent, perhaps acceptable when you’re in your twenties, but when
you’re on the lip of 50, it’s stupid.”
Here, and in one of my fantasy film scripts, Peter and Antoine are juxtaposed, but I paid homage in other ways, too. One scene in Baisers Volés features Antoine in his Paris bedsit, standing in front of a mirror, staring at himself, and repeating the name of his girlfriend, over and over, many more times than this: Christine Darbon, Christine Darbon, Christine Darbon, Christine Darbon, Christine Darbon. In The Former Boy Wonder, I reference this scene when Peter describes it to Sanchia and allude to it in the title of the first section of the book that’s set in the past: Sanchia Page Sanchia Page Sanchia Page Sanchia Page Sanchia Page. (The title of one of the novel’s other sections – The Bourgeois Sentimentalist – references Truffaut, too: it’s the description Jean Luc Godard once used to dismiss him.).
I consciously lifted one of Antoine Doinel’s characteristics and gave it to Peter. In most of the films, especially Baisers Volés and L’Amour En Fuite, Antoine is often seen running on a quest, dashing after a girlfriend or former girlfriend. From the earliest drafts, Peter is a man with a mission, too, a knight on a quest, and, as just mentioned, always in pursuit of his new love or his lost love. In early drafts, two key scenes feature him running after Sanchia, the first within a year of the end of the relationship, the second in the present day of the novel, when this middle-aged man runs through the streets of Notting Hill in pursuit of her. Seeing how I had already had him running at these two points of the story, and after watching the Doinel films again, I consciously made Peter run in scenes where he hadn’t in previous drafts. In an earlier version of a scene where he goes to meet Sanchia in an art gallery café, he arrives like this: “I rounded a corner and came into the café, and there she was, at a table in the middle”. But after watching the Doinel films again, I expanded this moment to emphasise the way Peter, like Antoine, is a character who is always in a hurry:
I rounded a corner and came into the café, and there she was, at a table
in the middle, poised and calm. I ran towards her, sliding on my leather
soles along the café’s parquet tiles, shooting along the surface like a kid.
Rather than bittersweet, the end of the love story in David Lean’s film Doctor Zhivago – which, for me, is more dramatic than that of Pasternak’s novel – is ironic and devastating. The lovers, Zhivago and Lara, lose one another, and the ructions of civil war and Soviet regime keep them apart for decades. The tragic climax comes when the old Zhivago, his health ruined, is passing through the streets of Moscow on a tram and sees Lara. He stands to get off, but the crowded tram prevents him, and he goes back to the window. As the tram passes her, he calls her name and thumps his hands against the window, but she doesn’t notice. He battles his way off the tram and begins to pursue her on foot, stumbling weakly. Lara carries on walking away from him, oblivious to what is happening behind her, and Zhivago’s heart gives out and he falls to the ground, dead. The implication here is identical to that in the endings of the novels I studied while writing mine (Le Grand Meaulnes, The Great Gatsby, and The Age of Innocence): that the past is not a place you can return to. I modelled a chapter in TFBW on that scene. In my version, Peter Duffy is on the platform in a London tube station and sees on the opposite platform a woman the thinks might be Sanchia. Like Zhivago with Lara, he gives chase and follows the woman across half of Notting Hill – without ever catching her up.
Ever since I came across that John Updike quote, I’ve known that stealing from one another is how artists function, and I’ve always felt fine about any of my thefts. While I was writing The Former Boy Wonder, I came across Gilles Mimouni’s 1996 film L’Appartement and was reassured about my, if you like, homages. L’Appartement borrows from Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films in several ways but if you’re looking for grand larceny, it’s in a scene where Max Mayer, the protagonist, stands outside a phone booth waiting to make a call. Inside, a man is angrily shouting at the person on the other end of the line. He hangs up, takes out a photograph, tears it up and chucks it on the floor. After the man has gone, Max collects the fragments and when he has pieced the photo together again, we see the face of an attractive young woman. It’s almost identical to a scene in Baisers Volés, made thirty years earlier, where Antoine Doinel has the same experience: he watches an irate man in a phone booth tear up a photograph of a young woman, takes the fragments home and pieces them together. Reassembling a torn-up photograph of an attractive woman was so resonant a moment in both films that it was hard for me to resist, so I didn’t: Peter Duffy tears up a photograph of Sanchia and later reassembles it. Thieves, every one of us.
The Former Boy Wonder is available now from Lendal Press