#FREDERIC RAPHAEL TV#

You're acclaimed for your dialogue but I've always thought your expository and descriptive prose is really exceptionally and beautifully well-written. I favour indirection, when possible, but I like to be going somewhere. Then again Lindmann, which is 'about' the Shoah, does not contain the word 'Jew'. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he was educated at Charterhouse School and St Johns. I especially like my own absence from it in any camouflaged form. Frederic Raphael is a novelist, screenwriter, biographer and journalist.

Like Men Betrayed is manifestly 'about' Greece although it never uses the word 'Greek', or 'Hellene'. I am rather proud of Like Men Betrayed (1970), which Paul Theroux described as 'Proust with machine-guns' (I am almost happy to recall that it also occasioned a reviewer in The Times to say that I had no sense of humour). I don't spend much time in narcissistic retrospection. Is there a favourite novel amongst your work? (I'm always asked this question). Robert Graves (who went to Charterhouse and disliked it almost as much as I did) wrote a book called Occupation: Writer, which will, as they say, do me. What is vital to me is the capacity to work alone and without having to apply for a licence. Excerpts from that novel are appended.WILLIAM BOYD : When someone asks you, 'What do you do?' do you reply 'Novelist', or 'Writer', or 'Novelist and screenwriter'? Or something else?ДЇREDERIC RAPHAEL: I never answer 'screenwriter'. Another rare quality, for a man of letters, is his generosity, shown here in the introduction he wrote for the belated re-issue of In Love, the wonderful lost novel by Alfred Hayes. ProustвЂ™s great novel is a fiction essentially made of critically factual remarks, and Frederic Raphael has much of that same rare quality. It is no denigration, however, to call him a modern master of the fragment.ДЇrederic Raphael would have been valuable if he had written nothing else except criticism вЂ“ see especially his works on Byron and Somerset Maugham вЂ“ but I think this other sideline, as a writer of highly compressed reflective prose, might prove in the long run to be an even better demonstration of how an artist can think continually and rewardingly in terms of aesthetic judgment, moral value and the unpredictable interactions of human character. His diary-borne recollections of what his undergraduate career was like in Cambridge are penetrating in detail far beyond anything achieved by any of the rest of us who have ever tried it, and collectively they provide a useful follow-up to his memoir of childhood, A Spoilt Boy (Orion), which needs to be read entire, and not in fragments. Always the most acute analyst of the position of the Jewish intellectual in modern British society, Raphael often, in his diary, does what a diary usually doesnвЂ™t do, and goes back to write a memoir. Opinions about modern history and politics tend to be worked inseparably into the texture of the prose.

A longer stretch, about Andre Gide, from the same volume is added to show another aspect of the continuing workвЂ™s many fascinations. Simply to have said of the Hollywood mogul Peter Guber that he вЂњsat very energeticallyвЂќ would be enough to prove an aphoristвЂ™s qualifications. Apart from a pertinent introductory book review preserved in the second volume, The Benefits of Doubt, most of the tiny pieces I have chosen here come from the third volume, Cuts and Bruises. This gift for compression shows up most conspicuously in the diary volumes he occasionally issues under the general title of Personal Terms, published by Carcanet. The author of Some Talk of Alexander, a monumental overview which takes in the whole of the ancient Greek world from a position on Olympus, has made some of his most treasurable effects a few words a time.

#FREDERIC RAPHAEL TV#

But his Oscar for the screenplay of Darling, and his national fame in Britain as the author of one of the all-time hit dramatic TV serials (yes, it was The Glittering Prizes), should not be allowed to obscure the fact that his daunting facility in the larger forms is based on his meticulous craft in the shortest form of all, the aphorism. Seasoned recipient of the glittering prizes вЂ“ a phrase that now belongs to him вЂ“ Frederic Raphael is one of the few serious novelists to have won an Academy Award for a screenplay: or, to put it another way, one of the few Academy Award winners to have written a serious novel.

Frederic raphael