Bleak Hotel

THE GREATEST MOVIE NEVER The Un-Making of The White Hotel Paul Newman Bleak Hotel by D.M. Thomas Quartet Books £15 “In 1981 I published a novel, The White Hotel, which unexpectedly aroused in readers a passionate admiration or equally passionate distaste. Within a few months of its publication, I received an offer to option the film rights. My novel’s heroine, Lisa, born in Odessa in 1890, walks a tightrope between Eros and Thanatos. She has a great gift for happiness and pleasure, but is tortured by the suffering of others and the intuition that great suffering will come to her. She is right, for in 1941 she becomes caught up in the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar in Kiev. The ‘white hotel’ of her sexual fantasy, written for her analyst Sigmund Freud, encompasses the extremes of pleasure and pain, joy and grief. The novel is complex in structure, moving from Lisa’s sexual fantasy in verse to a prose expansion of it, then to Freud’s ‘intellectual’ fantasy, to the nightmarish ‘real’ fantasy of Babi Yar, and finally to a spiritual fantasy. Each section is stylistically different. The novel therefore poses serious challenges for a film Maker” – D.M. Thomas Invoking the litigious fog of Dickens’s classic, Bleak Hotel is a painfully hilarious account by D.M. Thomas of the failure to make a movie out of his internationally acclaimed, prize-winning novel The White Hotel. A screenwriter’s nightmare that defied the conventional three-act structure, the novel was climax from beginning to end. To shoot it as written would result in an arty piece that would prove impenetrable; to re-write it in dramatic terms would result in something unfaithful to the story. Like a cinematic Everest, this novel has scattered on its slopes the body of many a valiant director, actor and screenwriter, including Bernardo Bertolucci, Dennis Potter, David Lynch, Barbara Streisand, Meryl Streep, Geoffrey Rush, Anthony Hopkins and D.M. Thomas himself. Basically Bleak Hotel relates how Trusting Thomas and his agent allow a couple of likeable swindlers, Geisler and Roberdeau, to take up the option on his controversial, visionary novel that stunned the literary world by intruding aspects of the final solution into a female opera singer’s sexual fantasies. Naturally the pair treasure every word and want to make it into the greatest movie ever. With loyal sincerity, they beguile and entice the author, sending him fresh holly boughs each Christmas, arranging champagne parties, meetings with great directors, pointless but delightful trips to America, France and Italy, paying for these excursions and soirees either not at all or with money from a generous backer who has faith in their talents. A mysterious pair, devoted to artistic movie-making, yet without financial scruple, they are in no way vicious or malevolent but – like characters in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon – joyously throw around wads of ‘musical money’, cash printed for ostentation and show but with little hard delivery value. After their facades have imploded and the venture foundered in debt and bankruptcy, another crusading producer is allowed a last-ditch attempt. Susan Potter gallops in with an evangelising fervour that even outdoes the previous pair. Initially warmed by this naïve expression of hope, the author manages to revive his high spirits as more big stars are courted and locations

discussed and explored, but alas Trusting Thomas becomes Doubting Thomas when, after another swarm of setbacks, Susan confesses she is hoping the intervention of Jesus Himself may save the movie. Ever upbeat, she brings to mind one of those forlorn characters in a Samuel Becket play, with names like Glug or Ham, who spout enthusiastic hymns to existence and the glory of the springtime as their bodies sink deeper into gigantic pots filled with mud. While the anchor of Bleak Hotel is the absorbing, subtly analytical account of the pitfalls that subverted the making of the movie, parallel to this footage another reel is unwinding: the big dipper of the author’s private life, involving the tragic death of his wife, Denise, a bewitching shade who swans through the narrative, offering cigarettes, camaraderie and consolation; the kindly intercession of the poet, Ted Walker, who counsels him during dark nights of mourning and later abruptly breaks with him; the valedictory walk-on of the dour sea-dog laureate, William Golding, who promptly expires after a party; recollections of Thomas’s mother and father at Carnkie; teenage memories and erotic forays. These subsidiary dramas flicker in and out of the shadowy endeavour to embalm in celluloid the doomed sexual oasis of the White Hotel, a sanctuary besieged on all sides by an impending holocaust just as Thomas’s psyche is stormed by thunderclouds of guilt, regret and trauma. This insertion of autobiographical and historical fragments (including an ironic appraisal of Stockhausen’s reading of the Twin Towers spectacle as fine art rather than human tragedy) may disrupt the reader’s concentration, but after a while he attunes to the rhythm of shifting vantage-points, the swoop from the objective long shot to the intimate close-up. In some ways, this is the America Dream seen through wry European eyes. At the end, punch-drunk by outrageous fortune, Thomas crawls out of the wreckage, apparently witty and upbeat. He forbears from condemning the duplicitous duo, Geisler and Roberdeau, promoting them to the mythological status of tricksters who celebrate and honour existence by the audacity and magical inventiveness of their deceptions (unlike the humble burglar or lowly mugger whose paltry pilferings and inelegant, drug-dazed assaults simply land them in gaol). What is plain is that so much microbial energy goes into the making of a large film that it is bound to engender in equal parts elation and devastation. Producers strut in and out like miniature Tamburlaines. Actors accept and reject offers in alternate breaths. Locations are made available then barred by warfare. The project bleeds and staggers like a wounded warrior whose breath is just able to lightly mist a mirror. To travel hopefully is better than to arrive, even after twenty-seven years have passed and youthful flower-faces have crumpled into cauliflowers and the final reckoning looms complete with cloak and scythe. Nevertheless, from still-warm ashes, D.M. Thomas has created a phoenix of a memoir, a successful and moving companion to his earlier Memories and Hallucinations (1988). In fact, Bleak Hotel would make a truly compelling movie, if only some far-sighted, amazing person would be willing to put his heart and soul and billions into it.