Lives in Writing by David Lodge Page A

family’s circumstances prevented him from even thinking about going to university. He left school and became an autodidact, scraping a living from a door-to-door dry-cleaning service in partnership with a friend, reading promiscuously and haunting the cinema, while he waited for his call-up to National Service. He wrote articles on spec, a few of which were published by the
Manchester Guardian
, and did some broadcasting. With another friend, Barrie, he formed a Jules-and-Jim three-some with a girl called Pat. One day, in Barrie’s absence, he and Pat succumbed to sexual desire, and confessed the deed to Barrie, who was devastated – but only for a few hours, after which he announced that he now realised how shallow and banal Pat was. It was another, comic, re-enactment of the Arthurian triangle.
    Boorman’s army service was spent mainly in the Education Corps, teaching raw recruits at a Royal Engineers’ basic training camp. He was threatened with a court martial for questioning the legitimacy of the Korean War, but charges were dropped when he demonstrated that all his arguments were taken from
The Times
. At about the same time he met a vibrant, attractive young German woman, called Christel, who was working as a nurse in a TB sanatorium. They lived together after his release from the army and, when she became pregnant, married. It was to be a long-lasting and fruitful marriage, though strained by some infidelities on Boorman’s part which eventually brought it unhappily to an end. ‘Christel had been loyal and true, and I had not. Trust was lost. I lived on suffrance, closely watched. When I finally broke away, the severance was wrenchingly painful for all the family.’ But the saddest event in his life so far was the death of his daughter Telsche at the age of thirty-seven, from cancer. She was the eldest of his four children, and collaborated with him on some of his films.
     
    Like many film directors, John Boorman learned his craft in television – not in drama, however, but through editing, directing and producing documentary programmes. He was an early recruit to ITN news, and then joined Southern TV, where he achieved unprecedented success with a regional magazine programme called
Day by Day
. Headhunted by the BBC in Bristol, he caused a stir with a series of films that candidly reflected the changing social mores of Britain in the early 1960s, and he joined a circle of lively young writers in Bristol that included Tom Stoppard, Charles Wood and Peter Nichols. It was collaborating with Peter Nichols on a film about the Dave Clark Five, designed to ride the wave created by the Beatles’
A Hard Day’s Night
, that gave Boorman his break in narrative movie-making.
    As soon as he was launched into this new career, however, he abandoned the documentary bias of his TV work and exploited the superior technical and budgetary resources of feature films to make works of mythic resonance and – in due course – epic ambition. He was offered the chance to direct a
noir
ish thriller for MGM if Lee Marvin could be persuaded to act in it. Marvin promised to do so on one condition, which he indicated by tossing the script out of the window. Boorman rewrote the script, and filmed the story as if it was a bad dream, shooting each scene in a different dominant colour. When the studio heads saw the rushes they suspected he was insane and interviewed him in the presence of a psychiatrist. But
Point Blank
was a critical success, if not a commercial blockbuster, and in due course, like many of Boorman’s productions, became a cult movie.
    The autobiography contains a memorable portrait of Lee Marvin, a Hemingwayesque character, incorrigibly macho, haunted by a traumatic combat experience as a Marine in the Second World War, and given to epic binges in which Boorman inevitably became embroiled, leading on one occasion to his being stopped in his car by an LA traffic cop with the immortal question, ‘Do you know you have