Nicholas Mosley - John Banks Interview Transcript 7 - 1

On the bench outside Peaklet Cottage, Sussex, May 20, 1991. 
Topics: Mosley's portrayal of "character" in the novel Accident and Harold Pinter's handling of this in the screenplay. 

JB - Peaklet Cottage reminds me of the setting of Accident, the film. 

NM - Well, not really at all, because Accident - in the film even more than in the book - was a good sort of bourgeois house where people were carrying on like good county people are supposed to carry on - tea parties on the lawn, all that sort of thing. But Peaklet is a workman's cottage, it's two small workmen's cottages knocked into one; there's no road up to it, when you're coming by car you have to leave the car right at the end of the field, about a quarter of a mile away, and you have to come across the field by foot. When the ground is dry you can get a car up to the door, but when it's wet you can't. And the whole point of coming here really is to sort of not be like the house in Accident, not be like that home-counties bourgeois life. I can be on my own here without too much difficulty, and when my wife Verity and the children come down on the weekends we can be a family, and we really don't want anything like the life of the family in the film of Accident. Of course, the film of Accident was different from the book of Accident, but even so there were certain similarities in their "lifestyle," as it's called.

J - Do you mean the social games playing?

N - I mean the social games playing; they were young married couples, sort of happily married young couples, but they still had an eye to other girls, socially,.flirtatiously, yes.

J - And here [Peaklet] you want to do some writing?

N - Here I want to do some writing. What I don't want to do is have a lot of tea parties on the lawn, wondering whether a pretty girl is going to turn up with my best friend in his sports car - that's the last thing I want really! I wouldn't mind if it happened, I suppose. But certainly I don't see that style of life here, no. 

J - In Majorca you read part of the piece from Accident about people "knowing," and in the film it's talked about, but it doesn't seem to come across. 

N - Well, that's true. Of course, the film was very different from the book. It wasn't different in the storyline, but the atmosphere was totally different. And Harold Pinter, who wrote the script for the film, was completely open with me about this. I had a very interesting correspondence with Harold when he was writing the script. He liked the book, and then I heard from him, I met him, and he said he wanted to keep the script as close to the book as he could, and he did as far as the story went, but he himself recognized - in a letter he wrote to me when he sent me a draft of the script - he recognized that he had altered the whole attitude of the story, the attitude of the characters to what was happening, in that...: I mean, Harold Pinter's people, however sophisticated they are, they're loners, they're tough people who don't have much contact with other human beings except through what might be called games-playing, social games-playing. And Harold knows this perfectly well, and he does it brilliantly, he does it absolutely brilliantly. In those early plays this was brought to high art, and especially the Accident filmscript is a marvelous script, [but] it's in Harold's terms.

   And so when Harold showed me the script and wrote me this letter he said, you will see I have altered this in certain crucial respects, I hope you don't mind, but this is the way I see it, and I'm this sort of writer and you're that sort of writer. And I said, sure, I understand this; you can't be anything except the very very good writer that you are, and I'm a different sort of writer. And the way that he had altered it was that in my story: although [my] characters did a lot of jokey social games-playing - sparring, the sort of witty English style of never quite saying what you mean but carrying on a sort of patter - but when the chips were down, that is, in the crisis - an accident, a young man killed, a young woman in danger of having her life ruined because she was driving when she shouldn't have been, she was drunk - when the chips were down then my two main central characters, the two men, do get together - they're old friends - they get together and they talk absolute sense. They talk straight, because they have to make up their minds what to do, and they say, look, on the one hand this, on the other hand that, and they go round and round the subject. And in the end they decide that they can't fix anything, that things have to take their course, but because they've looked at the question openly then they hope that whatever happens will be for the best. There's nothing better they can do. But they have this contact with one another on a very serious level. And, in fact, all through the book, although they're playing social games, my characters, there's always the feeling, I hope, of their friendliness towards one another, their real love for one another. These two men are old friends, they have a real love for one another. The man has a real love for his wife. He finds this young girl who he's attracted to, but, okay, you know, so what, he's very close to his wife.

J - Is this Charlie you're talking about?

N - No this is Stephen, the philosopher. Charlie's relationship with his wife isn't so much gone into. You don't often meet Charlie's wife, she's rather in the background. But still there's the general feeling that they're sort of decent people with warmth, and they carry on this life because they're still quite young and they have a lot of energy and life's for living rather than... "I can't do this and I can't do that," and so on. But they're warm human beings. And in the film they come out pretty tough. I think Stephen comes out quite a decent character; he comes out decent but rather wishy-washy.

J - Well, the scene between Charlie and Stephen where they're trying to work out what to do morally doesn't occur in the film.

N - No, that absolutely doesn't come in at all in the film. And Harold Pinter said to me, as you see I've cut that scene; he said I've really tried to do that scene, I've spent three or four days trying to write that scene and I can't. So I said, okay, you can't, which I understand, because it's not the sort of scene that Harold Pinter would do, it's not his thing. But I thought it was a very good script on his terms, and I have enormous respect for him as a writer, a huge respect, so what more can I ask? So I said okay.

   There was one thing I minded, there was something I minded a bit, but I think it didn't even make sense in the terms of his sort of script, which was that he hinted very broadly that Stephen slept with the girl Anna after the accident, when he had Anna at his mercy, as it were, up in his house. Well, in the book there's no question about this: he didn't sleep with her in the book. He saw her lying on the bed helpless and, you know, one thinks, Wow, but in the book it was quite clear that he did not sleep with her; and in the film it's very very strongly hinted that he probably did. And I think I said to Harold in my letter to him, look, I don't actually think this makes sense even in your way of seeing things. And I think he said he would think of toning it down so that it wasn't so obvious. He said something like, you know... No, I can't put words into Harold's mouth, it's completely unfair. But he sees... No, he said clearly, I do not have your optimism of seeing this story. I rather had [the view]: okay, there's been an accident, a young man has been killed, but life goes on and one learns something from it, they've all changed a little, perhaps one... you know, a bit of optimism. And Harold said that he didn't really see things like that, he didn't see life in these terms, anyway; life just happened; this happened and then that happened. And he had this phrase that I remember: and then in the end everyone is left carrying their own can! Well, this is good in a sense, and that's what I think, but I think I saw carrying one's own can as being a bit more optimistic a process than Harold did! But it was a marvelous script. 

J - In your book there's a hint that there's a connection between Stephen's not becoming involved with Anna, not taking advantage of her, and things working out well with his wife. 

N - Yes, I think there was this thing. I think after the accident Stephen realized he had been flirting around a bit with the idea of his young female pupils, but he had done his best in these circumstances to do the right thing - after the accident - and he thereby hoped that by him doing his best in this area, things would helped in the area of his wife, who was having a baby. There was some danger of the baby being born prematurely, perhaps being borne dead, and in the end the baby's alright, the baby's in its oxygen tent; there’s a question whether the baby might die or live. So Stephen does his best in this area, tries to help the girl, and not to make any more trouble than what he's been responsible for already, and he hopes things will come out not too bad in the other area - which is okay, the child lives. In the film there's a very quick shot I think of the baby in its oxygen tent, but one still doesn't quite know whether it's going to live or die, as far as I remember. [chuckles] It's just in its oxygen tent, lying there.

J - This seems to connect with what we were talking about in Majorca, about the ambiguity in people, their not being characters, and [whether] to be real, to be true in some way, you have to show the ambiguity. 

N - Yes, well I think that's what human beings are, I think to [suppose you] know you're own mind in a very simple way, you're probably limiting yourself, you're probably bluffing yourself. And this kind of question used to come up quite often when I was doing filmscripts. I did a script of my novel Impossible Object, then I did a filmscript about Trotsky, and in each case there were these things called 'script conferences,' with me, the writer, the director, and the producer, and even the art director sort of thing. And we all used to sit round like in school, with my script open on people's knees, and they'd all go through my script, and then these other people at the conference would ask things like, Now I'm not sure about this line here, Nicholas, now what's the character's motivation for this, what's his motive? And I said, Well I don't know, his motivation is extremely obscure here! With part of him he's trying to get his own selfish way; he's also thinking he's doing it all for the best; he's also trying to help someone else... and so on. I said, but look, all our motivations are so mixed, and the more we know about ourselves and about life, what we know is that our motivations are so mixed, it's never black and white. We never think: I know perfectly well that I'm out to ruin that person's life, or, I'm completely clear that I'm doing everything for the best motives. This simply isn't how life is at all, and the more one knows about oneself or other human beings, one knows it's not like that. So I'd say that. I'd say, well, if you want me to try to put it into words, he thinks a bit of that, but he also knows...and so on. But I found it quite difficult talking to people [about this]. Yes, one of the things that the film people would say is, But if you don't make a person's motives clear in your script, how are the people watching the film going to understand what's happening? And this was a real question of course, because so often characters in films are so simple, "character characters," you know, I suppose you do get an idea what their motives are. But I don't think even that is true! I think in all good films, in good acting parts, of course no one knows what their motives are. I mean, thousands and thousands of books have been written about "what are Hamlet's motives," for God's sake: no one knows what Hamlet's motives were. An actor can act it one way, or in a hundred thousand ways, sure.

J - So there isn't a correct account of what a person's motives are, there's no true story? 

N - I can't see it, I can't see it. If you had an infinite number of words then you could say everything, I suppose, but I can't... I think if you can say, now here we've really got what his motives are, this person - then this person you're talking about would have to be almost insane, he'd hardly be a human being. 

J - In a way, the person that you're interested in, the part of the person that you're interested in, is watching this story-telling going on, watching the story-telling about motives? 

N - Well, the story isn't about motives. I think the question of motives is so obscure that it isn't worth going on about. What's interesting is to say how much one can see of what is happening. I mean, leave one's motives out; I mean, who knows? One has to go to an analyst for seven years; if one goes to a Freudian for seven years then you might get a little thing about your motives - it's all because your mummy or daddy did that to you, so you've got this motive or that motive. But this simply isn't of any interest in ordinary life. 

J - With part of ourselves we see another part of ourselves telling these kinds of stories.

N - Oh, I see what you mean, yes. Yes, we see ourselves saying - Well I'm doing this all for the best really, or, I really hate that person, I'm going to screw them up. But as soon as you see yourself doing this you sort of stop doing it, almost. You can't say - I know, now I really know that I'm going to stomp round and do as much damage to my best friend as I possibly can! Once you say that, you say, Oh, come on! you know, What the hell! Then you go into something else: [mimicking] I don't see why I shouldn't, otherwise it's all going to bubble up inside me, or something. It's an ongoing thing of trying to see yourself, and of course one never gets it right. Finally the subject gets so dull that you go on to something else! 

J - And this is the complexity, of holding the knowledge of all the kinds of stories that you're inclined to tell about what you're doing, and yet knowing that really you're somewhere else, you're seeing this going on. 

N - Yes. Well, you're seeing that there are all these stories that you can tell about yourself, and what you’re holding isn't so much all the complexities - because they're infinite - what you're holding is the knowingness that there are all these complexities. So you're holding this sort of knowledge. So then you say, okay, what the hell, I just know things are very complex - and I've analysed, as much as I can spend the time now, I've seen this, and it's not quite that and it's not quite that, but one can go on for ever chewing it over - but just the fact that one holds in one's mind that human behaviour, human motives, are very complex... there's more chance of what you do next making sense rather than not making sense, coming out right... But then what do I mean by "right"? I don't mean right according to what's laid down in some book of morals: I mean you take the next right step that makes sense in the pattern that you hope is being established, that you hope is being worked out, something like that. 

J - Is Sartre's idea of bad faith involved here, that bad faith is acting out something that you're distanced from? 

N - Well, yes, Sartre's idea of bad faith was that you're acting a part, isn't it. You're acting a part and you know it's a social part, but just because it's easy to do it, you know that it's your social role - you are this or that, you're a Communist or a Nazi or an anti-Communist, whatever - and you just act it out because you can't think of anything else to do, that's all bad faith. You're not really holding it in yourself, not carrying the complexities and thereby being yourself, you're saying it's all too difficult, I'm just going to act out the parts that are put on me.

J - Which would be a way of discharging responsibility.

N - It would be a way of getting out of responsibility and being oneself as a particular human being, yes. 

This discussion is continued in Interview 7 - 2 on the role of the young aristocrat, William, in Accident, and Mosley's views on British aristocrats.