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Frederic Raphael

In 1951, when he was twenty, the novelist, screen-writer and homme-de-lettres-to-be Frederic Raphael bought a spiral-bound notebook from Joseph Gibert in the Boulevard St Michel and started keeping a curious kind of writer's journal. His purpose was 'to catch ideas and incidents on the wing' and 'to train myself to notice things as they were'. He continues this practice today, though the word 'things' has come to embrace more or less everything that matters in the writer's world. These notebooks are at once a detailed Biographia Literaria and a creative resource, not only for him but for other writers and readers. Raphael includes reflections, sketches for stories and other projects, vignettes of people and places. Some entries are pages long, some are pithy aphorisms, all in one way or another illuminating the vocation of writer and the equally urgent and vital vocation of reader. A writer's chief tools are watching, listening, guessing, keeping an open mind, reading the present and rereading the past to keep contact and faith with the works which until recent times constituted the imagination and critical discourse of our cultural tribes. Personal Terms is a generous collation from Raphael's notebooks, beginning (as Alice advises) at the beginning, and continuing the intermittent story up to 1969, that year of political crisis and disillusion. By then the eighteen-year-old boy in the Bou' Mich had become the author of eight novels and much else for the page and screen. He still visited (as he does today) Gibert's shop to acquire his enabling notebooks.

Lives and Letters

Personal Terms

My notebooks are my conscience,' writes Frederic Raphael. 'They contain a writer's letters to himself.' This second volume of his notebooks covers the first three years of the 1970s: years of slump, treacheries and deceits in the film world, of literary achievement and private tragi-comedies - the storm that washes away weeks of hard work in the garden of the Raphaels' French farmhouse, the serious accident in which his father nearly dies, before being unexpectedly restored to alarmingly irascible life. Raphael's sharp wit spares no one, not the sacred monsters of the movie business and the literary world, nor the incidental characters whose unguarded stories and personalities become the material for fiction. Least of all does he spare himself. Rough Copy is a self-portrait of a writer whose precision and honesty are both entertaining and searching.

Rough Copy

The first volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, Personal Terms, was greeted in the TLS as 'a small masterpiece'. With the publication of Cuts and Bruises, the third volume, we can see the sequence unfolding into a major literary achievement. Cuts and Bruises concerns the 1970s, during which Raphael travelled widely (not least to Hollywood, which yields a mordantly sweet and sour account of figures such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and John Schlesinger) and wrote the acclaimed television series The Glittering Prizes. Raphael is only incidentally concerned with the world of the famous, though, and has little interest in 'names' and gossip except to notice the discrepancies between public and private faces and to convey the texture of life around him. Greece remains an abiding passion, and the conduct of Greek friends during the last months of the Colonel's tyranny leads to surprising reflections on exile and return. Raphael's notebooks, never intended for publication, are exercises in candour, precise observation and wit. Cuts and Bruises adds to the growing impression that Raphael is creating an engrossingly readable, stylish and enduring chronicle of his times.

Cuts and Bruises

The fourth volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, Ticks and Crosses covers the years 1976 to 1978 with the sharp wit and provocative intelligence that made the earlier books an acclaimed success. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios with the cool acuity of a classicist; he records his thinking on philosophy, Jewishness, and Greece ancient and modern, with the tough irreverence of a Hollywood operator. Among the pleasures of Ticks and Crosses are an account of a farcical summer afternoon spent floating down a French river on a lilo in the company of Shirley Williams; an alarming trip up the wrong (and by no means dormant) volcano in Guatemala; meeting Nabokov; taking part in Any Questions with Enoch Powell... The eminent are caught off-guard; aphorisms sparkle, and throughout, Raphael's love of French life and culture, his delight in the human comedy of social life, illuminate his unfolding chronicle.

Ticks and Crosses

We had been instructed to start promptly at six, since the hall was needed again at eight. We pushed through the curtained doorway, like instrumentalists without instruments, and onto the stepped stage. The audience was still coming in. Uncertain of our running time, and with no one to introduce us, I thought we had better start. I got as far as 'Byr- ' when Alan decided he did indeed need his glasses. He delivered his rehearsed ad lib, claiming that his vanity was second only to Byron's, and put on his specs.It is July 1981, and Alan Bates succumbs to a fit of nerves as he and Frederic Raphael attempt to carry off an underrehearsed performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. This wry glimpse behind the scenes of the London literary scene sits, in Raphael's notebooks, amid clear-eyed analysis of the riots and social unrest then erupting in Britain's cities under Margaret Thatcher's government. Compulsively readable, by turns mischievous and coruscating, this latest volume of Raphael's reflections casts light on a period that saw the beginnings of a decisive shift in British and American culture. Along the way, there are finely incised pen-portraits of public figures ranging from Shirley Conran to Peter Sellers and from Robert Redford to Mary Whitehouse.

There and Then

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphael's acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms, an unrivalled parade of the author's eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. 'Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written,' as Jeremy Lewis said in the Literary Review, these writings are as unguarded, sardonic and tactless as they are candid. This seventh volume relives Margaret Thatcher's first years in office. Raphael's wide acquaintance in the world of politics, literature, journalism and the movies gives him rare access to the character of those, in England and America, who dominated the times. The unintended result is a Proustian parade of people, famous and otherwise forgotten, and events momentous and strictly personal, presented by an unabashedly partisan, unblinking eye-witness. There is nothing else quite like this unfolding project in English or American literature. 'I am not a camera, but – as these carnets prove – I am a pen. The moving finger writes differently from the clicking keys.'
'In these notebooks, Raphael shows himself alert to every vanity but his own, a shortcoming that, far from repelling a reader, becomes part and parcel of the their fascination. He is one of those writers who most reveals himself in his acerbic anatomy of others' (Anthony Quinn, Telegraph).