The film of my book was never going to get less than an "18", with its lovingly photographed copulation
Published 17 April 2000
A writer's life is like a mafioso's: long periods of waiting punctuated by short bursts of excitement. Last week saw one of those bursts. First, to Paris in a spousal capacity, for the French publication of my husband's What Remains to be Discovered, which is now Ce Qu'il Reste a Decouvrir and gallicises the simple declarative sentence - "There was." - as "Eh oui!"
Continuing the mundane travail of the author, I search for 16 avenue de la Motte-Picquet, the 1950 address of the subject of my next book, the DNA scientist Rosalind Franklin. A firm believer in the Richard Holmes Footsteps school of biography, I emerge from the Metro at La Motte-Picquet-Grenelle, to find that the avenue's numbers begin at 46. Am I up against the biographer's nemesis: renumbered houses and renamed streets? Or is it possible that la Motte-Picquet originates on the other side of the vast expanse between the Ecole Militaire and the Eiffel Tower? Eh oui! Traversing the tourist-strewn gravel in the pouring rain, I am in luck. Number 16 still exists, with the outlines of the sixth-floor flat behind the mansard to which Rosalind and flatmates hauled coal every day.
Off then to Dublin for the film festival and the launch of Nora, the movie of the biography of Mrs James Joyce I wrote in 1988. The road from the airport seems even more studded with gleaming high-rise flats and luxury hotels than when I last came here a year ago. "We're t'riving," boasts a taxi driver, giving me a lecture on the Celtic tiger, labour shortages and reverse emigration. This prosperity makes all the more ironic Joyce's father's observation when Joyce went into exile in 1904: "No one with any self-respect stays in Ireland." The film festival opens with a party at the James Joyce Centre on North George Street. Waiting paparazzi are rewarded when the Waking Ned star Susan Lynch, who plays Nora, appears with her dark-red locks streaming down over a white taffeta strapless dress. Susan, who is from Newry, tells me it is actually a wedding dress her sister spotted in a shop window in Belfast. Real Joyces are there, too: Bob Joyce, James Joyce's grand-nephew and the centre's director, his brother Derek and his wife, Joyce Joyce. As a photographer approaches my daughter and myself, we lower our wine glasses out of camera range. "Hold up your glasses," the snapper encourages, "to show yer having a good time."
We are. It is a high-spirited occasion at the mega-cinema complex on Parnell Street, even though the film's biggest star, Ewan McGregor, is stuck in Australia - in tears, it is said, because he can't get back to launch the movie made by his company and in which he plays James Joyce. But he appears on video, twinkling roguishly against the Sydney Bridge. Applause. Much applause, too, for the director, Pat Murphy, much-admired in Ireland for her past films and her perseverance in getting Nora made. Next day, the Irish Times, throwing around adjectives such as "compelling" and "striking", congratulates Murphy for that on-screen rarity: a full-blooded sexual relationship between Irish partners.
I never enter the Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephen's Green without thinking of the Countess Markiewicz, born Gore-Booth, with breeches and her pistol, occupying the green as her assigned post in the 1916 Rising. I nearly need a pistol to get through the crush for the post-launch party, muttering "I wrote the book". Inside, I find myself face to face with Ireland's white-haired, pink-cheeked film censor, Seamus Smith. "I prefer to call myself a classifier," he says. But no way was Nora going to get anything lower than an "18" classification, with its lovingly photographed scenes of masturbation and copulation, plus X-rated dialogue of the Joycean "Fock up, love" variety.
The following night, out at RTE, waiting our turn to go on The Late Late Show, Ireland's and the world's longest-running television chat show, we hear the bestselling Irish novelist Maeve Binchy confess to the host, Pat Kenny, that she is giving up writing novels because she's exhausted and because novels these days require steamy sex scenes which she can't write because she's never been to an orgy.
Then it's over to me, Susan and Ireland's voluble Senator David Norris, to try to explain Joyce's curious character. Was Nora right to be so angry with Joyce? Why was Joyce so jealous of Nora? Did Joyce's brother Stanislaus go to Trieste to save the genius from becoming a drunken wreck? Norris explodes that he'd rather have dinner with soused Joyce than upright Stannie any day. Susan, with her boyfriend and mother, then leaves for the late late drive back to Newry.
Back to London on Saturday for the presentation of awards at PEN's International Writers' Day. As one of the judges for the non-fiction category, I tell the winner, Andrew Roberts, how much I enjoyed the way he organised his vast material in his splendid Salisbury: Victorian Titan. Roberts replies that one reviewer complained that there were not enough notes when "there are 38 pages of notes". His irritation is a reminder that, even in a moment of triumph, authors are thin-skinned and that even a few sour words in a glowing review burn for a lifetime.
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