Many years later somebody gave me a poem because they knew how touching I found the end of Withnail and I, though they may not have known why.
In Camden rain falls heavily On elephants and wolves and him in The greatcoat. ‘Man delights not me, Nor woman neither. No, nor women Neither.’ Nor even wolves. Stop now: Make that heartbreaking little bow, Reshoulder your rain-loud umbrella And drink the last of Monty's cellar — One can quite reasonably say That you will never play the Dane, Chin chin. So so long wolves, the rain Was artificial anyway. The city's a machine which tries Us; sorts the Withnails from the I's.
One day when Nick was thirty-five, some men came along and said, ‘An ogre! Stand there and look ogre-ish while we film you.’ Nick did as he was told. In a very gruff voice he pretended to be a proper ogre like his brothers and uncles were. They made him wear a scuba-diving suit and go under the sea, and people saw the film, which was called The Deep, and said, ‘Oh, look, a real ogre!’ He had thighs like tree trunks, and a neck like a bull, and a chin like a boulder. He was awfully funny and handsome and looked the very picture of a big happy ogre.
Nick pretended to be a big ogre in lots of films, even though he knew the secret that big ogres were really small ogres. Nobody else knew or cared, but to Nick it was very perplexing, because he saw that all big things were really very small inside, and the rest of the space inside big people and big ogres was filled with sadness, dreadful sadness. Which nobody ever talked about, and they certainly wouldn't believe you if you did!
And Nick was the saddest of them all. How could he tell everybody that he wasn't big at all, but very small and filled with sadness, just like they were? He stretched himself up as high as the sun and then toppled over with an enormous crash. His legs and arms turned into stone, and his ribcage too, and his head turned into a great wooden door. He wasn't an ogre any more, he was just a ruin. But when people went in through the wooden door they were amazed at what they saw! On the walls were four great big pictures, of Nick as a painter, and as a horrible policeman, and a frightened lawyer, and, in another one, as an ogre afraid of his father. But the strange thing about all the pictures was that, in them, Nick was very small. Just about the size of your thumb!
‘How sad it is in here,’ the people said, standing inside the ruin of Nick. ‘There certainly is a lot of empty space inside an ogre!’ And then Nick stepped out from behind a candlestick. He was just as big as your thumb. Everybody fell silent, and Nick said, ‘See how small I am! This is what it's really like inside big ogres.’ Everybody was very surprised. So they all went home that night and felt happy because Nick was telling the truth, and the truth always makes people happy. So by telling the truth about ogres, Nick had also got rid of some of the sadness inside the people and everybody was very grateful to him. Nick was the most truthful ogre there had ever been!
And they never forgot those four wonderful pictures. (New York Stories, Q&A, Cape Fear, Affliction.)
Jim rang me from Liverpool but whatever had passed between him and Eric had cut deep and he was too proud to come back. ‘It's the strangest thing,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking I see you.’ And it was the strangest thing – I didn't keep thinking I saw him, but I did feel like he was seeing me, or a ghost of me I had shed and seen on to a northbound train at Euston.
London felt empty. Down none of the fifty-five thousand streets of the city was a long yellow coat moving quickly. Somewhere, on one of them, was Wilson, if Wilson was alive. How strange men were, how unanchored, that they contained within them this show-stopping coup de théâtre. They could disappear. It was the male miracle, this neat erasure, this tidy and total cancelling, the negative of giving birth. Men had secret powers. They were private in a way that women weren't. They seemed to know something we didn't about voids. They were amazing.
This is what I did. I watched films to cheer me up when love had made me unhappy. The oldest problem in the world and the twentieth century's greatest solution to it. Plus this was my job, right? Because Eric had actually run my Oliver Stone interview with its two extremely approximate quotes – the only thing I could accurately remember Stone saying was ‘Is the Camden New Journal like the Village Voice?’ – I'd been given a slot on Saturdays at a local radio station filling in holes in the programming with film reviews. It seemed to get easier the more I steered clear of relating everything to Engels. Another ten pounds. I was closing in on the Equity minimum wage.
I knuckled down. I tapped the fan and it opened. Not directors – who the hell were they? – but actors. Whereas some people might see, say, Women in Love and then go on to The Devils because they're interested in Ken Russell, I would see Women in Love for Alan Bates, and then chase after him in Britannia Hospital, bump into Malcolm McDowell there and follow him into If and O, Lucky Man! and then back to Bates in In Celebration, and without even realising it I would have seen most of the cream of Lindsay Anderson. Had you asked me if I'd ever seen any Godard, I'd have said, ‘Oh, no no no!’, even though I'd seen Breathless, Pierrot le Fou and Une Femme est Une Femme during a Belmondo binge and followed him to Is Paris Burning? where I recognised Glenn Ford among the ruins and hitched myself to him through Gilda and The Courtship of Eddie's Father by Vicente Minnelli and some rather duff westerns to The Big Heat where Lee Marvin throws boiling coffee over Gloria Grahame, and then careered after Marvin in everything (he was always brilliant) until we (Lee and I) tracked down the erotically brainy-looking John Cassavetes in The Killers, which got me to Rosemary's Baby – Christ, he's good in that – and a film called Brass Target which had good old George Kennedy in it playing Patton, who in Cool Hand Luke I sort of preferred to Newman and then in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot I even preferred to Clint, meaning that I could no longer avoid The Dirty Dozen, what with him, Marvin, Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland and Robert Ryan, who was so fantastic in Bad Day at Black Rock (with Marvin again!) that I went on a Ryan safari, stalking the wounded beast through Billy Budd, The Set-Up, Men in War and Crossfire, where the mighty Mitchum loomed, and that was me gone, an acolyte in the Mitchum temple, where one day (Cape Fear) I formed an attachment to a mid-ranking avuncular type I saw around a lot, Martin Balsam, that virtuoso of shirtsleeves, who has in fact appeared in every film ever made apart from Trainspotting and Raise the Red Lantern. Balsam's forearms were particularly compelling in All the President's Men (which I can never understand and is anyway not all that good but nonetheless my favourite movie of all time), wherein