Bad sex award goes to novelist Rowan Somerville

Rowan Somerville. Photograph: Dave M Benett

Bad sex award goes to novelist Rowan Somerville

This article is more than 11 years old

Lurid insect imagery secures prize for The Shape of Her, just ahead of Alastair Campbell, who was disqualified for wanting to win

Maev Kennedy
Tue 30 Nov 2010 10.49 GMT

 

With one killer sentence using the image of a butterfly collector – "like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her" – the novelist Rowan Somerville demolished all comers and secured this year's coveted Literary Review Bad Sex award.

The Many Faces of Jane Birkin

Jane Birkin

The Many Faces of Jane Birkin

By Katherine Cusumano
November 9, 2015

In Jane B. par Agnes V. (1988), Jane Birkin plays a muse, her unkempt hair strewn with flowers; Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete; Laurel of Laurel and Hardy; a Spanish folk dancer; Joan of Arc; Tarzan’s Jane; the lounging subject of an oil painting by Titian or Goya; and herself—past, present, and future. The film seamlessly blends fiction and biography as interpreted by Birkin’s friend and collaborator, Belgian director Agnès Varda. Each vignette comments on a life of performance: Ariadne is pursued, ball of thread in hand, by a menacing black camera; Birkin interrupts her folk dance to express her dismay at the scene’s kitsch; and a moment when Birkin shows Varda around her apartment diverges into a mundane monologue about Birkin’s affection for staircases and family photographs, and her dislike for her answering machine.

Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in Paris in 1973. 

Photograph: Michel Clement/AFP/Getty Images

Varda has now overseen the restoration of Jane B. par Agnes V. and Kung-Fu Master!, a companion film that depicts a mother of two (Birkin, whose actual children Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon play her fictional children) falling in love with a young boy (Varda’s son Mathieu Demy). Neither film has previously been accessible to American audiences; Jane B. par Agnes V. has never had an American theatrical release. The two films spill into one another. A moment when Birkin proposes the plot for a film turns into Kung-Fu Master!, while certain lines of dialogue become repeated motifs criss-crossing between films. Where does real-life end and performance begin? Varda seems to ask. “Même si on déballe tout, on ne dévoile pas grande chose,” Birkin says directly into the camera. Or, as translated by the subtitles, when you show it all, you reveal very little.

Taken as a pair, the movies offer different perspectives on Birkin’s life, career, and talent. “Kung-Fu Master! was my world, but Jane B. was Agnès,” Birkin says, giving credit to Varda for “anything that was refreshingly different.” But Birkin doesn’t do herself justice. Now 68, Birkin emerged as an “it-girl” and fashion icon in her native London during the Swinging ’60s and caused a minor scandal with her role in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. When she arrived in Paris in 1968, she quickly became the artistic and romantic partner of Serge Gainsbourg (actress Charlotte is their daughter). Often described as his “muse” (though not by herself—”it seems a bit pretentious,” she says of the label), she became a fixture of the French artistic scene thanks in part to their scandalous duet “Je t’aime… moi non plus,” which infamously ends in a woman’s orgasmic moans. (It was eventually banned by the BBC, as well as on Swedish, Italian, and some French radio programs.) And, yes, she’s the namesake of that crocodile-skin Hermès bag.

We caught up with Birkin during a break from her tour of performances with French actor Michel Piccoli—the two have staged readings of Serge Gainsbourg’s songs without music, most recently in Canada and with upcoming performances in Paris. “For the moment, I’m working on nothing at all,” she says.

 

KATHERINE CUSUMANO: Do you think that your work reads differently in French and English?

JANE BIRKIN: It’s a bit of a trap, because I have a very English accent in French. When I came to France in 1968, I couldn’t speak French. I learnt it with Serge Gainsbourg, and I learnt the slang. I never knew about masculine and feminine, and the tenses were always very difficult. The accent’s much better now because I did the theater. I had to work twice as hard as everybody else. Un ou une, and all of that, at the same time, I have to admit, I liked being trouble. When I made mistakes, people used to laugh. I could have learnt better, but I’ve always liked to make people laugh.

CUSUMANO: Do you feel different in France than you do in England?

BIRKIN: Certainly. In France, I’ve been a part of the furniture for so long. [Fifteen or 20 years ago], I was working as an assistant on Jacques Doillon’s film as the script girl, and I was so late to catch an airplane to London to be with my sister. It was her birthday, so I was running along the streets and tried to hail a taxi. There was a taxi who was putting his little hood on because he had finished work, but when he saw it was me, he said, “Oh, I’ll take you!” He wouldn’t let me pay, so I arrived at Charles de Gaulle having had this charming taxi man, and when I went up to Air France, they put me in first class. The wonderful trip went on. I arrived in London airport, and I was terribly, terribly late, so I rushed for the taxi line, and [the driver] said, “What’s the address?” I said, “I don’t know. If we go there, I’ll be able to recognize it.” He said, “That fucking woman in that fucking taxi doesn’t even know the fucking address,” and I nearly fainted. He dropped me off at Bushy Park, and I went through the park, running with my suitcase. I arrived at my sister’s house and collapsed into tears. She said, “You’re spoilt.” I said, “Yes, I am. I’m spoilt. That’s exactly what I am.”

CUSUMANO: Did it make you want to go back to France immediately?

BIRKIN: No, I’ve actually had more fun with my sister these past few years, going to her house. I don’t have anything of my own there anymore. My mother’s house has gone in Chelsea. It was such a fabulous house on the Thames. I think the children were miserable when I had to give it up. Everything sort of collapsed after that. The Christmases haven’t been the same—nothing will be the same anyway because of my daughter Kate, who died. It’s something that was for a different age. I have fun with my sister. I can go to art galleries with her, and just have crumpets for tea and not do that much. I love it in London.

CUSUMANO: For Kung-Fu Master!, was there ever any pushback to making a movie about such a taboo subject as the Oedipal relationship between a mother and a young boy?

BIRKIN: I don’t even know whether one could do it these days. But in those days, it seemed to me so normal, because it had really happened. My daughter Kate was giving a party in the house, and there was a little boy who left something at home. He wanted to come by the following day to pick up something he’d left. I thought this could make a really great story. Voila. It seemed very normal.

CUSUMANO: A lot of Jane B. was filmed in your home, with Agnès just with the camera on you. Is it possible to forget that you’re being watched?

BIRKIN: No. But it’s quite exciting, as long as you’re not requested to look into the camera. I always found that very indecent and difficult to do.

CUSUMANO: Why do you find that difficult?

BIRKIN: It’s like looking at the Peeping Tom who’s looking at you. You can pretend it isn’t really happening, and you give it your best as an actress, but if you’re supposed to look into the hole of the camera, then you’re sort of saying, “I know that you’re watching.” I’ve always found it a bit embarrassing.

CUSUMANO: When you are creating a role for yourself that is based in experience, where does you being Jane end and being a character begin?

BIRKIN: I wrote a screenplay of a film that I did as a director but not as an actor, a movie called Boxes. I got everything out— all the difficulties of being a mother, the guilt, leaving the fathers. The way I could see things was always by my way of looking at things. I got all the fathers to come, saying it wasn’t like that, saying, “It’s just your memory, it’s so selective, it’s as selective as a washing machine.” I was pleased to have given the men the capacity of feeling whatever they might have felt to be separated. I liked writing the dialogue for them, and against me, if you see what I mean.

CUSUMANO: There’s a line in Jane B. when you say, “What I’d like more than anything is to make a film about me as I am.” Do you think that you accomplished that?

BIRKIN: In little episodes in Jane B.

CUSUMANO: Do you think it’s possible to make a film that encapsulates a self?

BIRKIN: I don’t know. It was interesting seen by Agnès, but on one’s own, I think it’s limited.

CUSUMANO: Did you have an idea of where it was going when you started?

BIRKIN: No. I was overcome with admiration for Agnès’s knowledge on paintings. Agnès’s aesthetic of the whole thing worked very well. It was wonderful to put yourself into tableaux. It really was her. The thing she did most beautifully was to create all those paintings.

CUSUMANO: It does have a very painterly quality in the way that it’s composed of these different vignettes. In one of those vignettes, you are cast as a literal muse of Greek mythology as a way of talking about the muse to the artist. How do you feel about the label “muse”? I feel like that’s ascribed to you quite a lot.

BIRKIN: As it was a part of my life, I didn’t really think of myself as being a muse. I’m delighted that people think that I inspired Serge in any way, and I suppose that was the theme for Agnès—that’s why, she put it into the film, because of me and Serge.

CUSUMANO: Do you think that, in terms of mythology, the muse is secondary to the artist in any way? The muse in Jane B. seems like she can’t really exist without her artist.

BIRKIN: It’s quite flattering to be somebody’s muse. It never hung me up in any way, because Serge was always writing records. Right until the end, he wrote things for me. I think he realized that I could sing his pain, his difficulty, perhaps more than he wanted to do himself, which meant that I was necessarily a sort of female version, or a B-side of a record. That wasn’t necessarily the thing that showed, because Serge was much more aggressive than that. He went for things that were absolutely extraordinary in their strangeness and never wanted to go back and to repeat what he had done. He was bounding forwards. I realized my good fortune that he didn’t drop me like I think I might have dropped me. He went on writing probably the most beautiful songs, like “Runaway From Happiness”—”Fuir le bonheur”—and so I was lucky.

CUSUMANO: Do you have a favorite part of making a movie?

BIRKIN: I loved having a crew. I loved being the person who woke at six in the morning and knew where to put the camera. I loved watching the actresses cry, and to know that if you were clever and didn’t do too many rehearsals, that it just came that way. I understand the joy of having a female actress like Charlotte [Gainsbourg] and watching her give everything, and be able to capture it.

JANE B. PAR AGNES V. AND KUNG-FU MASTER! OPEN THIS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13 AT LAEMMLE ROYAL IN LOS ANGELES

INTERVIEW

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's 400th anniversary: 'man of Stratford' to be celebrated in 2016

Death of most performed playwright in the world to be marked in Stratford-on-Avon, London and across the globe


Maev Kennedy
Friday 1 January 2016 10.00 GMT

Maev Kennedy

Friday 1 January 2016 10.00 GMT

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T

he world shares him and London claims him, but Stratford-on-Avon intends to spend 2016 celebrating William Shakespeare as their man: the bard of Avon, born in the Warwickshire market town in 1564, and who died there 400 years ago.

Stratford remained hugely important throughout Shakespeare’s life, argues Paul Edmondson, the head of learning and research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. “People have seen Shakespeare as a Dick Whittington figure, who turns his back on Stratford and his family, goes to London to earn his fortune and only comes back to die,” he said.

“[But Stratford is] where he bought land and property, where he kept his library, where he lived and read and thought. We are going to spend the year re-emphasising the importance of Shakespe

For a man famous in his own lifetime there is little documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s life and times. The plays would scarcely have survived if his friends and fellow actors had not gathered together every scrap of every play they could find – drafts, prompt scripts, scribbled actors’ parts, and 17 plays not known in any other version – into the precious First Folio published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death.

The actor Mark Rylance has called it his favourite book in the world, and most of the surviving First Folios will be on display – including those belonging to the British and Bodleian libraries, and a tattered copy recently discovered in France.

Some of the most precious surviving documents will be gathered together in an exhibition at Somerset House in London, opening in February and jointly organised by the National Archives and King’s College London, including four of his six known signatures, which are all slightly different.

By Me, William Shakespeare will include his will, the court papers relating to the audacious move when Shakespeare and his fellow actors dismantled a theatre on the north side of the Thames and rebuilt it as the Globe on the South Bank, and accounts showing payments from the royal treasury for Boxing Day performances of James I and Queen Anne.

The outgoing Globe director, Dominic Dromgoole, recently jokily claimed Shakespeare as a true Londoner – albeit conceding “some spurious claim” by Stratford-on Avon. Stratford, however, will be insisting that the town made and educated Shakespeare His old school room is being restored with a £1.4m Heritage Lottery grant, to open as a permanent visitor attraction.

Shakespeare bought the splendid New Place, the second best house in the town, where he died according to literary legend on St George’s Day, 23 April, the same day as his birth. “You don’t buy a house like New Place and not live there,” Paul Edmondson said. “The general public and many academics have consistently underestimated the importance of Stratford to Shakespeare.”

Edmondson believes that after Shakespeare bought the house in 1597, all his thinking time was spent there, and that the late plays, including The Tempest, were at least planned in his library and probably written there.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trustdescribes New Place as “the jewel in the crown of the 400th anniversary celebrations”, but in truth it is more a mount with a gaping hole where the gem should be.

Shakespeare’s house was demolished 300 years ago, and the house that replaced it, probably incorporating some of the original fabric, was flattened in 1759 by an irascible clergyman, Francis Gastrell, in a row over taxes. He had already cut down Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, under which the writer is said to have sat and worked, because he was irritated by all the tourists peering into his garden.

The gap in the Stratford streetscape has never been filled, but a five-year archaeology project has peeled back the years, and the news that Shakespeare’s kitchen had been found in the partly surviving cellars went round the world. The whole site is being redisplayed for the anniversary, with the foundations marked and the garden restored.

“Without Stratford,” Edmondson said, “There would have been no Shakespeare.”

THE GUARDIAN

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett manuscript of first published novel to go on display

Nobel laureate's notebooks that cost Reading University almost £1m at auction will be on show for just one day

by Maev Kennedy
The Guardian, Monday 9 June 2014

Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Murphy displays the author's initial struggle with inspiration, featuring entire pages covered in scribbles and doodles. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Guardian

Six cheap dark blue notebooks, sacred relics to admirers of Samuel Beckett, will go on display this week for the first time since an English university paid almost £1m for them at auction. The manuscript of Murphy, the Nobel laureate's first published novel, from 1938, will be on show at Reading University for just one day, before returning to the Beckett scholar who is painstakingly transcribing every crossed-out word, dash and comma. Just one word took him four months to puzzle out: rather disappointingly, it was no gemstone of Beckettian imagination, but "tending".

"These things are valuable, though of course only exciting to sad people like me," John Pilling, a world-renowned authority on the author, said. "It is not his greatest work, but it is the earliest fiction manuscript we have, his first published novel, relatively readable and still funny, and these are precious qualities. It has had a cult following from the start – Harold Pinter stole his copy from Hackney library. And of course Murphy changed my life. I was only 15 when I first read it – a fateful day."

Beckett gave the notebooks to a slightly ramshackle friend, the Irish poet Brian Coffey, who eventually sold them to a collector. They were regarded as one of the most important 20th-century manuscripts still in private hands when auctioned at Sotheby's last year, estimated at up to £1.2m. After seven tense minutes, bidding against an anonymous collector on the phone, the university got them for £962,500.

Since mounting an exhibition in 1969 in celebration of the author winning the Nobel prize, Reading has gradually built up the largest collection of Beckett material in the world, including many gifts from the author before his death in 1989. The one-day exhibition on Wednesday, at the university's Museum of Rural Life – the most accessible secure display space – will be the first time the notebooks have ever been on show.

They reveal that the novel, where the central character gets a job in a mental hospital as a blessed escape from the madness of his life in London, was originally called Sasha Murphy and that he was 30, the same age as the author in 1936. More significantly, they show it took Beckett eight attempts to arrive at the opening lines, which he changed from: "The sun shone, as only the sun can, on nothing new," to the much more familiarly Beckettian tone of: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

After four months, Pilling is about halfway through the text, transcribing by hand in pencil into suitably Beckettian battered ancient ledgers, which belonged to his grandfather and proclaim on the cover that George V is king.

The notebooks show that Beckett struggled initially: the first 10 pages are completely scored out, and on several days inspiration obviously failed completely, leaving entire pages covered in scribbles and doodles, including a caricature of Charlie Chaplin.

"He does get himself into terrible tangles," Pilling said fondly. "What's so difficult about a character getting up and walking to the door? But you wouldn't believe the difficulties Beckett can make for himself, often before going back to his original version."

Pilling says his work is easier because he knows Beckett so well that he can often – but not always – work out what a heavily crossed-out word must be.

"A colleague leaned over my shoulder, looked at my notebook and the original, and said immediately: 'That word isn't scarves, it's favours.' He was right of course, he's always right except when he's wrong. But undoubtedly, some historian will look at the manuscript again in 20 years and say that it was scarves."

THE GUARDIAN