Unfinished Business: A Memoir

"I picked this up years ago, a one-volume edition of the diaries. I think they were originally published as three separate volumes and this was an omnibus or a digest – it might have been slightly abridged. It was a time in my life where if I liked the look of a book, I would buy it, and I think this one came about in a mark-down store. I was only in my 20s when I got it. Houseman was a rather posh, mildly eccentric English gent and there’s something quite appealing about that – the Peter Cushing, Frank Muir type. He has a wonderful voice, and an incredible life. He was born in Romania, came to England, was published by the Woolfs, then went to the US and worked in the grain industry for a while but got bored and teamed up with Orson Welles (as you do). They co-founded the Mercury Theatre Company. It was them that put on the black Macbeth , and Julius Caesar , and they put on the War of the Worlds radio programme that blew everyone’s minds. I’ve just finished the first volume of Simon Callow’s biography of Orson Welles, and there’s a lot of Houseman in it. “He has a wonderful voice, and an incredible life: he was born in Romania, came to England, was published by the Woolfs, went to the US, worked in the grain industry for a while but got bored and teamed up with Orson Welles – as you do…” Then he and Welles have an acrimonious split and he goes off and becomes a theatre producer and a director and all sorts of other things. In his 70s, someone says to him, ‘There’s a role in this film, would you mind doing it?’ And he says, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll give it a go,’ and he wins an Oscar for it. It’s called The Paper Chase (1973). It’s a drama about American law school, centred on a bunch of university students, and he is a complete bastard of a professor. It’s a great supporting role. It then got turned into a TV series in the late 70s /early 80s, and he reprised the role. It was his first proper screen performance. He’d done a couple of bit parts for friends and things. But then he does this, and wins the Oscar! You can see his speech on YouTube . He gets such a reception, because at the time, he’d done so much for the acting world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, with this book, it’s partly the story of an incredible life. But it’s also about his tone, which is friendly and self-deprecating. It’s really accessible, and he gives his take on how everything worked. I didn’t know much about who he was when I started reading, and by the end of it, I was in love with him, and and wanted to find out more about him – that’s what you get sometimes with these speculative purchases. There was another book that I was thinking of choosing, by an Englishman called Patrick Skene Catling [b.1925], probably best known for his children’s books. He ended up having affairs with Peggy Lee, and a few other other notable people, and was, at different points, involved in various wars…. Those sorts of lives – of people you didn’t know much or anything about – so often turn out to be fascinating. Houseman came from Romania to England and he was already writing, and I think he just sent something to them, and they said, ‘Very nice, we’ll publish it.’ Exactly – it’s things like that all the way through. One after the next. What a life. He thought to himself, ‘Oh, I could be a writer, but – you know what? – I’ll go to America and see what I can do there.’ Absolutely, and he’s fascinating about Orson Welles, obviously, and you see his complete incredulity at the War of the Worlds drama. He says something along the lines of, ‘I didn’t expect people to go mad. Are these people stupid? What’s going on?’ It’s well worth watching an interview with him on YouTube. He’s got this wonderful voice, you could listen to him for hours. He went on to do quite a lot of acting. He was in a TV version of [Luigi Pirandello’s play] Six Characters in Search of an Author . So this is just a classic example of where one speculative purchase can lead ­– and it made me want to read more about Orson Welles, too, and so on and on… Yes, exactly. I don’t get to do it so much anymore, and I do miss it. There are quite a few others I discovered simply by going, ‘That looks all right. Neat cover.’ I bought my first Haruki Murakami book in a second-hand bookshop because I liked the cover, and I went on to do some work with him – things like that can happen and you think, ‘I’d never have gone on that route if it hadn’t happened like that.’ What’s interesting about second-hand bookshops, though, is that there is a romance about them – almost everyone likes second-hand bookshops – and yet they deliver no royalties for any authors at all. There are lots of things that agents and authors and publishers get upset by – cheap ebooks, discount booksellers, or whatever it might be – but we all love second-hand bookshops. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, anything that gets people reading a book is wonderful, but most of these authors I’ve randomly picked up haven’t made a penny out of me…. Exactly, even though they’re all dead and won’t have any idea."