On the background to SEX & GENIUS
SEX and GENIUS was conceived in Positano in 1993. I was reading Henry James’s THE EUROPEANS and trying to remember how faithfully Merchant Ivory had treated the character of Eugenia (played by Lee Remick). I found it hard to believe that the film would have done justice to this characteristically ambivalent Jamesian heroine, lest she seemed ‘unsympathetic’ to a cinema audience; and that got me wondering what Henry James himself would have made of the countless film and TV adaptations of his work (this was pre WINGS OF THE DOVE, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, THE GOLDEN BOWL). It seemed likely that The Master would have been awe-struck by the visual realization of his imaginative world and horrified by the radical simplifications and corner-cuttings required by adaptation. The high priest of the novel would surely have had kittens; and he would have had them before getting to the preview theatre. It fascinated me to imagine what he would have made of people in the film biz generally – the actresses, the producers, the movie agents, and the commercial language of that world. I found it intriguing to imagine a clash between a nineteenth century novelist of genius (and virtue), for whom the term ‘artistic integrity’ is not some flaky throwaway phrase, and the ambitious, pragmatic, product-hungry bods of the movie industry. Although the idea posits an anachronism, because a contemporary Henry James could not exist, his work and sensibility do still exist and have a life in the minds of readers; and adaptation is a process by which the mentality of the present comes into conflict (and is maybe exposed by) the sensibility of the past. At any rate the character of James Hilldyard is an extrapolation into the present of a James-type novelist, and my setting of the novel in Italy is a partly a response to a landscape that I found as stirring as James himself, who not only travelled in Italy as a young man, but wrote and set many of his stories there.
It took a while to see that the main character of my book could not be James Hilldyard (the author), but had to be a person for whom the sanctity of literature was as near a given as it could plausibly be nowadays, and who would nonetheless be susceptible to the blandishments of Hollywood, with its transfiguring promise of glamour, power and sex. Michael Lear, who starts as an arts producer and then becomes the author’s friend, has a foot in the world of the arts, and another in the world of business. The action of the book rips him in two. The novel’s array of film types (there are a generous five agents) are all fictional characters but all avidly cultured from my real life experience of the world (which includes 22 trips to Cannes in eleven years).
