Frederic Raphael was the first man to use a four-letter word in The Spectator: the work of his fellow playwright Stephen King-Hall, he wrote in 1957, made him ‘puke’.
Frederic Raphael was the first man to use a four-letter word in The Spectator: the work of his fellow playwright Stephen King-Hall, he wrote in 1957, made him ‘puke’. Scorching dismissals and mordant discomforting truths have been flowing ever since from the novelist, Oscar-winning scriptwriter, playwright, classicist and critic, who will turn 80 later this year. Some of his most enduring work only began to appear in 2001, when Raphael published the earliest extracts from the working notebooks that he began compiling as a teenager. The fifth volume, Ifs and Buts, covering the years 1978—79, confirms the series as a minor masterpiece of razor-sharp reportage and waspish comedy.
Raphael avows himself in Ifs and Buts as Jewish, Anglo-American and un-English. Perhaps because he has, since the 1960s, rusticated for long seasons in a rural commune in Périgord Noir, his notebooks resemble those compilations by French intellectuals —Valéry’s Analects and Mauriac’s Bloc-notes — which combine aides-memoires, philosophical speculations, ballons d’essai for future work and character sketches. He is supremely decisive in his choices — the perfect sentence, he has written, is one against which there is no appeal — and disdains the English impulse to strike attitudes without thinking. ‘The English discover what they have decided,’ he suggests, ‘by seeing what they have done. The French analyse and then act, they think; the English act and then justify their actions.’
His notebooks are not a rag-bag of smart London chatter. The Cannes film festival, Chicago law courts and Hollywood provide scenery as well as London and Périgord.
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