Brian E-Book

Jeremy Cooper

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 264

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Perennially on the outside, Brian has led a solitary life; he works at Camden Council, lunches every day at Il Castelletto café and then returns to his small flat on Kentish Town Road. It is an existence carefully crafted to avoid disturbance and yet Brian yearns for more. A visit one day to the BFI brings film into his life, and Brian introduces a new element to his routine: nightly visits to the cinema on London's Southbank. Through the works of Yasujirō Ozu, Federico Fellini, Agnes Varda, Yilmaz Güney and others, Brian gains access to a rich cultural landscape outside his own experience, but also achieves his first real moments of belonging, accepted by a curious bunch of amateur film buffs, the small informal group of BFI regulars. A tender meditation on friendship and the importance of community, Brian is also a tangential work of film criticism, one that is not removed from its subject matter, but rather explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives.

Leseprobe

‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt such warmth for a character, or that I’ve been able to see cinema through another’s eyes in such a lucid, sustained way. As Brian moves further and further into a life of moviegoing, ordering his days, and then years, around it, he finds companionship and a calm sense of wellbeing. As I read this beautifully subtle novel, I found the same.’

— Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night

‘After having published his luminous Ash before Oak, Jeremy Cooper now brings us Brian, equally a work of mysterious interiority and poetry. It confirms that however solitary life might be, art enriches both our imaginations and our realities. This is a very tender book.’

— Xiaolu Guo, author of A Lover’s Discourse

Praise for Bolt from the Blue

‘There’s a strange magic to Jeremy Cooper’s writing. The way he puts words together creates an incantatory effect. Reading him is to be spellbound, then. I have no idea how he does it, only that I am seduced.’

— Ben Myers, author of The Offing

‘A novel written in epistolary form, Cooper has maximized the potential of this literary convention to achieve a work of great depth and quiet power.... At times spellbinding and mesmerizing, the work also proves provocative and inspirational. As much a love letter to the lost art of letter-writing as it is a thirty year-long dialogue of familial love, Cooper has produced an understated book that nonetheless resonates powerfully. This book is deeply sensitive to the ebb and flow of relationships over time and the way love is disguised, expressed and experienced, and it achieves that elusive dream of all authors and finds new meaning in the recording of life.’

— Helen Cullen, Irish Times

‘Jeremy Cooper’s work is consistently haunting and layered, built on a refreshing trust in the reader to delve deeper behind the quiet insinuations of his prose. His work resists every modern accelerant, creating a patient and precise tonic. He is easily one of the most thoughtful British fiction writers working today.’

— Adam Scovell, author of How Pale the Winter Has Made Us

‘A novel in epistolary form, the writer and art historian’s latest work is both an intimate account of a mother-daughter relationship and a lively history of London’s art scene.... Their contact is irregular, and by turns affectionate and combative, making the relationship feel engrossing, deep and utterly true.’

— New Statesman

‘For a book that has the word “love” on almost every page, Bolt from the Blue is endlessly inventive in showing us how love is often hidden, rationed, coded and disguised. It is an epistolary dialogue between a life of possibilities – as shown through the maturing vision of an artist – and one of disappointments, expressed through the wise and seasoned scepticism of the artist’s mother. Jeremy Cooper is a deft and sensitive writer who understands how to entrust his book to his characters.’

— Rónán Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul

‘Cooper has carefully crafted Bolt from the Blue, in all its slipperiness, so that we are looking for answers and explanations, even though there might be none. In this way, we are nudged into a mode of intense, pleasurable close reading, one that the novel frustrates and at the same time rewards.’

— Sophie Haigney, The Nation

Praise for Ash before Oak

‘Low-key and understated, this beautiful book ... is a civilized and melancholy document that slowly progresses towards a sense of enduring, going onwards, and even new life. It feels like a healing experience.’

— Phil Baker, The Sunday Times

‘[W]hat Cooper offers, very boldly and successfully, is a broad narrative arc of collapse and tentative recovery, in which a struggle for meaning and purpose in life assumes a desperate intensity.... Because of the narrator’s inability to describe his anguish, what’s mostly written here is not his pain, but his clinging to life: the beauty caught and traced, with great skill, in trying to overcome suffering. In its journal form, Ash before Oak salvages detritus, the unremarkable mess, banality and repetition of the everyday, just as the narrator works on restoring his dilapidated buildings in Somerset. And in a larger way, too, with admirable wisdom and precision, it salvages, from agonizing, ruinous thoughts and experiences, something transcendent, of lasting value.’

— Jerome Boyd Maunsell, Times Literary Supplement

‘A disarming and gorgeously rendered portrait of interiority... The novel’s genius lies in what goes unsaid, and in the gaps between entries – what the narrator keeps from readers is the most haunting plot of all. This meandering novel is one of quiet beauty, and brief flashes of joy among seasons of despair. A study in how writing can give lives meaning, and in how it can fail to be enough to keep one afloat, this is a rare, delicate book, teeming with the stuff of real life.’

— Publishers Weekly, starred review

BRIAN

JEREMY COOPER

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEBRIANABOUT THE AUTHORCOPYRIGHT

Brian became a regular at the BFI in stages. He did everything carefully, testing the water up and down the beach before taking the occasional swim. Prior to this big change in his life, he had gone to the movies casually, half a dozen times a year, maybe more, to the cinema nearest to wherever he was living. Though Brian was keen on film, his nervous concern focused on work, on holding down his job, leaving little energy for anything else, content to spend most evenings in front of the television with a mug of tea and packet of Chocolate Creams, his favourite biscuit. Without knowing quite why, or needing to find out, since missing its release a decade earlier he had always wanted to see Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales, a clip from the trailer fixed in permanent memory, the moment when a bounty hunter tracking Eastwood muttered to his partner: ‘Not a hard man to follow. Leaves bodies everywhere.’ Brian adored this remark, and used to repeat it under his breath at moments of stress during the day, to beneficial effect. He could not now recall where he had heard about a revival screening at the British Film Institute down on the South Bank, just when he had given up hope of ever seeing the movie. Grateful for such a good thing happening to him, by chance, unexpected, unearned, Brian bought himself a ticket.

It was excellent, not in the least bit disappointing, stuffed with tenderness and vengeance. Eastwood, who directed as well as starred, spent much of the film in the saddle and for this feat of skill and endurance promptly became Brian’s movie idol. For other reasons too: the lyricism of the Texan landscape through which Josey Wales pursued without mercy the Unionist guerrillas, killers of his wife and children; and for the depiction of peasant farmers of Missouri as people with hopes and pain.

This was only the second time Brian had been to the BFI, twenty years after his first visit, when he was nineteen, taken to see Kes along with two other youngsters by the manager at their hostel, to show them, Mr Trevor had said, that positive things do sometimes turn up, replacing hardship.  Or something like that. It felt long ago, a period from which Brian had managed to move on, without ever finding a comfortable alternative place for himself.

Throughout the early years of his working life Brian had tried as best he could to participate, handicapped by never knowing what to say to anyone. Within a group of people he felt pushed to the periphery, quickly aware that nobody much minded whether he turned up or not. He had joined a book-reading club, mostly of women, jolly, middle-aged, who ridiculed his proposals of novels to read, listened in silence to his halting comments on the book-of-the-month and moved promptly on to topics of their own concern. In another attempt at company, he took up football. Not playing, of course, he was hopeless at sport, but watching, becoming a home supporter at West Ham. This was a failure too, leaving him post-match on Saturday evenings with an even greater sense of isolation. At the time he had liked the idea of being part of a loyal crowd and it was the individual men nearby on the terraces who troubled him, their spray of shouted abuse at the opposition, the tribal jokes and gang laughter. He longed to be included, and dreaded it, equally. During these interim years he had had various jobs and an assortment of rented rooms. His first place in London was the one he had liked best, the dormitory in the St Pancras hostel where he had stayed for years, until Mr Trevor felt obliged to turf him out for being far beyond the age limit. He had eventually ended up alone in his present small rented flat above the Taj Mahal on Kentish Town Road, which he found perfectly adequate.

In the process of settling into his new home Brian had taken four long walks from the front door, north, south, east and west, needing the security of a physical sense of where he lived. At home on dark winter evenings after work he wanted, for safety’s sake, accurately to picture in his head the streets and houses and shops around him. It was on one of these exploratory tours that he had come across Talacre Gardens, after which he regularly took the short walk down Prince of Wales Road for a constitutional twice round the perimeter of the park and, in the summer, to sit and read on a bench. The seat he liked best, in the shade of a horse chestnut tree, was near one of the playgrounds, surrounded by a low wire fence over which balls and balloons escaped and which Brian used to retrieve and throw back. Two boys, brothers Brian guessed from their matching clothes and blond hair, invented the ritual game of deliberately tossing the balls out again, urging Brian to trot across the grass to pick them up and throw them back inside.

There was lots of laughter, from Brian too.

Walking slowly home, Brian thought of his own brother, Peter, nine years his senior, with whom he was unable to remember ever laughing. They barely knew each other, had never lived in the same house. Brian stopped suddenly in the street, muttering to himself, and stamped on the pavement several times one foot after the other, furious that playing with those two nice boys had awakened images of Peter and his father and their treatment of his mother.

With an effort he managed to clear his head of unwanted family memories and continued on into Kentish Town Road.

At Talacre one weekend a woman had walked over to Brian’s bench and introduced herself as Dorothy, Camden Council’s manager of the playground. She had noticed the gentle way he had been playing with the children on and off all summer and, being short of staff at weekends, she wondered if he might agree to keep volunteer-watch over the facility for a fixed couple of hours on Sunday mornings. The thought of community participation, of acceptance within a worthwhile group of local people delighted Brian and when, as it always seemed to, everything fell apart he felt especially hurt. Two mothers had complained about his unqualified status and, with regret, Dorothy asked him not to come again. For his own sake it might be safest if he did not visit the gardens at all for the time being, Dorothy warned, as his accusers were a vindictive pair.

Brian’s instinctive act of self-protection was to narrow his free time down to film.

For several years he had promised himself he would become a member at the British Film Institute, failing to do so for no reason other than the trepidation he generally felt about doing anything new. The Talacre Gardens fiasco impelled urgent action and after a visit to the watch-repairer in The Cut on a Saturday afternoon not long after seeing The Outlaw Josey Wales, Brian grasped the moment, walked on over to the South Bank and filled in the inexpensive BFI membership form. He felt a rush of rightness as he placed a copy of the month’s programme in his bag to study at home. From then on, he booked in for a screening at least every couple of weeks, berating himself for not having done so sooner.

Why ever not, he wondered. Why had he delayed till he was almost forty to do something so obviously right for him?

Not laziness; he had never been lazy not even as a boy, taking himself off on numberless bicycle rides up and down and around the streets of Magheramorne, to keep out of the way, a strategy terminated by escape to England with his mother. The difficulty, that to a certain extent he had always faced and which grew worse with age, was his dwelling on the multiple possible consequences of a single act and feeling the need to precision-weigh the varied benefits and costs. This took time to work out, sometimes a long time, so long that, by the end of the process, circumstances had often changed and the whole palaver of assessment had to begin all over again. Membership of the British Film Institute was not to be undertaken lightly, Brian felt, sensing that it raised the watching of film to a new level of commitment and responsibility. The dilemmas had repeated themselves with variations night after night as Brian lay in bed above the Taj Mahal wondering what the right thing to do was, questioning his ability to treat film with the seriousness it deserved.

Which was why, Brian concluded, dwelling also on his past failures to feel accepted, it had taken an age to become a member.

He mentioned the idea of making film his thing to Lorenzo at Il Castelletto, the café off Camden High Street where he had lunch every day of the week – at 2.15 p.m., to avoid the crush. With his brother Dario the third generation of Cerolis to run the café, Lorenzo went to music gigs in any spare time from the myriad family obligations of the Italian clan where he lived in East London. Friends of his had put together an irregular band in which he occasionally played guitar, its case poking out from behind the counter, stacked with the hot water boiler for tea, pampered espresso coffee machine and a rainbow assortment of mugs. Over the years Brian had come to trust Lorenzo, moved by his kindness to the customers for whom Il Castelletto was a refuge, perhaps the only public place in their day where they felt safe and wanted. Regulars like Marian, a neatly dressed middle-aged secretary at the gasworks, who came in twice each day, for an early coffee and late lunch, and was sometimes obliged to share Brian’s table by the door. At such times he witnessed close up the release of tension in her face at Lorenzo’s welcome and, from his own isolation, guessed that the hand placed on her shoulder and pantomime flattery amounted to Marian’s major human contact of the day. However busy with serving and clearing other tables, Lorenzo listened attentively to her home decorating preoccupations, responding with DIY stories of his own in Bow. Marian asked to borrow an unfinished pot of the paint he had chosen for his kitchen, to try out in hers.

No problem, he said.

Nothing was a problem to Lorenzo in his mission to please.

One quiet afternoon, on finishing his lunch of cottage pie and vegetables followed by apple crumble with custard, Brian peripherally broached the subject of his current concerns, the increasing dominance of film in his life, asking Lorenzo how he managed to prevent his love of indie rock from taking over.

How did he keep things in proportion, Brian wondered.

My kids, Lorenzo replied. They need me more than I need my guitar.

Oh!

Brian was taken aback. He never pictured Lorenzo married, with children, although he knew perfectly well that he was.

He found himself trying to explain how, living alone, it was possible for him to let things get out of hand. Out of proportion. Like forgetting to anticipate where the exit was on the Kentish Town platform and walking in the wrong direction at Waterloo so that he sat in the opposite end of the tube, having to walk its length again once he alighted. It did not matter at all. And yet it did. To Brian it felt a disgraceful failure of judgement.

Give yourself a break, Brian. You’re a decent bloke. Treat yourself better, Lorenzo said, giving him a soft pat on the shoulder. Must get on. See you tomorrow.

Without deciding to do so, indeed without really noticing the change, Brian’s BFI visits multiplied over the initial months of membership from once a fortnight to once a week, to twice on weekdays and once each weekend. To step up another notch and become a nightly regular like the select band of dedicated BFI buffs was a conscious decision, mulled over, wrestled with and yes-and-no-ed numerous times. Brian was aware of two things, principally, that finally impelled him into this life-altering commitment. One was the dark feelings that had begun to envelop him on his nights alone at home, where he had stopped bothering to make himself hot food and too often was unable to remember a single thing from the hours of television he sat slumped in front of, incapable of participation the next day at coffee-break chat in the office about the night’s viewing. He had also stopped reading, which was a more serious worry, and eczema had erupted on his elbows and behind his knees. At work he managed to present a brave face, nobody seeming to notice his despair. If they did, they said nothing. Nor would he have expected them to, avoidance of the personal an unwritten office rule. Brian kept himself to himself and did not know anyone well enough – or want to – for a proper conversation. He recognized the danger of disintegration and that he needed release somehow from the pressure in his head. Film, he reckoned, might be the answer.

Looked at from a positive perspective, Brian’s main reason for thinking of becoming an every-night regular at the British Film Institute was the regulars themselves: the disparate group of middle-aged men, six or seven most nights, whom he had observed with envy in their self-absorbed discussions in an isolated corner of the foyer. The more he saw of them, edging close enough on occasion to eavesdrop, the deeper his desire to take part.

Being the kind of person who needed a sheaf of reasons to act, Brian numbered off in his notebook a list of the other affirmative points: the prospect of repeated free visits to the newly opened Museum of the Moving Image at the back of the BFI; big reduction in heating bills by spending his evenings away from home; the satisfaction of mapping out a monthly schedule, marking the titles and times in his diary and relaxing in the knowledge that everything was arranged, any threat of surprise minimized; and, permeating all aspects of his imagined new life, the infinite delight of film.

Brian became a nightly regular.

The first film he saw at the BFI in his new capacity was a preview screening of The Fruit Machine, the fictional name of a gay nightclub in Brighton, with Annabelle – a.k.a. the comedian Robbie Coltrane – as mistress of ceremonies. Brian had enjoyed the year before Coltrane’s TV portrayal of Samuel Johnson in Blackadder the Third, and memory of this pleasure fed into his disappointment in the movie’s confusing shenanigans, the transvestite murder at the seaside neither funny nor especially tragic.

Never mind. There were some good things in it, as in every film, he told himself.

Rehearsing remarks for his role of buff-in-the-making, Brian noted the similarities between Eddie in The Fruit Machine and Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette of three years earlier, both with blond streak on top, cap on the back of the head, similar age and same sexual leaning. Different skin colour, but that did not matter.

Participation in the gathering of buffs appeared to be unconditional – the fact that they were all white males, no women, was more a matter of endemic social habit than the individual prejudice of the buffs, Brian felt, in recognition of his own narrow conventions. Drawing on maximum courage a couple of evenings after his switch to movie-a-night, Brian sidled up to the small group of men standing close together in a corner of the NFT 1 foyer and joined the circle. No cold shoulder. No sudden silence. He smiled nervously in a general way at the group, two of whom smiled back an easy-going welcome. Nobody asked him his name or anything about his job, the conversation exclusively about film, to Brian’s relief. As none of them appeared to address anybody by name there was no false familiarity, no banality, no banter, no point-scoring, and in those early days Brian felt received with greater warmth by almost all of the shifting band of regulars at the BFI than he had ever experienced anywhere else in his entire life.

The joy went to Brian’s head and during his second week as a regular he said much too much both before and after the screenings, spoke too quickly, too loudly, his voice rising in excitement to a cartoon squeak. The height of Brian’s new-boy excess emerged after a first-run showing of Bird, with Forest Whitaker as Charlie Yardbird Parker, directed and produced by Clint Eastwood. Brian’s intemperate behaviour was explained, though not excused, by the fact that he had recently read a second-hand copy of Bird Lives!, the music journalist Ross Russell’s biography of the saxophonist. In a muddle of emotion, Brian tried to summarize all at once this detailed, committed book, to relate it to the film, and to praise Eastwood’s direction. Aware of failing to make significant sense, Brian talked faster and faster until forced to stop and draw breath. During the pause he was shocked when one of the regulars pointed out something he had neglected to observe, that Whitaker looked uncannily similar to Parker at his zenith, to the extent of moving with the instrument in performance like a bebop revolutionary, despite never before having played the saxophone.

Whitaker’s own son Damon portrayed Parker as a boy, sealing the familial likeness, someone else added, when Brian had been shamed into silence.

On the night after the Bird debacle Brian held his nerve, resisting the temptation to turn tail, and took the risk of turning up at the BFI. To his surprise he was treated no differently, for safety’s sake nevertheless preserving a benign silence for the remainder of the week.

Separate from their gang was a small group of occasional moviegoers, women as well as men, whose presence Brian was conscious of from time to time. One of them, he noticed when the man stood in front of him in the queue waiting for delayed entry to NFT 2, smelt heavily of perfumed deodorant. Though Brian was confident his own body odour was under control, he could not deny catching a stale whiff of sweat from one or two of his lot. Daring to take a good look one evening at the rival set, he was astonished to notice that they talked to each other very differently from the way he and his friends did, with greater intimacy, even physical contact.

Friends?

None of the buffs were his friends, Brian admitted, keen to accept the truth when he saw it. Not that it mattered, but he assumed they were unmarried and suspected that, like him, they mostly lived alone.

There was one man whom he hoped might become a friend, but as yet he was simply a fellow regular. Something the man had said one night felt revelatory: that truth was not a crystal to be stored in a drawer but a fluid into which one falls head first. Brian had never before come across such ways of thinking.

Maybe the rival group, fewer in number and sporadic in their attendance, were in fact ordinary friends on arranged evenings out together? Chatting as-often-as-not of non-film things, such as the Lockerbie disaster which at Christmas Brian had overheard them discussing at length.

Another of life’s mysteries.

There were times when Brian felt that the only thing he understood anything about was film.

Nothing much else made sense.

Not that he could always make sense of the movies he saw either, straight understanding not the point in film. Take Ingmar Bergman, one of the BFI programmers’ favourites, a bias of which Brian approved, attending most screenings of the Swede’s films, especially impressed by The Seventh Seal and Persona, though neither of these films could he rationally explain from beginning to end. This did not stop him adoring Bergman’s women. Not sexually, the idea of any woman as an object of his physical desire Brian had barred from consciousness. No, he cherished Bibi Andersson as a person, for her utterly alive presence on screen, her tenderness and laughter, the actor who played the nurse in Persona who above everything else was the personification of womanhood. Brian used to believe that Bergman could never make a film that he would not like – until seeing the maestro’s most recent movie, Fanny and Alexander.

That really was a dud, the director’s seductive stack of wives and lovers sadly absent from the screen, Brian had commented at their post-screening discussion.

Bergman’s last movie?

Possibly, an old man now, tired and recalcitrant.

In his daily life Brian was endlessly anxious, often about the same repeated, insignificant and ridiculous things. Knowing his worries were nonsensical made little difference, he still panicked, returning to the flat when about to board the bus, to check that the window of his bedroom was closed, more distressed by the idea of maybe having made a mistake than by the unlikely danger of a break-in, with nothing of value to steal. Brian physically anticipated in advance the trajectories of each day, picturing himself walking ahead to a particular bus stop, holding out an arm and getting on, getting off and turning left in his mind, second right, then left again. Methodically he ticked off the details, the weather in his mental map mild, grey, featureless, helping him achieve the illusion of dull composure. The duller the better. No change meant no challenge, steady ahead.

Except in the worst of circumstances, Brian was sufficiently self-aware to know that it was he who generated the feelings of helplessness, not something or somebody outside. All the same, he accepted no excuse for error, allowed no means of recovery or forgiveness. The only method he could think of to soften his fears was this pre-imagining of the day’s chores. What time to take his trousers to the Camden Town dry cleaners, then when to collect them, finding conflicting reasons to waver back and forth, paralyzed by the simplest of decisions. There were mornings slumped in a seat on the tube on the way to work when Brian repeated over and over in his head the words he planned to say to Mr Wilson, his section manager, nothing of great importance, maybe a marginal shift of filing method, about which he managed to work himself into a state of insane unease.

He was afraid of saying the wrong thing, of having failed to learn from some earlier error which had slipped his mind.

Learn quick as lightning from your mistakes or die, his mother melodramatically threatened him as a boy. And meant it, he had come to understand.

Ingrained expectations of disaster cushioned Brian against the potential trauma of the most challenging of the films he saw during his first months as a novice buff, notably Burning Angel, made in Finland from a true-life incident, the suicide of a psychiatric nurse. A successful young model from Helsinki played the lead, in her first film, a performance of gauche beauty which mesmerized Brian. Her vulnerability touched his own, forcing him to push down inside against the swell of locked memories. Afterwards he read with caution the detailed programme note supplied each night by the BFI, primed to turn aside if the text approached too close, and was moved by the remarks of the Finnish director, a woman, quoted by the BFI curator:

This is not a ‘message film’. It simply sets out to tell a story about a topic that touches all of us. I wanted to show that a young person’s mind can suffer terrible upsets, that ghastly things occur in life, but they may change subsequently into valuable building blocks for one’s later life.

Hope in adversity, as Brian put it to himself.

Tuned to failure, Brian was poorly prepared for the better things which came his way from time to time. One such thing took place during his fourth week as a regular, which sealed his fate and propelled him into unquestioning commitment to seven nights a week at the BFI.

Distant Voices, Still Lives, set in Liverpool and based on the director Terence Davies’s boyhood, was in effect two short films made into one of standard length, Still Lives not started until two years after Distant Voices was completed. The break, due to lack of funds, was marked by a lift of mood in the director’s narrative voice, released by the death of his tyrannical father – played by an actor Brian admired, Pete Postlethwaite. Davies told the audience at the Q & A after the screening: ‘I said to my mother, why did you not just kill him? If it had been me, and this is true, I would have waited until he was asleep and I would have put a pillow over his face. But she was not like me.’

Brian made the vital discovery that night that something he needed to be true proved to be so: that a nakedly emotional film on themes and feelings close to his own story did not necessarily shake alive his stifled memories of the past.

He was safe. The narratives of others were not his. Able without too much trouble to resist identifying with Davies’s film, in a burst of relief Brian felt ready to watch anything the BFI chose to show.

He was not unmoved.

Far from it.

The wedding scene was amazing, with the bad-tempered groom overwhelmed by his new bride’s eight sisters and effeminate little brother, a child actor playing Davies, the youngest sibling.

The importance of religion in Davies’s altar-boy upbringing mirrored Brian’s, in reverse, a bonny Catholic and bigoted Prot, adolescent scouser versus nascent Orangeman. The church’s condemnation of gays was one of many issues which had made Davies into a devout atheist, the director told the audience, a remark applauded by Brian in his own adult certainty that man created God rather than the other way round.

You’d think we could have made a better job of putting together imaginary figureheads, Brian added to himself. And avoided centuries of murderous mayhem in religion’s competing names.

If anything, Brian was a bit of a Buddhist, he reckoned, in honour of his interest in Japan, one of the few distant parts of the world he knew anything about.

As Brian did not yet feel wholly comfortable at the buffs’ gatherings after his loss of dignity with the Charlie Parker film, to preserve his post-event sense of well-being after the moving experience of Distant Voices, Still Lives