Personal Terms

In 1951, when he was twenty, the novelist, screen-writer and homme-de-lettres-to-be Frederic Raphael bought a spiral-bound notebook from Joseph Gibert in the Boulevard St Michel and started keeping a curious kind of writer's journal. His purpose was 'to catch ideas and incidents on the wing' and 'to train myself to notice things as they were'. He continues this practice today, though the word 'things' has come to embrace more or less everything that matters in the writer's world. These notebooks are at once a detailed Biographia Literaria and a creative resource, not only for him but for other writers and readers. Raphael includes reflections, sketches for stories and other projects, vignettes of people and places. Some entries are pages long, some are pithy aphorisms, all in one way or another illuminating the vocation of writer and the equally urgent and vital vocation of reader. A writer's chief tools are watching, listening, guessing, keeping an open mind, reading the present and rereading the past to keep contact and faith with the works which until recent times constituted the imagination and critical discourse of our cultural tribes. Personal Terms is a generous collation from Raphael's notebooks, beginning (as Alice advises) at the beginning, and continuing the intermittent story up to 1969, that year of political crisis and disillusion. By then the eighteen-year-old boy in the Bou' Mich had become the author of eight novels and much else for the page and screen. He still visited (as he does today) Gibert's shop to acquire his enabling notebooks.

Spanning the first five years of the 1970s, this installment of Frederic Raphael's view of his own life is at once intimate and detached, a detachment made palpable by months spent in the French farmhouse he purchased at the end of the booming 1960s. Although seemingly poised to direct and write many more films, the slump of the 1970s instead leaves the writer free to concentrate on fiction again. Lesser-known personalities whose unguarded stories and characters provide fodder for inspiration are his primary focus, although sketches of prominent film and literary world figures such as Arnold Wesker, Norman Jewison, and Sean Connery also appear. Presented here is a moving portrait of an author in the thick of creating who he is, what he wants to say, and how.

Mixing observations about friends and family with short sketches and literary gossip, this third installment of the author's notebooks updates an intriguing personal and cultural record. Starting where Rough Copy: Personal Terms II left off, the story of one contemporary writer's life is resumed in anecdotes, aphorisms, journal entries, reviews, and vignettes of people and places.

A writer's wry observations about the glamorous worlds of Hollywood and literary London during the second half of the 1970s are offered in this autobiography. Though Frederic Raphael is only incidentally concerned with the rich and famous and has little interest in names and gossip, he notices and comments on the discrepancies between public and private faces to convey the texture of life around him. His notebooks, never originally intended for publication but contained in this compilation, are exercises in candor, precise observation, and wit, creating an engrossingly stylish and enduring chronicle of his times.

Witty and stylish, these extracts from Frederic Raphael's journal chronicle the life and reflections of the screenwriter. Of special interest to film enthusiasts, this candid memoir includes encounters with David Garnett and Rebecca West, and their vivid recollections of H. G. Wells, Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, and London's Bloomsbury, in addition to accounts of working with Diana Dors and almost working with Diane Keaton. Offering a behind-the-scenes look into the world of moviemaking, this absorbing narrative reveals darker reflections on public and private life, on what it is to be a Jew, on terrorism, and on the cruelties within relationships.

Compulsively readable, wise, and mischievous by turns, this sixth volume from the collection of Frederic Raphael's personal journals chronicles his eventful life in the seemingly glamorous worlds of 1980s Hollywood and literary London. Included are his encounters with Mary Whitehouse and Meryl Streep, vital memories of Dirk Bogarde, and warm reflections on Peter Sellers. Postwar British values and Byron's sex life are subjected to scrutiny; and there are acute portraits of Robert Redford, Shirley Conran, and many others. This account continues the account of time spent, in the words of the Sunday Times, with one eye on life's greasy pole and the other on the eternal verities.'

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphael's acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms, an unrivalled parade of the author's eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. "Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written," as Jeremy Lewis said in the Literary Review, these writings are as unguarded, sardonic and tactless as they are candid. This seventh volume relives Margaret Thatcher's first years in office. Raphael's wide acquaintance in the world of politics, literature, journalism and the movies gives him rare access to the character of those, in England and America, who dominated the times. The unintended result is a Proustian parade of people, famous and otherwise forgotten, and events momentous and strictly personal, presented by an unabashedly partisan, unblinking eyewitness. There is nothing else quite like this unfolding project in English or American literature. "I am not a camera, but-as these carnets prove-I am a pen. The moving finger writes differently from the clicking keys."