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146 ‘The Collections’ photographed by Adama Jalloh. Styled by James Sleaford. Black knitted wool-viscosemohair jacquard jumper, £940, by Salvatore Ferragamo

Adama Jalloh | Simon Emmett

CONTENTS

On the cover Benedict Cumberbatch Photographed by Simon Emmett. Styled by Catherine Hayward. Cumberbatch wears navy wool textured peacoat, £2,500; navy mohair-blend sweater, £690, both by Giorgio Armani

CONTENTS

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Winter 2021 Bulletin 061

Lamborghini’s legendary Countach returns

073

Fred Rigby’s furniture brings the outdoors indoors

065

Director Adam McKay on the end of the world

077

Erdem Moralioglu on his debut men’s collection

070

Bell & Ross’s square deal

080

Introducing Attirecare, the Aesop of laundry

099

083

Smart-casual dining: in praise of posh pub grub

093

The tank top rolls back the years

086

Justin Peck on reimagining ’West Side Story’

094

Niwaki: for green-ﬁngered style snobs

088

The joyful noise of Bang & Olufsen

097

Comfort zone: why you need a new robe

091

Holding court: the legacy of Air Jordan 1s

099

Thomasin McKenzie talks ‘Last Night in Soho’

Renee Kemps | Rachel Louise Brown

073

CONTENTS

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Winter 2021

The Esquire Edit 2021 102

Our capsule collection of winter must-haves

Journal 109

Satellite Personages by Dylan Jones

110

Until it’s Over, Splash it All Over by Andrew O’Hagan

112

Lights Out by Simon Mills

114

Dead Skin by Joe Dunthorne

115

Happy Endings by David Thomson

136

118

Paolo Sorrentino on movies, memories and Maradona

126

Perfect timing: winter’s best watches close-up

136

The ongoing education of Benedict Cumberbatch

172

Surrendering to Jonathan Franzen

Fashion 146

Menswear, autumn/winter 2021

126

Simon Emmett | Adam Goodison

Features

CONTENTS

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Winter 2021 Fiction

166

Gossip (Third Hand) by Helen Oyeyemi

Market

180

Wash bags, knitted jumpers, hiking boots, electric razors and coffee

Backstage

194

Behind the scenes of Esquire’s Winter 2021 cover shoot

180

Dan McAlister

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Access Hearst Magazines UK website at hearst.co.uk © A publication of Hearst Magazines UK. Issue: Winter 2021 | Published: 11 November 2021. ESQUIRE, ISSN 0960-5150 is published four times per year by Hearst Magazines UK. By permission of Hearst Communication Inc c/o USACAN Media Corp at 123A Distribution Way, Building H-1, Suite 104, Plattsburgh, NY 12901. Periodicals postage paid at Plattsburgh, NY. POSTMASTER: send address changes to Esquire c/o Express Mag, PO box 2769, Plattsburgh, NY 12901-0239. Magazine printed by Walstead Roche, Victoria Business Park, Roche, St Austell, PL26 8LX. Magazine distributed by Frontline Ltd, Peterborough, tel: 01733 555161. Conditions of sale and supply: ESQUIRE shall not, without the written consent of the publishers first given, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade except at the full retail price of £6 and shall not be lent, hired out, or otherwise disposed of in a mutilated condition or in any unauthorised cover, by way of trade, or affixed to or as part of any publication or advertising, literary or pictorial matter whatsoever. Manuscripts and illustrations are accepted on the understanding that no liability is incurred for safe custody, but ESQUIRE cannot consider unsolicited material for publication. All characters in any fictional story are purely imaginary and no reference or allusion is intended to apply to any living person or persons. ESQUIRE is fully protected by copyright and nothing may be printed wholly or in part without permission. ESQUIRE is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation. We abide by the Editors’ Code of Practice and are committed to upholding the highest standards of journalism. If you think we have not met those standards and wish to make a complaint please contact complaints@hearst. co.uk or visit hearst.co.uk/hearst-magazines-uk-complaints-procedure. If we are unable to resolve your complaint, or if you would like more information about IPSO or the Editors’ Code, contact IPSO at ipso. co.uk. Subscriptions and back issues: the standard subscription price (BAR) is £24 for four issues of ESQUIRE, based on the standard cover price of £6. For new and renewal orders, ring 01858 438 770* or visit hearstmagazines.co.uk/contact-us. Please note: you can also contact us regarding back issues and special editions | Already a subscriber? Visit hearstmagazines.co.uk/managemyaccount to update your contact details, renew your subscription and find out when your next issue is due to be delivered, or ring 01858 438 770*, or write to ESQUIRE, Hearst Magazines UK, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Lathkill Street, Market Harborough, Leicestershire LE16 9EF. Please quote your subscription number in all correspondence | We regret that free gifts, supplements, books and other items included with the magazine when it is sold in the UK are not available with copies of the magazine purchased outside the UK | *Lines open weekdays, 8am–9.30pm; Saturdays, 8am–4pm. Calls are charged at your standard network rate. Please check with your network provider for more details.

WINTER 2021

ESQUIRE

Contributors ADAMA JALLOH

DYLAN JONES

is a portrait and documentary photographer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times and i-D. Commercial clients include Nike, Alexander McQueen and Tate.

has written books on subjects including David Bowie, Jim Morrison, Paul Smith, Live Aid and the New Romantics. His most recent, Shiny and New: Ten Moments of Pop Genius that Deﬁned the ’80s, is out now in paperback.

‘THE COLLECTIONS’, PAGE 146

‘SATELLITE PERSONAGES’, PAGE 109

DAVID THOMSON is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, which The New Republic called “the best book on the movies ever written in English”. BENEDICT MORGAN’S

‘HAPPY ENDINGS’, PAGE 115

HELEN OYEYEMI

still-life photographs have appeared in Vogue and Wallpaper*, and in ads for Paul Smith and Mulberry.

is the award-winning author of plays, short stories and seven novels including, most recently, Peaces.

‘CLOSE CONTACT’, PAGE 126

‘GOSSIP (THIRD HAND)’, PAGE 166

ANDREW O’HAGAN’S novel Mayﬂies will soon be a TV series. ‘UNTIL IT’S ALL OVER, SPLASH IT ALL OVER’, PAGE 110

SIMON MILLS

WILL HERSEY’S

is down with OPC (Other People’s Cigarettes).

most recent Esquire piece was about hotel breakfast buffets.

‘LIGHTS OUT’, PAGE 112

‘TOO SHARP TO TOUCH’, PAGE 61

SIMON EMMETT’S

JOE DUNTHORNE is a novelist (Submarine) and a poet (O Positive). He is currently working on a nonﬁction book about radioactive toothpaste. ‘DEAD SKIN’, PAGE 114

Esquire subjects have included Joaquin Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, Cara Delevingne, Jude Law, Idris Elba, Tony Blair, Adam Driver, Matt Damon, Robert Pattinson, Benicio del Toro, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Noel Gallagher, Paul Pogba, Lily Allen, Javier Bardem, Josh O’Connor, the Arctic Monkeys, Sir Michael Caine and Derek Zoolander.

JAMES SLEAFORD

‘BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH NEEDS TO

was for nine years the fashion director of French GQ. His work appears in Hero, 10 Men and Mr Porter.

WORK ON HIS BANJO GAME’, PAGE 136

‘THE COLLECTIONS’, PAGE 146

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Cover star Benedict Cumberbatch, interviewed by Johnny Davis on p136

Essential escapism “BARBARISM WILL NOT BE ERADICATED BY CULTURE.” So says a character in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, which just ended its Covid-interrupted but otherwise triumphant ﬁrst run in London. The man speaking, with typically Stoppardian erudition, is a member of a thriving, assimilated, uppermiddle-class Jewish family in early 20th-century Vienna. He is arguing with a relative who believes that so central is the Jewish contribution to the cultural life of that most cultivated society, that nothing could possibly derail the progress of successful integration. It doesn’t take long for the prophecy of barbarism to be fulﬁlled. A piece of music, or a painting, or a book — Schoenberg, Klimt and Freud are presiding spirits hovering over Leopoldstadt, not forgetting

Alex Bilmes EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Theodor Herzl, and Hitler, of course — can have power, but it can’t save us. The parallels with our own moment are stark: the rise of nationalism; the demonising of minorities, including but not limited to Jews; the shirking of our responsibilities to the persecuted; the deadly antipathy towards intellectuals and the arts... These echoes can be clearly heard today, and not only in Mitteleuropa. A discussion in Leopoldstadt of America’s failure to meet even its modest quota of Jews seeking asylum from Nazi Austria might have been pointed directly at our own failure to rescue all but a handful of the people of Afghanistan from their tormentors. Except Stoppard finished his meisterwerk long before our sudden flight from that country. This kind of venality never goes out of style. So, no, barbarism has not and will not be eradicated by culture. But neither has culture been eradicated by barbarism, and Stoppard’s play is proof of that. As ever, though, we Brits are having a jolly good go at it. The night I saw Leopoldstadt happened to be the same one that Boris Johnson announced his autumn cabinet reshuffle. The appointment of a new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport was confirmed: Nadine Dorries, a woman previously — and surely one day, posthumously — best known for her appearance on ITV’s long-running reality show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. (Is that barbarism or culture, or barbarism as culture, or vice versa?) Some might suggest that this earlier experience of Dorries’ is an excellent primer for her new life as a minister in the Johnson administration, given that eating shit on TV is the central requirement of both roles. But her suitability for the job doesn’t stop there. The MP for Mid Bedfordshire has further previous in the moronic inferno, as a BBC-baiting, Islamophobic, gayrights-bashing culture warrior. And, as her weary defenders have reminded us, as a bestselling author of soft focus, landfilling historical dramas that run the full gamut of emotions from lachrymose to maudlin. (I mention only in passing that Germany’s culture secretary is an art historian, while France’s wrote a book on Verdi.) What is the point of culture, Stoppard’s integrationist Jew might wonder, if it can’t protect us from doom? Or, in our case, from Dorries. But is that what culture is for? Paolo Sorrentino is the writer-director of a series of dazzling films and TV shows, most →

famously his Oscar-winning satire of Roman high society, The Great Beauty. In December, he returns with an extraordinary new movie, The Hand of God, about fate, family, football and the consolations of cinema. In September, I went to the Venice Film Festival, where The Hand of God was in competition, to talk to Sorrentino about, among other things, the power of art to provide refuge from reality. Sorrentino doesn’t think culture can save us, necessarily, but cinema arrived at a moment in his own life when he needed it badly, and it gave him a reason to carry on. That is one of the themes of The Hand of God. Sorrentino believes in the legitimacy of escapism. He says that he began to create alternative realities because it was the only way he could cope with events in his own life. But art can be a confrontation with reality, as much as an escape from it. Leopoldstadt offers that confrontation. It is Stoppard’s reckoning with his own family history: all four of his grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. It is an act of bearing witness. It is a reminder of what happens when we allow tyranny to take root. The Hand of God is a reckoning, too, with an appalling family tragedy. It may prove cathartic for Sorrentino — he doesn’t know yet — but for the rest of us it offers a sobering reminder of the fragility, but not the futility, of human life. The Hand of God won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice. But it was by no means the only exciting, challenging new ﬁlm playing at the festival.

EDITOR’S LETTER

This issue of Esquire, as culture gets back to business after its long lay-off, we spotlight a number of the most hotly anticipated movies on the way. Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho is a psychological thriller set in Swinging London, inﬂuenced by the kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s, as well as by Polanski’s Repulsion. Olivia Ovenden interviewed one of its stars, the young New Zealander Thomasin McKenzie, and we took her photo outside Bar Italia on Frith Street. (Cultured Londoners will know that it was in that same building, in 1926, as a plaque on the wall reminds ristretto drinkers, that John Logie Baird gave the ﬁrst public demonstration of his newfangled invention, television.) In a separate piece, Olivia talked to Adam McKay, who made his name as the director of the broadest of broad Hollywood comedies (the deathless Anchorman is one of his) and then switched to effervescent, star-packed, but also pointed political satires including The Big Short, about the subprime-mortgage crisis; Vice, about the war on terror; and his new one, Don’t Look Up, with Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, about, well, the end of the world. (Timely!) In addition to his accomplishments, McKay makes for a charming interviewee. More movie-talk from Miranda Collinge, who caught up with the fast-moving Justin Peck, choreographer of the New York City Ballet and the man stepping into Jerome Robbins’ giant dancing shoes for Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. And David Thomson, doyen

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of film writers, wonders what happened to the happy ending? (007 preservationists, take note.) And then there’s Benedict Cumberbatch, the man of the hour (again) with four high-profile new films ready for release, including the latest outings for his Marvel character, Doctor Strange. While I was sunning myself on the terrace of the Excelsior Hotel, waiting for Sorrentino to arrive, I watched Kirsten Dunst and Jane Campion, at the next table over, preparing for their promotional duties for The Power of the Dog, a new Western — also featuring Campion’s compatriot, Thomasin McKenzie — that Cumberbatch, its star turn, discusses with Johnny Davis for his excellent profile on page 136. Culture, as even John Logie Baird would agree, isn’t only moving pictures. Also in this issue, an admission of guilt, from yours truly: I enjoy the novels of Jonathan Franzen, even the new one, and I don’t care who knows it. That may not sound like a shocking opinion to hold to you (and understandably so), but in certain literary circles, especially online, it’s fighting talk. Elsewhere, Charlie Teasdale talks to British womenswear darling Erdem Moralioglu about his first collection for men; Andrew O’Hagan hymns the joys of fragrance pour homme; and Simon Mills stubs out the fashion set’s favourite snout. We celebrate the best watches on the market; classic trainers; nu pub grub; trendy detergent (really); Japanese gardening tools (double really) and the very best from the winter men’s collections. Finally, I am delighted to welcome Dylan Jones to Esquire, for his long overdue debut in these pages. (Dylan, where have you been hiding all these years?) Dylan is not only the best and most successful British magazine editor of his or any other generation, he is also the author of too many books to count, including a series of hit oral biographies about pop stars and pop movements (David Bowie; the New Romantics). For our Journal section, he offers a characteristically waspish account of how he puts those books together, introducing the terrifying concept of the “one anecdote” interviewee. As someone who has been interviewed by Dylan for his books, and never managed to produce more than a single publishable story each time, I read this column with a shudder and a wince. No doubt the slight was fully intended, as well as richly deserved. Barbarism? That’s as close as we get here. ○

BULLETIN PEOPLE TO WATCH, PLACES TO BE, PRODUCTS TO BUY

Too sharp to touch A supercar classic roars back, now available as a hybrid By Will Hersey

Bulletin

Comebacks and retro revamps in anniversary years are hardly a rarity in the car world, yet news that a reimagined Lamborghini Countach is on its way in 2022 feels a little different. Particularly to anyone who had their own bedroom in the mid-1980s. Back then, it was bordering on illegal not to have a cheaply framed picture of an airbushed Countach on the wall, probably to the left of a Ghostbusters poster, and just above a rack of Garﬁeld books. More spaceship than road car, with lines that looked too sharp to touch, everything about the Countach felt extreme and dangerous. You wondered in awe what it might be like to open those scissor doors for yourself, and, with equal astonishment, how the driver could see out of the window while driving in an almost prone position. So bad was the visibility in fact, an actual periscope system was introduced. But this is not a car to ever be picked on for its impracticality. The Countach was a pure manifestation of 1980s ambition and childhood dreams, a cultural status that was shifted into a new gear for a younger generation when it appeared as Leonardo DiCaprio’s post-quaalude runabout in The Wolf of Street.

In fact, the Countach had been goggling eyes and boggling minds as early as 1971 at the Geneva Motor Show, where it was unveiled as the LP500 concept, and later in production form in 1974, the product of genius designer Marcello Gandini’s wedge-shaped styling phase. Gandini had previously designed the Countach’s elegant, beautiful and very different predecessor, the Miura, and also has classics including the Renault 5 Turbo and original BMW 5 Series on his CV. Gandini has also since conﬁrmed the legend behind the Countach’s name, derived from a Piedmontese swearword used to express wonderment (translating something close to “plague”) repeatedly uttered by one of the local project team, who was in constant awe of what he was working on — “… countach”. Gandini initially suggested it might make a good name only as a joke, but when it seemed to go down well in English too, it stuck. Most signiﬁcantly, the Countach heralded a new dawn for the supercar; here was the future, delivered early. In came the modern era that continues to this day. It became Lamborghini’s calling card for the next 20 years and that famous wedge has remained a design hallmark for every Lambo since.

Previous page and below: the Lamborghini Countach LPI 800-4 in ‘Impact White’, a limited-series hybrid inspired by the iconic Countach supercar that debuted 50 years ago

“The first Countach has been present in our Centro Stile as a model for some years now,” says Lamborghini’s chief designer Mitja Borkert. “Whenever I look at it, it gives me goosebumps and it serves as the perfect reminder for me and the entire design team to design every future Lamborghini in a visionary and futuristic way.” And so, with a 50th anniversary looming, who can blame Lamborghini for giving in to temptation and announcing the Countach LP1 800-4? In the words of CEO Stephan Winkelmann, it “imagines how the iconic Countach of the 1970s and 1980s might have evolved into an elite super sports model of this decade”. On that brief, you have to say that it instantly delivers. Direct callbacks are everywhere: the narrow grille, flat nose, rectangular headlights, tapered rear, side vents and — of course — scissor doors. OK, there’s no spoiler or flared rear wheel arches but you can’t have everything. In a now crowded supercar field, the Countach doesn’t carry quite the same alien menace, but to expect this new version to have half the impact of its epoch-altering original would be insane. It’s enough that it works both on its own terms and as a successfully executed heritage play. Carbon chassis, body panels, 3D-printed air vents and a photocramatic roof are among the 21st-century additions. And to carry the Countach name, it also had to have a rumbling V12 engine. Though now with an electric motor tacked on. It’ll have the same hybrid underpinnings as the Sian in fact, a 6.5-litre V12 paired with 48v electric motor creating a combined 804hp. So as the car moves, additional power can be stored in a super-capacitor which can be sent directly to the wheels when called upon. And called upon it will be. Given that the original Countach existed in the heyday of Top Trumps, it would be churlish not to run the Countach LPI 800-4’s numbers: 0-62 in 2.8 secs; 0-124 in 8.6secs; a top speed of 221mph. Rapid in any era. Only 112 will be made in honour of the original Countach’s project name, LP112, with original 1970s colours on the spec sheet too. Each will cost close to £2m and, yes, all have been accounted for. Which helps explain something of why Lamborghini might have embarked on this project in the first place. No doubt there are a few buyers, maybe now in their mid-forties, whose own Countach dreams can be traced back to an old picture on their bedroom wall. For anyone who didn’t make the shortlist, Ghostbusters is streaming on Netflix. ○ lamborghini.com

Bulletin

Laughter in the dark The comedies of Adam McKay have become bleaker as the world has gone the same way. His next f ilm, a climate-crisis satire, is his most absurd, and frightening, so far

Miller Mobley

By Olivia Ovenden

‘It’s the most thinly disguised metaphor in the history of metaphors,’ says director Adam McKay, above, of the premise of his forthcoming sci-ﬁ black comedy ‘Don’t Look Up’

Bulletin

Above: Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in ‘Don’t Look Up’

On the list of things that can be collectively agreed are not particularly funny, humanity’s slow march towards apocalypse as oceans rise and forests burn is right up there. But for American writer and director Adam McKay, the more chilling the subject matter, the more alluring the challenge of playing it for laughs. Witness 2015’s The Big Short, about the subprimemortgage crisis, and 2018’s Vice, about the murky origins of the war on terror. In McKay’s forthcoming ﬁlm, Don’t Look Up, two astronomers discover a comet is headed towards Earth and attempt to warn the rest of the world; their struggle to be taken seriously is a satirical take on the polarised and poisonous moment we ﬁnd ourselves in. “It’s the most thinly disguised metaphor in the history of metaphors,” the 53-year-old director tells me from his home in Los Angeles. “The original idea for the script was the feeling of how crazy it is to live when there’s a crystal-clear threat that is being expressed from scientists [all

over] the world, and yet we chug along like it’s fine. When Covid hit, I realised it really was about how much we’ve fouled the means of communication, and how monetising the very way we talk to each other could be the end of us.” We are speaking in August, two days after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a disturbing report that signalled “code red for humanity”, and, as McKay’s film aims to illustrate, already the story has slid down news websites to make space for less depressing dispatches. “The whole system is so wired for profits and the margins are so tight that everyone feels this moment-to-moment desperation of trying to stay afloat with clicks,” he says with resignation. McKay made his name as a writer on Saturday Night Live during the 1990s, then rose to prominence directing mainstream blockbuster comedies like Anchorman and Step Brothers. In 2015 he changed gear, adapting Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short into a brainy, antic comedy,

→

Bulletin

have done much to dissuade Bezos, Murdoch et al from continuing as they were. So, is a satire about the climate crisis really going to do any material good? “Anyone who criticises the movie for those reasons, I would say they are absolutely right,” he says. “We tend to look at one book, one movie, one song, like it’s going to solve everything. I think the truth is there are hundreds and thousands of different approaches to communicating on any issue.” These are hard times for satirists, as ﬁction struggles to compete with our ridiculous reality,

and even the cartoonish villains of Vice pale in comparison to the Trump administration. McKay watched the president refusing to concede the 2020 election with a sick feeling it was going to work, only for his tenure to end in the car park of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping, between a crematorium and a dildo shop. A McKay-esque blend of farce and dread. “We’ve jumped the shark, we’ve been eaten by the shark, we’ve been shit-out by the shark,” he laughs. “Shark, Shark, Shark.” ○ Don’t Look Up is in cinemas on 10 December and on Netﬂix from 24 December

Earlier McKay ﬁlms include, below from top: ‘Vice’ (2018) with Christian Bale and Amy Adams; ‘The Big Short’ (2015) featuring Bale; and ‘Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy’ (2004), with Will Ferrell in the lead role

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with a killer ensemble of Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt. As in his subsequent 2018 movie, Vice, about how VP Dick Cheney’s villainous influence on George W Bush’s presidency led the world to war, McKay walked the line between depressing and droll, inviting the audience to stare into the abyss and try to see the funny side. Shifting tones in this way is something he’s aware turns some people off, admitting that he’s missed on a couple of attempts. Still, “putting yourself on a ledge like that, [where] you may fall, you may fail” is what excites him. Don’t Look Up has been the trickiest to balance of his films thus far, with lead Leonardo DiCaprio — who stars alongside a truly impressive cast that includes Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett, Jonah Hill, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, and, well, Google the rest yourself — going back and forth with McKay for months to get the tone right before agreeing to join the cast. Around four years ago, McKay became profoundly frightened about the environmental crisis. He had already done the “spitting into the ocean” things like switching to an electric car, giving up red meat and off-setting his carbon footprint, but when he started to talk to people in the climate community he was terrified by what they told him. Through his production company Hyperobject Industries, which takes its title from the philosopher Timothy Morton’s writing about “hyperobjects” — events and dynamics like the internet, race or climate change, which are so large they create their own gravitational pull — McKay tries to wrangle these unwieldy concepts into something we can digest. “We encounter [hyperobjects] in ways that, much like being next to a blue whale, you would only see a piece of it. You’d get whacked by a fin,” he says. Using slick montages, sped-up explainers delivered to camera (from a bathtub, by Margot Robbie, in The Big Short) or even bizarre musical numbers, McKay tries to pin down ideas like the swampy political landscape Cheney manipulated, or the lack of regulation that turned the housing market into a ticking bomb, to show us the whole whale. “We’re trying to create a character that is the collective discourse or culture. Some people would say it’s quite messy and they don’t like it, but that’s what we’re trying to do with The Big Short and Vice, and now with Don’t Look Up.” On Succession, the HBO series on which McKay is an executive producer, the writers skewer the greedy immorality of the billionaire class, and yet it is hard to believe that this will

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It’s (still) hip to be square Bell & Ross covers all the angles By Johnny Davis

Not too long ago, this correspondent was given the following advice from the CEO of a wellknown watch brand. “Men,” he explained, “do not buy square watches.” The Apple Watch went on sale a few months later — roughly the same time that very boss was last heard of. Anyway, it’s not like we needed some upstarts from Silicon Valley to show us that men can cope perfectly well with square wristwear, as the decades’ worth of admirers of Tag Heuer’s Monaco, Cartier’s Tank and Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso prove. The new undisputed kings of the square watch are Bell & Ross. French-led, Swiss-made and founded in 1992, the relative newbies proved that a square case was less a dead end, more a perfectly proportioned canvas on which to let your design department really go to town. Thus Bell & Ross has given us square camouﬂage watches, square watches made of titanium and rubber, square watches inspired by the French Secret Service and square watches emblazoned with glow-in-the-dark sapphire skulls. Pitched between professional tool watches — cockpit instruments are a favourite inspiration — and fashion totems, Bell & Ross watches are best worn with a big smile on your face. The brand has had an excellent 2021 — check out its BR 03-92 Red Radar Ceramic, a watch unlike any other — and concludes the year in similar style. Its new BR 05 Chrono White Hawk has a silver sapphire dial, a small seconds at three o’clock, a date at four-thirty, a chronograph at nine o’clock, and looks equally handsome on its black rubber strap or its steel bracelet (pictured left). That’s a lot to cram in, but the Chrono White Hawk looks clean, not busy. Limited to 250 pieces and priced at £5,100 on a rubber strap and £5,600 on a steel bracelet, it is simply — oh, yes — this season’s squarest deal. ○ bellross.com

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Soft furnishings Fred Rigby’s designs are inspired by the gentle beauty of his native Dorset By Johnny Davis

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The poetry of Thomas Hardy. The surrealism of Paul Nash. The spookiness of Polly Harvey. Now we may add Fred Rigby’s name to the list of people whose work has drawn inﬂuence from the low-lying valleys and Jurassic coastline of Dorset. Rigby grew up there and though his small, successful design studio (est: 2008) has completed projects for a diverse list of clients that includes a boutique hotel in the Tuscan countryside and a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hackney, when the time came to design his own furniture collection it was the English countryside he turned to. Tables inspired by the patterns of rippling raindrops, dining chairs with thickly proportioned legs designed to stand like

tree trunks, puffy sofas in hay and sunﬂower hues — it’s the outdoors brought indoors. “Our armchair and sofa collection is called Cove, and based around the undulating hillsides and cliffs of the area,” Rigby says. “With the shapes we create, they’re tactile. You want to run your hand over these pieces.” Rigby is of the opinion that our homes are too cluttered by sharp corners and hard edges. That if you can soften them then “it’s just more pleasing to the eye”. The Everyday Collection also includes armless seats, coffee tables and dining tables, built from a natural palette of oak, wool and steel, all of which is locally sourced. More pieces will follow.

“Everyone’s spent the last year really looking at their homes, and they want to put beautiful objects into their houses,” Rigby says. “They want to know it’s going to be a conservation piece, where the materials have come from and where it’s been made. With this collection, we’ve really tried to hit those points.” Fred Rigby Studio is based in the altogether less bucolic surroundings of Stoke Newington, north London. Which has its own charms. But it’s not the Dorset coast. “London is a different beast,” smiles Rigby. “Inspiration — you can still ﬁnd it. Although I try to go back down to Dorset every month.” ○ fredrigbystudio.com

Renee Kemps

Clockwise from right: London-based designer Fred Rigby on his Cove armchair; Raindrop side tables, from £520 each; the Cove armchair, £2,500. Previous page: Tide oval table, from £2,600, paired with four Tide dining chairs, from £450 each

Modern nature Erdem’s f irst menswear collection makes the case for elegant understatement By Charlie Teasdale

Above: photographed on a beach near Derek Jarman’s former Dungeness cottage, Erdem’s menswear consists of 36 looks

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Erdem Moralioglu has long been one of Britain’s most beloved designers of womenswear. Born in Montreal, Canada, of Turkish and British descent, he has lived in London since the turn of the century, and since launching his label, Erdem, in 2005, he’s been a favourite for a particular kind of chic, distinctive British woman: Kristin Scott Thomas, Erin O’Connor and Alexa Chung are all fans. The house style is classically feminine, fragrant with florals, floaty fabrics, delicate bows, modest necklines and hems that glide hypnotically in the wearer’s wake. In June, Moralioglu unveiled Erdem’s inaugural menswear collection, a series of nuanced takes on the standards of masculine clothing, and an exercise in creative restraint. Simple flatfronted trousers cut with a higher-than-usual waist and shorter-than-usual leg. Mohair knits with ever-so-slightly bulbous sleeves. Shirts with →

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subtly oversized collars. Short, boxy blazers, almost compact enough for Coco Chanel. There are ﬂorals, but not many. The most obvious question, given the conﬁdence of the collection, which goes on sale this November, is what kept him so long? “In truth, I’d always thought about it,” he says of the decision to launch menswear. (It’s July, and Moralioglu is calling from Patmos, in Greece, the country to which at one stage this summer it seemed every other Londoner with taste and the means to indulge it had decamped.) “I always thought that my woman had a brother, a partner, a friend. I did always imagine that he existed.” Moralioglu has a twin sister, Sara, so he perhaps understands better than most that something can come from the same place, but still be different, and he was adamant that the men’s collection would not simply be a butch version of his

womenswear — whatever that would mean in 2021. It would be “symbiotic” with the womenswear, but also independent. The creative process began in earnest in the early summer of 2020, when, for obvious reasons, Moralioglu found the “time, space and silence” to zero in on who the Erdem menswear customer might be. “In the first lockdown I read Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, and I suddenly became really obsessed with him,” says Moralioglu of the late British artist and filmmaker’s celebrated journals. “And of course, I saw so many images of him. And what I found so interesting about Jarman — who created this very colourful, extraordinary visual world as a filmmaker, as an artist — he was very much a uniform dresser, and he had a blueprint of a wardrobe. I found that so inspiring, this idea of the slightly romantic utilitarianism of his

world. And that was really the beginning of it.” In the wake of the enforced drudgery of the past 18 months, there has been talk of a return to ﬂamboyance in dress. Others (this reporter included) think we will revel in clothes once again, but it will be in the name of understatement, rather than a return to pre-pandemic peacockery. “You’ve boiled it down to exactly what the motivation and intention was,” says Moralioglu with a sudden fervour, “to have this template of pieces that had a permanence and an elegance to them. And I think there’s something really wonderful about a quietness to things… that’s good! We live in a very strange time of noise, and how wonderful to be able to have pieces that are just quiet, and just become that piece you always go back to and absorb into your life.” ○ erdem.com

Tom Mannion | Sarah Piantadosi

‘I did always imagine the Erdem man existed’: Erdem Moralioglu, above, makes his ﬁrst moves in menswear, right, 16 years after founding his eponymous brand

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Cool wash A British ‘lifestyle care’ company is here to make laundry day more stylish

Clean sweep: Attirecare’s minimalist branded products eschew anodyne freshness for something altogether more sensory

By Charlie Teasdale

There is more to soap than its ability to make things cleaner. As the likes of Aesop and Diptyque have deftly illustrated, soap can be a tool for meditation, a subtle illustration of wealth, a means to quantify the perceived coolness of a new restaurant, and an estate agent’s secret weapon: good soap, shrewdly positioned on the sink, lets a guest, or a potential customer, know that they are in the right place. But that subtle semaphore needn’t be conﬁned to the bathroom. A maker of alternative, decidedly chic cleaning products, Attirecare was established by two former fashion-industry insiders who saw a gap in the market for “lifestyle care” products that

do the job and look nice on the shelf. “We couldn't believe how hard it was to ﬁnd something like this,” explains co-founder Abigail Brookes. “Our aim quickly became to marry the two together: well-designed, good-looking products without compromising on what’s inside.” The range features the usual products you’d expect — detergent, fabric softener, dishwasher — but then there are more niche creations, such as the red-wine stain remover, denim wash or organic dog shampoo. And then there are the scents. The multi-purpose cleaner, for example, is fragrant with ﬁg and amber, and designed to leave some olfactory remanence of the

hill towns on the Italian west coast in its wake. Attirecare appeals to the more discerning homeowner, then, and right now that market is growing. “The pandemic has made a lot of people rethink many aspects of their day-to-day lives, including what they own and how they take care of it,” says Brookes. “We deﬁnitely think that people are becoming more conscious in the way they take care of all of their possessions, not just clothing.” So, enter a brand that helps you get the Beaujolais out of your best chinos and rid the house of novel viruses. If there’s scope to Instagram the process, then all the better. ○ attirecare.com

Hot 4 U delivery dinners, from left: smoked herring with oyster sauce and potato noodles; salted mackerel brandade

Caitlin Isola

Raising the bar A gang of irreverent young chefs is bringing refinement — and fun — back to pub grub By Miranda Collinge

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It’s a mid-afternoon in late August, but to chef Matthew Scott, who cooks under the moniker Hot 4 U, the effects of a manic morning are still being felt. He’s spent the day thus far at The Prince Arthur in east London, one of two — soon to be three — superior pubs at which he and his core group of six young chefs, all in their twenties, run the kitchens. Things haven’t been going well. “It’s just one of those days where nothing arrives and deliveries are wrong and chefs call in sick; it’s one of them,” he says, blithely. “But we’re de-flustered now. We’re absolutely fine.” For someone whose day has been unfolding somewhat chaotically, Leicesterraised Scott, who is 32 (“but I feel much older hanging out with these young sprats”), is remarkably zen. The former head chef at Cub in Hoxton, east London, and cultish Taiwanese bun house Bao Soho before that, has his menu for this evening more or less sorted: “We’ve got some really nice Cornish cockles with a leche de tigre marinade made with fermented currants and berries, and roasted Jimmy Nardello peppers, and our raw-aged beef tartare with oyster mayonnaise and ‘pomme-bears’.” And anyway, he isn’t fazed by thinking off-the-cuff, which suits his crowd: “We get a lot of regulars, so there’s always something new to try on the menu. It’s almost like one big specials board.” A note on those “pomme-bears”: they are indeed a riff on crisps, but made in-house and dusted with kombu and vinegar powder. They caught your eye, though, right? It’s the kind of dish that’s typical of Scott, and which you might find on the menu at The Prince Arthur. When I ate dinner recently at The Plough, the other east London pub at which Hot 4 U has a permanent residency, a feast of artfully cooked vegetables and seafood was followed by an unceremonious lump of fried dough topped with rainbow sprinkles, a glacé cherry and a mini England flag (it was the Euros, and football was still coming home). It was fun, it was funny, and it tasted unbelievably good. These are, in a way, the founding principles of Hot 4 U, which started life as a £35-a-head weekly meal-kit delivery service. Scott, then on furlough from Cub, set it up with another young chef, Eddy Tejada (the two have since

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Above, from left: bone marrow whisky luge; smoked ox tongue reuben

’Lockdown provided an opportunity to stick a middle f inger up to the system through the medium of food,’ says chef Matthew Scott

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parted ways), at the beginning of the first lockdown to “create jobs for our friends”, support suppliers and make work for idle hands. “It was very important to be different, be fun and give people a little bit of relief, even comic relief,” he says. “It was an opportunity to stick your middle finger up to the government or the system through the medium of food.” This they achieved — in no uncertain terms — through the medium of dishes like the “Fuck Boris Bun”, a milk bun topped with a sugar-paper drawing of the prime minister with a penis on his head, or the whisky luge, in which they delivered a bone marrow dish accompanied by a shot of Glasshouse whisky to drink through the emptied bone. “It was just so nice to see people engaging with it during the pandemic and throwing whisky down themselves in their living rooms,” says Scott. Hot 4 U’s move from meal kits to pub residencies came about through a chance meeting with Tiny Dancer Group, the owners of The Plough and The Prince Arthur, although Scott has seized the opportunity to play with the expectations that go with pub food. “We were smoking butts and cooking turbots and doing things that shouldn’t be done in pubs,” he says, “because the idea was like, why not?” (In an affectionate nod to their setting, for dessert on the last service at The Plough before the January 2021 lockdown, all the diners, including two food writers, were served trifle and a WKD Blue strawpedo.) In November, Tiny Dancer Group is opening a third pub, its first outside London: The London Tavern in Margate. Once again, Hot 4 U will be in control of the food. Given that it’s all still a few months off when we speak, Scott’s plans are still at the “mood board” stage — that’s how he seems to roll — though he’s thinking portico ovens and an open kitchen, “and obviously a seafood and coastal ingredients focus: beach herbs, salt-marsh lamb and lovely fish”. And maybe, maybe, he says, he’ll play it straight this time. “Producedriven, open-fire cooking, really banging roast dinners and a boozer at the heart of it. Just a pub, and what a pub should be. No frills, you know?” ○ The London Tavern opens in November; @hot4u_ldn

Taking f light For Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story revival, choreographer Justin Peck steps into the slippers of the legendary Jerome Robbins, to make an American classic his own

When Justin Peck’s dad was 10 years old, his own father — Peck’s grandfather — took him to see a new Broadway show that was proving something of a sensation. West Side Story, which had opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in September 1957 and would run for more than 700 performances, came with a pedigree that was second to none: it was the brainchild of choreographer Jerome Robbins, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics from Stephen Sondheim, not to mention, of course, that it was an updated retelling of a certain love story by a certain William Shakespeare. “My dad was really blown away by it when he ﬁrst saw it,” says the 34-year-old Peck from his office in Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, where he, like Robbins before him, is New York City Ballet’s artistic advisor and resident choreographer, and one of the most exciting forces in dance today.

“My grandfather wasn’t much of a musicaltheatre fan; he was more interested in plays. But West Side Story held this very special place. It was an outlier for him. He really admired it, and thought it was a very daring take on Romeo and Juliet, which it is.” West Side Story was formative for Peck too. As a child in San Diego, California, watching the 1961 film version, with Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer as star-crossed lovers Maria and Tony, gave him, he says, “one of the first glimpses into seeing male dancers interpret a story through movement and acting”. Later, when he was studying at the School of American Ballet in his teens, he was able to watch NYCB’s production of Robbins’ iconic 40-minute West Side Story Suite; later still, after he’d joined the company himself, he would perform the suite in one of his first leading roles. “So,” says Peck, who has a gentle, self-effacing manner that belies his formidable achievements, “I got to know it kind of inside and out.” All of which meant that when a dream proposition came his way — the chance to choreograph a new film version of West Side Story — the decision was, for Peck, somewhat loaded. “It was a very exhilarating moment, but also slightly terrifying, because I have so much reverence and admiration for this piece. I wasn’t fully confident I could take it on, because the original has been embedded in my history as a dance-maker, and also in my family’s history, so there was something a little bit scary about the ghosts in that.” It can’t have hurt, however, that the request came from Steven Spielberg, who would be directing the new movie, nor that the screenplay was being written by Tony Kushner, the Pulitzerwinning playwright behind Angels in America.

It was no surprise they wanted Peck, who has worked with musicians from Sufjan Stevens to Steve Reich, won numerous awards including a Tony, and been described in The New York Times as “the most eminent choreographer of ballet in the United States”, to join them. Still Peck, in the nicest possible way, had some questions. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t coming in to just restage it, or put up the original dances. That’s not what I’m interested in doing. I’m interested in a creative process. And I think we came to a really honest, common ground with how to pursue that.” After some “tough conversations”, Peck said yes. It’s difficult to overstate quite how important the original West Side Story was to musical theatre, and to people, like Peck’s grandfather, in whom the words “musical theatre” elicit lessthan-effervescent feelings. It was tougher, for one thing: the story of the warring Montagues

Ryan Pﬂuger

By Miranda Collinge

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Left: David Alvarez as Bernardo, centre, leads the Sharks in the upcoming adaptation of ‘West Side Story’. Below left: the ﬁlm’s choreographer, Justin Peck, has been resident choreographer of New York City Ballet since 2014

and Capulets reframed as the Polish-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks fighting for territory in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, set to iconic numbers such as “America”, “Cool”, and “Dance at the Gym”. Even more shocking than the knife fights was the sight of street gangs cracking out the high-leg kicks and pas de bourrées, their menace somehow undiminished. Also ground-breaking was the fact that dance was not an add-on in West Side Story, it was its life-force. “I think it’s important to establish from the beginning for the audience that dance is a language that runs through this film,” says Peck. “What Robbins did so skilfully is he has the characters ease their way into a kind of dance carriage that is so subtle that we almost don’t fully realise it until it hits us across the face. It’s almost like an airplane taking off: it’s moving, it’s moving, it starts to take off, you almost don’t feel that you’ve left the ground. That’s definitely

something that I’ve picked up on and attempted to incorporate through my work too.” Peck says he and the ﬁlm-makers saw “thousands and thousands” of people during the audition period; Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver) was eventually cast as Tony with the part of Maria going to newcomer Rachel Zegler. One of the aspects that he’s most proud of is that there is no body-doubling in the new ﬁlm, even for an actor like Elgort, who hadn’t danced seriously since he was a kid. “That’s not something that is valued with every movie-musical: there is a lot of smoke and mirrors when it comes to dance. We didn’t have any of that. Everyone is genuinely giving an extraordinary dance performance.” Each rehearsal day would begin with a dance class led by one of his associate choreographers, Craig Salstein or Patricia Delgado (Delgado is also Peck’s wife, with whom he has a seven-

month-old daughter). “I would take the class along with everyone, and that really brought us together as a company. You could really sense there was a glue amongst the cast.” Sometimes Spielberg would come to rehearsals and mimic the movements of the camera. “Steven was very active in that space. He would be using his iPhone and walking through. It was a really exciting part of the process, to get to collaborate with him in that way.” This is all a marked difference to Robbins’ approach. The earlier choreographer requested that the actors playing the Sharks and Jets stay in character at all times and did his best to stoke real beef between them. (The original Broadway Maria, Carol Lawrence, later described Robbins as “brutal”.) “It’s a different way of approaching the process, but I didn’t want to impose that kind of method on the cast,” says Peck, diplomatically. “I’ve always valued a sense of community bond. That’s the only way I know how to be in room with other people.” As for his next step, Peck is keeping it loose. Recently he’s been pleased to get back to live performances — when we speak he’s just back from the Vail Dance Festival in Colorado — and he’s now working on a piece with Pulitzerwinning composer Caroline Shaw for NYCB’s winter season. His bigger ambition, though, is to combine choreographing with directing, like Robbins did with West Side Story, or Bob Fosse did with Cabaret. Despite Peck’s unassuming mien, you somehow suspect he will. “I would say, honestly, that I don’t have the road between the dream and the goal, the reality, but…” he hesitates, then gathers himself. “But I’m working on it.”○ West Side Story is in cinemas on 10 December

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Setting the tone Bang & Olufsen makes white products (not white noise) By Johnny Davis

Beoplay A9 4th Generation speaker, £2,800, by Bang & Olufsen; bang-olufsen.com

Why didn’t Bang & Olufsen call its new all-white collection “White Noise”? Surely they missed a trick. Then again, being world-class experts in hiﬁdelity audio, maybe not. Such experts would know only too well the connotations “white noise” has, that it contains all the audible frequencies, just as white light contains all the frequencies in the visible range. And that, of all the noise types named for a loose analogy to the colours of light — pink noise, brown noise, red noise — white noise is the harshest, comparable to television static or a hissing radiator. Furthermore, that the word “noise” is itself derived from the Latin word for “nausea”. And no one wants that. Better, perhaps, to focus on more positive connotations with the colour. Being world-class experts in hi-ﬁdelity audio marketing, Bang & Olufsen

would also know only too well that, just as orange is associated with the informal and the affordable (welcome aboard easyJet!) and red with impulse buys (red backgrounds sell better on eBay), white promotes positivity and cleanliness. Much more like it, when it comes to launching a six-piece collection of its most beloved products, from premium wireless earbuds to the towering 15kg circular A9 speaker. Add in a nod to the company’s Scandi design heritage and remind people what time of year it is (the time to buy new stuff) and you have the “Bang & Olufsen Festive Nordic Ice Collection”. So much better than “White Noise”. Which is why Bang & Olufsen is, and remains, the worldclass expert. ○

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Left: despite the Air Jordan 1 breaching NBA uniform rules, Jordan was able to ﬂaunt his now-iconic trainer at the 1985 Slam Dunk Contest due to it not being an official league match. Below: the Air Jordan I Retro HI OG in ‘bordeaux’

Winning formula Isn’t the phrase ‘classic trainers’ an oxymoron? Not if you’re wearing the Air Jordan 1

Getty Images

By Murray Clark

At what age does something become “classic”? Ten years? Twenty? One hundred? Will some things, no matter their seniority, always fall short of classic status, like Crocs, and bandanas? After all, classic is a coveted status. To be classic is to be ageless. Classic things don’t buckle to trending curves. They ﬂy above them. So loafers, and sharp navy suits, and continental lagers. We’ll always enjoy these things. And now, maybe (def initely), trainers. For decades, the casual alternative to proper,

leather-soled shoes was seen as lesser. How could something worn by misanthropic teens stand toe-to-toe with their monochromatic, officeOK counterparts? Well, those misanthropic teens are now all grown up — and they can wear what they like to the office, if the office is even open. The Air Jordan 1 has grown up with them. And when we continue to buy a product that has existed, largely unchanged, for three decades, is that not the deﬁnition of a classic? Introduced in 1984, the Air Jordan 1 is a

basketball shoe ﬁrst made for Michael Jordan, then in his Chicago Bulls pomp. Thirty-three iterations later, the Air Jordan 1 remains one of Nike’s marquee trainers. Over the years there have been multiple colours, re-issues, re-re-reissues and redesigns, but the Air Jordan 1 has remained largely the same: tall, slightly boxy, and simple — especially when compared to the recent deluge of over-engineered sneaks. A new pair is soon to be released in a very formal shade of “bordeaux”. (How grown up is that?) So classic is the Jordan 1 that there’s even a Christian Dior version, designed by Jordan obsessive Kim Jones, with its famous swoosh decorated in the maison’s monogram. It sold out instantly when it went on sale last year but, reassuringly, you can still get hold of a pair on resale sites, as long as you’re happy to drop £10,000 on them. Hype culture is alive and well, then. But where other trainers have peaked and troughed in terms of their value, Air Jordan 1 has only grown in stature. The Jordan 1 is not the only trainer to have attained classic status: Adidas Stan Smiths, Converse Chuck Taylors, New Balance 990s. There’s a classic Reebok called the Reebok Classic. And while other styles come and go, these retain their appeal: simple, stylish, chic. But none more so than the Air Jordan 1, the most fetishised and enduring trainer design of all. The new bordeaux “colourway” — to use the sneaker-speak — doesn’t mess too much with a winning formula. It is largely white, offset with pools of boozy deep red. And that’s sort of it. If you buy a pair, chances are you’ll get just as much wear out of them as your best double-monkstraps and your favourite navy blue suit. In fact, in our current culture, probably much more. ○ nike.com

DOMAINE CLARENCE DILLON IS IN THE LEGACY BUSINESS HRH Prince Robert of Luxembourg on one of France’s oldest luxury companies and its unique approach to winemaking

Esquire: Domaine Clarence Dillon has quite a lineage, how did it begin? HRH Prince Robert: “The company was started in 1935 by my great-grandfather, Clarence Dillon, the same year he acquired Château Haut-Brion. He was quite the Renaissance man, interested in everything from the culinary arts to wine. In 1983, we acquired the fabled neighbouring estate, Château La Mission Haut-Brion.” Esquire: How has the company diversified since you took over in 1997? HRH Prince Robert: “We’ve grown into different areas, including Le Clarence, a Michelin-starred Paris restaurant, which opened in 2015. Before this, in 2005, we founded wholesale company Clarence Dillon Wines, which operates all over the world. We also created Clarendelle, a family of seven premium Bordeaux wines. In 2015 we launched La Cave du Château (www.lcdc.wine), a retail and e-tail company focused on the finest terroirs of France.” Esquire: What makes the Château Quintus estate so ideal for the top-quality wines? HRH Prince Robert: “It’s the biodiversity and soils of the ground here. Its plateau and natural slopes are mainly made up of limestone and clay. We have a very strict selection policy in both our production and blending process. This has been greatly influenced by our work at Château Haut-Brion, but we had to be humble; we realised we needed to listen and learn from this new environment and terroir. After 10 years, I’m proud to say we’re getting the hang of it and producing phenomenal wines. The purpose with the creation of Quintus was to allow its exceptional terroir to shine through and create a new world reference for fine wine in Saint-Émilion. Hats off to our winemaking team, they’re doing a great job!” Esquire: What do you look for in a good wine? HRH Prince Robert: “With a truly exceptional wine, I’m looking to be deeply moved; to be stopped dead in my tracks and be almost breathless after my first sip. It might be the equivalent to a music aficionado hearing an extraordinary aria that takes their breath away. Nowadays, you can find a lot of good wines but we’re in the business of producing truly great wines.” Place your order at www.domaineclarencedillon.com Above: HRH Prince Robert credits the biodiversity of the Château Quintus estate for producing such exceptional wine

Words: Tom Ward and Isabella Silvers. Photography: Mika Boudot

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Vest in show The once donnish tank top is suddenly a high-style staple By Murray Clark

Morgan O’Donovan

Sweater vests. Tank tops. Sleeveless jumpers. Whatever you call them, their history as the knitwear preference for bookish and/or golfy types is indisputable. Well, bookish has currency these days: see Gucci’s never-ending carousel of deadpan Wes Anderson nerds. Golf style is also, suddenly, incongruously cool: see the ascendant streetwear-cum-country-club label Manors, and not-quite-so-country-club rapper Tyler, the Creator. And so the humble sweater vest has become this season’s essential knit. It’s boxier this time around. A little looser, too. But most remarkably, and unexpectedly, it’s become a blank canvas for brands to weave their identities. London menswear star Drake’s has taken a Brideshead Revisited approach: V-neck, cricket stripes, cable-knit front. Raf Simons went for post-apocalyptic powder pink, with thick, ropey cable knits, and finishes from The Fifth Element. And at Dior’s LSD-tinged S/S ’22 show — a Travis Scott collaboration down a runway of fluoro cacti and fungi — the unofficial best in show among menswear aficionados was the sweater vest: a quadratic mash-up of the house’s vaunted monogram and that of “Cactus Jack”, Scott’s own record label. Bookish doesn’t look quite so bookish any more. ○

The right to bare arms: beige/camel cashmere tank top, £1,550, by Dior; dior.com

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Looking sharp: hand-crafted Japanese scythes and topiary saws imported by UK company Niwaki

Bonsai scissors! Gardening tools don’t come any more raref ied, or beautiful, than those on sale at a new London shop By Johnny Davis

Being a worldly reader of Esquire, you will already be familiar with the marketing playbook that proves you can take any unglamorous, industrial item you like and rebrand it into a cool, desirable lifestyle accessory. We talk, for example, of the English sports company Geoffrey Parker, retailer of £350 “premium ﬂying leather disks” — frisbees — that feature a felt lining for superior “ﬁnger comfort”. Also the “meticulous workmanship” and “smooth lines” of the oven gloves produced by a company called Liuchenmaoyi, yours for £205. (Though, curiously, the care instructions suggest avoiding “high-temperature” ironing and boiling water. Perhaps they’re the kind of oven gloves best used to accessorise an oven door, rather than, you know, to take something hot off the hob.)

Anyway, you get the point: value is what someone is willing to pay. Which brings us to Niwaki. Translated as “garden tree” from Japanese, the UK-based company imports the finest saws, sickles and Bonsai scissors — gardening gear — Japan has to offer. This month, it opens its first UK shop on London’s Chiltern Street — home of menswear boutique Trunk, the Chiltern Firehouse and other desirable destinations. Niwaki was founded in 1997 by Jake Hobson, a Japanophile who has lived and studied the country’s culture all his adult life, particularly one of its most definitive and universal art forms, niwaki — the art of pruning and shaping trees. Hobson started Niwaki after a trip to the Hanami festival, a celebration of Japan’s cherry blossom season, and set about importing the finest

horticultural tools the country specialises in — of which there are many. Like all Japanese craftspeople, its gardeners take their work seriously and treat it with respect. Niwaki’s trowels, for example, are hand-forged by a father-and-son team in Sanjō, a small city in the Niigata Prefecture. One may also marvel at the provenance of Niwaki’s hammers, saws, stepladders and hatchets. Until now your Christmas list may never have been troubled by the idea of a set of secateurs. That may well change when you see Niwaki’s Tsubo pair, hand-wrapped in Wisteria rattan. None of it is exactly cheap. The bonsai scissors start at £29 and the branch cutters are £99. But it is all extraordinarily beautiful. And, for our money, more inspiring than oven gloves. ○ 38 Chiltern Street, London W1; niwaki.com

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Sleeper hit This winter, submit to the cosy elegance of the robe By Charlie Teasdale

White/blue organic cotton oversized ‘Carmel’ bathrobe, £170, by Tekla; teklafabrics.com

Of the many hangovers of lockdown, the adoption of loungewear as everyday clothing has perhaps been the subtlest. We’ve all griped (or gloated) about working from home, lamented the faff of pre- and post-holiday testing and cringed at the awkward shuffle of limbs that has replaced the handshake. And yet we’ve kept shtum about the loss of hard collars; when we see that neck-tie dangling on the back of the bedroom door, we look away in embarrassment. “We have seen an incredible reaction to sleepwear, with sales growth of 60 per cent since 2020,” says Damien Paul, head of menswear at Matches Fashion, the online retailer. “As we spend more time at home, our customers are looking for luxurious items, such as a cashmere robe, which can be used as a tactile knit to add texture to an outfit.” Tekla is the definitive brand of this new laidback epoch. Best known for its bedding and towels, it recently released a classic bathrobe, designed to be worn in and out of the house. Could/should you really wear a bath robe over jeans and a hoody? “Yes, most definitely,” says Tekla co-founder Kristoffer Juhl. “You can and must do exactly how you feel. Even though a strong focus for us is functionality when developing products — and even though we think of the robe’s main uses as swimming, after-bath leisure, relaxing at home — nothing prevents you from enjoying it as you wish.” The robe, it seems, is the sleeper hit of the season. Matches recently collaborated with Parisian shirtmaker Charvet on a capsule collection featuring a handmade shawl-collar robe in mid-blue linen, while Charvet’s British equivalent, Turnbull & Asser, this year released a pair of kimono gowns that were designed to look as good over a shirt and tie as they do over pyjamas. But this season, the robe isn’t even necessarily a robe. There are thick wool robe-overcoats at Louis Vuitton and Brioni, while both Fendi and Dolce & Gabbana have created vast quilted takes on the garment. There is robe maximalism at Bottega Veneta (bright green, shearling, north of £6,165) and robe minimalism at The Row, which has found space in its ascetic aesthetic for a coat that many might describe as “cosy”. If the robe suggests too much exertion — as in actually getting out of bed — then idle aesthetes will be glad to hear that pyjamas are in, too. There are silky co-ords at Études and Dries Van Noten, and even onesies at Prada. Could you wear a robe over your onesie? Why ever not? At this point, as Kristoffer Juhl has it, you must do exactly as you feel. ○

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Big time In Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright’s new chiller, Thomasin McKenzie enters the dark side of 1960s Soho Interview by Olivia Ovenden Portrait by Rachel Louise Brown Styling by Tilly Wheating

Above right: Thomasin McKenzie photographed for Esquire outside Bar Italia in London’s Soho, July 2021. She wears green cotton jacket, £2,200; matching trousers, £970; black/white leather moccasins, £610, all by Gucci. 18k yellow goldemerald ring, £9,400, by Liv Luttrell. 18k white gold-black diamond ring, £2,000; 18k yellow golddiamond ring, £2,700; 18k white gold-diamond ring, £2,800; 18k yellow gold-white diamondemerald earring, £POA, all by Ara Vartanian

The actress Thomasin McKenzie is an introverted performer, imbuing her characters with a quiet intensity rather than ﬁghting for the camera’s attention. “It takes a lot of effort from me to be ‘big’,” she tells Esquire over Zoom, from her family home in Wellington, New Zealand. “Even when I feel like I’m doing a massive performance, I watch the ﬁlm and it’s so much smaller than it felt in my head.”

For her next role, the 21-year-old, who is endearingly sweet yet preternaturally sage, in the way actors who have worked alongside adults from a young age sometimes are, had no choice: she had to go big. McKenzie leads the cast of the ﬂamboyant horror ﬁlm Last Night in Soho, a technicolour extravaganza from Edgar Wright, the treasured British director behind Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver. The actress plays Eloise, →

a goofy aspiring fashion designer who dreams of moving to London. Once there, she is transported to the Swinging Sixties where she encounters Sandy (played by the similarly elﬁn actress Anya Taylor-Joy, who screams, sobs and smokes with the same vigour as she did in the

Below, from top: McKenzie as Eloise in ‘Last Night in Soho’; alongside Ben Foster in her breakthrough role in Debra Granik’s 2018 ﬁlm ‘Leave No Trace’

Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit), only to find the fluorescent lights and glamour of the city are a garish nightmare from up close. McKenzie is the daughter of an actress, Miranda Harcourt, and a director, Stuart McKenzie, and the granddaughter of another actress, Dame Kate Harcourt. Her early years in New Zealand were spent running around the acting school where her mother taught. A savvy nine-year-old, she initially entered the family

’I'm not naturally a horror watcher. I couldn't do Suspiria. It didn't sound like my cup of tea’

business as a side-hustle, performing for pocket money so that she could buy new toys. “I used to collect erasers, which are rubbers but I call them erasers because in America rubbers are condoms and it’s not a good look to say you’re collecting condoms,” she laughs. “I was really obsessed with Sylvanian Families, too.” McKenzie’s breakout role came in Debra Granik’s 2018 Leave No Trace, about a PTSDafflicted father who lives off-grid in the woods with his daughter, a part McKenzie fit so perfectly that, watching the film, it feels as though Granik had come across McKenzie by searching the forest before they started filming. The director pulled off the same trick once before, plucking a teenaged Jennifer Lawrence from obscurity for the revered Winter’s Bone. McKenzie’s performance in Leave No Trace earned her comparisons to Lawrence, a strange thing for an 18-year-old who had grown up on The Hunger Games to contend with. Admired performances in Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit and M Night Shyamalan’s Old followed, and now her slate of upcoming projects features some of the biggest names in filmmaking. McKenzie was shooting her compatriot Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, about a pair of warring brothers on a ranch in Montana, when the pandemic halted production in early 2020. She went back to stay with her family in New Zealand, settling into a bubble far away from the noise she had grown accustomed to. “After Leave No Trace it was hard to take stock,” she says. “The lockdown was a great moment to pause and reassess what kind of stuff I wanted to do. I don’t do films because of how big they might be, I’m just living every day.” Last Night in Soho is Wright’s love letter to London’s most louche and libidinous enclave, which dazzled him as a teenage boy from Dorset. The closing credits feature shots of the city captured during the pandemic, when the streets were terrifyingly empty and the pubs were — more terrifyingly still — shuttered. “It paints a good picture of what Soho is: the good and the bad,” McKenzie says of the film. Wright issued a list of 1960s films for her to make her way through to get a sense of the tone he wanted, with horror classics like Polanski’s Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, as well as British kitchen-sink dramas Poor Cow and A Taste of Honey all featuring. “I’m not naturally a horror watcher,” she says. “He had [Dario Argento’s terrifying 1977 film] Suspiria on the list but I couldn’t do it. It didn’t sound like my cup of tea.” ○ Last Night in Soho is in cinemas now

Hair: Carlos Ferraz | Makeup: Alex Babsky | Focus Features Rex/ Shutterstock

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Introducing the Esquire Edit 2021 Esquire is proud to present the fourth edition of the Esquire Edit, our capsule collection of wardrobe essentials made in collaboration with Liberty, and some of our favourite menswear brands. This year, the collection will be available in-store and online at Liberty, as well as the brands’ respective websites and stores

6 5. Cotton shirt by Esquire x NN07, £130

A complete essential for any winter wardrobe, NN07’s Silas overshirt, realised in Esquire offwhite, features two chest pockets and is cut with a square, boxy hem, so is perfect for layering up over knitwear and sweats.

4. Selvedge denim jeans by Esquire x Edwin, £190

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An icon of the denim universe, Edwin has been making incredible jeans since 1947. For this year’s Edit, we have a special edition of the regular tapered ﬁt in mid-blue rainbow selvedge denim — the ultimate go-anywhere, do-anything pair of jeans.

1. Sunglasses by Esquire x Kirk Originals, £225

2. Pouch by Esquire x Ally Capellino, £50

3. Woven belt by Esquire x Anderson’s, £90

Founded in 1919, Kirk Originals is one of the best in the business. These Kirven frames, shaped from tortoiseshell acetate, are ﬁnished with Esquire off-white detailing.

A pouch will always come in handy, and the leather of this Ally Capellino number will take on a patina as you use it, only making it cooler as the years go on.

Anderson’s makes all of its belts in Italy and is really the foremost name in the industry, offering that perfect mix of supreme function and classic, timeless form.

6. Graphic knit sweater by Esquire x NN07, £200 The ﬁrst graphic knit to feature in the Edit, but what a knit it is. Dress up with trousers and black lace-ups, or dress down with the Edwin jeans and a pair of trainers.

7. Backpack by Esquire x Ally Capellino, £650 Ally Capellino is one of the stalwart brands in leather accessories, and the Hoy backpack, with its Calvert leather and webbing straps, is super tough, but also equipped with clever storage.

8. Seersucker trousers by Esquire x YMC, £150

10. Seersucker overshirt by Esquire x YMC, £150

Named in honour of skate legend Tony Alva, these YMC trousers are a testament to slacker style: loose cut, with a tapered, gently cropped leg and a drawstring waist. Worn with the Doc Savage shirt, they complete the essential un-suit.

Made in black seersucker, with Esquire off-white detailing, YMC’s Doc Savage shirt treads the line between utility and elegance. It has the workwear vibe, but the seersucker elevates everything to an altogether sleeker place.

9. Shawl-collar cardigan by Esquire x Oliver Spencer, £270

11. Two-tone loafers by Esquire x Duke + Dexter, £240

Made by one of our favourite designers, this cardigan has real Steve-McQueen-in-theHamptons vibes. It’s snug, and will look great with a certain pair of mid-blue denim jeans.

One of the surprise essentials of the season, we couldn’t launch this year’s Edit without a pair of two-tone penny loafers. These are by Duke + Dexter, one of the most exciting brands in the UK.

David Lineton

12. Cotton crew-neck sweatshirt by Esquire x Sunspel, £115 Sunspel's classic loopback sweatshirt — in Esquire off-white with contrast collar detailing — is cosy and warm and perfect for lazy days, but plenty slick enough for work, too.

13. Cotton and silk scarf by Esquire x Liberty, £210

14. Cotton polo shirt by Esquire x Sunspel, £135

The prints at Liberty are worldfamous, so we’re delighted to have an exclusive for the Esquire Edit. This scarf is a cotton and silk mix, so it’s extraordinarily soft, but with a weight suitable for the chilly winter months.

Sunspel’s classic Riviera polo was originally tailored for Daniel Craig’s James Bond in Casino Royale, so not only does it offer that enduring style, but we know it can also handle the rigours of the life of a Double-O.

15. Cotton crew-neck T-shirt by Esquire x Sunspel, £80 Sunspel’s mastery of cotton basics is unparalleled, as this two-tone T-shirt attests. Lightweight, ultraﬁne, long staple Pima cotton — and, above all, the perfect ﬁt.

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NOTES, ESSAYS AND PROVOCATIONS

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The writing life

SATELLITE PERSONAGES

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Dylan Jones

YOU BECOME VERY CYNICAL WHEN YOU WRITE AN ORAL BIOGRAPHY. I’ve written three now, and on each occasion I’ve spoken to over 100 people. And, again, on each occasion I have spent a decent amount of time weighing up just how useful someone was going to be to me. For instance: is this person going to give me 800 words, or 1,500? Is this person going to give me 5,000, say, or just 500? Of course, if you’re interviewing Martin Scorsese or Tony Blair (which I have: the former for my 2017 book on David Bowie, and the latter for a book on the 1990s I’ve got coming out next spring), then you’ll probably take everything they’ve got. Because a Scorsese offcut is going to be prime ﬁllet, every time. Other people? Well, I’ve often sat with satellite personages who might as well have “250 words” or “one anecdote” stamped on their foreheads. When you’re on a deadline and you’re working through a lifetime of personal anecdotes, you learn to take life in your stride. Let’s face it, some people’s lives, or their memories, are simply not as interesting as they could be. And so you edit them. So that’s probably Rule One: Don’t be afraid to be dismissive of someone’s recollections. After all, this is your book, not theirs, and their anecdote is not your mantra. Rule Two: Let other people do the heavy lifting. When you begin a book, you’ll usually have

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a starting point, and you’ll also probably know where you want it to end. But don’t let the starting point determine your journey, or your ﬁnal destination. These should be guided by the people you interview, and you should allow them to lead you where they want to. In the editing you can bob and weave and cut and paste (a cliché but much needed) as much as you like, but when you’re encouraging someone to share their life with you, give them the courtesy of allowing them to drive. They might take you to someone you’ve never been before. Rule Three? Simple: Interview a lot of people. The three books of oral biography I have done have all required me to speak to vast numbers of people before they start to take shape, and as soon as you reach a stage where you think the book is starting to develop a personality, an old adage will come into play: the more people you interview, the more you realise you need. No, you don’t need six people to tell you the same anecdote, and nor do you need six contradictory tales about the same evening, but you do need light and shade, and the more gradations the better. Rule Four is very important: Don’t pester people who don’t get back to you. Find a better voice instead. Understandably, you can’t really write a book about the vicissitudes of grime without having some kind of contribution from Stormzy, but if he’s reluctant to engage, don’t let this dampen your enthusiasm. Secondary sources or alternative voices are completely legitimate, and can often move the narrative in a new and transformative way. Occasionally, someone’s absence can actually give the book a refreshing ﬂavour, and one should never forget that with historical biography, secondary sources are usually all a biographer has to work with; some of the best Warhol books, for instance, have no contributions from the artist himself. Rule Five is sacred: Allow people to redact themselves. I once interviewed a lovely woman who told me some quite extraordinary secrets about her relationship with David Bowie; the kind of secrets that would have no doubt resulted in more than a couple of boxes of delight in the Mail Online’s “sidebar of shame”. But a few days after our interview she asked if I could destroy the tape: she didn’t want her memories sullied by their proximity to other people’s, and so I did as she asked (after transcribing it, for my own personal library, of course). But the most important thing about reporting is getting your facts right, and, if you’re interviewing someone, making sure that whatever

JOURNAL

you print is as accurate as possible. This is Rule Six. I am not a stickler for including every “um” and “er” or “like” and “you know”, and I will absolutely finesse a quote if it’s going to flatter whoever said it. This doesn’t mean I would ever finesse something in order to change its emphasis — that’s lying, by the way — but if a quote contains three or four clauses that are all reaching for the same thing, and if my editing makes whoever is speaking sound like they know what they’re talking about, then the odd snip here and there is simply good surgery. But you can’t just “make do”. Occasionally, I have interviewed someone knowing that all I want is for them to tell me the only pertinent story they have (you need some of the boring, well-known stories as the building blocks of your book). And sometimes when

you’re sitting there listening to someone waffle on about something you have no interest in, a little jewel of an air bubble floats to the surface. On both occasions you might have the inclination to forget about transcribing the tape and just write what you remember from the encounter. But trust me: you should never, ever do this. You will invariably find that what you remember of the conversation is wildly different from what the person actually said. Sure, if you’re taking contemporaneous shorthand then you might be more accurate, but my advice is to transcribe it all. Because not only will someone’s soliloquy sound very different in isolation, if you listen carefully you will always find little gems in the darkness. Because that’s what oral biography is really all about: finding little gems in the darkness. ○

Pour homme

UNTIL IT’S OVER, SPLASH IT ALL OVER Andrew O’Hagan

THERE IS NO ENDING; THERE IS NO CESSATION; THERE IS NO SURCEASE. You are required to be on attraction duty (AD) until they pull the sheet over your head. This is very bad news for some of us, who were tired of AD in the year 1975, anno domini, when Elizabeth Watt resisted my advances on the way to school and made off with David Griffin instead. I was only seven, but I decided the life of the lothario was not for me: too much toleration; too much shit-talk; and too much after-shave. But, even now, 46 years on, one cannot simply throw in the towel and say I don’t care. For a start, there’s the wife. She’s younger than me and fitter in every department, and all she requires, by way of compensation, is that I improve my jokes and stick to a strict regime of high-end cologne. I’m obviously struggling with the first, which is why I spend most afternoons in the perfume department at Liberty, the place where being on AD is like life and death, only more important. I can tell you the two worst-smelling men I ever met. The first was Robbie McArdle (not his real name), a boy from the otherwise fragrant

Ayrshire town of Springside, and a soap-dodger of Olympic standard. The second was a waiter who used to work in a famous French restaurant in Covent Garden. He came doused in gallons of Mouchoir de Monsieur, a rather famous male scent by Guerlain, and he was living, walking, ponging proof that you can have too much of a good thing. On the other hand, too much washing (if we follow the wisdom of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis) is bad for the skin and bad for the environment, so maybe my two knew the score all along. They still make me think, though, of the heavenly beneﬁts of a little top-notch cologne daintily applied. I once met this man called Luca Turin. I wanted his name. I also wanted his nose. He can sniff a hint of lavender at 500 miles. Let’s start with the name: if you’re going to be an expert on scent, you should be named, give or take a few consonants, after two beautiful havens redolent of your background. (Sadly, my perfume name would be Gorbals Kilmarnock.) Turin is a noted biophysicist, with a whole history of research into olfactory stuff, and he co-wrote, with his

Alamy

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wife Tania Sanchez, the best book ever written by woman and man, called Perfumes (2008). You might think I exaggerate, but the book takes every bottle of scent you’ve ever heard of — including the ones that give you the ick — and expounds upon them with cool persuasion. He is the man, after all, who referred to Kouros, one of the alltime popular reeks, redolent of Essex taxi ranks and neon bars, as giving a “borderline unwashed smell”. Turin brought me to realise the joyful truth that men should always smell a tiny bit grim. We can talk about fougère and aldehydes all day,

you can talk cheap smells and expensive ones — Old Spice and Habit Rouge are both “nearperfect” examples of the oriental genre — but what Turin is against, and quite hilariously, is the “sports” genre, and we should all listen. “All fragrances whose name involves the words energy, blue, sport, turbo, fresh, or acier in any order… is stuff for the generic guy wishing to meet a generic girl and have generic offspring. It has nothing to do with any other pleasure than that of merging with the crowd.” Most men don’t think when they sniff. They

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go for safety. I used to have a girlfriend with two sons, and I offered them cash, and a free bottle of Vetiver each, if they stopped using Lynx Africa every morning before school. Even great writers, famous for the use of four senses, can go melancholy and stale when it comes to smell. Proust is an exception. In his great book, the smell of petrol in Paris reminds him of trips in the country. Albertine’s laugh was “as strong, sensual and revealing as the scent of geraniums”. In his most famous scene, that of our hero dunking the madeleine cake into a cup of linden tea, it is the everything of it that brings back the past so completely, but mainly it is the scent. The art of perfume is that it can bring the world a bit closer, not only the world of the past, but that too, plus it’s generally nicer smelling of ferns and spices than of boiled socks. There’s a whole, hilarious universe of sniffs. If you think online hotheads can get ranty and mental about football, you should check them out on whether or not the new Gucci scent is duff or magniﬁcent. “I’ll punch your fucking lights out,” is not what you most expect when discussing the merits of the new Hermès H24, an aromatic green fragrance for men. To me, it smells of sage, freshly ironed shirts, lemon, and a bright morning in Positano. To one or two others, it smells of mould, metal ﬁlings, off-soup, and is “barbershop soapy”. One man, who perhaps doesn’t get out as much as he might, tells us “this is chemical warfare”. Well, I used it all summer and the town of Largs — Britain’s best holiday destination — has never smelt so sweet. Every time I passed an old lady she smiled at me like I was Cary Grant (who wore Jicky, by the way, a high-powered scent by Guerlain that smells wonderful, with a brazen, mysterious, distant note of the water-closet). Being a man is not what is used to be, thank god. “Denim, for the man who doesn’t have to try too hard.” Even at the time, it seemed like a cosmic joke. (Denim, for the kid who couldn’t get a ride on the seafront tram at Blackpool, more like.) All the adverts for aftershave seemed like they were issued by the NHS, keen for the nation’s men to wash their armpits and only have sex as a last resort. Remember Henry Cooper’s work for Brut? Comb-over, dad-bod, and plenty of slapping it about, giving it “there’s nothing like a nice old bath to make you feel great”, then Kevin Keegan or Barry Sheene muscling in on that act. “Just splash it all over, ’Enry?” they say, while the “dolly bird” smiles. British men were expected, or forgiven, for wanting to wear something called “Brut” →

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or “Hai Karate”, while drinking beer from cans that had scantily clad girls on them, and inspecting Page Three. Whenever I hear people talk about the good old days, I think of all this. Every man past 35 gets the nostalgia he deserves, but the good news is remedies come in a bottle. No, you fool, not Macallan Single Malt, but a brilliant invention from your own correspondent. “Change”, a brand new fragrance by Gorbals Kilmarnock. ○

Smokes

LIGHTS OUT Simon Mills

IT WASN’T LONG AGO THAT CIGARETTES were content with just slowly killing the people who smoked them 10 or 20 times a day. Now the tobacco industry wants to do away with itself, too. In an act of slow-burning suicide, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of cigarettes has chosen to quit smoking, stubbing out a multi-billion dollar business on the back of its own hand. In the summer, Philip Morris International announced that it intends to “un-smoke the world”, including stopping the sale of Marlboro cigarettes in Britain within a decade. Audaciously, the tobacco giant also proposed the notion of “a world without cigarettes”. It called on the British government to actively ban the sale of its tobacco products, with Philip Morris International CEO Jacek Olczak suggesting that the UK should start treating cigarettes like petrol-powered cars, the sale of which is due to be banned from 2030. An interesting approach when one considers that, just two years ago, Philip Morris’s Marlboro brand was the world’s most valuable tobacco product. Estimated to be worth $33.6 billion, Marlboro’s value sat alongside brands like Nike and American Express. And get this: with its marketing muscle now fully behind the IQOS e-cigarette, a device that heats tobacco to deliver nicotine without the smoke and tar that cause diseases, including cancer, Philip Morris plans to reposition itself as... wait for it… a “health and wellness” brand. At epoch-deﬁning, culturally seismic moments like this, it is, one feels, important to spare a

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thought for the cruelly victimised community who will be most acutely affected by such a gamechanging decision: the supermodels. Without Marlboro Golds (the cigarette formerly known as Marlboro Lights and still called that by, well, everyone) what on earth is Kate Moss going to do? What will the fashion industry X-rays in Paris, Milan and London do with their hands and mouths between shows, looks and shots? How will the stylists, photographers, PRs, party organisers and model -agency mavens get through the day without a draw on their corktipped cylinders of poisoned pleasure? Hard to believe, now that smokers have become pariahs and outsiders (quite literally, darling), but throughout the naughty 1990s and beyond, Marlboro Lights were everywhere, as ubiquitous as drop-waist Maharishi combat pants, Nike Air Max and “Wonderwall”. Back in those days, an old party-hard friend of mine would stop at his front door every time he ventured out for an evening — so that’s every single evening for a decade — taking a second to ensure that he had everything he required, in hand or pocket, for the next few hours’ carousing. He called it the “C-check”: cash (for cabs and cocaine), credit cards (for cocktails and champagne) and, most crucially, cigarettes. Marlboro Lights, of course. No other brand was acceptable. My pal knew, as we all did, that those perfectly formed paper tunnels, packed tight with heady brown leaves, were social mobility sold in crushproof packs of 20. Mini chimeneas of glowing orange and sweetly intoxicating acridity that flirted and swaggered, even on the lips of dorks and in the hands of wallflowers. Simply everyone who smoked, smoked them. In 2021, smokers are regarded as bad influencers, but in previous decades they were cover stars, rock stars, Soho blades, record-company tyros, movie directors, Primrose Hill yummy mummies. And, at times, it seemed as if the whole of Swinging London was bumming from the same pack. Though truly a global product, Marlboro Lights seemed to flaunt a certain London look (the brand was named after a Philip Morris factory on Great Marlborough Street, W1), neatly and expensively and serendipitously positioned as the vogue cigarette long before Vogue cigarettes became a thing. More than just a smoke they were a pop icon, with their architectural logo, its letters crenelated like the Manhattan skyline, pack graphics designed in geometric, constructivist style by Frank Gianninoto. Launched in the 1920s, advertising for Marlboro was originally based on the cigarettes’

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“lady-like” filter tip (big tough men obviously preferring their smokes full strength and unfiltered). Marlboro’s cork filter had a printed red band around it to hide lipstick stains. “Beauty Tips to Keep the Paper from Your Lips” went the sales blurb. The Marlboro Lights’ foggy hegemony and swanky social mobility was baffling and frustrating for its rivals, who spent just as much on sponsoring F1 teams as they did but couldn’t quite get in the game. Indeed, so all-asphyxiating was the great American smoke in the Big Smoke during the last millennium that other brands were forced into guerilla marketing tactics in order to stay competitive. At Oliver Peyton’s wildly fashionable Atlantic Bar and Grill in Piccadilly, cigarette girls would walk the floors brandishing trays of Camel Lights. If they spotted some hipster inhaler — Bono or Helena Christensen — with a pack of Marlboro Lights next to their Cosmopolitan cocktail, a Camel cutie would insert herself and offer a whole pack — gratis — so long as the celebrity smoker stubbed out his or her Marlboro Light and sparked up a Camel instead. It didn’t work. Marlboro Lights carried on being the defaultsetting smoke for bad-boy actors and 3am-eternal fashion mannequins; girls who lit boys who lit girls who lit boys, as the Blur song goes (nearly). But it was getting the supermodels on board that was Marlboro’s greatest, accidental coup. All the big girls knew that a pack of Marlboro Lights a day kept the hunger at bay. Especially when paired with copious sea breezes and the company of a lizardly rock star. And then there was Kate Moss, perhaps the greatest smoker of all time. During the 1990s, Kate was said to be raking in around $10 million a year from contracts with Burberry, Chanel, Calvin Klein and more. But her most loyal and gilded partnership was surely with the Marlboro Lights flip-top pack, which she promoted with reliable and casually professional zeal. Pretty much every night, for around 20 years. How much was Philip Morris paying Kate for this incredible PR? Zip. Zero pounds. Kate was Marlboro’s coolest and sexiest brand ambassador — and she did it for free. For the love of the warm glow of the yellow flame ignition, the long, noirish drag, the fuggy blast of sweetly noxious, bluey-grey cloud. And now? Time for Kate — and the rest of us — to prepare for a world without the Marlboro Golds. Either that, or move to the developing world. No plans, so far, to stop selling the cancer sticks there. ○

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Letting go

DEAD SKIN Joe Dunthorne

FOR THE LAST 20 YEARS I HAVE BEEN TRYING to convince my parents that the three boxes of old computer games and broken joysticks I’ve been keeping in a cupboard in their bedroom will one day become priceless artefacts of early man, like the cave paintings at Lascaux. It wasn’t until this year that I was vindicated: a pristine, unopened copy of Super Mario Bros from 1985 sold at auction for two million dollars. Two million dollars. Imagine, I told them, the retirement villa on the

shores of Lake Como I will buy you with the proceeds from the sale of my ultra-rare copy of The Castles of Doctor Creep on floppy disk. My parents stood back in awe as I unveiled the dusty boxes, a yellowing Commodore 64, its plastic now the colour of a smoker’s fingernails. I tested the keys — crunchy with dead skin — then set about putting it all on eBay. After a week of researching the rarity of each game, photographing the tatty boxes in natural light on a clean white tablecloth, I had earned £131. Enough for a budget flight to Como but not the villa. As I took the last package to the post office, my father applauded and my mother said: “This is wonderful news.” It took me a moment to realise that they were celebrating the moment when their 39-year-old son finally moved all his crap out of their house. At the bottom of one of the boxes — underneath the video games and an empty tin of Ghostbusters-themed spaghetti hoops from 1992

that I had hoped would become high-value memorabilia — I found a plastic bag full of love letters, diaries, bad poems and notebooks. These are the kinds of items that mean too much to throw in the bin and yet you would never want to live in the same house as them, let alone reread them. I now understood why I had buried them here in my parents’ house. This was longterm toxic waste disposal. All afternoon, I knelt on the ﬂoor of their room, picking through the debris, ﬁlling the air with ghosts. I found old school reports and a Year 7 class photo where I could clearly discern — in the horror of certain children’s eyes, their hunched shoulders and tight lips — those unlucky enough to have already been struck down by puberty. Scanning my classmates’ names, all the intricate networks of friendship and animosity came back to me, the people I loved and those I hated, and those who loved and hated me. I had a sudden rush of empathy for the boy

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who used to laugh at my eczema — who once wrote “I hate scab-boy Joe Dunthorne” on a store cupboard — when I saw that he was the first boy in our class to get acne. I found a pile of ticket stubs in which I was able to trace my journey towards angst and selfimportance — from Super Furry Animals to Placebo to Radiohead. Then there were the letters from my girlfriend during the year when she started studying PPE at Oxford and I went to Australia to work as a door-to-door salesman, convincing suburban business owners to change their landline provider. In retrospect, it’s amazing that she waited so long to break up with me. Reading her letters again, it’s clear she did try to help me understand what was coming but I was unable or unwilling to believe her. When she finally called to let me know that it was over, I uttered the timeless words of the emotionally stunted: but… but… but… you can’t. Finally, there were the diaries. I was never much of a diarist except at certain key moments when I decided that whatever was going on in my life was sufficiently formative that I had a responsibility to my future self to record it. For this reason, these notebooks made it seem as though my life from age 12 to 22 was one relentless stream of life-changing incidents: two break-ups, one car crash, a six-date punk tour in a converted Royal Mail van, a modest, mental breakdown in a Bengali seaside town. A decade of joy and pain compressed into 50 scrawled pages. A part of me perhaps imagined that the British Library would one day be storing these documents in a humidity-controlled environment so that PhD students could discuss how my shoplifting phase subsequently manifested in my poetry’s use of unattributed quotation. But no. The archivist hasn’t been in touch and when I told my father that I felt torn about whether to throw it all out — thus giving him a chance to say “My boy, no! It must be retained for posterity!” — he merely shrugged and said that perhaps I should throw it away bit by bit, so that it didn’t feel too final. As I read back through the diaries, I realised the question was not whether I should bin them but why I hadn’t done so already. If Marie Kondo were here, I would tell her that they sparked no joy but shame in abundance, as well as confusion, regret and long periods of staring at the wall. They also sparked relief that I was no longer 22 years old and gratitude that it all took place in a time before Facebook. Even the entries that should have been worth keeping — the record of the time that my band supported an

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unknown group called the Arctic Monkeys, a night that I have subsequently worked up into a shapely anecdote — my diary revealed the sad truth that I’d been too wasted to watch any of the bands above us on the bill (which was all the bands). The diary offered just one piece of deep emotional insight: “Had a post-gig pipe. Felt shitfaced.” So I stood over the recycling bin and tossed the diaries in, one by one. Farewell, teenage Joe, you mean and self-righteous moralist! Farewell, early-twenties Joe, you paranoid and horny wreckhead! It is pleasant to think that one day soon — when these notebooks have been pulped, slurried, bleached and recycled into packing boxes — they might return to me in the form of an urgent next-day delivery of pull-up nappies

for my one-year-old daughter, and that this will be perfect karmic justice. Having disposed of the unﬂattering realities contained in my diaries, I hope to eventually view my younger self through the forgiving delusions of old age, telling my grandchildren that I played with the Arctic Monkeys and what lovely boys they were. I knew from the moment I saw them that they would be famous. Me and Alex really hit it off. All that remains is the question of what to do with the £131 I made on eBay. Technically, it should go to my parents for storage costs but, let’s be honest, they need it less than me, what with their pensions and their sensible attitudes to money. And anyway, I’m sure they would want me to put it towards something really worthwhile like, say, talk therapy or a new Nintendo. ○

Cinema

HAPPY ENDINGS David Thomson

ARE YOU HAPPY? WOULD YOU BE WARY OF ADMITTING THAT condition in these troubled times? Do you have an expectation — on a scale of one to five — of being happy in the next 12 months? On the theory that things are going to get better — aren’t they? Or has that well run so dry or unfathomable it seems naïve to ask the question? There’s a history of happiness, as with most large ideas. We need to understand that for centuries, the mass of humans — the “us” factor — hardly considered feeling good. We were desperate simply to survive, or endure: get past famine and disease; keep out of the reach of pogroms, earthquakes, pandemics and the wars organised by the wealthy and the powerful. Just try to get away with the trick and leave some brief imprint of a feeling of persistence — like a Shakespeare sonnet, a Rembrandt self-portrait, some flights from The Magic Flute. Or a pleasant garden. Thus, there might be five minutes, or five days, of wellbeing — not that Rembrandt in his mirror is entirely reassuring. But it’s a substantial thing if a person can look at himself and feel approaching closure without going mad. It has always lain within the capacity of the human species — with or without religion — to trust the mirror and get on with a new day. Without

yielding to the empty frenzy of being H-A-P-P-Y! But in our recent history, the last 150 years, a right of common happiness did come in sight. There might be a generality of people who had electricity, a water closet, enough to eat, a health plan, insurance — and the movies. We started to play Happy Families, and without irony or shame we absorbed the movie aim of happy endings. Of course, we knew that code was unreliable, and close to a fraud, but we did not give up on it. In the hard times of the 1930s and the war years, we went to see our myths turned into light: Fred and Ginger, dancing over black and white floors, the sound of their steps like our shared pulse. In the din and fear of war, Hollywood made fantasies — from Casablanca to To Have and Have Not, films that ignored the war, as well as comedies, from The Shop Around the Corner to The Lady Eve. Those films are still alive, though watching them again (if you are old enough) can prompt a wry smile at what was our innocence once. We trusted that everything was going to be all right — and joked about the folly of believing that dream. There is a sublime breaking point, a moment when walking on eggshells can’t miss the sounds of cracking. I’m seeing 1950, a set with a floor like a stage and a backdrop of fluffed white clouds →

against a red sky. A few guys do hectic dance moves before we settle on one assured woman, in tights and high heels, a black jacket and a jaunty fedora. It’s Judy Garland and she’s singing “Get Happy”, a song by Harold Arlen in the movie Summer Stock. Judy looks terrific in her last chance at being a knockout: she had lost 15lbs for the sequence, and that meant going back on forbidden pills. She was not happy. She was a wreck, and this was the last movie (and the last sequence) she would do at MGM, before they told her to get lost (after 28 films in 14 years). Her marriage to Vincente Minnelli was over. Worst of all, no one was of a mind to make her kind of films any more; the ones where we could watch a “Get Happy” rapture without crossing our fingers, and any other sentient parts. Judy Garland was a wisecracker with a ton of sour jokes to drop on her pals about acting happy. Somehow you had to have surreal wit to see the “Get Happy” routine played against a line of chorines from Auschwitz or Hiroshima. So many reasons were sinking in about being ashamed of happy endings. So as the narrative genres that had always ended with embraces, of lovers and social contracts — playing on the curtains that greeted “The End” — movies grew darker, or more grown-up or downbeat or “true to life” (as if that had ever been a viable project). Soon enough, the only happiness left on our screens was in the advertising — the limousine that ghosted through uphill curves; the shampoo that set free aphrodisia; and the insurance schemes that told us it was safe to die. And the one thing all of us loathe now is advertising, along with the dismay that reckons there is nothing we can do about it. Those steady lies are our toxic contract, like recharging our phone every night, and stifling the dread that wonders what happens if that charging does not work and the phone no longer comes on. We are so close to that edge. Cut to the Oscars night, 25 April 2021, with Nomadland winning best director, best actress and best picture for a movie about people who have shifted from homelessness, unemployment and so many failures in the happiness game to being a new nomadic tribe, eking out experience in desert places. It was an honourable film, though not a patch on Chloe Zhao’s earlier The Rider – a piercing evocation of hard times in a beautiful place. But Nomadland was so far from an entertainment that might make millions of us feel happy for 120 minutes — more or less the old Academy deal. One picture last year did manage the old trick. To be exact, it was a movie spun out over several

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episodes on television. I’m thinking of The Queen’s Gambit, in which the seductive ferocity of Beth or Anya Taylor-Joy became a myth for how women can be as triumphant and lovely as Fred and Ginger doing a routine like “I Won’t Dance”. You can argue that a young woman becoming a chess master or mistress is not the most accessible fable for feminist arrival. After all, only one woman at a time can be the best chess player in the world. But Scott Frank (who did The Queen’s Gambit) had found a rich metaphor with Beth: a life force, unrewarded in many aspects of life, but a wide-eyed winner. Enough people felt good enough watching that they started playing chess (an ideal pursuit for a lockdown

society or for people trying to mask obsession). Now, I don’t know what happens to Beth once she’s won, and she’s still in her twenties. Judy doing “Get Happy” must have known her days were numbered. But if you watch that routine again, you can’t miss her feeling blessed swooping across a sound stage, with a good song and smart choreography. She knew that, from her heels to the tip of her fedora, she was sashaying on a brittle ﬁne line. But it was worth the risk and her courage still moves us. Over 70 years later, she has a cocky strut that matches the delirious exaltation in Anya Taylor-Joy. Get Happy while you can. The actress may never ﬂy like this again. ○

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DOUBLE

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EXPOSURE

BORN OF TRAGEDY, PAOLO SORRENTINO’S THE HAND OF GOD TELLS THE STORY OF THE ACCLAIMED DIRECTOR’S OWN SHATTERED YOUTH, WITH NEWCOMER FILIPPO SCOTTI AS THE FUTURE AUTEUR. FOR ESQUIRE, THE DUO RECONVENE TO TALK FILM, FAMILY — AND THE GENIUS OF MARADONA BY ALEX BILMES

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Previous pages: Filippo Scotti and Paolo Sorrentino photographed in Rome, June 2021. Below, from top: Scotti as Fabietto Schisa, with Teresa Saponangelo and Toni Servillo as his parents, in Paolo Sorrentino’s ‘The Hand of God’; the extended Schisa clan prepare to take a dip

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DIEGO MARADONA SAVED PAOLO SORRENTINO’S LIFE; CINEMA GAVE IT MEANING. On Sunday, 5 April, 1987, Maradona’s Napoli travelled to Tuscany, where they played out a goalless draw with Empoli. Sorrentino, the future maestro of Italian cinema, then a 17-year-old schoolboy, had planned to spend the weekend with his parents, at their house in the mountains. But with the World Cup-winning Argentine as their talisman, Napoli were on the way to their first-ever Serie A championship. Young Paolo, a fanatical supporter of his local team, was permitted, for the first time, to go to the match alone. Both his parents were killed that weekend, poisoned in their bed by carbon monoxide fumes from a faulty heater. “That tragedy has marked my life,” Sorrentino told me, in September. “My adolescence ended with my parents’ death. At 17, I was as old as I am now. I’m still stuck on that date, on that day. My life has not changed. That pain is still with me and will always be with me and has forged my temperament, my personality, and made me unstable and very prone to rage. All that is connected to that tragedy.” Also connected: Sorrentino’s choice of career. “There is a very direct cause-and-effect relationship between the deaths of my parents and my decision to become a filmmaker,” Sorrentino said, speaking through an interpreter. “That tragedy was so unbearable in terms of pain that the only solution I found was to create a parallel reality, this fictional world where I can escape and find relief. That’s why I decided to become a screenwriter and then later a filmmaker. Therapy for me was spending a lot of time describing a reality which was not perfect, but which I could tolerate, perhaps even love. My own reality, I just could not tolerate.” Now, more than three decades after the events described, Sorrentino has made a film dealing head-on with his tortured adolescence. Set in Naples in the 1980s, The Hand of God is a gorgeous evocation of that most intoxicating of Italian cities, by turns seductive and repellent, sacred and profane. It is a tribute to a mesmerising footballer who elevated his sport, in Sorrentino’s eyes, to the level of art. It is a memorial to the director’s parents, and to a lost way of life. And it is a paean to movies as refuge from real life, a celebration of escapism. “Cinema’s not good for anything,” huffs a character in The Hand of God. “Except as a distraction from reality.” In other words, the film’s director might reply, cinema is as essential as air. The Hand of God is a film, according to Sorrentino, “that has been on my mind forever”. The delay, clearly, is understandable. “For many years I didn’t have the courage to write it. Then I found the courage to write it but not to do it. Eventually I found the courage to do it.” Putting the words on the page was the hardest part, harder even than filming the scene in which his parents die. “I cried most of the time during the writing,” he said. “It wasn’t easy to see the screen, it was blurred by my tears.” When the film was in production, “I did it the only way I could. That is, I pretended it was a film like any other. You somehow hide yourself behind the cinematic technique. At least, I tried.” Sorrentino was talking to me on the terrace of the Excelsior Hotel, overlooking the sparkling Adriatic from the Venice Lido. It was morning on the first day of the Venice Film Festival, the day before The Hand of God’s premiere. The sun beat down, but a soft breeze kept temperatures in the mild mid-20s. Apart from the Covid checkpoints outside, and the bag searches at the gates, and the masked queues of festival participants waiting to show their credentials, all seemed unusually well with the world. “Look at where we are,” said Sorrentino, drawing on a cigar and gazing, not entirely approvingly, towards the empty beach. “Cinema is a place which seems to be glamorous. But films are made by and attended by people who are very much uneasy with themselves, and with life. And I do

believe that those who are at ease with themselves and with life are outside that circle.” SORRENTINO MADE HIS DEBUT AS WRITER-DIRECTOR IN 2001 with a comedy, One Man Up, starring Toni Servillo, who became his enduring muse. His breakthrough came in 2004 with the crime-drama The Consequences of Love. Servillo plays an elegant, fastidious, lonely middle-aged bag man for the mob, exiled to a Swiss hotel, where he becomes infatuated with a beautiful waitress. Somehow both austere and flamboyant, cool and existential, it marked the arrival of a major talent with a baroque imagination, a high style, and cold steel in his veins. He followed it with The Family Friend (2006), another portrait of an older man, the miserly Geremia, played by Giacomo Rizzo, who is undone by his desire for a lovely young woman. International acclaim followed in 2008 with Il Divo, Sorrentino’s scabrous biopic of the Machiavellian Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti. A stunning portrait of power corrupted, it was distinguished by another terrific performance from Toni Servillo, heavily disguised this time — concealment and surface being as central to Sorrentino’s cinema as revelation and depth. His first English-language film, This Must Be the Place (2011) was an extraordinary road movie, with Sean Penn fully committed as a zonked-out goth rock star on the trail of the Nazi who brutalised his father. If that sounds weird, that’s because it was weird: weirdly funny, weirdly charming, weirdly trance-inducing, and weirdly sui generis. In 2013, Sorrentino delivered his masterpiece. The Great Beauty is a ravishing document of Roman decadence, with Servillo, again, as Jep, a jaded literary journalist and soi-disant king of socialites, executing a lazy front crawl through the fetid “whirlpool of the high life”. “I was destined for sensibility,” sighs Jep, and his creator might say the same. The Great Beauty is a pungent satire of Sorrentino’s adopted home city, but it’s also a swoon, a bacchanal, a glorious debauch. The fluidity of Sorrentino’s camera, the sumptuousness of his mise-en-scène, the vulgarity, the glitz, the flash, the flesh, the tits, the ’taches, the dance numbers! Jep quotes Flaubert’s stated desire to write “a book about nothing” — all style, no substance. And there are those who suggest Sorrentino succeeded where old Gustave failed, that he is more interested in the fabric of the curtain he is pulling back, than what it reveals about the politics of the rotten society hidden behind it. He is focused on the trappings of power and money, rather than the costs and implications. But what fabric it is! And what trappings they are! Sorrentino won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and it would have been a scandal if he hadn’t. Since then, Sorrentino aficionados have been treated to the trippy Youth (2015), with Michael Caine’s conductor and Harvey Keitel’s movie director, lions in winter, in search of their missing mojos at an exclusive Alpine spa. (Maradona makes an appearance in that film, too, played by the unimprovably named actor Roly Serrano.) The Young Pope (2016) was a sexily sacrilegious TV series, with a gleeful Jude Law relishing his role as a hardline-conservative American pontiff. Its sequel, The New Pope (2019), saw Law joined by John Malkovich, an actor whose languid cynicism seems tailor-made for Sorrentino. In 2018, Sorrentino released Loro, an epically lubricious portrait of the repulsive former Italian president, Silvio Berlusconi, yet another chewy part for the chameleonic Servillo. Sorrentino’s films are stylish, surrealist investigations of love and regret, sex and death, age and beauty, irony and rapture. They are chic and vulgar, frivolous and profound, sublime and ridiculous. Like life, he seems to say, although life lived at a pitch many of us might occasionally struggle to recognise. His work exhibits a particular fascination with the intersections of →

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For the first time Sorrentino was working without his regular cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi, who photographed all of his previous films. For The Hand of God, Sorrentino turned instead to Daria D’Antonio, another native Neapolitan, who it is reported will be working with him on his next film, Mob Girl, starring Jennifer Lawrence as an FBI informant. (That’s if his next film isn’t a biopic of the late Hollywood super-agent Sue Mengers, also starring Jennifer Lawrence; unlike the mob girl, on this topic alone Sorrentino pleads the fifth.) Also a new production designer, Carmine Guarino, and a new costume designer, Mariano Tufano. The music is more sober, the colour palette more subdued, the camera more static; all the customary cinematic effects are stripped back. “I do believe that each story dictates its own style,” said Sorrentino. “At the very beginning [of shooting The Hand of God] I tried a tracking shot but I realised there was something wrong with it. Yes, the story called for a simpler approach.” I am not the first viewer to note that if The Great Beauty was, in some measure, Sorrentino’s homage to Fellini’s sumptuous La Dolce Vita, then this might be his Amarcord, Fellini’s story of his own boyhood in southern Italy, warmly comic, pointed, unsentimental. The title of Fellini’s 1973 classic, roughly translated, means “I remember.” ALMOST ALL THE ACTION IN THE HAND OF GOD is seen through the eyes of the teenage Fabio Schisa, known as Fabietto, a childhood nickname that is both fond and diminishing. This stand-in for the youthful Sorrentino is played with appealing sensitivity by newcomer Filippo Scotti, upon whose slender frame the director hangs the many separate elements that make up the film. Fabietto is a dreamy, awkward adolescent, a loner in the playground, unable to talk to girls. He’s a bit of a geek, your Fabietto, I told Sorrentino. “Geek?” repeated the director. “What is ‘geek’?” He is not cool, I suggested. He is shy. He is friendless. He’s a virgin. He wears his Walkman clipped to his belt, 24/7. “He’s a disaster!” said Sorrentino, in English. Sitting next to Sorrentino and opposite me was Filippo Scotti. Sorrentino is 51; Scotti 30 years his junior. Both have curly hair, each wears an earring in his left lobe. Both are Italian. I could probably make more of it, but in truth there, as far as I could tell, the similarities ended. Sorrentino is something of a crumpled dandy. With his unruly corona of steel wool hair, his capacious eye bags, his wry, hangdog face, and his vintage rocker’s sideburns, he looks like a whisky priest, albeit one with a Mr Porter account. On the day I met him he wore a silk blazer the colour of sand over a deep blue chambray shirt, unbuttoned at the chest to reveal a tan of varnished mahogany. Fresh-faced, pale and delicate, Scotti wore a black leather jacket, Prada logo on the breast pocket, over a white T-shirt. Sorrentino answered my questions expansively, in great detail, mostly in Italian but with occasional English exclamations, making points with his smouldering stogie. While he talked, Scotti sipped bottled water and waited patiently for questions addressed to him. When they came, he answered in English with a fluency impressive in one who said he only recently began to learn the language. The affection between them was clear. It was also clear who was boss. Scotti had never been to Venice before. Quite something, I would imagine, to arrive, aged 21, in such a spectacular city for the first time to find one’s own image, on posters for The Hand of God (È Stata La Mano Di Dio), adorning cathedral-sized buildings on the Grand Canal. He looked

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sex, money and power. His wild shifts in tone, his images at once painterly and soft-pornographic, his strange and uncompromising vision, not all of this is to everyone’s taste — and the fact that his gaze is unblinkingly male has not gone unnoticed by feminist critics — but it’s hard to imagine anyone coming away unstimulated from a Paolo Sorrentino production. The Hand of God might be his most satisfying work since The Great Beauty, and his most affecting. Funded by Netflix, it was shot in and around Naples in the summer of 2020, in the brief period of freedom between lockdowns. “It was almost idyllic,” Sorrentino told me. (Love that “almost”.) As the toothsome TV pundits like to say of football matches, Sorrentino’s cinematic Bildungsroman is a game of two halves. The first half is a sensual, evocative, and very funny depiction of an awkward teenage boy’s coming of age in the considerable bosom of his loving but loopy family. (Bosoms in Sorrentino films are frequently considerable.) The second half opens with an appalling tragedy identical to that which befell Sorrentino’s parents. It becomes a sombre, ruminative, and moving meditation on love, loss, and the forming of a film director — which is what the boy aspires to be, inspired, among others, by Fellini and a more recent, real-life Neapolitan director, Antonio Capuano (played here by a gloomy Ciro Capano), as well as by the divine Diego’s example of the transcendence of the imagination: if you can dream it, you can do it. Much of the pleasure to be taken from the opening section of The Hand of God is in the portraits of the boy’s family, the Schisas, and their eccentric friends and neighbours. We meet the boy’s father, a sweet-natured man who works in a bank and manages to be both extravagantly uxorious and habitually unfaithful. Inevitably, he is played by Toni Servillo. (Hard to imagine Servillo’s chagrin if he hadn’t been offered the part.) We meet the boy’s vivacious, prankster mother (Teresa Saponangelo) and witness her agonies over her husband’s infidelity. We spend time with his older brother (Marlon Joubert) — though not his sister because, in an enjoyable running joke, she’s always in the bathroom. All these are closely modelled on Sorrentino’s own family. We meet, too, the Baroness (a scene-stealing Betty Pedrazzi), the family’s snobbish upstairs neighbour, grandly indignant, who will play a crucial — and unexpected — role in the boy’s sentimental education. And at an al fresco family gathering, we meet his extended family, including the monstrous Signora Gentile, seen shovelling a great ball of burrata into her gob, liquid cheese running down her chin. Perhaps most memorably we meet the boy’s crazy-beautiful Aunt Patrizia, a traumatised exhibitionist, played with wit and pathos by the striking Luisa Ranieri. “When did you all become so disappointing?” wonders a senior family member. Viewers may beg to disagree: you might not want to live with them, but they’re a lot of fun to watch. And then we witness the deaths, and Sorrentino’s reaction to them. “In the film,” he said, “the percentage of pain and the difficulties I experienced when I was a boy is very limited, very small compared to the dark, sombre reality I found myself in. But in order to make a film, even if it’s based on a true story, you have to add novelistic and cinematic elements. What is true to my own personal story is the feeling.” The fantastic and the quotidian coexist in The Hand of God, as in earlier films — as well as the family we encounter San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, and the mystical Little Monk, a legendary Neapolitan sprite. But those steeped in Sorrentino, as I was in the days leading up to our interview, might detect a plainer, less ostentatious cinematic style — by his standards, at least — compared to the rich sauce of earlier works, more minestrone than ragu.

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Below, from top: Toni Servillo as the jaded journalist Jep in Sorrentino's Oscar-winning 2013 masterpiece, ‘The Great Beauty’; Jude Law and John Malkovich in ‘The New Pope’

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Below, clockwise from top: Sorrentino with his Grand Jury Prize award, and Scotti with the Mastroianni prize for best new actor, at the Venice Film Festival, September 2021; Diego Maradona miraculously outjumps England's Peter Shilton to score in the World Cup quarter-ﬁnal, Mexico 1986; Sorrentino at the later-named Diego Armando Maradona Stadium, home of his beloved Napoli, during the making of ‘The Hand of God’

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Getty Images | Gianni Fiorito/Netﬂix

genuinely taken aback. “It’s just amazing!” he offered, because what else can one say about such an experience? His director had seen it all before. At open castings in Naples, Sorrentino auditioned more than 100 hopefuls for the role of Fabietto. What was he looking for? “I have no idea! I saw many, many actors. He was the best in terms of his ability. But the other element that made me choose him was that I did not understand him, and I still don’t. I don’t understand him in the same way I did not understand myself, the kid I was when I was 17. He’s a mysterious man. He could become a star. All the stars I have known are mysterious.” Scotti had no comment on the likelihood of his imminent stardom, although he looked winningly sheepish as it was discussed. What he did say is that the night before his first audition with Sorrentino he was “supernervous”, slept not a wink, and yet — mysteriously? — felt not at all tired when he arrived at the Palazzo Cavalcanti, on Naples’ via Toledo, for his chance to impress. He wasn’t a complete novice: he had acted on stage, in short films, and on a Netflix series, Luna Nera. But this was of a different order of magnitude. “It was shocking for me to see [Sorrentino],” he remembers of that first meeting. “It was like a cold shower. I just tried to focus on the lines as much as I could.” He already had an inkling that he might be playing Sorrentino himself as a boy. “Sometimes,” Scotti said, “when you are going to an audition the first thing they say is shave your beard, take off your earring. Not this time. It was, ‘Keep your sideburns.’ A little detail. But I didn’t know for sure.” Once he learnt the part was his, the fear intensified. In Venice, he turned to Sorrentino: “I don’t know if you remember that when we went to read the script together, I was like, ‘Paolo, are you sure? I mean you only chose me yesterday. There is still time to change your mind.’ I was pretty scared.” Scotti maintained his equilibrium by shutting out too many thoughts of the heavy responsibility of reincarnating the director as a boy. “The thing about working with a great director is that everything around you seems simple,” he said. “Everything is so well organised. I remember that after the first meeting Paolo told me, ‘Read the script, memorise the scene, but don’t try to understand everything. We will jump together.’” FROM THE STAGE OF THE DOLBY THEATER IN LOS ANGELES, in March 2014, Sorrentino dedicated his Oscar for The Great Beauty to his parents and his siblings, his collaborators, and his wife, as well as “Federico Fellini, Talking Heads, Martin Scorsese and Diego Armando Maradona.” Anyone with even a passing interest in football — and plenty with none, such was his impact — will know that Maradona is considered by many to be the most gifted footballer ever. Sorrentino certainly thinks so. Near the beginning of The Hand of God, as rumours swirl about the possibility that Maradona might come to play for Napoli, an older character is asked how likely he thinks this is. “He’d never leave Barcelona for this shithole,” comes the world-weary reply. But he did. In 1984 Maradona arrived to transform the fortunes of Napoli from hopeless also-rans to champions. Sorrentino speaks of Maradona, as Maradona did himself on at least one occasion, in religious terms. “What I know,” he told me, “is that Maradona is perceived by Neapolitans as a god. He was back then and he still is now. He appeared and disappeared like a divine entity, a spirit. He’s more important than San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples. He never landed and got off a plane in Naples, he just appeared. And then disappeared. And then in ’94 he was resurrected. And then he died in martyrdom. He was killed and he is now a martyr. Of course, people who are against him say he was a victim of himself — as we all are — but in his case I do think he was a martyr.”

The suggestion that Maradona, who died, aged 60, in November 2020, shortly after shooting wrapped on The Hand of God, might have squandered his opportunities as his life descended into chaos, is given short shrift by Sorrentino. “I don’t think we should judge harshly those who pass from being the poorest to being the most famous in the world,” Sorrentino said. “I know people who OD’d from much less fame.” The scene in The Hand of God that might prove hardest for an English audience to swallow is the one that gives the film its title, when the whole of Naples, Schisas among them, erupts in celebration at Maradona’s impish handball against England, in the quarter-final of the 1986 World Cup. “A genius!” is the Neapolitan verdict on the Argentine’s revenge on the imperialist English, as the replays show that rather than magically outjumping the much taller England goalkeeper, Peter Shilton, Maradona has in fact punched the ball into the net. It is this act of outrageous, improvised cheek — we say cheating, they say whatever it takes — that seals the match in infamy, if you’re English, and Maradona’s reputation in infallibility, if you’re Neapolitan. (Or, presumably, Argentine.) Visitors to Naples even today, almost 30 years after he left Napoli, will confirm that wandering the streets, one sees almost as many images of Maradona as of the Madonna — and she can be found on every other corner. Last year, following his death, Napoli’s famous old stadium, the San Paolo, was renamed the Diego Armando Maradona Stadium. But Maradona has, perhaps, an extra special meaning for Sorrentino. “He was, for me, a symbol of something I hadn’t experienced,” Sorrentino said. “I come from a family who never brought me to see films, I never went to museums. I had very little relationship with art in general. My first taste of art was Maradona. He was an artist of football. He is the first one who made me see that an artist, in his expression, is able to transcend reality, which is what he did.” Also, he saved a boy’s life. DIEGO MARADONA WAS BORN AND RAISED DIRT POOR IN THE SLUMS OF BUENOS AIRES. His almost superhuman talent made him, for a time, rich and famous beyond dreams, or nightmares, a hero to millions, and then, as his life spiralled out of control, a villain to millions of others. A victim of his appetites, he was destroyed by drugs, bad company, terrible decisions. Sorrentino has made films before about men who fly too close to the sun, men who surrender to their worst instincts, causing harm to themselves and others. But The Hand of God is not about Maradona. It’s about an innocent teenage boy — not rich or famous or powerful or corrupt — who suffers a horrifying double-bereavement and finds escape in creativity, salvation in art. “The truth is,” Sorrentino said, “I have never fully understood why I made these films about these older, powerful, corrupted men. I was just fascinated with them. And it was another way to escape reality, to distance myself and to go very far away, to find an alternative universe.” Having completed The Hand of God, I wondered if he feels a sense of catharsis? “We’ll see,” Sorrentino said. “I made a film about Giulio Andreotti because I was obsessed with him. Once I’d made it, I was no longer interested in Andreotti. I hope it’s the same with my constant coming to terms with my biography. I don’t know yet.” The film opens with an epigraph, a quote from the divine Diego himself: “I did what I could. I don’t think I did it so badly.” Is Sorrentino able to say the same? “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I think I am.” ○ The Hand of God is on Netflix from 15 December

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Edited by JOHNNY DAVIS

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DIVING

Interview by Johnny Davis

Photographs by Simon Emmett

Styling by Catherine Hayward

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH NEEDS TO WORK ON HIS BANJO GAME But he does know how to whittle. And stack hay. And paint cats. And if you ask nicely, he might make a shoe for your horse. With four new films ready for release, from Marvel spectaculars to intense dramas, cinema’s most distinctive — and best prepared — leading man has had a productive pandemic

Opposite: Benedict Cumberbatch photographed for Esquire in London, July 2021. He wears navy wool shacket, £2,100; navy/grey check wool sweater, £590; navy wool trousers, £980, all by GIORGIO ARMANI

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BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH IS A DILIGENT RESEARCHER of the lives of his characters, both fictional and non-fictional. On the face of it, the story of Greville Wynne, the character he plays in his most recent film, The Courier, offered rich pickings. But there was a problem. A real-life businessman recruited by MI6 during the Cold War as a go-between with Soviet asset Oleg Penkovsky, the late Wynne had left behind two books detailing his exploits. Unfortunately, he was a compulsive liar. Much of what he described was either wrong or simply couldn’t have taken place. The Courier, then, needed to be one Hollywood biopic that relied less on its source material to try to get to the truth. (When it comes to espionage, it turns out you don’t know who to trust.) So how best to get a handle on the man? “It’s weird,” Cumberbatch says. “Things come out of leftfield that pull you in the direction of understanding a character.” With Greville Wynne it was his tie. “I said ‘This tie’s in every single photograph of him. It’s what he wears on his show trial, it’s what he wears when he comes out of prison, it’s what he wears before he was ever embroiled in this whole thing.’ I researched it. It was a University of Nottingham Engineering Club tie. He was never part of any club. It’s a uniform. He’s projecting a personality. It’s an act. A bit of showmanship.” BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH HAS BEEN BUSY. He currently has four films awaiting release. Two for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home, and two others in which his love of research proved especially useful. For The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, about an eccentric Edwardian artist whose pictures of big-eyed cats playing cards, doing the washing up, etc, bought him a very big audience but very little money, he enlisted the help of Wain’s long-time art dealer, Chris Beetles. “I did a lot of the painting that you see in the film,” Cumberbatch says. “That is me doing it though I can’t do it with both hands [Wain painted with two hands simultaneously].” But he really had his work cut out on The Power of the Dog, the mind-blowing new western by Jane Campion. He plays Phil Burbank, a Montana ranch owner who torments a local widow who unexpectedly marries his younger brother, George. According to Thomas Savage’s original 1967 novel, the elder Burbank is “a great reader, a taxidermist, skilled at braiding rawhide and horsehair, a solver of chess problems, a smith and metalworker, a collector of arrowheads (even fashioning arrowheads himself with greater skill than any Indian), a banjo

player, a fine writer, a builder of hay-stacking beaver-slide derricks, a vivid conversationalist”. All the horse-riding Cumberbatch was fine with, having covered that one in the 2011 movie War Horse. “Loved it,” he says. “Wonderful just to get back in the saddle.” That just left braiding, roping, ironmongery, hide-treating, hay-stacking, whistling, whittling and the banjo. The Power of the Dog leaves you in no doubt he became proficient in them all. He was match-fit before shooting began, visiting an ironmonger on location in South Island — New Zealand standing in for the 1920s American West — where he hammered out a horseshoe to give Campion as a good luck present. In the book, which Campion adapted herself, Burbank doesn’t just make derricks. He also carves “tiny chairs no higher than an inch”. Such a chair has a small but significant part in the story, so he made a set of those, too. For reasons buried deep in his past and because it is the image he needs to project, Burbank seldom washes. So Cumberbatch followed suit. “I wanted that layer of stink on me. I wanted people in the room to know what I smelt like. It was hard, though. It wasn’t just in rehearsals. I was going out to eat and meet friends of Jane and stuff. I was a bit embarrassed by the cleaner, where I was living.” He stayed in character throughout, ominous Montana drawl intact. “If someone forgot, on the first day, and called me Benedict, I wouldn’t move,” he says. There were also a lot of cigarettes to be smoked — “perfectly rolled with one-hand”, as per Savage’s text. “That was really hard,” he says. “Filterless rollies, just take after take after take. I gave myself nicotine poisoning three times. When you have to smoke a lot, it genuinely is horrible.” Still, with all this, there’s always room for improvement. “I really wanted to become world-class at the banjo,” Cumberbatch says. “And I’m very much not. I’m very far off.” BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH ARRIVES PROMPTLY ONE JULY MORNING to have his photograph taken for this article. He stands in the garden in a windcheater and trainers talking on his phone. He is slight and polite and gets involved in the photos, suggesting set-ups, noticing when the sunlight’s changed. “When you’re on the red carpet and they’re going ‘To me! To me! To me!’ That’s horrible,” he says. “This is a bit more creative.” Afterwards he settles down with a chocolate

brownie and a ginger beer, news that will no doubt send shockwaves across the corner of the internet dedicated to whether Benedict Cumberbatch is or is not a vegan. (But then there seems to be a corner of the internet dedicated to anything to do with Benedict Cumberbatch.) “I was for about 18 months,” he confirms. “I applaud people who are vegan and I enjoyed my journey with it, but it [non-vegan food] just crept back into my life.” Of more concern is sustainability. The outfits he wears in these pages have, for the most part, been chosen with their environmental footprint in mind, with his input. “Unsustainable practices… there is another way of doing it,” he says. “You can think of a solution and really do something.” Cumberbatch is a doer. His friend, Keira Knightley, once said he never chooses the easy path. He laughs. “Pushing that boulder up the hill. I mean… I like a challenge,” he says. Why does he think that is? “I really enjoy my work. When I do work, I want to work hard. It has to be worth leaving my family [his wife, the theatre director Sophie Hunter, and three boys] and home for. To make them… Oh, this sounds weird but I guess to validate me not being there. And if I can get away with a new skill and call it work, lucky me, you know? That saves me a few night classes or, you know, time I don’t have.” Still, there’s a difference between learning a new skill and wanting to become world-class at the banjo. “But on the side of the set it’s very, very good,” he says. “It’s like giving an actor something to eat, like Marlon Brando said. You’re constantly taking the nervous energy away. It did mean I was slightly antisocial, but you know, whatever. I don’t need to be gossiping around the coffee urn on every shoot. I think my primary motivation is that I just really, really enjoy it,” he says. “And I like the idea that I might be getting better at it.” IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE THAT ANYONE WHO SEES THE POWER OF THE DOG COULD DISAGREE. It is outstanding in every way, from the script to the scenery. “I spent a really long time trying to work out the languaging for it,” says Jane Campion. “How we were going to photograph it, frame it. And have a rule of utter economy. Like, try to keep those shots going for as long as we could and try to not make it frivolous.” The book the film is based on is not wellknown, selling “no more than a few thousand copies” on its release, notes Annie Proulx in her →

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afterword to a 2001 reprint. But in Burbank it features, she says, “one of the meanest characters in American literature”. “It kept coming back to me,” Campion says. “And if something haunts you, you’ve got to let nature happen. I felt ‘this should be done.’” As for her leading man: “We pushed each other along. He was a really great collaborator with high expectations and ideals. Practical skills? Oh my god… he was dazzling.” I ASK CUMBERBATCH IF HE’S EVER SIGNED UP FOR A JOB and thought “I’ll just busk it”. “Yeah,” he says, immediately. “I’m doing it tonight.” He’s talking about Letters Live, the event at which famous names read out historical letters. Audiences never know what they’re going to get, the celebrity bingo aspect being part of the appeal. Cumberbatch has been a regular since the first show in 2013. “I really haven’t practised,” he says. Tonight he reads a letter written by a dying miner to his wife, in a 1902 mining disaster, his 14-year-old son trapped next to him. Then one from a guest banned from the Empress Hotel in British Columbia, three sides of increasingly farfetched excuses that went viral in 2018. Four lines from Hunter S Thompson to a literary agent who turned him down. And a letter from Nick Cave in reply to someone called Cynthia, asking for advice on grief. Cave’s son, Arthur, died in 2015. “I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there,” he writes. “I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there.” Afterwards I find Cumberbatch in the bar with his wife, and friends. He says he started getting overcome by the first letter, its meaning only coming into focus as he read it aloud. “I couldn’t help it,” he says. “I didn’t realise about his son. I told you I hadn’t practised. So, the joy of doing the Empress Hotel…” Then there was Nick Cave. Cumberbatch is a formidable mimic, but Cave’s letter is one letter he chooses to perform in his own voice. “I do quite a good Nick Cave, I was very tempted to...” he says. “But I just thought ‘I can’t.’ He’s too big a presence.” Cave has Louis Wain paintings up on the walls of his Brighton home. He also has a cameo in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain playing HG Wells. “It’s a bit of a Nick Cave fest,” Cumberbatch says. “Nick Cave is a master, he really is.” OF THE MANY COMPELLING CHARACTERS CUMBERBATCH HAS TAKEN ON — Sherlock Holmes, Alan

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Turing, Stephen Hawking, WWI soldier Colonel Mackenzie, Hamlet, Frankenstein, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s Peter Guillam — the only one who is both real and still alive, is Dominic Cummings. I wonder if that changed his approach? He immediately points out my mistake. “Patrick Melrose is still alive,” he says. “Billy Bulger, I think, has died. Julian Assange is still alive… you know, Khan’s on ice, so that’s open for debate…” (For the record, William “Billy” Bulger, the American lawyer he played in 2015’s Black Mass, is 87 and still alive at the time of writing. Patrick Melrose, who he played in 2018’s sublime TV miniseries, is based on the semi-autobiographical novels of Edward St Aubyn, 61, and still around. Khan Noonien Singh, who he played in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, is a genetically engineered augmented superhuman from the 23rd century, who the crew of the USS Enterprise put into cryogenic sleep. He’s got me on Assange.) Still, he takes my point? “I take your point… in a way. But don’t think I have just played historical characters.” It’s difficult to gauge whether he’s actually quite put out. “What’s the nature of the question? I don’t think it’s a very strong thesis.” I really wanted to ask about Cummings, I say. That having re-watched Brexit: The Uncivil War, 2019’s TV drama about the Vote Leave campaign, in the light of his recent disclosures and allegations, it seemed even more eerily on the money. “I tease James [Graham, the writer] about every headline that pops up, you know?” he says. “Going ‘We’re now on sequel number ﬁve’. It’s been extraordinary to watch a character who was pretty unknown in the backrooms of the corridors of power come to the forefront in such an extraordinary way. I don’t really want to judge him.” But he met Cummings. He must have watched his “revenge” with interest? “I have my own opinions. But I think it’s far more important that other people express those things than me. I don’t have any insight beyond the moments in time that I try to get something right of them in a portrayal. I’m not the go-to expert on this.” There is, I suggest, one more still-living famous name he’s played this year. Morrissey, on The Simpsons. “That was not Morrissey!” In the episode Panic on the Streets of Springﬁeld, Lisa becomes besotted by depressed English singer Quilloughby and his band The Snuffs, authors of “Hamburger Homicide”, “How Late Is Then?” and “Everyone Is Horrid Except Me

(And Possibly You)”. Later, she visits a music festival and finds the bequiffed singer has turned into an overweight bigot. You do sound a lot like him, and sing a lot like him. “Oh, thank you,” he says. “I take it as a compliment because I love the way he sings and sounds.” Morrissey was less keen. His manager issued a sprawling statement, saying, among other things, of Cumberbatch, “Could he be that hard up for cash that he would agree to bad rap another artist that harshly?” saying he should “speak up”. “Does he even have enough balls to do that?” “No comment,” Cumberbatch says, probably for the best. HAVING WATCHED OR RE-WATCHED A SIZEABLE but still incomplete sample of his work looking for clues and context and connections — 21 roles — I fear that the most insightful finding I can report back is that Cumberbatch is simply a terrific actor. There was a time when even he had to concede that he was falling victim to “playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals”, as he told Radio Times in 2011. But that is simply no longer true, if it ever really was anyway. In 12 Years a Slave there’s a plantation owner called George Ford with Cumberbatch’s face and body, but the voice, posture and movement is of someone else entirely. In Atonement there’s an oily paedophile named Paul Marshall, someone the film’s credits insist is Cumberbatch, but I fear there must have been some terrible mix-up. On the YouTube comments under The Fifth Estate trailer, his Julian Assange film (still alive, 50!), the verdict is unanimous. “As an Australian I must say that Benedict’s accent in this movie is an outstanding achievement! Even the highest ranked actors can’t pull it off like he did.” “For a British bloke he pulls of the aussie accent magnificently.” “His accent is sooo gooood omg.” More perplexing still, it’s not like Cumberbatch has a particularly forgettable face, as all those “sexy otter” memes and Sid-the-Sloth-from-IceAge jokes suggest. But the only time you think “Oh, there’s that bloke from Sherlock” is when you’re watching Sherlock. “He’s uniquely chameleon-like,” says Dominic Cooke, who directed Cumberbatch in The Courier and 2016’s BBC production of Richard III. “It is possible to transform physically, and he takes on a completely different physical space and appearance. He did two [stage] shows in the space of a couple of years, Frankenstein [directed by Danny Boyle, 2011, where Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller audaciously took alternate nights playing

‘MY PRIMARY MOTIVATION IS THAT I REALLY ENJOY MY WORK. AND I WANT TO WORK HARD. IT HAS TO BE WORTH LEAVING MY FAMILY AND HOME FOR. AND I LIKE THE IDEA THAT I MIGHT BE GETTING BETTER AT IT’

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Frankenstein/The Creature], which was like a piece of modern dance, he was naked for the first 20 minutes, throwing himself around the stage. The other was a really tight Terence Rattigan play [After the Dance, 2010, directed by Thea Sharrock] where he was very vertical and ‘held’, and I said to him ‘I cannot imagine another actor on the planet who could do both of those things as well as you did them.’” “He’s got such a strong imagination, like a child,” says Claire Foy, who has played Cumberbatch’s on-screen wife twice, once in 2011 drama Wreckers and again in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. “He’s so willing to go into a scenario and see what happens. And that really is rare. That’s not how I am with acting, and it’s amazing to be around.” “Look at him in Black Mass, playing Johnny Depp’s brother,” says Edward Berger, who directed Patrick Melrose and will work with Cumberbatch again next year on a Netflix miniseries of The 39 Steps. “It’s a much smaller role [than Depp’s]. But the deep voice, the way he performs… He will never give you a boring performance, and that’s part of the secret. ‘How can I stand out? How can I make the audience remember the scene?’” “Every actor has their process,” says Will Sharpe, director of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. “When we rehearsed, he was supercomprehensive. Interrogating every footstep, every stroke of the pencil. But on set, he leaves it at the door. He becomes more instinctive, but he has all the knowledge there.” Before playing Dominic Cummings, Cumberbatch went round to his house for dinner. Cummings’s wife, The Spectator journalist Mary Wakefield, wrote about it. “He was friendly, curious — but he hadn’t come to judge Dom. He’d come to become him,” she said. She made a vegan pie (she’d heard a rumour). When Cumberbatch arrived he declined alcohol on the grounds he didn’t really drink and assumed “what I imagine is a very Cumberbatchian pose” — legs underneath him, head up, leaning forward. Two hours later he was reclining with a glass of red wine, “just like Dom”. By 1am he was a mirror image. Both men reclining, each with an arm behind his head. Later, she showed her two-year-old a photo of Cumberbatch on the Brexit set. “Dada,” he reportedly said. “That’s Dada, Mum.” CUMBERBATCH MADE HIS PUBLIC DEBUT in the Daily Mirror, under the sell “Wanda’s Little Wonder”, at four days old. His parents, Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton, are actors. Mum appeared in

West End farces, 1970s TV staples The Saint and The Likely Lads and plays by John Osborne and Fay Weldon. Dad was a regular at the Royal Court and was in a run of several well-known TV shows, from Cold Comfort Farm to Foyle’s War. More recently they played Sherlock’s parents, in Sherlock. I ask Cumberbatch what he was like when he was young. “At what age?” Whatever comes to mind. “I was very inquisitive. I was talkative. Slightly eccentric, I think. An old soul, as one of my teachers described me. I had a great amount of energy. I was an only child so I loathed conflict.” That’s an only-child thing? “Yeah, it kicks off all the time at home now. Not if you’re an only child. You’re not used to resistance. I still don’t like conflict.” School, he says, sorted him out. “I was lucky enough to be in an environment [public school] that focused it into craft and acting and music and rugby and other sports. As opposed to going ‘This is a problem child, we need to do something about him.’ I think I was desperately insecure for all sorts of reasons and tried to compensate for that. I was petrified by the idea of what other people thought of me.” That’s why people become actors. “Oh, there’s any number of reasons. Both my parents were, and I loved watching it.” I ask if there were famous faces off the telly coming to the house. “To a degree. But we very, very, very rarely entertained. But, you know, they [his parents] were in and out of companies of film productions, or film shoots that were coming to an end. I remember wrap parties. But it wasn’t like Stella Street. I had the experience of my mum being recognised in the frozen-peas section. That’s what I thought fame was.” Is acting hard? “I’ve got nothing to compare it to, so I don’t know. I enjoy the things that are challenging about it… so I wouldn’t say it’s hard. That’s such a loaded question. The reality of how people get into acting and have a career, that’s hard. Doing it is a joy. I think any actor would agree with that.” You do seem to be working at capacity. “I’m kind of easing out of that now, where I always wanted to live a life less ordinary. A couple of flirts with mortality made me go ‘I really want to make the most of this brief, insignificant moment to do something.’” Cumberbatch is referring to a time in South Africa in 2004, when he and two friends were bundled into the boot of a car and held at gunpoint. There was also a gap-year incident at a Tibetan monastery, in which he nearly died of

dehydration. An armchair psychologist would certainly spot a link there. “It’s very ‘armchair’. Yeah, absolutely. Time is precious and if you have something that threatens your time you immediately see why.” “Fame is harder,” he says. “Fame is much harder, I think.” AT 9PM ON JULY 25 2010, AT THE AGE OF 34, Cumberbatch went from a well-regarded actor doing “small parts in big films”, to becoming literally famous overnight. From episode one, Sherlock was giddily and globally successful and Cumberbatch inspired a level of devotion that can be hard to get your head around. By any measure he has dealt with it exceptionally well. “Sherlock was essentially the perfect match of actor and part,” says Mark Gatiss, its co-creator and writer. “Having taken the plunge on a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, everything about Benedict, his age, his look, his ‘otherness’ marked him out. We drew up a huge list of possible Sherlocks but, in the end, we saw no-one but him.” History suggests that it was his repulsive Atonement turn — a small part in a big film, a fine example of how to make the audience remember the scene — that landed Cumberbatch the gig as the high-functioning sociopath detective. Gatiss says that’s half-right. “I’d worked with Ben on Starter for 10 [a 2006 film about University Challenge. Cumberbatch plays the stuck-up team captain; Gatiss is Bamber Gascoigne] and knew him a little bit. But Atonement made a huge impression on us all.” Gatiss says he’s asked every day if there’ll ever be more Sherlock. I ask Cumberbatch if he’d like to put a percentage chance on it. “It wouldn’t be fair on anyone else involved — I’m not going to be drawn into that. No, no.” Come on. “Oh look, I still say never say never. I really like that character… it’s just, the circumstances need to be right and I think maybe it’s too soon now to see it have another life. I think, wonderful as it is, it’s had its moment for now. But that’s not to say it wouldn’t have another iteration in the future.” Director Dominic Cooke thinks Sherlock came at the right time for Cumberbatch. “He had a long time just being a very good actor and getting on with it. Emotionally, he was mature by the time he got to the pressures of success. I think he quite enjoys it — he enjoys it more than a lot of British actors. He curates it quite carefully, like an oldfashioned star.” Cooke recalls a reception the pair attended after the burial service for Richard III at Leicester →

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Cathedral in 2015, the king’s body having been discovered buried under a car park. Cumberbatch read a commissioned poem by Carol Ann Duffy. “It was like a nature documentary when they realised he was there — that flurry of activity.” A trickle of selfies became a flood. “It became intense, and he did quite a lot of it, and then he just said ‘I’m sorry, I’m not doing anymore now because I’m going to talk to my friend.’ He wasn’t defensive or stressed out, and everyone got it. I was very impressed with that.” Cumberbatch remembers doing Frankenstein and realising that the same people were in the front row every night. They’d come from China. He asked them how on earth they could afford the time and money. “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” they said. “We love you.” IT’S A FOOL’S ERRAND TO TRY AND PUT YOUR FINGER ON WHY one person is more popular than another, let alone assess it if you actually are that person. But Cumberbatch is so hysterically loved that I ask him if he stops to wonder why. His answer is notable for its peculiarity and its length, and perhaps for something of what it reveals of how he sees himself, compared to how I suspect others might see him. This is what he says. “I’m easy with promoting my failings, and that I’m just trying to do it and fail better, at whatever it is. Life principles. Advocacy work. Privacy. All of that. I don’t know. I really don’t want to say these things because it becomes about selfappraisal and it sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet. But I try to keep a balance of certainty in who I am. And also an empathy for others, to try to be an open human being. So hopefully I keep everyone surprised and everyone, I suppose, who is that devoted… also people who are dismissive as well, there’s all sorts of voices out there, when you get to the sort of exposure I’ve had, and I’m aware of that as much as I’m aware of the devotion — I think people are loyal to me because, and maybe I say this with good intentions, but I try to improve. Like the old Samuel Beckett paraphrase, fail better.” WHAT HAS YOUR EXPERIENCE OF BEING A SUPERHERO TAUGHT YOU? “That’s a good question,” Cumberbatch says. “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.” IN 2014 CUMBERBATCH JOINED MARVEL as Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, primary protector of Earth against magical and mystical threats. His friend Tom Hiddleston had signed up three years earlier, in the role of Loki, God of Mischief.

“He didn’t ask for advice,” Hiddleston says. “And he didn’t need it! He had already worked on a huge scale on Star Trek Into Darkness and Sherlock was a global phenomenon. Over the 10 or so years I’ve known him what stands out is his limitless curiosity. He’s keenly aware that life is short and precious, and his range comes from the depth of his internal world — we contain multitudes — and his energy. I love his Doctor Strange, I think it’s terriﬁc.” I ask Cumberbatch: did Marvel approach him? “Yes, yes they did.” And how quickly did you say yes? “I kind of had my doubts about it, from just going into the comics. I thought ‘This is a very dated, sexist character.’ And it’s very tied up in that crossover, that kind of East meets West occultism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.” He was a Vietnam-era pulp character. Ken Kesey was into him. “Yeah, yeah. And then they sort of sold me on the bigger picture, on ‘Oh no, don’t worry, this will be very much a character of his time. And, yes, he has attitude problems… but this is what we envisage’.” Cumberbatch met with Scott Derrickson, known for his horror movies, and said yes. “And then I realised ‘Oh fuck, I can’t do it’,” he says. “I promised to do Hamlet [at the Barbican]. It’s all set up, the theatre’s booked, I can’t do it when you want to shoot it.” So Marvel moved the shoot back six months. One of the impressive things on the very long list of impressive things Marvel Studios has pulled off is that it doesn’t just make popular movies out of popular characters, it makes popular movies out of ones no one’s heard of. Doctor Strange wasn’t exactly Krypto the Superdog. But he wasn’t Iron Man either. “Completely,” says Cumberbatch. “I’ve got the Second Album Fear with this one, because the ﬁrst one was such a riotous success and he’s become a much-loved character.” He thinks about this. “I think it’s always harder to exceed expectations when they’re high. I’m not saying they make them low. ‘We’re going to do Ant-Man!’ They’re starting to take more risks now, I think. You know, Taika Waititi, they were, like, ‘Are we…? Is this going to work?’ And it’s fucking so funny, Thor: Ragnarok.” You must be a hit at children’s parties now. “Not at the age range I’m going to.” Aren’t a couple of your kids the perfect age? “Yeah… if you’re aware I’m Doctor Strange. But I do look quite different from him.” In fact, he has appeared as Doctor Strange at a kids’ party, in a Jimmy Kimmel Live sketch.

“The one time I’ve ever played him outside of the [Marvel] world,” Cumberbatch says. “[The kids] really didn’t know who I was. And my abilities as the Sorcerer Supreme weren’t really appreciated by toddlers on a sugar high.” The Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer, which gives almost equal billing to Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, was watched 335.5m times in its first 24 hours, a record that gives it fair dibs on being the most anticipated movie ever made. Christian Bale, Tilda Swinton, Anthony Hopkins… it’s harder to find a first-rate actor who hasn’t done a superhero movie now. But when they’re in their costumes, when the Avengers are all assembled, don’t they ever start giggling? “All the time when you’re making those movies are pinch-yourself moments,” says Cumberbatch, strategically misunderstanding. “I’m never over the giddy nature of working opposite Spider-Man. It’s pretty cool.” No one’s ever said “We’re middle-aged men! This isn’t what we went to Rada for”? “Yeah, but you go into it, and you commit to it and it’s daft. But it’s also really enjoyable and intoxicating and should be celebrated as well and treated for what it is, which is fun.” ANOTHER MORNING, ANOTHER INTERVIEW. Cumberbatch sits in a chair having makeup applied, his face illuminated by lightbulbs. He is to be photographed for the industry magazine The Hollywood Reporter (it appears with the coverline: “The Age of Cumberbatch”). He’s back from LA, from finishing off SpiderMan: No Way Home and fizzing with actorly enthusiasm about his co-star. “I had a lot of time with Tom Holland being utterly, utterly gobsmackingly brilliant. He’s just the real deal.” When we first met, it was the morning after he’d seen The Power of the Dog for the first time. Now he’s had time for it to sink in. “It leaves an indelible mark,” he says. “When you’re crafting a character like that, going deep into your psyche, it gives you sympathy and reverence. He wasn’t a monster. He was somebody trying to lead an authentic life.” Cumberbatch isn’t one to keep mementos from sets: “I never like being a tourist or a voyeur of my own work,” he says. But there was something he needed to hold on to from this one, to not let the experience go. To enshrine it a little bit. And so he took a tiny chair, no higher than an inch, in the style of Adam. He figured it couldn’t hurt. He’d made it himself, after all. ○ The Power of the Dog is in cinemas on 17 November and on Netflix from 1 December

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THERE’S A SECOND-HAND BOOKSHOP NEAR LESSER TOWN SQUARE, just a few steps away from that church with the tall, skinny clocktower that scrapes upwards alongside a shorter, much more genial-looking plump domed turret. The bookshop gathers itself in against the few cluttered square feet of pavement assigned to its exterior: there are so many books that some have to live outside in boxes, on a rickety shelf, and on two spinning carousels that don’t really turn anymore. The sign on the door says NO MONEY. The bookshop’s owner, Mr Zapomník, is inflexible on this matter. To customers who find it stressful to shop for books this way (too many reminders of the complex negotiations needed to acquire various goods when the Communists were in charge) he says: “There’s no need to think of it that way; mostly this is exercise for the books themselves.” Some customers have carte blanche: just take whatever you want. Others have take-it-or-leave-it offers. For one Vančura text you can take away two short-story collections and one poetry collection or play: no novels. For one Klíma text you can have three novels, but only novels. Cortázar’s Hopscotch gets you all the Shakespeare, Marlowe or Webster you can carry. Certain books will get you nothing except an order to leave immediately, though nobody is ever forbidden from coming back and trying again another day, with a different book. Though the decisions are made quickly, the rules are not made up as they go along. The staff refer to decades of precedent and they know their inventory. It’s literature live. A new staff member joined Mr Z’s team on the proviso that she speak only for herself unless possessed with explicit authorisation to do otherwise. The newbie spoke Czech, understood Slovak and read Latin. You know, just like every Prague housewife whose kids have flown the nest and whose professor husband has recently eloped with a former student. The newbie tried to act like she’d seen it all coming, but privately, she was feeling really, really low. Mr Z’s comment that her Latin literacy would “come in handy with some things that have been occurring at the shop” was a little bit of a boost. She kept asking herself stupid “If I had done this or that instead of grappling with Latin would I still be in a loving relationship” questions, so she was keen to proceed with the practical application of what she’d learned. After a few weeks that didn’t feature any Latin-related tasks, the newbie asked Mr Z about the “occurrences around the shop” he’d mentioned when hiring her. Mr Z’s face lit up. “This house was built by one of King Rudolf ’s courtiers,” he said, in an explaining voice. “I hear he had a gormless face and his family wasn’t just posh, they were a bunch of pious scholars, so he

always had an effective idea or two when it came to smoothing over tensions between the astronomers and the clergy. Apparently over the years three different people gave him this house as a token of appreciation for his peace-making — all three people thought they owned the house, but it was his all along, and he didn’t make a big deal out of it, just let them think they’d been generous. Thanks, thanks, so kind. I’m thinking he didn’t want so many people knowing this place belonged to him, anyway. People would ask what he used it for, since he didn’t install any tenants or servants or anybody. But look at it this way… it’s a convenient spot, this… close to the Castle and all its goings-on, so you can dash back before you’re missed…” One morning the newbie was on the toilet in the upstairs bathroom. There was a little casement window to her left, and she reflexively checked the view from that window every couple of seconds, dreading the thought of catching a Peeping Tom in the act. The newbie would’ve preferred the window to be curtained, but she wasn’t sure how to raise the issue without sounding like she thought everybody was interested in looking at her arse. It was difficult; everything was. There was a bump in the plaster panel that centred the window frame. She flicked a fingernail against it, then pushed it, to see if it sank. It wasn’t flat, but sharp — she almost got a paper cut. She ran a thumbnail around its circumference and it crackled. Paper, but not everyday paper. It seemed a folded banknote had infiltrated Mr Z’s money-free zone. She pulled. Oh. It was just paper after all… old paper… hang on, wasn’t this parchment? She felt it should be handled with gloves, and not just because she happened to be on the toilet just then. Latin. In almost luridly rectangular hand, someone had written: Only a matter that rests on three separate points can be settled for ever. That sentence was crossed out, then written out all over again and underlined. Over the days and weeks that followed, the newbie found further scraps all over the building. Her findings put her in a ticklish position. She couldn’t in her heart of hearts approve of an entire, very old notebook (16th-century, according to a friend of Mr Zapomník’s) being torn into scraps that resurfaced at will. Within the current meanings of propertyprotective law, doing this to a centuries-old artefact was probably a criminal offence. Yet the newbie prized each scrap as if it were a medal… for what? Patience? Learning where to look? Taking over hoovering duties and closely examining the dust bag before emptying it out? At any rate, soon enough she realised what was going on: this was gossip. And gossip was just her favourite, no matter how old it was. It made her feel →

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like a wise person who knew how to avoid being talked about. Knowing that it’s absolutely none of your business probably makes you want to hear this too: Fairly late in life, a nobleman at the court of Rudolf II fell in love with two physicians. Words like “smitten” and “besotted” barely approximate the nobleman’s state of mind; his heart and brain were ransacked. What he felt for the female physician was something akin to a first love that both quakes and settles a person at their very core: there was no particle of him that didn’t call to her, answer her. He stood dumbfounded in the presence of the male physician: that feeling, so sweetly distilled, was all the love that would go with him as he left this world. And both physicians were continuously present in his thoughts… … Talking about it later, the nobleman’s wife said she thought he might have been all right if these two people had happened to him a good 30 years apart. An opinion to be regarded with caution: wifey didn’t really seem to know what it’s like to lose your mind over someone even once, let alone twice. The nobleman’s wife, careful by nature, had been relieved that her parents had chosen someone who listened to her advice about what to do with their money and didn’t bother her for conversation or fulfilment of conjugal duties once she showed him a doctor’s note that stated that intimate activity was lifethreatening for her. She had another doctor’s note confirming that the sound of her husband’s voice inflamed her brain and endangered her health. She was no slacker, though — she had the dynastic side of things all settled. Before she’d seen fit to get the doctors’ notes, the nobleman and his wife had had three children: one heir and two daughters to strategically marry off when their shrewd mother saw that the time was right. I say she’d earned the right to some rest. The year was 1590. And in that royal court slathered with the cream of the realm’s crop of alchemists, astronomers, poets, painters, sculptors, philosophers and diplomats, the two physicians kept a low profile. They did not aim to astound. And the nobleman who loved them employed many wily manoeuvres to ensure that they didn’t learn that he was wooing them both. The female physician was interested in curative maltreatment. That was her term for it: most people who saw her at work would say: “Oh, isn’t she — isn’t that — torture???” An indisputably wicked business… unless you allowed Livia to assure you that her rationale was quite different. Livia was persuasive; her living situation had rubbed off on her. She was a member of the Florentine ambassador’s retinue — an illegitimate daughter of the ambassador’s, in fact, intermittently spoiled and neglected. In her teenaged years she tired of that

cycle and began to take notice of where she was and who was around her. She was mere centimetres from the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. And the throne was held by a King entirely composed of question marks. If the world and its ideas are a jigsaw puzzle of boundless dimensions, then question-marked and question-remarkable Rudolf had raised a hurricane of puzzle pieces that flew elliptically, crashed to the ground, shattered in collision with each other, connected in mid-air, fell upwards…? It seemed to Livia that everyone and everything presented themselves at court: either as age-old riddles or brand-new ones that burst out of scrolls and caskets and the translation of thunderous tongues. Instructors in various disciplines volunteered themselves: Livia represented a sliver of a chance to gain a precious moment of the King’s attention. Say she mentioned some teaching of theirs to the head of her household, who went on to repeat the mention in the right company, even by way of amusement… well, the instructor’s fortune could still be made. In return Livia was not unattracted, hesitating before turning away from Deep Mycology, incense making and enfleurage. She chose the one instructor who had neither the time nor the inclination to teach her anything: her father’s physician. The Florentine ambassador’s physician was one of the most respected in all Christendom, and had some knowledge of Ottoman medical practice too — so he could not escape Livia. She assisted this senior physician tirelessly and assisted in any way that occurred to her until, for the sake of his patients, he was forced to intervene and tell her what would actually be helpful for her to do and why. You mustn’t hold him responsible for Livia’s eventual specialisation, or her assertion that humans have knowledge of immortality, and that their lives only end (or appear to end) because they’re estranged from that knowledge. Livia was very firmly convinced that only curative maltreatment could restore a person’s sense of their true unkillability. And there was no use asking her who had taught her that, where she’d read it, or how she had come by the idea. She’d only name courtiers who agreed with her. Remember: those jigsaw pieces were boomeranging all around the Castle; claiming the origin of an approach was futile even if you wanted to. Considering Livia a challenge that he was up for, the lovelorn nobleman took care to woo her with sensitivity and eloquence. He made it clear that not only would Livia be able to hurt him in every way, but he’d tell her all about it in exhaustive detail. This was music to the ears of a researcher who wanted to hone the precision of her notes. Plus: certain of the nobleman’s measurements excited Livia immensely: the

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circumference of his nostrils and the arched depth of his nail beds. These told her that not only was she going to be able to hurt him in every way, but to a degree unprecedented for either of them. Livia had high hopes of being able to hurt the nobleman so much that he’d be in good health until the world itself came to an end, and probably even after that as well. With Livia the nobleman played a double role. He was co-guardian of her vision, which mostly meant buying all the equipment and materials she requested, instigating circulation of select ﬁndings from her experiments and giving her pep talks amidst the earth-, sea- and sky-shattering squealing of every single one of his nerve endings. He did everything he could think of to magnify her sense of purpose, and it worked. Her focus cocooned the two of them in data — data concerning how much he was able to take and how far she was able to go — and there would be no emergence until she’d catalogued it all. Despite all this, Livia never guessed that the body she subjected to curative maltreatment was that of her benefactor. He kept her very much in the dark about that. This was a counter-intuitive gambit on the nobleman’s part: after all, he got off on the idea of unconditional love just as much as the next emotionally intelligent gentleman about town. But he’d got to the age of 31 without that ever happening for him or for anybody he knew. Also… life expectancy being what it was, he had about 10 years left to enjoy any kind of ardent entanglement whatsoever. It was time to concentrate on “as ifs”. The nobleman had correctly understood this physician to be someone who liked a bit of intrigue. So, with the aid of a borrowed name and the wax seal of a third cousin of his who’d died in battle, the nobleman commissioned curative maltreatment research without meeting Livia: it was all done through letters she faithfully burned after reading… even the ones where he praised her progress and asked helpful questions. His physical self he presented to Livia as a “servant”, along with an introductory letter from his “master” that placed him entirely at her disposal. This worked well; he was pitied as a mere pawn of the man who commissioned the experiments. “You must outlast your master,” Livia whispered to him. “Not by a few measly years: by millenia!” When she wasn’t curatively mistreating the nobleman, she cared for him in other ways… well, it was exactly “as if ” she loved him. Which made it worth all the hassle. Livia wrote to the nobleman whenever she was ready to try a new method; he’d pay off her chaperones and meet her at a house close to the Castle. A house you may recognise. It wasn’t quite aligned with the lane it was on; it was a bit too wide, faintly over-stuffed somehow… no, it was evasive in its dimensions — that it was it. Something about the way the outer angles stretched

over the interior ones. It was the sort of house you could imagine eating the house next door, giving you a blank look with all openings very tightly fastened when you asked When did you last see your neighbour? and then munching up another building as soon as you turned your back. Bones and all. A house like that gobbles up every other structure along the lane without ever admitting it. Still chewing, it’d tell you I wouldn’t worry about it… just last week they were talking were going on holiday, or Aren’t all these disappearances awful! Sometimes I almost worry that I might be next. That’s right — it’s the building where Mr Zapomník’s bookshop stands now. If Prague Castle ever disappears overnight, I shall immediately release the address so that the bookshop can be thoroughly searched. The nobleman’s courtship of Livia included a month during which she mixed finely ground gold leaf into wine and had him drink that twice daily. He pissed gold and drooled gold and sweated gold, and in the third week it seemed to him that he was flayed by a brightness — a tingling spotlight, or two spotlights, one at his feet and one just above his head, shining into him and through him and melting him into a rancid puddle (later this was what he’d marvel at the most — that turning into a gold machine had made him stink as much as all that, and that the stench itself was so excruciating). Livia was reluctant to halt that experiment — measure for measure, he was excreting a lot more gold than he had taken in, and she was interested in working out how that was even possible. But his cover story for the month had been a trip to Silesia that was supposed to be drawing to an end. And he needed a few days to retrieve the appearance of someone who’d spent the past few days talking and riding and banqueting as opposed to screaming and melting. Another notable month was the one where she forced him to sleep all day, every day: she concocted a compound that she burned in the fireplace. After breathing in the fumes he couldn’t stay awake, and could only be woken by blows so heavy that they broke a wrist or a rib. And each time he woke she asked him what he’d dreamed, and he hadn’t dreamt of anything at all… Had Livia been the nobleman’s only love, he would’ve perished without leaving a trace of their quest to put an end to endings. Luckily(?) the nobleman’s second physician, Mikuláš, patched him up. Occasionally the nobleman was on tenterhooks as Mikuláš arrived at the house; he’d rehearse stories about falling off his horse or being attacked by a bear. He never got to tell them. Mikuláš never asked; he just set about treating the wounds. Unlike Livia, he didn’t equate medicine with healing. He was more inclined to argue that all doctors offered was longterm palliative care. Long-term? Yes, from birth onwards. Mikuláš →

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didn’t need to point out that the human organism is a frenzy of simultaneous processes; very often they could feel it. Blinking is a labour-intensive production, as is smiling, breathing, digestion, and everything else. Immortality?! How about focussing on handling the wear and tear of a single day? Mikuláš, the third son of a Moravian Count, had spent his life cheerfully staying out of his eldest brother’s way, the unspoken message being: The title’s all yours, psycho. His medical training had been formally administered by monks. But the monks weren’t responsible for his theory that we die when we can no longer hang on to the delusion that embodiment is a viable project. It isn’t, and never was, and the longer we keep trying, the worse it gets. And if you asked Mikuláš how he’d come to think like this he said he’d read it somewhere, and that it didn’t matter where. He was no scholar; he was doing what he could to help his patients feel less humiliated by the patent truth that we are not able to be. An inability we demonstrate daily. His nobleman was a model patient — rapturously exhausted, and eager to fade away into pleasure. Mikuláš prescribed no bitter medicines, delivered doses mouth to mouth and favoured the most temperate alleviations: numbing ointments, cooling elixirs, dimly but warmly lit rooms, the gentle laying on of hands, physical exercise to shift melancholic humours. Physical exercise: whenever the nobleman strolled in through the lofty columns of the Castle’s míčovna and saw his dove-like physician playing so gravely there with shoe in hand, he recalled the bliss of release, of renunciation, even. With what looked like a mere touch, Mikuláš spun a leather ball across the tiled inner chamber and set off at a sprint to receive it on its return journey. Sometimes — often — the ball ﬂew from shoe heel to shoe heel with such whistling velocity that the nobleman missed the moment when it dropped out of circulation and saw nothing when he studied the ground: the aeronaut had already rolled into the shadows. Livia, Livia’s lovemaking, her curative maltreatments and the sheer violence of her will: Livia was storm, stress and carnage on every level. She had already begun training a more junior physician in her curative maltreatment methods: to take care of the nobleman after she was gone, she said(!) But in his own softly impersonal way Mikuláš was every bit as exacting: his was a love that wished you gone. At times the nobleman felt himself becoming… slightly more and slightly less than a man. A channel of correspondence….? His days and nights with Livia were answered by his days and nights with Mikuláš. Both physicians grew uncertain of their methods; their patient was not responding the way he should have if they were right. And yet it wasn’t galling to be wrong,

or to have their work undone. The contradictions felt sweet, the question you thought you’d answered returning to meet you as an equal. “You’re getting stronger and stronger,” Mikuláš would say, running his hands along his patient’s shoulders, arms, and chest, flinching slightly, as if the healthy musculature was tumorous growth. His fingers made alphabetical patterns as he spread ointment across the nobleman’s wounds — well, one particular letter of the alphabet: a long sweep down, then a shorter sweep across. L, L, L, tessellations soaking into the skin. Weekly suffocation practice with Livia began to take on the contours of a séance: gripping him by the hair and raising his feebly lolling head from the pillows she’d stare into his eyes and tell him that she’d caught him again; he’d tried to resist breathing as the function returned to him. “Explain! What is this, who is this in you?” The nobleman could feel his lovers coming to know each other through him. The closer they grew to each other, the further they drifted from their medical practice. Livia had three shaggy, golden-fleeced goats brought to her from Palermo and grazed them on some land bordering the King’s vineyards. It was land that had been awarded to the Florentine Ambassador, so there were no legal problems, but the Ambassador had promised the land to his physician as a medicinal garden and the physician had already begun planting. The goats’ diet caused them to gambol in quite a reckless manner. Livia bought a lute and sang and played to them and it seemed to calm them down a bit; they’d settle down on the grass and nibble at her skirts whilst bleating their own lyrics. She milked them and made butter that even the garden-deprived physician had to agree was quite something. Mikuláš bought a bakery in the Lesser Quarter and applied himself to the milling of flour and the application of caraway and sunflower seeds to his doughs. The crusts of his rolls and loaves crackled to the point of debauchery. One evening, the nobleman sat down with a slice of Mikuláš’s sourdough. He topped it with some butter from Livia’s goats; a layer that stood about an inch high. He added a bit of salt — let’s presume that the salt represented him — and tucked in. Having patiently pandered to his ex-physicians’ requirements, and having seen them both through to the other side of their ambitions, the nobleman now felt sure of his own. Livia and Mikuláš were ready to meet each other in the flesh. That is, in their own flesh, not his. They had to get out of the King’s orbit. The nobleman didn’t want to blame the King outright for the fact that everyone who existed in his vicinity was completely losing their shit,

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problematising the desire to live yet unable to forgive themselves for dying. This wasn’t entirely Rudolf ’s fault, but pastoral care was lacking. You can’t really have perpetual festivals of theory without that. The nobleman lured his bread and his butter out to the woods of Okoř, quite some way from Prague Castle. Livia’s goats came too, as she couldn’t find anyone willing to watch them while she was gone. The trees were meant to be a soothing factor, but they must have gone on the wrong day; it was like walking amongst the bristles of an exceedingly green and even more excessively sulky hog. (The boundaries of the city of Prague had not yet expanded as far as Okoř back then. They still haven’t. But you mark my words: one day they will.) Regardless of the setting, Livia and Mikuláš had some enthralment and some animosity to deal with before they could talk. “So! It’s you…” They hugged, compared hand sizes with their palms pressed together, Livia suddenly dealt Mikuláš a resounding slap, Mikuláš kissed Livia and then bit her cheek so hard that the blood washed down her neck — they both mocked and harangued the nobleman for thinking that he was so clever and so good at being in love, etc. Juvenile stuff. Around midnight, the nobleman almost got up and fled. Perhaps he’d got it wrong; the affinities were Livia’s and Mikuláš’s to pursue on their own. They could just name their first child after him and leave it at that. But deep into the night Mikuláš got up and sorted out some food for all three. They hadn’t had a meal all day, and even though they got on his nerves, he didn’t think they should starve. Bread, butter and salt: they began to talk. And it didn’t take long for them to agree (Mikuláš perhaps more reluctantly than the other two) that finding out how to speak to the stars was not in their gift. Nor would they be the ones to learn what to do about the desolate beastliness of the body. So what actually was in their gift? It seemed to have something to do with the way they were together, and their way of perceiving and reaching each other that was one to one to one… possibly more; it was just that they’d never thought about expanding their resources this way. To reach out and touch she or he who opposes you. Without enmity, indeed with (or through) some emotion there still may not yet be a name for. “It’s funny that you’re just some man,” Livia said to Mikuláš, “Fine, a bit more than a man… a baker… all this time I couldn’t talk about you or ask about you because I didn’t know anything at all except that you are, and it seemed like finding out anything more would get me put into a madhouse.” “Just some man,” Mikuláš said, contemplating the nobleman. “That’s what I thought about this one. They grow on you,

though, the ones you just keep seeing around.” Livia took the nobleman’s hand. “They do.” The timing seemed right for the nobleman to propose that the three of them permanently forsake Rudolf ’s court and start all over again as bandits. And that’s what they did. For three utterly uninhibited years. Action suited them much better than thought had. At the end of the three years, the bandits bullet-proofed their bonds by separating. Livia rode off to terrorise Bohemia’s border with Germany, the nobleman picked the Silesian-Polish border, and Mikuláš went to raise hell at the Moravian-Austrian border. Each took with them four ways of dealing with those who crossed their path. If the weather wasn’t too harsh and they were in a materialistic mood they’d just take everything from you: money, jewellery, shoes, clothes, underwear. You and your party would be left to navigate the countryside stark naked. Then there was Livia’s way: The Way of the Goat. She’d rob you and then keep you on as a surplus goatherd for her ﬂock. For a few days — a week at most. If she liked you (that is, if you treated the goats as if they were your own children) you could make goats’ milk butter alongside her too. (For Mikuláš and the nobleman, however, the Way of the Goat meant they’d make you get down on all fours and bleat until they said you could stop.) Mikuláš’s way was fairly Dionysian; you’d be stuffed with bread and beer, told jokes you were too afraid to laugh at and then suddenly released at dawn with all your goods intact. The nobleman’s way was to make you tell him the names and whereabouts of two people you loved. Then he’d go and kidnap them too! In that case the three of you were captives for months… You really didn’t know which way it was going to be with any one of these three. Travellers were scared witless; especially by the very thought of the nobleman, that mindchanger, whose name none of them ever knew. So for a time, all non-essential travel to the Czech lands was curtailed. The aversion lingered, and made its way into lullabies that were sung about the bandits. Sleep, little one, or the goatherd milkmaid bandit will make you walk her Way of the Goat. Go to sleep RIGHT NOW or the mad baker bandit will make you eat bread until you pop… etc. Those lullabies are extant. When I sang them to my own children, it worked a treat every single time: the kiddies were absolutely bricking it. And so I tip my hat to those three lovers: immortal after all, impossible after all. Needless to say, the sharp drop in visitor footfall annoyed Rudolf II no end. It also (as the author of the notebook remarks) served him right. ○

HELEN OYEYEMI

(IF LOVING JONATHAN FRANZEN IS WRONG)

A serious young man: Jonathan Franzen, aged 37, in 1996

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I DON’T WANT TO BE RIGHT

Twenty years after his era-deﬁning masterpiece, The Corrections, the author’s latest novel, Crossroads, the ﬁrst in a trilogy about the travails of a white middle-class family in the American Midwest, might be the least fashionable book of the year. So how come it’s so hard to resist?

By Alex Bilmes

ANCIENT HISTORY, PART ONE TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, A YOUNG AMERICAN WRITER, very serious indeed, author of two precocious novels admired by critics but ignored by the so-called general reader (who is this shadowy figure?) announced, in an essay for Harper’s magazine, that his national literature was in need of a saviour. A saviour from what? From the baroque perversions of postmodernism. From the blind alleys of academe. From the fissure between the hifalutin literary world, with its noodly experiments in form and structure, and the humble book shopper, with her preference — so basic! — for old-fangled nonsense-like narrative and character development. The public, argued this serious young American writer, pushing his owlish spectacles up his nose, had been short-changed — neglected! alienated! — by the flatulent windbaggery of the late-20th-century metafabulists: Barth, Gaddis, Pynchon, all that mob, and even the serious young American writer’s hero, Don DeLillo, to whom he had once been in thrall. Also by a new generation, such as the serious young American writer’s good buddy, David Foster Wallace, who that same year produced his corpulent behemoth, Infinite Jest, with its footnotes to the endnotes — the exemplar of what the super-critic James Wood called “hysterical realism”. Was the spreadeagled adoration of Foster Wallace’s sprawling, antic, superabundance of sentences not final evidence that the social realist novel was a beached whale that had blown its last? Not a bit of it, argued the serious young American writer. Readers still wanted stories with beginnings that built to middles that moved towards endings, novels set in concrete, objective realities, richly summoned, finely detailed, peopled by characters like ourselves, conjured into existence by authors who believed in novels being about something more than themselves, and other novels, who thought that literary theory was for campus lecture theatres, who encouraged suspension of disbelief, and promoted the nobility of the quotidian, and enough already with the ironic clever-dickery and the damnable, self-reflexive mucking about. Readers wanted to connect. They wanted books that revealed their own lives to them, over, maybe, 500 to 600 pages of densely packed prose. Domestic dramas, written in the close third

person, allowing access to the innermost thoughts of their characters. Novels about dysfunctional families, strained relationships, disappointed parents and unhappy children and sexual indiscretions and feelings of inadequacy and nervous breakdowns, and the compromises and accommodations we must make to live in the world as it is today. What was needed was books about latte drinkers, for people who drink lattes. But who would America’s storytelling saviour be, this heir to Tolstoy, this Flaubert de notre temps? None other than the author himself: Jonathan Franzen, aged 37, from St Louis, Missouri, floppy hair grazing the collar of his serious young American writer’s tweed jacket. It was an exceptionally bold and bumptious promise and, five years later, Franzen delivered on it with a thumping, character-driven, social-realist, state-of-the-nation novel of late capitalist anomie that has been consistently rated at or near the top of the polls of the best books of the 21st century — “so far”, as they say, the muggles. The Corrections was published in the US on 1 September 2001. Ten days later the planes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Not even the most spectacular event in American history since the moon landings (so far) could steal Franzen’s thunder. If anything, 9/11 enhanced the reputation of his novel. Its tone of creeping anxiety and insidious disaffection was regarded as eerily prescient, as if Franzen, seer-like, had anticipated the attacks and their aftermath, and the toll they would take on ordinary Americans. The Corrections is an intimate epic, the story of a middle-class family, the Lamberts, told from multiple perspectives. There are three grown-up children, all now living on the East Coast, each one approaching crisis: Gary, a rich, insecure banker; Chip, a struggling screenwriter; and Denise, a bisexual chef. Back home in the Midwestern suburb where they grew up, their father, Alfred, is succumbing to Parkinson’s disease. Their mother, Enid, is fixated on getting them all back together for one last family Christmas. Put that way, it doesn’t sound like much of anything, but the book was a sensation. It sold more than three million copies — a staggering amount for a literary novel — won the National Book Award, and it made its author, for a time, the most fêted American novelist of his generation, and certainly the most famous. It is, I think, almost impossible to conceive of a novel — a novel! —creating similar excitement today. No, not even one by Richard Osman.

I interviewed Franzen in late 2001, for the Evening Standard. The interest of the British popular press in a long and complicated novel by a previously obscure author from Missouri was not altogether a matter of intellectual curiosity. Franzen hadn’t merely written a literary bestseller, he’d conformed to garret-dwelling archetype and in the process created a myth: it had taken him nine years to complete The Corrections, working mostly on a second-hand computer in a tiny Harlem apartment, discarding “thousands” of pages in the process. At times, he was so blocked, so easily distracted, that he took to blindfolding himself and plugging his ears while writing. He also drank a lot of vodka. (Who wouldn’t?) All these biographical factoids, too, became central to the story of the book’s success. He didn’t stop there. Most confoundingly, and notoriously, the donnish Franzen became embroiled in a feud with, of all celestial beings, Oprah Winfrey, after she selected The Corrections for her book club — a career-def ining anointment for most writers, from someone non-Americans might reasonably think of as a daytime chat-show host, but whose compatriots venerate as a demigod — and he publicly questioned whether this was a good look for him and his serious book, deriding her team’s other choices as “schmaltzy”. (They later made up, kinda, at least enough for her to choose his next novel for her book club.) Contrary to his reputation for grumpy smartarsery, the Franzen I met way back when was almost painfully polite — the phrase “pardon me” was employed so often as to seem like a tic — but he was also guarded. When I suggested that the title of The Corrections might reﬂect his desire to, um, correct the mistakes made by other novelists — I meant DeLillo and Foster Wallace and the rest — he came on like (2001 simile alert!) a Donald Rumsfeld press conference: “That is something I will neither conﬁrm or deny.” I mean, fair enough, but it’s only a book. I asked him, as you do, about the autobiographical aspects of the work. “None of the book is my life,” he said. Then: “Of course, I could just as easily answer, ‘Every word in the book is my life.’ The emotional landscape — the pattern of the strong father who suddenly deteriorates — is something I’ve been through. I’ve seen how a family responds, or fails to respond, to that kind of crisis. And I’ve been in a troubled marriage. I know what it’s like to have siblings. I mean, people don’t write in a vacuum. Everything is from somewhere.”

Marion Ettlinger/Corbis via Getty Images

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Page-turner of the century: published 10 days before 9/11, ‘The Corrections’ made its author the most ted novelist in America

The Corrections, those who read it discovered, was something more interesting than a routine family saga. Neither was it quite a traditional social-realist novel in the high Victorian mode; Franzen had hidden a number of esoteric deviations from the plot under the hood of his jalopy. As well as telling the story of the Lamberts, The Corrections investigates psychopharmacology, biotechnology, high-ﬁnance, Eastern European politics and cruise ships. You might almost call these diversions postmodern. “I want,” Franzen told me, “to be a kind of diplomat, shuttling back and forth between a certain kind of modernism and older-fashioned realism.” He got his wish. It worked. Franzen’s follow-up to The Corrections, published in 2010, was another breeze block of social realism. Freedom returns to the Midwest, its author’s psychic terrain, if no longer his home (he lives in California), for the story of another middle-class family, the Berglunds: Walter, a middle-aged executive in the middle of a midlife crisis. Patty, his wife. Their friend, and Patty’s lover, Richard Katz, punk-singer-turned-altcountry-troubadour. (2010, remember?) Plus the Berglund kids, and the Berglund parents and siblings, all, to varying degrees, damaged and disappointed, despite their outwardly privileged existences in the land of, I guess, the free? Like The Corrections, Freedom enjoys the liberty of frequent digression: avian conservation, mountaintop removal mining (heroically boring), the gentriﬁcation of America’s inner cities, the war on terror and the perils of late capitalism. And like The Corrections, Freedom ranges far and wide in space and time: suburban St Paul in the late 1970s; contemporary Washington DC; hillbilly West Virginia. Its most daring departure from the preceding novel was to have large sections presented as the autobiography of Patty, the most compelling character, apparently written at the urging of her therapist. Freedom was greeted by salivating reviews. The New York Times described it as “galvanic”. (Steady on there.) Franzen’s face appeared on the cover of Time magazine above the headline “Great American Novelist”. The book’s sales couldn’t measure up to those

of The Corrections (no novel’s sales could) but it was still a resounding commercial success. I suppose it’s remarkable, in hindsight — it’s certainly sobering — to remember that there was a time, not so long ago, when a middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender, ablebodied white man could dominate bestseller lists with a series of cat-killers about the first-world problems of straight, white, cisgender, middleaged, middle-class, able-bodied Americans — and not just get away with it, but be roundly celebrated for it on the books pages and the chat shows and the prize-giving podiums. Not that no-one cried foul at the time, but their yelps were mostly drowned out by the riotous applause and the beeping of the check-out tills. Writing in the London Review of Books earlier this year, the novelist Lauren Oyler noted that the cruellest tribute you could pay to a writer of fiction today would be to compare their work to that of Jonathan Franzen: “Among young writers online, this is more controversial than any sex thing you can come up with.” (She went on to note that the reason the comparison occurred to her while reading the book under review was because of its “careful rendering of emotional detail, and sweeping narrative arc.” I mean, how dare he?) It’s hard to know exactly when, or even why, it started, but the internet has developed a fixation on Jonathan Franzen. Not in a good way. He has been deemed, by the online Gauleiters, “problematic”: a lightning rod for generational resentments between zoomers and boomers. It’s not only Oprah whose buttons he has pushed. The former lead book critic of The New York Times once called him a “jackass”. (Hey! What happened to “galvanic”?) An instinctive contrarian, he has managed to enrage environmentalists, feminists, the timeline commentariat and apparently everyone under 40, fulminating against the “totalitarianism” of the internet, and the “protection racket” of social media. It is, of course, entirely possible that he is every bit as irritating as his online antagonists would have us believe. In a revealing 2018 profile for The New York Times (“Jonathan Franzen →

An instinctive contrarian, Franzen has managed to enrage environmentalists, feminists, the timeline commentariat and apparently everyone under 40

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Strings attached: Franzen’s new novel, ‘Crossroads’ (Fourth Estate, £20), is the ﬁrst in a generationsspanning trilo

Is Fine With All of It”, by that beady-eyed hellion, Taffy Brodesser-Akner), he declined to describe the woman he lives with as his “partner”, saying he hated the word. I’m with him on that, who isn’t? Partner is a dreadful term, and only ghastly people use it. Franzen, he told Taffy B-A, prefers “spousal equivalent.” Gah! Is that a joke made deliberately to annoy? Or is he serious? And wouldn’t that be even worse? But then, who cares? You don’t have to live with the guy, only read his books — or not! Mostly the animus stems from the fact of his gender, and to a lesser extent, his ethnicity. And while there is no suggestion that I’ve seen of personal toxicity — he is hardly Mailer, or Roth, or Updike, or Bellow (feel free to add to this list) — and in fact he has often been praised for his sensitive treatment of female characters — Enid in The Corrections, Patty in Freedom — it is nonetheless an incontestable fact that he is a straight, white, middle-aged man, yadda yadda, and no one, it is often said, wants to hear from them (us) right now. “There is no way to make myself not male,” Franzen told Emma Brockes of The Guardian, in 2015. (Forgetting, perhaps, that there is one way, and lots of people get very angry at any suggestion that there isn’t, but that’s not what he meant. Not that it matters what he meant. Or does it? No. Yes. No. Fuck you. Etc.) In order to appease feminist critics, he told Brockes, “there’s a sense that there is really nothing I can do except die — or, I suppose, retire and never write again.” Franzen spoke then of being “hurt” and “ashamed” by the opprobrium heaped on him. One could forgive him for wondering, sometimes, how come Jeffrey Eugenides doesn’t cop this shit, and who gave Ben Lerner a free pass? But he seems a resolute sort of stick. And I suspect that the idea that might interest him more about the position he finds himself in — totemic exemplar of a divisive figure: white male novelist — is that it has very little to do with the kind of novels he writes, and everything to do with the kind of person who writes them. Franzen’s critics aren’t angry because his work is not postmodern enough. They’re angry because his success, in their judgement, takes up space that could be used by writers who are not white cisgender men. Franzen was mistaken, then, in that Clintonera essay, to suggest that the future of the novel would be the conflict between form and content, avant-garde and middlebrow, postmodern and premodern. The correction required turned

out to be not one of literary approach, but identity and representation. It wasn’t that readers required more realism or less realism, it was that they needed more books by black authors, and women, and the many, many other groups under-represented on publishers’ lists and in book club selections. It is easy, today, to make a list of, say, the 10 most signiﬁcant novelists to achieve mainstream recognition in the past 20 years without including a single white guy. So I will: Colson Whitehead, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rachel Cusk, Junot Díaz, Zadie Smith, Paul Beatty, Elena Ferrante, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jennifer Egan, Sally Rooney. And it wouldn’t have been so easy before 2000. Some of those write social realism, others don’t. That’s not the point. Middle-aged white men haven’t been put off entirely — Hallo, Karl Ove Knausgård! — and Franzen certainly hasn’t. In 2015, he published Purity (“piercingly brilliant”: The Observer), another door-stopper, this one almost-but-notquite a departure, in that it wasn’t wholly concerned with the detonation of a nuclear family. By the time we meet the novel’s heroine, Purity, who goes by Pip (nudge, nudge) her family is long splintered. Hers is a quest to discover the secret of her disputed parentage. It brings her into the orbit of a dangerous, Julian Assangelike online evangelist, Andreas Wolf, offering Franzen much scope to rehearse his antiinternet arguments. Purity didn’t achieve anything like the level of cultural penetration of Franzen’s previous two megahits — again, whose novel did? — but it did contain some of his most entertaining swipes at, as ever, pathetic middle-aged white people, most enjoyably a paraplegic creative writing professor cuckolded by his younger wife, the comic-satiric aspect being the most often overlooked aspect of Franzen’s writing by those who seek to traduce him. In its lavish over-plotting and occasionally madcap tone, Purity, more than anything Franzen had published since the 1990s, seemed to owe a debt to the exuberant postmodernism of Pynchon et al, the so-called “systems novel”. But ﬂawed human relationships and the question of how to live now were still its central concerns. Writing in The New York Times in 2010, Franzen had declared that the purpose of novels, “and only novels”, is to tell the inner story of family life. Or, he added, grumpily, “it used to be.” Perhaps it could be again? Before we sigh and offer a jaded “Good luck with that, JF”, it turns out Franzen has more to say. Really quite a lot more.

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ANCIENT HISTORY, PART TWO FIFTY YEARS AGO, IN A SUBURB OF CHICAGO CALLED NEW PROSPECT, there lived a family, unhappy in its own way. Russ Hildebrandt was a clergyman, an ordained minister of the First Reformed church. He was also a typical thwarted middleaged man: financially strapped, professionally stuck, sexually frustrated. Marion was the clergyman’s wife, older and smarter than he, but damaged in ways he didn’t know about and couldn’t have imagined. She was also an archetype: weight-watching, middle-aged housewife, disappointed in her marriage to a bore who might even be shading into a creep. There were four kids: straight-arrow college boy, Clem; popular high-school hottie, Becky; druggy boy genius, Perry; and even-tempered little Judson, whose defining characteristic (apart from the even temper) was that he was nine. Crossroads, Franzen’s new novel, arrives as the first book in a projected trilogy entitled “A Key to All Mythologies”. And, in case you were wondering, yes, the Middlemarch reference has riled as many kombucha-gulping Eng lit types as it has caused gleeful others to hug themselves with passionate self-love, before tapping out and refilling their pipes. (“A Key to All Mythologies” is the title of the hopelessly engorged, and mindnumbing — also unfinishable — magnum opus of George Eliot’s insufferable Mr Casaubon.) Crossroads, then, is part one in a generationsspanning saga of a family, and the family, specifically the American family. When we meet the Hildebrandts, they are smarting from a scandal at the church youth group that gives its name to the title of the book. Blundering Russ and his wandering eye have been exiled from Crossroads following a mortifying showdown with some of the perkier teenage girls, who much prefer the charismatic ministrations of Russ’s arch enemy, the preening phony Rick Ambrose. (An echo of the dodgy past of Andreas Wolf, in Purity.) Russ’s fall from grace sets in train a series of crises, with each member of this conser vative-alternative

Midwestern family sent hurtling blindly to points far and wide: Russ and the woman with which he has become infatuated (and Perry and his stolen stash) on a disastrous trip to Arizona; Marion (and young Judson) to California, to be reunited with a man from her troubled youth; Clem to college, and then to New Orleans, and then to South America; Becky to Europe. There is some shuttling back and forth in time — most memorably, and incongruously, a lurid, almost Gothic ﬂashback section in which we learn some hair-raising stuff about Marion’s #MeToo past, in noirish 1940s Los Angeles — but otherwise the story proceeds in a stately manner, Franzen’s mastery of plot and character and tone only very occasionally ﬂagging (the Goth-noir stuff). Crossroads is about faith, lust, envy, addiction, madness, the chasms between generations and even, a bit, the misunderstandings between people of different backgrounds and ethnicities. It is about attraction and repulsion; the word “repel” and its derivatives appear with such regularity you want to offer Franzen a cough sweet. Crossroads presents the members of the Hildebrandt family and their various intimates as a collection of magnets, pulling each other in and pushing each other away. It is possible, at least it was in my case, to feel the same way about Franzen’s book itself, to be both drawn in by it, as it hums along, and then, if not repelled, then certainly discouraged — by its length, its occasional clumsiness, and also, in 2021, when so much in our society does seem at stake, its triviality. Certainly, as Lauren Oyler suggests, it might be the most unfashionable novel of the year, a nearly 570-page epic (part one of three, mark you) about the not-very-serious-really problems of some relatively comfortable white people half a century ago, with Franzen’s tin ear for modern cultural sensitivities much in evidence. There are brief appearances for povertystricken urban African Americans, during the novel’s excursions into Chicago, and povertystricken rural Native Americans, in the sections set in Arizona. No doubt the awkwardness of the meetings between the white protagonists and the people of colour is deliberate: Franzen is satirising the patronising presumptions of his

decent, churchgoing people. But it’s still the case that within the world of the novel, the minority characters exist to ref lect back on the wealthier white characters their prejudices and preconceptions, as well as to highlight their philanthropic endeavours. African Americans and Native Americans, in Crossroads, are to be feared, or pitied, or romanticised, or admired, but mostly they are to be helped. The efforts of the white people to provide charity are mocked, but there’s no suggestion I could see that their hearts are ever really in the wrong place, even if, as in Russ’s case, he uses his charity work as an opportunity to get his leg over. Franzen writes what he knows, from his position of white male privilege. Of course, to fully develop the minority characters, he would have to try to write from inside their heads, in their voices: very much a no-no in 2021. And so the Black pastor, Theo Crenshaw, and Russ’s Navajo connection, Keith Durochie, must remain ciphers. Such is our present predicament. The further I got into Crossroads, the more I began to wonder what I was reading, and why. Not because of my delicate sensibilities (I do believe they exist, and I promise I will never stop trying to locate them), nor because I am allergic to domestic melodrama (I’m not). It’s Franzen’s thing, and to ﬁnd fault with that, on novel number six, would be like complaining about the lack of car chases in Penelope Fitzgerald. That wasn’t the problem. It’s more that while The Corrections in particular felt crisp and signiﬁcant, Crossroads at times feels an odd combination of stodgy but weightless, like a day-old French fry. Reading it, I felt transported back to my own childhood, watching TV miniseries based on crass airport paperbacks: The Thorn Birds, in which a handsome priest in olden times falls for a sexy parishioner. Did Colleen McCullough’s reverend, like Franzen’s, have a huge cock? Wouldn’t know, haven’t read it... Probably. Then — and yes, I’ve been working up to this — there’s that title. It won’t be a consideration for Franzen’s American audience, but for British readers of a certain age (we’re a niche group, but, like embittered Midwestern suburbanites, we do exist) what the title Crossroads will evoke most →

One could forgive Franzen for wondering, sometimes, how come Jeffrey Eugenides doesn’t cop this shit, and who gave Ben Lerner a free pass?

Kevin Gray

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Novelist plus spectacles: Franzen in 2015, photographed for Esquire at his home in Santa Cruz, California

immediately is not the work of the legendary Delta bluesman who sold his soul to the devil in return for guitar genius unmatched until the arrival of, I don’t know, anti-vaxxer axeman Eric Clapton (whose cover version, with Cream, of “Crossroads” receives short shrift from crusty old Russ Hildebrandt), nor even the idea that in life there are certain moments when consequential decisions must be made. Instead Franzen’s title summons a long-running (1964-1988) ITV soap opera set in a Midlands motel, much mocked by the alleged comedians of the day for its wooden acting, cardboard sets, and paper-thin plots. For all its faults, or even as a result of them — its most memorable character, indeed its only memorable character, was a “village idiot” called Benny, who wore a woolly hat — Crossroads the TV soap was hugely popular, drawing up to 15 million kitsch-loving viewers each episode. It was also regarded as socially relevant, tackling subjects controversial at the time for mainstream light entertainment: interracial romance; marital breakdown; the need to be patient with simpletons in silly headgear. (Still timely today!) Franzen’s previous novels felt like contributions to a wider conversation about where society was at, and where it was headed. There is something less essential about Crossroads, a period piece about The Way They Lived Then: folk rock and the fug of doobies and afternoon inf idelity. No doubt, through examining American society in the early 1970s, as a dominant conservative society begins to confront, and assimilate, the counterculture — a crossroads moment for the US, as well as for the Hildebrandts — Franzen is building towards a larger portrait of the shifts in public manners and private mores over the past half-century. But this time the stakes don’t seem so high. Will randy Russ succumb to temptation and cheat on misery-guts Marion with foxy Frances, the ﬂirtatious young widow who joins him on charitable trips to Chicago in his clapped-out Plymouth Fury? Will beautiful Becky steal hunky high-school heartthrob Tanner from his spiky girlfriend? Will pilled-up Perry get so banjaxed on uppers he manages to stop smirking for a paragraph? The motivations of the teenage characters seem frustratingly opaque. Why does cleanliving Clem dump sexy Sharon, quit college and volunteer for Vietnam? Is it because he is somehow sexually attracted to his own sister? A potentially, ahem, fertile — if icky — plotline that is never quite developed. Or is it to break away once and for all from his embarrassment of a dad? More plausible but also… yawn.

And then there’s the other nagging thought, when after a longish break one confronts a novel such as this one: if it’s middlebrow, characterdriven narrative fiction that’s required in 2021, we know where to go. Two years before The Corrections was published, The Sopranos had introduced the idea, developed over the following decades, that the small screen would be the medium through which the inheritors of the mantle of the realist novelist would do their work. If it was the new Dickens you wanted to be, prestige TV was the place to be. The great contemporary storytellers were showrunners, not novelists, and the venerable print-publishing houses had been replaced by video on demand. Novels are analogue. Franzen is an analogue figure, and a maker of analogue products, living and working in a digital age. A stepson of the time, in Vasily Grossman’s phrase. This may be why Crossroads is not set in the present day. One suspects that the challenge of writing a novel located in the social media age, with characters who exist online as much as they do IRL — a challenge he accepted, to an extent, with Purity, but that has been taken up more recently, and much more enthusiastically, by younger novelists — is not for Franzen. Dude doesn’t even ’gram. (I look forward not only to Lauren Oyler’s take on Crossroads, if one is forthcoming, but also to Patricia Lockwood’s. And if no one has commissioned that yet, then I do wish she’d call.) Franzen is 62 now. Presumably the next few years, maybe more than a few, are mapped out completing the trilogy that Crossroads begins. Perhaps, given the previous breaks between his novels, this will be his swansong. If so, whatever side you take in the culture wars, it’ll be hard to deny the guy has had a remarkable career. Halfway through Crossroads, I resolved to quit my Franzen habit once and for all. This would be my last hit. No way would I read the next part of the trilogy, whenever that appears. But then, as with Crossroads’ Marion and her cigarettes and Perry and his cocaine, I’m always resolving to quit stuff that I subsequently take up again. Because whatever it is, the things I get unhealthily stuck on — fags, booze, long novels about the decline of Western civilisation refracted through the petty problems of middleclass strivers in America’s f lyover states — I fucking enjoy them. I bitch about it, but I flew through Crossroads in a weekend, barely pausing to eat or sleep or swab my nose and throat, happy to be hooked once again by this brilliant writer’s near unmatched ability to get me inside the heads of his indelible characters. Gah! ○

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN MCALISTER

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Backstage Excerpts and out-takes from the pages of Esquire

Above: Benedict Cumberbatch wears lilac merino wool jumper, £160, by Sheep Inc, burgundy cottoncorduroy trousers, £730, by Brunello Cucinelli, and rose gold 47mm x 28.3mm Reverso Tribute Duoface Small Seconds watch, £21,100, by Jaeger-LeCoultre

For the photographs beginning on p136, Cumberbatch combines classic men’s style with his interest in the new generation of young designers whose stance on the environmental impact of their collections is just as important as their creative output. He was determined to ensure the Giorgio Armani clothes he wore for Esquire would be pre-used and re-used: that they would have a life after the shoot (and they will) rather than being discarded. As for the other pieces he wears and the designers creating them, Cumberbatch said: “The idea that you can re-use materials like LEJ’s

upcycled silk shirt [p139], source your wool back to the exact field the sheep graze in [jumper pictured above] or take your old, knackered sneakers back for repurposing [page 140] is innovative problem-solving at its very finest. This generation is politically awake. And that’s the definition of luxury to me: the idea that I can perhaps leave this planet in a better state than when I found it. “I’m proud to say that I even wear my underpants until they have holes in them and the elastic gives out.” Never let it be said the man lacks commitment to the cause. ○

Words by Catherine Hayward | Simon Emmett

Our cover star Benedict Cumberbatch is a man of many parts. Recently, he has added fashion sustainability campaigner to his roll call of personae. So when it came to his Esquire photoshoot, in London in July, he wanted to make sure he wore clothes that reﬂected his concerns for the environment. “I want to help promote an alternative to how fashion currently operates,” he explains. “It’s really important to help create not just an awareness but an actual shift in attitude too. The circular fashion economy should have a positive impact on the environment.” Cumberbatch cites Naomi Klein’s 1999 book No Logo and Livia Firth’s Green Carpet Challenge initiative, which enlists celebrities to promote eco-conscious fashion, as catalysts for his own journey towards sustainability. “No Logo was a real game-changer for me,” says Cumberbatch. “It linked the product to the process — the horror of sweatshops, the crackdown on unions, the real politics of the garment industry. It resonates even more today.”