CONNECTING THE PROSE AND THE PASSION

Helena Bonham Carter and Simon Callow on Forster, family and falling in love with libraries

Helena Bonham Carter was joined by the writer and fellow actor Simon Callow at home this spring to discuss her new role: Library President. The two are longtime members and met filming the 1985 EM Forster adaptation A Room With a View. Bonham Carter was 19. It was the first of many Merchant Ivory productions for her, including Maurice and Howards End , before Hollywood called, with a role as the suicidal love interest in David Fincher’s Fight Club. Work with her former husband, Tim Burton, came next, as well as a contribution to the Harry Potter franchise and more. Callow’s acting career includes stage roles in Shakespeare, Beckett, pantomime and contemporary theatre and beloved British films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral. He is a biographer of Oscar Wilde and Orson Welles and a renowned Dickens expert. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

HELENA BONHAM CARTER Simon, it’s very nice to see you here. Welcome to my Presidential home! I’m not having a clever day – do you find that, or are you always clever?

SIMON CALLOW Always. But I think I might be daunted by being the President of The London Library. Such a wonderful title, such a wonderful entity.

HELENA I love the title. The older I get, the more I like having conversations with dead people – for instance my dad, who made me a member when I was 21. For the Library to then ask me to be President…

SIMON Fantastic.

HELENA I used the Library a lot then, which was also when I first met you. I was sort of roaming and feeling lost, having a great time filming but feeling out of my depth everywhere. My peer group had gone to uni, and I was suddenly just on my own path and really unequipped to deal with it. I had a massive chip on my shoulder. So The London Library was my college. I felt legitimate, and I thought I could wander in and dress up like Virginia Woolf.

SIMON It’s like going right back to the source, isn’t it? There it all is, and there they were.

HELENA There they were! It’s not only a conversation with my dead dad, but a conversation with EM Forster. If it was not for him, we wouldn’t be here.

SIMON A Room With A View is my favourite film of all the films I’ve been in, and I’m still astonished by its freshness.

HELENA It still works.

SIMON It really does. It was my second film and I was incredibly relieved – I’d been in Amadeus and detested every second. When I got the script [for A Room With A View], Ismail [Merchant, the producer] said to me: “We want you to play the leading part!” So I thought, “This is great, he sees me as George. I’ll go on a diet immediately.” Then my agent discovered I was in fact playing the Reverend Beebe. And I thought, “No, outright no.” I was terribly hurt.

HELENA And totally miscast.

SIMON Beebe’s the fat old parson; I can’t possibly play him. Finally I gave in to discover that suddenly I was with the aristocracy of British film and theatre: Maggie [Smith], Judi [Dench] and Fabia Drake, no less. And you. Who was completely new.

HELENA I was a foetus.

SIMON What I remember about you then was the incredible speed with which you spoke.

HELENA Oh, seriously? That’s like my daughter.

SIMON You would change tack in the middle of a sentence and contradict yourself.

HELENA I don’t think that’s changed. I’m interested that I spoke at all. I remember myself as a mute, a total mouse, and so in awe of everyone. I was aware that you were a writer and talking about Mozart a lot, so I thought, “He’s the Renaissance man that I have to become.” Also, without being too indiscreet, you were one of the kinder adults.

SIMON Fabia was an absolute holy terror. What was great was to be working on a script drawn from such a wonderful novel. Ruth [Prawer Jhabvala, who adapted the original novel for the film] incomparably excelled at weaving the words from the novel into a real script, so that these were really people talking to each other. My favourite scene in any movie I’ve acted in is our scene at the piano.

Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With A View (1985), with her spinster cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, played by Dame Maggie Smith.

Photo: Katya Grenfell; Goldcrest

HELENA It was the most important scene. You, as Mr Beebe, caught Lucy [Honeychurch, my character] playing in private. He’s so tender and I love that. “If only you knew how to live as you play.”

SIMON Beebe, certainly as written by Ruth – less so by Forster actually – is essentially benevolent. I remember the first read through, in London somewhere?

HELENA I was terrified. Maybe it was the first time I read with Maggie and Judi.

SIMON Maggie terrified me by saying, “Why are you calling him ‘Beebe’? It has to be ‘Bee-be’. Beebe sounds as if we’re at the Beeb!” Were you always a great reader of novels?

HELENA Quite a good reader, though I was slow. I was taught at English A Level by Penelope Fitzgerald.

SIMON I knew and loved her. Was she a good teacher?

HELENA Extraordinary. Did you ever read Offshore ? I love that. But I thought that it would be good to look as if I read, because then every heroine in every book or film was a reader or writer. I wanted to be Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career. It was probably quite healthy, instead of fixating on a physique, which is what most people do these days because of Instagram. I wasn’t very sexual for a long time.

SIMON You were wearing lots of clothes.

HELENA So many clothes.

SIMON One couldn’t even begin to guess what the woman beneath would be.

HELENA No, there wasn’t a body.

SIMON It was extraordinary, you were a sort of Oxfam shop on two legs.

HELENA I don’t know where that came from. I think I had a real complex. Maybe because I was in such a male world. I went to Westminster [School], which was all boys, so before I even walked into period movies, I was dressed as a Victorian. It was always about pretending to be in the past. I over romanticised or felt I belonged in the past, actually.

SIMON The biggest relationships in my young life were with my grandmothers. I asked one to make me an 18th-century costume for a Christmas present.

Simon Callow as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Amadeus by Peter Shaffer at the Oliver Theatre, London, 1979.

Photo: Donald Cooper

HELENA Oh, I love that. So you dressed up as Mozart?

SIMON In effect. I loved the fabrics, the shimmer of it all.

HELENA On Maurice [1987] I did hair and makeup for all the men, which was rather a good way of dating people. It was Tinder then. In terms of influence, how important were your parents?

SIMON The only one of my family that read novels was my grandmother, though she never talked about them. A book can be just for you. You have a relationship with the characters and have somehow subsumed them into your psyche.

HELENA I always feel like you want to share the wonder.

SIMON Your family are very literary, aren’t they?

HELEN Well, my grandmother Violet definitely was, on my dad’s side. She was [Prime Minister H H] Asquith’s daughter [and president of the Liberal Party from 1945–47]. My maternal grandmother was a special character, but found it difficult to read. I think she would have been diagnosed as dyslexic now, but she wrote beautifully. My mum, her whole life has never been without several books. My dad developed cortical blindness, which meant he couldn’t see faces, but could read, so he read his way through the last 24 years of his life. We had half of The London Library in our home because they’d send him books.

SIMON Oh, fantastic.

HELENA Violet was formidable and wrote a lot of letters. I came back from filming with Woody Allen in a monastery in Taormina, and Dad was editing them. There was a postcard to her husband in 1940 saying: “Have just finished Morgan’s latest Howards End.” She knew Edward Morgan Forster. When I came to film Howards End with you, I read Violet’s [unfinished] autobiography and thought, “Oh god, she was basically like the Helen Schlegel character, a sort of radical bohemian, a bluestocking…” And would have been the same age. So maybe she was a bit of a model for Helen.

SIMON Forster wasn’t a recluse until later at King’s College Cambridge, I think.

HELENA Did you ever get a sense of what he was like?

SIMON Everything in his life was the opposite of what he espoused: the passion, the connecting. This gives his work its force, because it didn’t come easily to him. He had to struggle to make it happen.

HELENA He did have relationships though, didn’t he?

SIMON Famously with a married policeman, Bob Buckingham. But also earlier, in Alexandria, and later, with a Bulgarian art collector, 45 years his junior. All very discreet. As a young gay man, I was impatient with him. Instead of thinking how extraordinary it was for its time, I just thought, “Come on, we’ve gone beyond all of this”. It felt a bit spinsterly. Now I think it’s passionate and unbelievably brave and exquisitely written. Then, I was more taken by DH Lawrence, which was all oceanic… My entire ambition was to be a writer. Do you write?

HELENA I’ve been asked to, and I’ve written the odd article. My attention span is troubling, but I do enjoy it when I apply myself.

SIMON I have to work very hard at it, and do terrifically long days. I can be at the laptop by seven.

HELENA In the morning? Jeez. OK, so you’ve got Morning Brain.

SIMON I’ve got a night brain, too. But no afternoon brain.

HELENA The afternoon is not really good for much.

SIMON Yes. I have difficulty in the theatre, rehearsing in the afternoon.

HELENA I have to have a snooze, no matter what. The snooze has been a pillar of my living. Do you ever write in books when you’re reading them, or is that sacrilegious?

SIMON I do when I’m reviewing, but that’s with proofs, so I can scrawl all over them.

HELENA I’ve got a thing about having a relationship with a book, so I will, unfortunately, write sentences in them. Also in the hope that somehow it’s going to stick in the brain.

SIMON Let’s talk about the Library – its location, for instance. St James’s Square is enchanting.

HELENA Yes, and I do think that places work magic on us and influence what we think. It is very creative. Also, just silence. To go and sit with others with no danger of conversation, but you’ve got the company of other people concentrating. If you’re going to seriously write, it could be very lonely. You have to go to battle with yourself, but it’s alleviated at the Library because you’re with other people who are going into battle with themselves.

Helena Bonham Carter as Helen Schiegel in Howards End (1992), a character that resembles her grandmother Viole, whom E M Forster met.

Photo: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock Photo

SIMON Libraries generally have a very curious combination of this quietness and focus, coupled with a very sexy feeling. It’s the silence.

HELENA I was going to raise that, but you start.

SIMON I wonder why that is exactly. It’s just because everybody’s in their own space and in their own world somehow, and you know that as you drift into that sort of semi hypnotic state, sex is going to be in there somewhere.

HELENA Yeah, it’s always there.

SIMON So it’s the subconscious. It’s sort of milling around the Library. I think I said this before, it’s like a book bordello. You just go up and take whatever you want to.

HELENA Have your pleasure. I like that.

SIMON The Library’s postal service is also miraculous. And everyone’s so sympathetic. Years ago, my dog acquired a passion for 17th-century literature; it turns out it was the fish glue used to bind the spines. One day I came home and there was a priceless volume in pieces all over the place. I offered to replace it somehow but the Librarian said: “I have dogs: I understand.”

HELENA How do you use the Library?

SIMON Not for writing or reading. Just to borrow books. The collection of arcana is vast. Writing about Orson Welles, I needed to know what it was like to be a tourist in Morocco in 1930. The Library had six – six! – guides from the period. I don’t know anywhere else I could have found that. I love clambering up the metal stairs and finding things that nobody’s taken out for 100 years.

HELENA You think George Eliot is going to actually appear.

SIMON It still is enchanting to me to do that.

HELENA As a writer, do you have a ritual?

SIMON Procrastinate as long as possible. I was so relieved to discover that Ibsen could spend four hours rearranging his desk before starting to write. Unlike Dickens.

HELENA He just sat down?

SIMON He was always writing at least two things at once, sometimes more – he wrote the last of The Pickwick Papers and the first chapters of Nicholas Nickleby simultaneously. He worked it all out, I’m sure, on his long walks.

Helena Bonham Carter and Simon Callow at the Library's Christmas Party in 2022.

Photos: Amanda Ward

HELENA Have you seen his original manuscripts?

SIMON Almost illegible; you feel the heat of his creative energy. He talks about the characters dancing down the pen.

HELENA I love that – when somebody takes possession.

SIMON As with acting: when it’s good, it’s not you playing the character, it’s the character playing you. •