Yoko Shimada and Richard Chamberlain in the 1980 TV adaptation of Shogun. Photo: Alami
As a British prisoner of war in Changi Prison during the Second World War, James Clavell was once approached by a Japanese officer and offered to lend him his samurai sword. Clavell refused the opportunity to commit hara-kiri; but he was struck by the thoughtfulness of this officer, who supposed that Clavell was consumed with shame for allowing himself to be captured.
Imprisoned by the Japanese in one of the most notorious prisons of all time, Clavell became infatuated with his captors, finding their ruthlessness and strict codes of honor both repulsive and inspiring.
Years later, when he had become one of the world's best-selling authors, he said that one of his main motivations for writing novels like Shogun and The Rat King was to give Western readers «a glimmer of understanding Japanese.»
Between 1962 and 1993, James Clavell published six novels, most of them the size of cinder blocks, that comprised what he called the «Asian Saga.» Spanning many countries and several centuries, the Saga enjoyed phenomenal sales around the world (when asked how many languages his books were published in, he replied: “I think that’s it”) and defined the way millions of readers think about the Far East. Eastern thinking.
As is often the case with very popular novelists, Clavell quickly fell out of fashion in the years after his death in 1994; there have been no events or documentaries in 2021 to mark its centenary. Yet Clavell should be remembered — not only for his books, but also for the fascinating details of his amazing life.
The hardships and horrors he endured at Changi make for one hell of a story — as he proved by making it the subject of his first novel, King Rat, in 1962. – in the 1980s he received a record advance of $5 million for his novel The Vortex – he also had a distinguished film career, as a screenwriter for such classic films as The Great Escape and The Fly, as well as a screenwriter and director films «The Great Escape» and «The Fly». Sidney Poitier's rugged «To Sir, With Love» car. In his personal life, he fathered a beloved child who was adopted by Marlon Brando, causing Brando to pursue Clavell through the courts in an increasingly crazed vendetta.
Fortunately, Clavell may now be on the cusp of a renaissance. His 1975 historical novel Shogun, which tells the story of how the first Englishman to set foot in Japan became a samurai, has now been made into a brutal, stylish Disney/FX miniseries starring Cosmo Jarvis, Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai .
Shogun was Clavell's third novel (though chronologically the first in the Asian saga), and while his previous books had sold well, this one took them into the stratosphere. The inspiration for this story came when Clavell was idly leafing through one of his daughter's textbooks and came across the sentence: «In 1600, an Englishman named Will Adams came to Japan and became a samurai.»
For Clavell, this was an opportunity to delve into the origins of the Japanese character — through the eyes of his English hero, renamed John Blackthorne — as he saw it up close at Changi, presenting his feudal-era samurai warriors as highly cultured. and is capable of great cruelty. The book also introduced Western readers to then-unfamiliar spiritual concepts such as Karma and Vā. (If you listen to Clavell's appearance on Desert Island Discs, there's something unusual about him discussing these topics in his thick officer's accent.)
It seemed that everyone read the Shogun. The New York Times reported that Henry Kissinger was so swayed by the book's charm that he adopted the characters' way of talking to their women and began bossing his wife around, addressing her as «Woman!»
James Clavell in 1981. Photo: Getty
In 1980, Clavell oversaw the production of a five-part television adaptation of Shogun, filmed entirely in Japan, starring the era's leading swashbuckler Richard Chamberlain as Blackthorne, along with Toshiro Mifune and Yoko Shimada. As executive producer, Clavell insisted, against the advice of network executives, that long stretches of the series be in Japanese without subtitles to emphasize the disorienting effect on Blackthorne being stranded on this alien world after the shipwreck.
Viewers It didn't deter: About 30 percent of the US population was glued to the series, and Clavell recalled that on the nights it was shown, restaurants were empty and their employees lugged out televisions to watch it themselves.
The popularity of the novel and miniseries has caused some concern among scholars, but they have been quick to point out numerous inaccuracies, from the anachronistic behavior of the Japanese characters to the constant use of carrier pigeons in the story, although they did not exist in the 17th century. -centuries-old Japan. When the series aired in Japan, it was prefaced by an introduction by Yoko Shimada, who played Blackthorn's love interest Mariko, and former US Ambassador Edwin O Reischauer, pleading with viewers to forgive the mistakes.
Clavell was contemptuous of the pedantic objections of American scientists. “It seems that I have more or less single-handedly usurped their function by creating an appreciation for Japanese culture, which is exactly what they are supposed to do,” he remarked with typical composure.
“Have you ever been to war? Have you ever been shot at?» Clavell snapped when a New York Times reporter questioned his inaccuracies. In his opinion, his experience as a soldier gave his military story the necessary authenticity. “It’s very difficult for someone sitting at Harvard or Yale as a history professor to really understand what it’s like to have someone stick a bayonet in your face and prick your skin… Obviously, he was never in danger.”
Clavell's life began in Sydney, where his father, a Royal Navy officer, was on assignment: he was christened in the bell of HMS Melbourne, with Dame Nellie Melba singing at the ceremony. He grew up in England and enlisted in the Royal Artillery shortly after the outbreak of World War II.
In 1942, after months of jungle warfare in Java, he was captured by the Japanese and imprisoned in Changi Prison in Singapore. He was shot in the cheek while trying to evade capture (he bore the scar for the rest of his life), and, without access to medicine, he plugged the hole himself with a piece of cotton wool soaked in vinegar. This made chewing difficult, although he recalled that it was not a big problem since there was very little food.
Disease and malnutrition reigned in the prison: only one out of 15 men survived. Three years later, Clavell, having seen most of his friends die, was released after the Japanese surrender. He returned to Britain ostensibly a hero and certainly an object of curiosity — «I know how animals feel in the zoo» — but felt deep shame, as the scion of a family of warriors going back generations, at having failed and was captured. When he disembarked at Greenock, he was greeted by a brass hat with a letter of congratulation signed by the king: Clavell tore it in the man's face.
Richard Attenborough and Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, co-written with James Clavell. Photo: Getty
He entered the University of Birmingham but, like many ex-servicemen, was unable to go to study. His ambition was to become a film director, and he endured several years of tedious work as a distributor while trying to break into the industry. In 1953, he decided to move to the United States, trying to get a job as a screenwriter.
He wasn't honest when executives asked him what films he had worked on. «I muttered 50 things that seemed pretty successful, a parody of the last success, and they said, 'Oh, really.' And especially if you speak with an English accent, it gives you an advantage,” he recalled in 1981. “My opportunities to write or act in films were given to me by the Americans. You can go there with nothing, like my wife and I did, and make a few dollars. We're getting hungrier every year.»
Clavell's first big success as a screenwriter was The Fly (1958), starring David Hedison as a mad scientist whose experiments result in his head being transferred into the fly's body and vice versa. In later years, Clavell's party consisted of an exact imitation of a man-fly's squeak: «Help me! Help me!» Help me!» after being caught in a web.
In addition to writing The Great Escape (1963), Clavell directed adventure films and Westerns such as Five Gates to Hell (1959) and Walk Like a Dragon (1960). He recalled that he made his way into directing by neglecting studio directors' choices for his scripts and persistently suggesting that people he knew were unavailable or too expensive until he was the only option. He said he applied the rules of survival he learned in Changi: «If you understand the game, you'll be fine.»
The 1958 horror film The Fly was Clavell's first screenplay. Photo: CHRISTOPHEL COLLECTION
But it was the writers' strike that led to the most lucrative part of his career. For many years after the end of the war, Clavell did not say a word to anyone about his experiences at Changi, but in the early sixties he began to slowly apologize to his wife. When he had free time due to the writers' strike, she advised him to write down his experiences in a book. One day she went so far as to lock him in his office and tell him he could come out when he had written five pages.
As soon as he started, the dam broke, and within eight weeks he had a manuscript of 850 copies. pages (although, unlike his later books, the publisher radically shortened them). The book King Rat, published in 1962, tells the story of the friendship between Changi inmates Peter Marlow, a young lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, and an American non-commissioned officer known as «King», who, as the main black market dealer, is at the top of the prison hierarchy: he is the only prisoner who has underpants.
The British officers in prison are snobs and bullies who steal food from their men and are stupid enough to believe King when he sells them the rats he raises, which he says are a delicacy called «mouse deer». On the contrary, Japanese officers, even the most ruthless, always have dignity. Literary critic John Sutherland summed up the moral of the story: “We won the war, but they were the best soldiers.”
James Clavell with Sidney Poitier on the set of «To Sir, With Love» Photo: Getty
King Rat was directed by Bryan Forbes in 1965, but two years later Clavell wrote and directed the more memorable To Sir With Love, based on E. R. Braithwaite's memoir of coming to London as an immigrant from the British Guiana and could not find any work. except as a teacher in a tough East End school. In the film, students played by Judy Geeson and Lulu were beaten by Sidney Poitier; Both Poitier and Clavell made their fortunes because their contracts gave them a percentage of the profits from the cheap but wildly popular picture, which grossed $15 million.
With money in the bank, Clavell began to devote more time to writing. His second novel, Tai-Pan (1966), was a kind of bloody boardroom saga about the founding of a trading company (based on Jardine Matheson) in Hong Kong in the 1840s: the title means «Merchant Prince». A fan of Ayn Rand, Clavell was fascinated by the activities of swashbuckling capitalists and, more importantly, knew how to make them interesting for his readers.
After Shogun, Clavell returned to Hong Kong in Noble House (1981), which is set in 1963 and features his alter ego Peter Marlowe from The Rat King, now a writer researching the novel, as well as the descendants of the characters Shogun and Tai Pan.
The Asian saga was completed by Vortex (1986), a story about modern Iran, and Gai-Jin (1993), set in 1860s Japan. The latest book, as noted by The Telegraph's reviewer, is set in «a world of intrigue, violence and betrayal, where the only certainty is that no one can be trusted… It is also an almost entirely male environment, in which men drink whiskey, visit prostitutes and beat fists on the table to ask, “What the hell is going on?”
< p>Clavell's rules for writing were simple: “What the clouds look like, what the sunset is like — all bulls — that is, what the clouds look like, what the sunset is like. What's happening? Who does what to whom? That's all you need.» Despite the high levels of testosterone in his books, he claimed that his readers were more female than male.
One aspect of Clavell's life was perhaps more bizarre than anything described in his books. In the 1970s, Clavell had an affair with an American actress named Caroline Barrett, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Petra, whom Clavell refused to acknowledge. Barrett continued to work as Marlon Brando's personal assistant, and in the 1980s Brando decided to adopt the girl and fund a £7 million child support claim against Clavell on Barrett's behalf.
According to Brando's personal makeup assistant Philip Rhodes, the actor became obsessed with the trial, spending hours poring over legal tomes: «He had never prepared for a film or play as carefully as he did for this case.» Brando seemed to become obsessed with Clavell, taking every opportunity to denounce his neglect of his natural daughter — despite the fact that, as his biographer Peter Manso noted, he had several unacknowledged children of his own. The hypocrisy may have run deeper: Brando's former assistant Pat Quinn stated that «Marlon didn't want to work again» and was hoping to get some of Clavell's money. Brando eventually abandoned the case and tried to repay Barrett for the money he had spent.
Despite this episode, Clavell remained married to his wife April for more than 40 years. He and his family were always on the move and rarely stayed in one place for long. “I learned at Changi not to show a moving target,” he once remarked.
Clavell died in 1994 at the age of 72 while being treated for cancer, and although he had only read half of the proposed 12 volumes of The Asian Saga, he could look back on a life in which he made the most of every opportunity . minute. “He’s a good person,” Clavell’s friend, Chinese-American actor Benson Fong, once said of him. “He's actually more nice than nice. He has no time for politeness.”
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