Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and ‘A Room with a View’

I

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013) won an Oscar for her screenplay of A Room with a View (1985), based on E. M. Forster’s novel of 1908.  The only screenwriter to win both the Booker Prize (for her novel Heat and Dust) and two Oscars, she also won a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976) and a MacArthur Award (1984), and was made Commander of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998. At a time when few women were writing for films, she had great success in adapting her own and others’ novels, especially those set in Italy and India.  Her unusual life, her experience of different languages and cultures, gave her a keen understanding of novels of manners, especially of how characters struggle to define themselves in a changing society.

Prawer Jhabvala was above all an inspiration to and collaborator with the producer Ismail Merchant (1936-2005) and the director James Ivory (born 1928). In A Room with a View she adapted Forster’s dramatic structure and dialogue to form the backbone of Ivory’s visually dazzling film.  Describing her background and analysing her intelligent, perceptive and stylish screenplay, will help to bring this brilliant woman out of the shadows and give her the artistic recognition she deserves.

An iconic still from ‘A Room with a View’ (1985).

The small birdlike Prawer Jhabvala was slightly over five feet tall and weighed only 100 pounds (45 kilos).  Her exotic appearance, occasional saris and Indian surname, while living in India and writing about that country, gave the mistaken impression that she was Indian.  In fact, she was born into a Jewish family in Cologne in the German Rhineland.  In “Disinheritance”, her poignant and beautifully written memoir, Jhabvala wrote:

My father was Polish and had come to Germany during the First World War to escape military conscription in Poland.  In Germany he met my mother [née Cohn] who was actually born in Cologne.  Her father had come from Russia to escape military conscription there. . . . Not much rootedness–everyone having come from somewhere else, usually having run away from, or having been driven away from, somewhere else.

My first memories—between 1927 and 1933—were of a well-integrated, solid, assimilated, German-Jewish family.  We couldn’t forget the Jewish part because my [maternal] grandfather was the cantor of the biggest Jewish synagogue in Cologne.

Her father, Marcus Prawer, was a lawyer.  Her older brother S. S. Prawer, an expert on Heinrich Heine, became Professor of German at Oxford.

Prawer Jhabvala’s grandfather had sometimes been arrested and interrogated, but he had powerful connections with the police and was soon released.  Her maternal grandmother was born in Cologne and studied at the Berlin Conservatory of Music.  She considered herself German and did not believe the Nazi horrors would last.  Despite the agonies of Kristallnacht in November 1938—when Jewish shops were destroyed, synagogues burned and at least 91 Jews killed—the Prawer family remained in Germany until April 1939. (Sigmund Freud needed the help of Mussolini, Roosevelt and Princess Marie Bonaparte to escape from Vienna in June 1938.)  If the precocious adolescent writer had been arrested by the Gestapo and sent to an extermination camp, she could have shared the fate of Anne Frank.

Prawer Jhabvala never talked or wrote about what had happened to her in Germany, and her daughter Firoza was glad her mother had “shielded me from the horror”.  After he learned that forty Polish relatives had been murdered in the Holocaust, her depressed and guilt-ridden father committed suicide in 1948.  Firoza to wrote me that Ruth did not discuss her father’s suicide, but “may have told my older sister who told me.  She understood why he did it but never discussed her loss in personal terms or feelings.  She suddenly brought up the details of how it happened to the rabbi whom she spoke to before she died.”

Ruth and her family emigrated to England when she was twelve years old.  She studied at Queen Mary College, London University, from 1945 to 1951 and earned a Master’s degree in English.  That year she met and married a fellow student, the Indian Parsi Cyrus Jhabvala (1920-2014), who became a distinguished architect and influential teacher.  After living in India for 24 years, she used the Booker Prize money to move to New York and bought a flat on the East Side in the same building as Merchant and Ivory.

Firoza wrote that her father was not upset or angry when Ruth left India and moved to New York: “My parents had an understanding about this.  He was always very supportive of her career.”  She spent three months of the year in Delhi; after his retirement Cyrus joined her full time in New York.

Prawer Jhabvala described herself as “a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis.  I am irritable and have weak nerves.”  She left India when depressed by the country and climate, and began to hate it: “the tide of poverty, disease and squalor rising all around; the heat—the frayed nerves; the strange, alien, often inexplicable, often maddening, Indian character. . . . The grasping landlord, the pitiless money lender, the evil mother-in-law who tortured the little daughter-in-law (aged fourteen) for not bringing enough dowry.”  She found herself more and more unwilling to leave her comfortable Delhi flat, where servants took care of the house, meals and children,  and into the streets teeming with human misery.

By 1975 it was time to depart.  The last twelve years had been a perpetual struggle: “not to love it too much and not to hate it too much. . . . During my last years in India I became desperately homesick for Europe.  Finally it got so bad that I just had to go and live there and start again—adapt myself again—leaving India behind me as I had left Germany and then England.  Feeling so homesick for Europe, longing for it so intensely [she paradoxically] went to live in New York,” which she felt had many European qualities.  “The accent of the tongue may be American but the accent of the soul has retained the intonation of the European past.”

I wondered if her reasons for leaving included health problems: jaundice and asthma from the Delhi smog, depression about the state of the country, her three daughters grown up and far from home, and the wish to be closer to her collaborators.  Firoza explained:

I think there was a little of all of that you mentioned.  She missed the childhood and culture she had lost in Germany, and was amazed to see the same people in New York, some of whom were her old school friends.  She didn’t want to go back to Europe because she said it still smelled of blood.  The critics in India were terribly mean, especially when they found out she wasn’t Indian.  I think that really affected her, this lack of acceptance.  She began to feel like an alien in India and wanted to be among people more like her.  She, of course, loved Jim and Ismail and they wanted her to be closer to them.

By 1999 Prawer Jhabvala had lived and written on three continents: 24 years in Europe (1927-51), 24 years in Asia (1951-75) and 24 years in North America (1975-99).  She felt disinherited, blown from country to country, culture to culture, and explained: “Perhaps after my first disinheritance—my calm acceptance of it, of so cheerfully pretending to be English, and then Indian, and then Anglo-Indian, changing colour as I changed countries —maybe I will just have to go on doing it, changing countries like lovers.”  But her radical transformations and shifting identities—from German to English, English to Indian, Indian to American—gave her a new vision and perspective that no other writer had ever experienced.

Ruth’s daughters, like herself, now live on three continents: Europe, Asia and America.  Firoza added that Ruth mixed cultures until the end of her life: “We had no religious education.  Our father was an atheist anyway.  But she asked for a rabbi and all the Jewish death rituals when the time came, and asked to be cremated.  So we had to go from a synagogue in Manhattan to a Hindu crematorium in New Jersey.”

II

The vital Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala partnership was the longest in the history of movies.  None of them was English.  Their cosmopolitan triangle was composed of an Indian Muslim, son of a Bombay businessman, who’d studied business at New York University; an American Catholic, son of an Oregon lumberman; and a German Jew, granddaughter of a cantor.  Their three backgrounds echoed Jhabvala’s three continents; Merchant and Ivory were longtime lovers.  Merchant was dynamic, mercurial and explosive.  Ivory—quiet, calm and laid-back—was a minimalist director who asked actors how they wanted to play the part.  Ruth was as modest, shy and self-effacing as her biblical namesake who implored her mother-in-law: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thy lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people” (Ruth 1:16).

Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

The young Ivory met Merchant in 1959 at a New York screening of his documentary about Indian miniatures.  Merchant bought the rights to Jhabvala’s novel The Householder (1960); and when he first came to her house and asked her to write the film adaptation, she timidly pretended to be the maid.  They eventually collaborated on 22 elegant, sophisticated films over a period of 46 years, beginning in 1963 and ending with The City of Your Final Destination in 2009.  At a time when violent action films were popular, they made modest-budget, superbly cast, high quality, sophisticated films for intelligent adults.  Their films often portray a new arrival’s changing perceptions of an alien culture: The Europeans in New England, Heat and Dust in India, A Room with a View in Florence.

Ivory described the unusual harmony when working with Jhabvala: “we decide what we want to emphasize in the script, and I tell her what my favorite scenes might well be, or are, if she’s adapting a book.  If it’s from a book then I mark up the book, so that she knows the favorite things of mine that I wouldn’t want to lose.”  Jhabvala revealed that their collaboration was more contentious.  To avoid conflict the weak-nerved woman patiently submitted to Ivory’s severe criticism: “We generally discuss what we want to do and I go off and do it and I give it to him.  Then he says Oh no, he doesn’t like this or that, can’t he have that, and I go off and do it again and he says the same thing again.  This goes on till we have something more or less satisfactory.  So I’m really working on my own, then I give the screenplay to him for comment.  After Jim likes it, I fade out of the picture completely.  I rarely go on the set, I don’t see the location, I don’t want to meet the actors.”

Prawer Jhabvala interpreted the novel for people who hadn’t read it, and the film version reached a much wider audience than the original book.  She precisely described how she constructed a screenplay, which normally took two or three months: “I read the book again several times, and then I make an abstract of each scene.  Then I put the book aside, and working from my abstract or my synopsis, I turn it around in a way that would work for a film—compress here, expand there, turn things around.  That I do without looking at the book.  Then I work from that. . . . I haven’t changed the story, but I have changed the way the story develops.  You have to build up to something central, something big.”

She emphasised the need for distillation to maintain interest, and was grateful that no one interfered with the final script: “I mustn’t have a single word that’s not absolutely necessary.  You have to compress and compress and just give them the essence.”  When converting the 246-page novel into a 135-page script,  she used a great deal of Forster’s dialogue and often put it into quotation marks.  She added: “I’ve been very lucky.  I’ve escaped that [interference] completely.  I never had anybody rewrite my work. . . . James Ivory always has creative control and final cut.” She admired and trusted Ivory, and believed the writer should serve the vision of the director.  But to guide him, she provided descriptions of the setting, the characters’ appearance and feelings, and even the camera placement.

Though Jhabvala hated interference, she welcomed the actors’ suggestions as they learned and spoke her lines: “I do not like visiting a set.  It’s not only that there is nothing for me to do there—there isn’t—but also that I am in the way. . . Sometimes actors will spontaneously put in something of their own.  That’s the most wonderful gift they can give to a film.  I hate the script to be considered set in stone. . . . I love it when actors change the dialogue to make it fit them better, or add to it, or subtract, or reinterpret, or do whatever they wish to serve themselves.  I want them to take possession of it for themselves, knowing that they will do so much more than I could do on the page, by infusing the words with their own talents and personalities.”

III

Goldcrest producers, which put up part of the money for A Room with a View, wanted the Americans John Travolta and Glenn Close in the leading roles.  Merchant-Ivory, completely independent, rejected this notion and attracted a superb English cast.  Helena Bonham Carter was then 19 and planning to go to university.  She beautifully expresses Lucy Honeychurch’s complex and changing moods as Italy reveals her deepest feelings, and this role made her a star.  Daniel Day-Lewis, who later became a star in very different virile roles, showed his comic gifts in the unappealing character of Cecil Vyse, Lucy’s intolerably egoistic and priggish fiancé.  Julian Sands played the passionate but insecure George Emerson, who naturally replaces Cecil.  (Sands disappeared in January 2023 while hiking in the southern California mountains and his body was not found until June.)  The supporting cast—Denholm Elliott as George’s father Mr Emerson, Judi Dench as the popular romance novelist Eleanor Lavish, Simon Callow as the Reverend Arthur Beebe and Maggie Smith, always playing herself, as the spinster Charlotte Bartlett—were experienced character actors who balanced the ensemble and gave depth to the youthful romance.

Maggie Smith in A Room with a View (1985)

Music, architecture and art add significantly to the beauty and meaning of the film.  Decorated title cards match the actors with their roles during the opening credits, and chapter titles from Forster’s book introduce the different scenes.  As the credits roll Kiri Te Kanawa sings one of the greatest Italian arias, “mio babbino caro” (my dear little father) from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (1918) and the operatic music continues to play after the aria ends.  When George kisses Lucy, Te Kanawa sings “il bel sogno” (the beautiful dream) from Puccini’s La Rondine (The Swallow, 1917).  In the Florentine  Pensione Bartolini, Lucy passionately plays Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata (1804) as the light, alluding to her name, shines from the window and onto her face.  Beebe prophetically declares, “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting—both for us and for her.”  Later on in England, she plays Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 4 (1817), and sings a revealing aria in English, “Vacant heart and hand and eye” from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), again an allusion to her name.  Music releases Lucy’s emotions; architecture and art refine her aesthetic sensibility.

In the Edwardian era, Italy was stranger and more foreign to English visitors than it is today, and in A Room with a View Italians are both murderers and lovers.  Eleanor Lavish announces the theme of her novel and the film, “The Young English Girl transfigured by Italy” as her strong emotions burst through her conventional carapace and reveal her true character.  The opening scene in the pensione establishes the conflict between the beliefs of the Emersons and those of Lucy’s older cousin and chaperone Charlotte Bartlett.  Mr Emerson, a retired journalist, is named after Ralph Waldo, the American champion of individualism.  At the end of the film, when packing to return to London, he tells George, “leave me Thoreau till I leave.  I need him by me now”.  Finally, choosing to follow the beliefs of Mr Emerson rather than Miss Bartlett, Lucy eventually finds personal freedom and love.

Lucy looks disappointed and sad when their rooms do not have the promised view.  As the principal characters first meet at the dining room table, the generously intrusive Mr Emerson offers to exchange rooms with Lucy and Charlotte. Miss Bartlett, a shabby-genteel snob, considers this most tactless, indelicate and shocking, and doesn’t wish to be obligated to a man whom she considers to be from a lower social class.  More important, the men have just slept in the beds offered to the ladies and, she fears, have left behind the smell of their smoke and (more suggestively) the impression of their bodies.  But the Reverend Beebe, acting as intermediary, persuades Lucy to accept this kind offer, and establishes the implicit nominal connection between “Bee-be” and “Honey-church”.  Mr Emerson seals the pact by boldly placing violets in the hair of the nervously flattered old ladies Catherine and Teresa Alan.  The costumes, sets and scenery throughout the film are eye-ravishing recreations of that period.  The room with a view across the Arno reveals the Duomo (cathedral), the Church of San Miniato and the Signoria (town hall).

Lucy has no father and Mr Emerson, her future father-in-law, becomes her babbino caro and guides her toward instinctive wisdom.  All the older characters—Eleanor Lavish, Charlotte Bartlett, Catherine and Teresa Alan, the Reverend Arthur Beebe and the Reverend Cuthbert Eager—are unmarried.  Mr Emerson is a widower, Lucy’s mother Mrs Honeychurch is a widow.  This opens the way for the younger generation—George, who is depressed and Lucy, who is misguided—to find the passionate life they desire.  George, a ruggedly handsome clerk in the railways, suffers from Weltschmerz, a troubling fin de siècle world-weariness.  He draws a big question mark on a mirror in the pensione, asks what TS Eliot calls “the overwhelming question” in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (published in 1916, eight years after Forster’s novel) and wonders “shall love prevail?”

In the Piazza Annunciata, Lucy passes an equestrian statue by Giambologna (1607) of Ferdinando I, Grand Duke of Tuscany.  She meets Mr Emerson in the Church of Santa Croce, which contains the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo; the frescoes of Giotto on the life of St. Francis of Assisi; and the magnificent altarpiece by Ugolino di Nerio (1328) of the Virgin and Child surrounded by four robed and crowned saints, placed in a golden architectural setting with Gothic arches and tall spires.  The Reverend Eager, the bewhiskered resident English chaplain, eager to impose his life-throttling views on his captive audience, lectures on Giotto while Mr Emerson rudely mocks him.  In their contentious dialogue Eager asserts, “Remember the facts about this church of Santa Croce; how it was built by faith in the full fervour of medievalism.”  But Emerson interrupts him and declares: “Built by faith indeed!  That simply means the workmen weren’t paid properly.”  Eager doesn’t condescend to argue with him, but makes a snide remark and walks away.

In the Piazza Signoria Lucy buys postcards and, as two Italians fight over 5 lire, witnesses a fatal stabbing.  The hand that covers the face of the wounded Italian belonged to an extra who accidentally got into the shot.  Ivory kept it in the picture to suggest the crowd’s rush to help the victim.  As the funeral carriage arrives with hooded men dressed in black, members of the Misericordia who tend the wounded and carry away the corpses, Lucy’s postcards get bloodstained and she faints.  George providentially rescues her and carries her to safety.  As George leaves to fetch her postcards, she tries steal away from him “with the cunning of a maniac.”  But he returns, throws her polluted postcards into the Arno and watches them float away as life replaces art and leads to Lucy’s emotional liberation.

George—a brooding contrast to his extravert father—responds to the “Everlasting Yes” in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834) and announces that “something tremendous has happened”. As Lucy changes in his eyes from an impossible ideal to a woman he feels mad to kiss, he suddenly falls in love with her.

The Reverend Cuthbert Eager leads an excursion through the countryside to Fiesole, on a scenic height above Florence.  Though he can’t speak correct Italian, he pompously states: “We residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little—handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker.”  During the picnic Charlotte, assuming the martyr’s role, refuses a protective blanket and exclaims: “The ground will do for me. . . .  I have not had rheumatism for years, and if I do feel it coming on, I shall stand up.”

Seeking Beebe and Eager, Lucy asks in broken Italian “Dove buoni uomini?” (where good men?).  The handsome Italian carriage driver, who’s been kissing his pretty girlfriend along the way, leads her, not to the clergymen, but instead to his passionate English alter-ego.  Lucy’s dramatic appearance inspires George, without asking permission, to kiss her in a sea of wild violets swaying in the wind.  Though Lucy has liberated George from his brooding, she can’t respond to his kiss—how could she?—but she doesn’t resist and accepts it with good will.  Nevertheless Lucy, now partly transformed, must inevitably return to her repressive life in Surrey.

Following Forster, Prawer Jhabvala contrasts the sympathetic characters—Lucy, Mr Emerson and George, with the satirical ones—Lavish, Bartlett, Eager and Lucy’s fiancé Cecil Vyse.  Precise, prissy and sexless, Cecil sneers at everything.  He doesn’t have to work, complacently calls himself an aesthete and connoisseur, and says: “My attitude—quite an indefensible one—is that so long as I am no trouble to anyone, I have a right to do as I like.”  When he refuses to play tennis, he quotes Lucy’s younger brother Freddy and explains, “ ‘There are some chaps who are no good for anything but books.’  I plead guilty to being such a chap.”  Though well connected, clever and rich, the snobbish and arrogant Cecil seems too negative, not at all the sort of man juicy Lucy would really want to marry.  She doesn’t love him, or even pretend to, but accepts him as a suitable suitor, sacrificially served up by her social-climbing mother.  Terribly pleased by Lucy’s consent to marry him, Cecil alludes with slight irony to a famous novel by Alessandro Manzoni, calling the happy couple I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed, 1827).  Freddy and Beebe are not pleased.  Cecil’s pince-nez reflects his pinched personality, his high stiff collar almost chokes him.  When he asks permission to kiss Lucy, she wittily replies: “I can’t run at you, you know.”  In contrast to George’s impulsive embrace, Cecil gives a chaste, frigid and pursed-lips kiss as his pince tumbles off his nez.

Back in London, at the National Gallery, Cecil meets Mr Emerson in front of Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (c.1435-60), which portrays the 1432 Florentine victory over Siena.  The horses and soldiers, lancer and archers, brilliantly portray the frenzied violence of Renaissance combat that notably contrasts to the domestic tranquility of rural Surrey.  Cecil tells Emerson about the cottage for rent in their village, and takes malicious pleasure in thwarting its snobbish landlord with lowly tenants as well as Lucy’s plan to rent it to the congenial Alans.

Prawer Jhabvala dramatises the thematic contrast between music, views and poppies, and hypocrisy, rigidity and repression, in the exuberant naked bathing scene that was filmed in a Kentish pond.  Simon Callow, who camped it up as the Reverend Beebe, was not told that the water would be cold and his genitals fully exposed.  Beebe, his blood stirred by the wonder of the water and the youthful enthusiasm of George and Freddy, strips off his clerical collar and clothing, jumps into the pond and becomes transformed.  Wildly excited, he abandons his dignity as the frolicking boys fling themselves at him, splash him and duck him.  Mrs Honeychurch and Lucy, escorted by Cecil, have a quite a different walk, with a view of the naked men bathing.  In the novel, this scene has strong homosexual overtones: Forster evidently longed to fulfill his fantasy and join the naked men.  But this theme is cautiously muted in the film.  But Lucy glimpses George’s virile member, as she will when they are married, and likes what she sees.

As Cecil reads aloud Lavish’s novel Under the Loggia, which describes George kissing Lucy in the violets, Lucy realises that Charlotte has told Lavish about it and embarrassed Lucy.  Charlotte habitually says, “I shall never forgive myself,” and Lucy angrily replies: “You always say that, Charlotte, but you always do forgive yourself, quite readily.”

George exclaims: “Everything is Fate,” a variant of Heraclitus’ “Character is fate,” and surges toward his destiny to win Lucy.  She and Cecil have a serious quarrel when she learns that he has arranged the cottage for the Emersons and made her look ridiculous.  She then rejects him, slips from his vise-like grip and tells him: “You wrap yourself up in art and books and music, and you want to wrap me up!  That’s why I’m breaking off my engagement.”  Expressing his feelings and looking sympathetic for the first time, Cecil says, “I must actually thank you for what you’ve done—for your courage in doing it.  I do admire you for it.”

By conventional standards of polite behaviour the Emersons behave badly, even boorishly.  The father tells everyone what to think and makes fun of Eager’s lecture in Santa Croce.  George throws Lucy’s postcards away and in England kisses the virginal girl for the second time.  But their outrageous acts are actually generous and liberating.  George expresses his true feelings, breaks through Lucy’s reticence, and shows her the difference between him and Cecil.  Near the end of the film Mr Emerson gives Lucy a therapeutic tutorial.  He tells her that “everyone has been lying” except George, who believes that love will prevail in the end, and that “you’ve deceived everyone including yourself.”  Alluding to St. Augustine, he urges her to “Love and do what you will. . . .

You love George!  You love the boy body and soul as he loves you!”  As in Jane Austen’s novels, the characters are initially attracted to each other, overcome a series of personal and social obstacles, and end up happily married.  The exemplary Italian carriage driver has done his work and the lovers have finally been united.  The “babbino caro” aria reprises at the end as Lucy and George return to their room in the pensione and admire the symbolic Florentine view.

The reviews of the film were enthusiastic.  Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Tribune (April 4, 1986), wrote: “This is the best film they have made.  It is an intellectual film, but intellectual about emotions.  It encourages us to think about how we feel, instead of simply acting on our feelings.”  Vincent Canby, in the New York Times (March 7, 1986), stated that Jhabvala, Ivory and Merchant “have created an exceptionally faithful, ebullient screen equivalent to a literary work that lesser talents would embalm. . . . It is blithely, elegantly funny, a fit description of the first-rate film adaptation.”

The film was still greatly admired 25 years later.  Catherine Shoard, in the Guardian (October 16, 2010), declared, “This is incredibly fresh and arresting film-making: moving and amusing, swooningly romantic and socially ferocious—nothing less than a full-frontal (in every way) assault on your soul.”  Farran Nehme, in Film Comment (February 17, 2016), concluded: “It is fresh, sophisticated, and above all, passionate.  That A Room with a View is also lovely to look at detracts neither from its comic wisdom nor its status as one of the best films of the ’80s.”  The collaboration of Jhabvala’s literary intelligence with Ivory’s visual drama created a masterpiece.

At the last minute, as the actors were boarding the plane to Italy to be filmed, Merchant had desperately asked them to accept half their salary—though at this point they had no choice and their salary was modest to begin with.  But the financial cuts were unnecessary.  The film, which was shot in ten weeks and cost only $3 million, earned $43,000 on the opening weekend in New York and $21 million worldwide.  The ecstatic Merchant told everyone, “you have no idea what this is going to mean,” and easily got funding for their more ambitious and expensive films: Howards End, The Remains of the Day and Jefferson  in Paris.

Jeffrey Meyers will publish James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist on February 7, 2024 and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in August or September 2024, both with Louisiana State University Press.

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