Craig Raine

Confessions of an Actor is, unsurprisingly, more an impersonation than a real piece of writing. In it, Laurence Olivier acts writing – an uneasy mixture of the chatty (‘All right, I can hear you, reader dear’) and the belle-lettrist flourish (‘Fortunately for the restoration of my depleted coffers … ’). What good bits of writing there are (not many) stem equally from Olivier’s métier: as when, for instance, he arrives in Hollywood to help the mad Vivien Leigh. ‘I said, “Hello, darling,” and when she spoke to me it was in the tone of halting dreamlike amazement that people in the theatre use for mad scenes when they can’t think of anything better. My instinctive reaction was that she was putting it on.’ She wasn’t. Soon she had to be sedated: ‘To my horror I saw that the nurse was enjoying it; she was waggling the syringe and there was a glint in her eye. But there was no time for anything; Danny Kaye and I threw ourselves on top of Vivien and held her down. Vivien fought us with the utmost ferocity as the needle went in, biting and scratching Danny and me, screaming appalling abuse at both of us, with particular attention to my erotic impulses … ’ There is a professional, unadorned quality of observation here that survives the sentence’s limp end: ‘it seemed an eternity before she went limp and Danny and I were able to let her go, both shattered and exhausted.’ The whole incident shows us not only the distraught husband but also the observant actor. Indeed, in Olivier’s life, the professional, for the most part, took priority over the personal: ‘I have always believed that if you aspire to be an artist you must be prepared to make such personal sacrifices as separation readily, if not exactly cheerfully. It’s tough but it’s right.’

His wet waders dipped in lacquer by the light,

the lobsterman puts out to sea against the tide

that tilts his boat. From where we stand, up on the dunes,

his wicker pots have dwindled already to balls of twine,

but for five minutes, saluting the sun out of our eyes,

we watch him knit with clumsy oars, while the waves

unravel their length, this way, that way, on the beach below ...

Have we...

(for Norma Kitson)

Seeing the pagoda of dirty dinner plates, I observe my hands

under the kitchen tap as it they belonged to Marco Polo:

glib with soap, they speak of details from a pillow book,

the fifty-seven ways in which the Yin receives the Yang.

Rinsed and purified, they flick off drops like a court magician

whose stretching fingers seek to hypnotise the helpless house ...

This single...

‘Fetch me the handkerchief; my mind misgives …’

Othello (III, iv, 89)

In the dormitory, boys laced up their rugby boots like parcels,

knowing the mud outside would add that final touch of scaling wax.

It’s taken them twenty years to be delivered by an accident:

I see a pint of gritty mussels for sale and think of wet boots

on the changing-room floor. The...