93. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala — Heat and Dust with Brigitte Hales

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew...

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes, and Kim, today's lost lady was a Booker-Prize-winning novelist (we'll be discussing that book today) but she was also a two time Oscar-winning screenwriter. I believe she's the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar. She wrote the adaptations for so many stellar films, some of which you and I, and I'm guessing our listeners, too, would consider among our all time favorite movies. And yet we both had no idea they were written by a woman. I guess we never paid much attention to the credits. Shame on us.

KIM: That's why we're placing this screenwriter and author, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, in our “lost ladies” file. She's well-known to some, but not to enough people.

AMY: And who better to join us as today's guests than a Hollywood screenwriter, right? We've got one, a good friend of ours, in fact, to talk about Prawer Jhabvala and her movies. Should we cut to the chase and introduce her, Kim?

KIM: By the side of the everlasting "why" (or "should" in this case), there is a “yes.” That's a quote from one of Jhabvala's films. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM:  Today's guest is screenwriter Brigitte Hales, who was a writer on the popular ABC series "Once Upon a Time." Her most recent film project is Disenchanted — that's Disney's sequel to Enchanted, starring Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey, which comes out later this year. She's currently writing another big movie sequel, and we're not allowed to spill the beans on that just yet, but let's just say she continues to run with the princess/fairytale theme. In 2020, Brigitte also worked on Steven Spielberg's reboot of "Amazing Stories" for Apple TV. 

AMY: As a neighbor of mine, Brigitte also was a lifeline for me during the pandemic. I would drag a folding chair down the street and meet with her for coffee every Sunday morning during the pandemic. She'd sit up on her balcony and I'd sit below in her driveway, and it was like "Romeo and Juliet," only instead of two teenagers obsessively in love, we were just venting all our stress and boredom and panic to one another. And then of course, we'd also frequently detour with gossip about the British Royal Family, because we both share that obsession as well. But anyway, we attempted to keep each other sane during that first year of the pandemic and still to this day, I think we're doing that, but I very much look forward to talking about other things than COVID numbers with you in today's episode, Brigitte. Welcome to the show!

BRIGITTE: Thank you! I'm so excited to be here. I've been enjoying these episodes so, so much, and you know, it's, it really still makes me laugh now to think about that time. It was so sad. Like, I really did not feel good while it was happening, but those are really great memories. And I have to say that I was thinking about this book and how great it would have been as a pandemic read because it just totally sweeps you away and takes you to a completely different place, which I was desperately trying to get to when I was stuck in my house. So I'm really sad that this book did not come into my life two years ago. 

AMY: I know, I did read it during lockdown and it was, it was like grabbing a passport and hopping on a plane. The next best thing. 

BRIGITTE: Oh completely. I felt like I traveled after I finished this book. 

AMY: Yeah. Okay. So I think it probably goes without saying that we are all obsessed with Merchant Ivory films, and that's part of the reason, Brigitte, that I wanted to bring you on for this episode, 

BRIGITTE: Oh, absolutely. I feel like Merchant Ivory films are where my obsession with a very specific type of English movie started, you know, like very sweeping, great cinematography kind of repressed emotion, all that kind of thing. Yeah. I love that.

AMY: Kim and I are actually going to delve into this a little bit more in next week's episode. I don't want to get too much into that, but I will say, I found out that there was A Room With a View musical that I had never heard of or known about before. And I love musicals so I'm like, "How have I not seen this? And how do I go see it?"

KIM: I'm scared and excited at the same time to hear that. 

BRIGITTE: Someone needs to reboot that.

AMY: Yeah, 

BRIGITTE: You’ve got to get that going, someone out there.

KIM: So when we're thinking about Merchant Ivory films, we think of the two main guys, right? James Ivory and Ismael Merchant. 

AMY: Yes. And they were a romantic couple in real life as well, but there was actually a third person — a woman — on their team from day one: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. And yes, Kim, I have to clarify the pronunciation; we've been thinking the whole time. It was Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but because she was from Germany and they pronounced the "w" as a "v" I believe it's Ruth [Praver] Jhabvala. I've seen it said both ways. But yeah, we know about Merchant; We know about Ivory; but Ruth was actually their go-to writer on their biggest films. She penned 23 movies for them in a partnership spanning 40 years. And I realized that "Merchant Ivory Jhabvala," it doesn't quite roll off the tongue with the same ease as Merchant Ivory, but it kind of seems like an omission if you ask me, especially since Ruth won more Oscars than those guys ever did. So Brigette, were you aware of her, before we started doing this?

BRIGITTE: Not really. I mean, I knew her name because of the Oscar for Howard's End. But you know, when I was thinking about that, it's not actually that unusual in movies, even today, for screenwriters to get almost zero credit or notoriety, unless they're also the director. And it probably doesn't help that she's a woman. But yeah, it's, it's sadly often the case.

AMY: I know. I feel almost ashamed, like, it's my favorite movie, A Room With a View, and I didn't know a woman was involved with it at all. She won a Booker Prize. She was so prolific. So I'm sure there's a lot of listeners out there that are like, "You guys are crazy. We've known about her all along." 

BRIGITTE: I mean, putting aside how many short stories she wrote and how many novels she wrote, the fact that she wrote 23 movies is insane. That is a massive career all by itself.

KIM: Yeah. That's a huge number. So actually, the story is, Merchant and Ivory first hooked up with Ruth because they wanted to adapt her 1960 novel The Householder. And according to a New Yorker profile, Ismael Merchant telephoned her in India where she lived to ask her about optioning the book. She put them off by pretending to be her mother-in-law, the other Mrs. Jhabvala. That's how interested she was in collaborating with them. It's pretty funny. 

AMY: Apparently she did that frequently. She'd just answer the phone and say, "Ruth is not at home," which, Kim, that reminds me of Mary Astell from one of our previous episodes. She would lean her head out of window and tell visitors, "Miss Astell is not at home." 

KIM: Yeah, that's great. 

BRIGITTE: I wish we could still do that. Can I just jump in and say that that wit is totally in her books? I read some of her short stories. I started reading and it's definitely there. It's great. I love it.

AMY: A lot of humor. Yeah. Um, so apparently when they approached her about adapting her book, she had not seen a lot of movies, so she wasn't really that keen on the idea. But they sweet-talked her and she relented and she wound up writing the screenplay for the movie, The Householder, which premiered in 1963. It was the first official Merchant Ivory feature. It is set in India, and it's about a young couple in the early days of their arranged marriage. 

KIM: So Heat and Dust, the novel we're going to be focusing on today, is also set in India. And this might be a good time to back up a little bit in Ruth's story, because one mistake people frequently make (and made in her lifetime as well) is thinking she is an Indian writer. 

AMY: Yeah, and I will admit, I made the same assumption before looking into her story more closely. Yeah. I actually went to the library to get a copy of The Householder, and when I was checking it out, the librarian looks up and he's like, "You know, she's not Indian, right?" And I was like, "Actually, I do know that." Um, but apparently that's a common misconception, that he had to point that out to me. So the fact that she's not Indian also makes her writing a little bit controversial, but before we get into that, Brigitte, would you mind walking us through some of Ruth's backstory?

BRIGITTE: Yeah, sure. so she was born in 1927 in Cologne to Jewish parents who were at the time very assimilated and successful in their society. Her father was a lawyer. Her grandfather was prominent in the synagogue. Then when she was around seven, both parents were arrested by the Nazis and accused of having ties to Communism. Luckily they were released. Um, and soon after they escaped to Great Britain. They were apparently among the last wave of refugees to make it out. At the end of the war, they learned that more than 40 of their relatives had been killed in the camps. And her father was so broken by this news that he killed himself in 1948. Um, you know, by the time he died, Ruth was already studying English literature at Queen Mary College in London. Although one of the interesting things that I discovered about her, was that she was six years old when she says she realized that she was a writer. She had been asked to write a story about a rabbit. And she said in this interview that I wrote the title "Der Hase," I'm probably mangling that. "At once I was flooded with my destiny only, I didn't know that's what it was. I only remember my entire absorption and delight in writing about der hase to think that such happiness could be." When I read this, I was like, "I don't think I have ever had this experience." I still don't ever say to myself, "To think that such happiness could be," as I'm sitting at my typewriter. It's the opposite. 

AMY: I feel like at one point in school, this teacher or somebody accused her of not having written one of the stories. They said her parents had to have written it, because it was that good. So she had some talent, that little one.

BRIGITTE: She sure did.

KIM: So as you said, she studied English lit at Queen Mary College in London, and at a college party there, that's where she met her husband, an architect named Cyrus Jhabvala. His nickname was "Jhab." They married in the early 1950s and moved to his native India — Delhi, to be exact — where they would live for the next 25 years. The couple had three daughters and they had a long and happy marriage. You think it might have been culture shock for her, and it probably was, but she also loved all the richness and vibrancy of India. She was particularly fond of all the Indian sweets. After all the rationing in England during World War II, she was just thrilled to be able to indulge. So that's a cute anecdote about her. 

AMY: So, yeah, actually being a foreigner wherever she lived became part of her lifelong identity. She once said in an interview with the BBC, "Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can't remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don't give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in." And to explore this idea a little further, at a lecture in 1979, she described herself as quote "a writer without any ground of being out of which to write, really blown about from country to country, culture to culture, till I feel, till I am nothing." She then added, "I like it that way." And she compared herself to "a cuckoo, forever insinuating myself into others' nests, a chameleon, hiding myself in false or borrowed colors." 

KIM: Yeah. And when her novels and stories set in India were published, most of the stories were published in The New Yorker. It seemed like Indian readers embraced her, at first. Based on her married surname, they assumed she was Indian, but when they discovered she wasn't, they accused her of satirizing Indian characters and being too critical of the culture and country. She shrugged her shoulders at the criticism. And at one point she told The New York Times, "If you don't say that India is simply paradise on earth and the extended Hindu family the most perfect way of organizing society, you're anti-Indian. I don't have any readers there." 

AMY: Yeah. This is a tough one. I guess I can see why Indians might instinctively resist an outsider writing about their culture, especially if she was sometimes being a little bit critical of it. They could have also felt like maybe she was taking the spotlight away from actual Indian writers. 

BRIGITTE: Obviously of course, regardless of this episode, for sure there are great Indian writers that you'll find. This issue is, I think, especially prevalent right now, um, and the conversation about who gets to tell what stories and what do you get to write about, or, you know, paint... I guess it's not probably as big of an issue in music, although there are some kinds of sounds and whatnot that are associated with specific, you know, cultures. But the more I thought about this, the more I was thinking about how there are so many fantastic writers that wrote about cultures that weren't their own. Writers like Hemingway or Graham Greene. They were able to walk into a place and observe it in a way that when you live there and you're rushing through life every day, you're not going to be able to pick up on the same types of things that someone who isn't from your culture is able to see. I don't know, it worries me a little bit that we're going to continually shun anybody who isn't from a specific group of people from writing about things that they notice that might be incredible observations for the people who live there. I don't know, it's a very thorny issue.

AMY: She always felt like she didn't have her own tradition to draw on. She didn't have a place. She didn't have her own sort of identity. That's why she says, "I felt like a cuckoo, always in another nest," but if you think about it, so at this point in her life, she moves to India, she had probably been in Germany 10 years before she left. She’d probably been in England for another 10 years. Now she's in India and this is like the longest span that she's been somewhere. She lived there for 25 years. She was married to an Indian. They had Indian children. Her life was there. I don't know, we'll get into this a little bit more, but I agree, Brigitte. She's kind of straddling the line. So she's bringing the outsider's perspective, but then she's also, there submersed in it, you know, related to it. Um, there was a New Yorker profile where the writer Maya Jassanoff says that she actually had “an anthropologist’s curiosity about how society functions…” and that “she’s a decidedly nonparticipant observer; her narrative stance brings together candor and detachment.” So that sort of gets to what you were saying, Brigette. But then on the flip side of that, her very good friend, the Indian novelist Anita DeSai, she kind of said the opposite. In an essay in The Guardian, she wrote that “Ruth, like a great actor, becomes her characters and presents them to us from the inside out, not the outside in. She does not criticize or satirize them – as so many Indian readers accused her of doing – she becomes those she portrays. 

BRIGITTE: I totally agree with that. I mean, obviously, I'm just speaking for myself here, but reading Heat and Dust, I did not feel like there were any caricatures in this book at all. And I actually feel like in a weird way, this book kind of combines both of those quotes that you just read, because there is a sort of anthropologist's curiosity that I sensed in this book, which, you know, I was actually reading some of it in London and it's not a place I've been that many times. And so I felt like that kind of sense was coming alive in me, too. It's what happens when you're in a new place, you know, and your ability to just see these little details about the world that you're walking through is just so beautifully present in this book. And then at the same time, she's writing real people, people that are very complex. She writes about the tensions that existed in the time between the East and the West. Um, she's very hard on the white characters I would say. She often talks about how the white characters have a sense of superiority, which they certainly do. And she even uses some of this to justify a little bit of the violence that's in the book, that there's this simmering resentment that is justified by the Indian characters. So again, just my point of view, but, at least looking at this particular book, I feel like it does justice to the place and the people that she knew and were living with.

AMY: I've heard it said about her that she was the first post colonialist writer and I think this book exemplifies that, because before this a lot of the people writing about India were writing about the Empire. Glorifying it. And she, in most of her literature about India, was writing more about contemporary India and also just real life day-to-day what it was like to be there. So I like Heat and Dust as an example of bridging the gap between those two. And we'll get into it in a second with a synopsis of what the book's about, but she's making those connections between the past and the present . She's making the connection between the East and the West, and who better to do that than a woman who has had a foot in both of those worlds, right?

KIM: Yeah. So this seems like the perfect jumping off point to really get into our discussion about the book, Heat and Dust. She wrote it during a summer dust storm the last year she lived in India. It came out in 1975. It won the Booker Prize that year. Brigitte, do you want to set up the story for our listeners? 

BRIGITTE: Sure. So the book's about two women in two different time periods. One is Olivia in 1920s India, which is the British Raj era. She's the wife of an English official in the colonial government there who slowly falls in love with an Indian prince. And the other woman is essentially her step granddaughter in the 1970s who's completely captivated by this story in her family, which no one likes to discuss. It's kind of a, like, "We don't talk about Bruno" situation.

AMY: I was just going to make that reference. If we wind up doing a musical version of this, a la A Room View, we're going to add in a, "We don't talk about 'Livia."

BRIGITTE: It writes itself, basically. 

AMY: Yes. 

BRIGITTE: So anyway, yes, our woman in the seventies, who interestingly, I believe is never named, and I searched to make sure that this was true because her part is written in first person. But yes, she decides to move to India and try and trace Olivia's path and she ends up on a fantastic romantic adventure of her own.

AMY: And the interesting thing about Jhabvala's process in writing the novel is that she wrote the two narratives separately in their entirety, and then she went back, broke them up and pieced them back together like a puzzle into Heat and Dust, which I thought was really interesting. And I don't know if I would have thought to do it that way as a writer. And you can't tell she did it that way. 

BRIGITTE: I would never have guessed that she did that. Um, I also found out that in the middle of this, she contracted jaundice and was kind of in this sort of dreamy state, 

AMY: Like a fever dream, yeah.

BRIGITTE: I just think the book has such a wonderful dreamy quality to it that I just really kind of sunk into. And when I found out that she was in this kind of basically altered state when she wrote it, it made total sense.

AMY: I have the impression reading it like, "Oh, I'm reading a Merchant Ivory movie." That's the experience I felt. 

BRIGITTE: When we get into talking about the book a little bit, I pulled out a couple of sentences that are a perfect example of action description in screenwriting, because you could take these four sentences, and a director and a DP and a production designer could just make the whole scene come to life. This is why they loved her. They found a writer who could write lyrically and visually, and her characters were really refined and restrained, so great actors wanted to be in these movies. I mean, I get why they loved her.

AMY: And I also want to talk about, this, you know, step granddaughter, from the 1970s who is really wanting to piece together the story about who is this Olivia woman from the 1920s. It's such a mystery built right into the beginning of the book. You know there's drama. You are immediately sucked in, right?

KIM: Absolutely. Yeah. And that same kind of mystique that surrounds Olivia also surrounds this mysterious Nawab that Olivia is said to have run off with. He's thought to be in league with these local bandits who are causing all kinds of trouble for the British colonial officials. And there's something really fascinating, but also a little dangerous about him. Our seventies-era narrator is trying to get to the bottom of this family secret when she asks her Indian guide if he has any intel. Jhabvala writes, “Yes, he had heard rumors about him and his dissolute bad life; also vague rumors about the old scandal. But who cares about that now? All those people are dead, and even if any of them should still be left alive somewhere, there is no one to be interested in their doings.”

AMY: Okay, this is genius on her part because she's just like, no, you don't want to know about this while the reader's just sitting there going, "I do! I'm dying to know! Please tell me!"

KIM: What a great conceit there. Yep. 

BRIGITTE: So good. And I also think that, um, this choice she made to tell it in first person, as diary entries, really makes it feel like you are the person who's arriving in India. And the way she observes the world, it just immediately makes it feel so personal to you in a way that I think is super effective in drawing you into the story. Actually, can I read my little part of this beginning where she notices India, the world that she creates? Um, okay. So here's the little section. This is like page four or something. Our unnamed character from the seventies has just arrived in India. And these are some of her very first impressions that she has. She says, " I go to the window and look down in the street. It's bright as day down there, not only with the white street lights, but each stall and barrow is lit up with a flare of naphtha. There are crowds of people; some are sleeping — it's so warm that all they have to do is stretch out, no bedding necessary." I mean, when you're reading writing like that, it may seem like it's really easy to do that, but it is not easy to do that! In that tiny paragraph you saw in your head a character walk to a window, look down and the whole world came to life. I mean, it's absolutely beautiful prose to read in a book, but if you were writing a screenplay and you wanted to write what a character would do, that's exactly how you would write it.

AMY: Literally it is just telling you the action to set the mood.

KIM: Yep. Absolutely. 

BRIGITTE: But it's giving you just enough detail to tell you what color the light is, to tell you how busy the street is, what the character does, but not with too much description that you really just don't need. Now, sometimes writers love to write that kind of description and it's fun to read, so I don't necessarily diminish writers who are very verbose, but the simplicity of her writing is really just truly beautiful.

AMY: That's why her career dovetails so nicely as a Hollywood screenwriter. 

BRIGITTE: Even though she hated it. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: I don't know if she hated it, but we'll get into that.

BRIGITTE: She looked down on it.

AMY: She saw it as trivial. Yeah.

BRIGITTE: Yes. And all great novelists do, so it's okay. I don't hate her for that.

AMY: Um, in terms of her being able to set the mood instantly, I had a similar vibe when this 1970s narrator goes and visits the old Nawab's abandoned palace from the 1920s. She writes at one point, “One curtain was still left hanging there - a rich brocade, stiff with dust and age. I touched it to admire the material, but it was like touching something dead and mouldering.”

BRIGITTE: And that again, like, what is that, two sentences? 

KIM: So short, but there's so much text in. 

BRIGITTE: You could see how that would become a film, and you could see how a great actor could bring across this feeling of touching something dead and mouldering. I mean, it's just it's Ugh. I'm jealous.

AMY: Um, when we're talking about the flashing back and forth between the two time periods, in addition to feeling like I was Reading a Merchant Ivory movie, I also felt like I was reading The English Patient a little bit. Um, you know, I, I had those vibes, if you liked, or remember that book by Michael Ondaatje. Is that how you say his name? I'm not sure. So if you liked The English Patient, you'll really like this book because it has a lot of the same characteristics.

BRIGITTE: Agreed. 

KIM: So Jhabvala instantly drops us into an India that is pulsing with energy and beauty in one sense, but there's also this feeling that's oppressive in both time periods she switches between. Here's a section early on I want to read where the narrator gives us a great description of that feeling:

 I have not yet traveled on a bus in India that has not been packed to bursting-point, with people inside and luggage on top; and they are always so old that they shake up every bone in the human body and every screw in their own. If the buses are always the same, so is the landscape through which they travel. Once a town is left behind, there is nothing till the next one except flat lands, broiling sky, distances and dust. Especially the dust: the sides of the bus are open with only bars across them so that the hot winds blow in freely, bearing desert sands to choke up ears and nostrils and set one’s teeth on edge with grit.

AMY: Ooh. So yeah, there's this literal heat and dust in terms of the weather and the environment, but then there's also the heat of passion, of course, and then kind of the dust of the bygone era. So even though Olivia, our 1920s era gal, she loves her husband. He seems like a relatively good guy, but she is just bored out of her skull with all the other British citizens in her circle. And then if we flash forward to the 1970s, our narrator there also has some of the same eye-rolls for the English tourists that she encounters in India, right, Brigitte?

BRIGITTE: Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting because during the seventies, the kind of British person that you might've encountered would be, you know, one of these people sort of looking for enlightenment, you know, on the road. And she actually has this couple, and the guy is dressed in an orange robe with a shaved head, a little bit of a poser, you know? He's throwing around language of enlightenment and searching for a guru and that kind of thing. Um, and actually of the girl she writes: “The girl was indignant – not only about this watchman but about all the other people all over India. She said they were all dirty and dishonest. She had a very pretty, open, English face but when she said that it became mean and clenched, and I realized that the longer she stayed in India the more her face would become like that.

   “Why did you come?” I asked her.

   “To find peace.” She laughed grimly: “But all I found was dysentery.”

AMY: So that goes back to, Brigitte, what you were saying: white characters in this book are not always painted in the best light, right?

BRIGITTE: Definitely not.

AMY: And you know, in that passage she's clearly poking fun at the European kind of distasteful attitude about India, and I think if you read some of her other stories, you find this kind of mocking of Westerners. They're either not cut out for life in India, or they have a sort of over-the-top obsession with India where you're just like "calm down, you hippie," you know?

BRIGITTE: Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah, there's actually a famous line Jhabvala wrote in the forward to one of her short story collections. It's about the experience of being a European in India. I'll read it. “It goes like this: first stage, tremendous enthusiasm — everything Indian is marvelous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvelous; third stage, everything Indian abominable. For some people it ends there, for others the cycle renews itself and goes on. I have been through it so many times that now I think of myself as strapped to a wheel that goes round and round and sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m down. When I meet other Europeans, I can usually tell after a few moments’ conversation at what stage of the cycle they happen to be.”

BRIGITTE: I suspect that this might just be the experience of most people when they move to a culture or a country that's completely different or even slightly different from their own.

AMY: Yeah, but then I also think it just seems like everything in India is intense, right? Intensely colorful, intensely hot, intensely miserable at times, you know? 

BRIGITTE: When you're in an extreme environment, it makes all of those feelings even more extreme.

KIM: Yeah. So anyway, back to the novel, Olivia's really languishing in India. She wants to be part of what she sees as the real India. She doesn't want to be stuck in her little bubble of proper Brits. 

AMY: And so enter this handsome, mysterious hottie, the Nawab of Khatm. He lives a decadent life in his palace and he has this magnetic charm, power, a little bit of cockiness, but also generosity, maybe some ruthlessness, even. Brigitte, anything else you want to touch on relating to this mysterious stranger?

BRIGITTE: Besides that I was completely in love with him? I totally was.

AMY: I'm glad you were because I think that's what she intended. I went hot and cold on the guy, but…

BRIGITTE: He's a bad boy, let's just be honest. That's what he is. And I fell for it, and I was really hoping that he was going to completely change his ways for Olivia, meaning myself, you know. I mean, like I just completely imagined the sexiest guy in the entire world reading this thing, but I will say that I also think that he's a great example of how rich her characters are, because he's really not just a one- dimensional hot guy, you know? He does very strange things, like he has this English character, Harry, who he basically keeps hostage in his palace and it's never really quite clear why. The guy wants to leave, and he won't, essentially, let them go. 

KIM: It's very mysterious. 

BRIGITTE: Yeah. In general, I feel like most of her characters are kind of unknowable in some way. And I actually found that some of the reviewers didn't like that about her writing. That was a criticism for them. For me, I love that. I like that you don't really get to know... do you ever really get to know anybody, frankly? 

KIM: It makes it much more interesting 

BRIGITTE: And people are never just one thing. The Nawab, for example… probably, there's a bit of truth in all of the things that you were saying, Amy. He is all of those things at times. Sometimes he's ruthless. Sometimes he's generous. Sometimes he's loving. Sometimes he's just hot. 

KIM: And he's a lot of fun! Like that game of musical chairs at the shrine that they were at. 

AMY: I like to call that "Musical Chair Foreplay." 

KIM: Yeah, I've never heard of "Musical Chair Foreplay." 

AMY: That's what it was. There was no other way to describe that! 

KIM: Sexy!

BRIGITTE: I mean,! Someone out there is doing it right now because that's the world we live in.

KIM: Okay. So naturally of course, Olivia falls almost instantly madly in love with the Nawab, but when she turns up pregnant, she's in a major quandary.

AMY: Yeah, Yeah, exactly. She knows when this baby is born it's going to be a dead giveaway that her very blond husband is not the father. And we don't want to give away anything else that happens after that, either to Olivia or to the 1970s narrator, whose own story sort of parallels that of her predecessor. So, we won't go into more detail about what happens. 

BRIGITTE: It's not what you're thinking though. I did not see where it was going, I will say that. 

KIM: No, I agree. 

AMY: Okay, so sometimes when I hear that a book has won the Booker Prize, I'm like, it's not going to be my beach read — my fun beach read, but this one really was a page turner. It was nice to read. It didn't feel like a slog.

BRIGITTE: No, no, no.

AMY: What was a slog, however…

KIM: Oh yeah.

BRIGITTE: Oh! 

AMY: …the Merchant Ivory adaptation of Heat and Dust. 

KIM: We did a little film festival, the three of us, and we watched the movie. 

AMY: Treated ourselves to some Indian cuisine. 

BRIGITTE: Which was really good. The food was great.

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: And how, how do you mess this up? Because like I said, she wrote it like a Merchant Ivory movie. All you have to do is just…I don't know. It didn't work. It didn't work. 

BRIGITTE: Well, I have a theory.

KIM: Yeah. Tell us what happened. What went wrong, Brigitte? 

BRIGITTE: I think, and it actually has made me want to read her screenplay for this, and also for Howard's End, um, specifically… I think in her early adaptation process, I don't want to say she didn't have faith in the filmmakers because I don't think she understood enough about screenwriting to have faith or not have faith, but what she tried to do was to take all the sort of subtext of the book and the undercurrent, and she just made it all text. Now that could have been alongside their direction. I'm not gonna blame her, you know, for those choices, but what happened was all of the mystery and the sort of subtle undertones of things were completely gone, and they hadn't really found their visual style yet. So this book that is just rich with these incredible descriptions of India, is just completely, the movie is just flat. Like, it doesn't really look nice at all. So it's just, it's sad.

KIM: Yeah, the characters are one-dimensional. And like you said, it's flat, too, visually. 

AMY: We couldn't finish it. 

KIM: Listeners, we didn't finish the movie. 

AMY: So read the book is what we're saying. Stick to the book. Um, but anyway, getting back to the elements that some people find problematic in the book, there's an Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel condemned the novel, saying it was “stereotyped in its characters and viciously prejudiced in its vision of the Indian scene.” Then, on the other hand, Ruth’s friend and literary protegee Anita Desai  wrote: “It’s very sad that there was, and continues to be, resentment towards a foreigner writing about India with such frankness and irony.”

KIM: I think the best we can do is let you, our listeners, read the book and decide for yourself. I can understand both sides of the debate, but I personally appreciated, for a change, a woman's experience of living in India as an expat during that time. And as you said, Amy, she was writing about what she knew and really attempting to give a nuanced perspective. 

BRIGITTE: Yeah, I think this is one of those things everyone's just going to go round and round and round about, and it could be a conversation you get in with someone that's really fun. And it could be one in which, you know, you have to maybe prepare yourself that your point of view isn't right. And I will say the one thing that I feel confident in saying is that she's a great writer. It's one of the better books I've read in a while.

KIM: I agree. It's a wonderful book, and I want to read more by her, so I want to get a list from you of what you've read after this. You can jot down what to read next. Um, and I will also say we would love to hear from our listeners, too, if they want to share their feelings about it as well, because we do want to listen to other viewpoints 

AMY: So Brigitte, I wanted to bring up a few remarks that Ruth had made about the process of writing for film and see if you sort of agreed with what she had to say or not.

BRIGITTE: Sure.

AMY: Okay. So she had one said, “I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can’t follow the form of the novel. It’s a different thing completely. It’s impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure for the whole thing. You have to crack that.” So I don't know if you've ever had to adapt a book... 

BRIGITTE: I did actually. My first staff job was adapting a Stephen King novel called 11/22/63. And it was a huge book, and obviously, for a multi episode show, that process is going to be way different than for a movie. But she's right. A movie is a totally different thing. The rhythm is different. When you start trying to put all your scenes into that kind of format, it just doesn't read the same. It doesn't feel the same. And sometimes things that were said in the book are much better not said when you have a great actor. So yeah, I don't think she's wrong about that. 

AMY: I actually watched an interview with Ruth where she was kind of talking about this. And she said that when she adapted The Householder, she thought she could just take the dialogue from her book and just plug it in. And she's like, "This is easy." But then she said, "After the fact, I realized that was a bad idea. Like, you can't just take the dialogue and put it in the screenplay." Okay, so, so the next thing she said, about Hollywood: “Film is not like a book; it’s not a writer’s baby at all. So many people have put in their talent, by that time that you feel grateful for what they’ve done, you don’t feel possessive about it in any way.” Do you agree?

BRIGITTE: Oh that's a tough one. I think sometimes that's true. If you've been on a project that's been really difficult, or that wasn't necessarily your original idea, then I a hundred percent agree. And she's right. In movies, it's not a writer's baby. It's just not. It's the directors. It's pretty much everyone but the writer, even though they wouldn't be there, like, if there wasn't a writer, but they don't seem to remember that most of the time. However, in TV and streaming as we would probably call it these days, that is not true. The writer is king there.

AMY: You know whyI think she didn't feel that possessiveness is that it wasn't her first love. Writing novels was what she enjoyed. She didn't feel possessive about the screenplays because it was a hobby. 

BRIGITTE: So many screenwriters just fell down weeping. "Just had a little hobby," when they're desperately trying to have a career!

AMY: I know, but that's how everyone who knew her described it. She just didn't care that much about the movies. Okay, one last thing. She says that she spent tons of time in the editing room on each Merchant Ivory film and was described as merciless in the editing process. Is that typical ?

BRIGITTE: Not in film. When you're in TV, you are in the editing room and you do have to be merciless by the way. And you often don't have a choice, because it's really obvious that it's not working or that a line that you really liked should go. In fact, most of the time, it's you taking out dialogue because a lot of it just plays better when it's just an actor doing their thing, rather than saying the stuff that you wrote. And one of the things I actually read about her, I think it was in regards to Howard's End, was that her writing really allows for actors to do the kind of thing that they love to do best, which is to sort of sit in emotion and just let it play across their face. And that's what you find in the editing room. It's those kinds of moments where you're like, you know what, I didn't need the 16 lines that I wrote around this. All I need is for Anthony Hopkins to sit there and do the thing he does, you know? Like, that's it.

AMY: I think for the very few screenplays that Kim and I have written, that's the part that's really hard as a writer, is that you can't just be like "Anthony Hopkins, figure out this blank spot." 

BRIGITTE: You have to put it in. And very often working in studios, they make you put it in. They make you put in every single line that would describe anything that anybody would be confused about. And then you get on set and actors look at you and they say, "Do you think I'm stupid or the audience is stupid?" And you have to sort of, you can't say... 

AMY: Maaaaybe.

BRIGITTE: You just say, "well, you know, I thought it better that we just have it there just in case." That's what you always say. "Just in case." But you know what? Almost all the time, when you have a good actor, you don't need it. You don't. 

AMY: So let's circle back to ...

KIM: Ruth's life. Yeah. Her story. So as she became more and more involved professionally with Merchant and Ivory, Ruth and her husband ended up settling in New York City. This was the third major move of her life. She and her husband bought her an apartment there with her proceeds from the Booker Prize. Actually, it was in the same building as James and Ismael's apartment, so they were always hanging out just an elevator's ride away from each other. That would be great, Amy, if we lived in the same building. Also, she and her family would spend the summer at Claverack, which is a beautiful house that James and Ismael had in the Hudson River Valley. Sounds gorgeous. 

AMY: I just love the idea that they were all friends and basically kind of family. 

KIM: For such a long time. 

AMY: James Ivory just published a memoir that came out last year, and he said the three of them kind of came to be known as a triumvirate, but Ruth didn't like that word, triumvirate. So maybe in a way she was kind of glad that she was not part of the official branding. Maybe she didn't want her name on that heading Merchant Ivory. Yeah, it seemed like she valued her privacy and I think maybe she was like, I'll let them be the front men and I'll just go back to writing my novels, which is what I really enjoy anyway. 

KIM: Yeah. 

BRIGITTE: I think a lot of writers have that personality, which makes it easy to be taken advantage of because you don't really want the accolades in the way that sometimes other people who have a more public role do. It's just not why you're in it, you know? You're in it to sit in a dark room and make stuff up, and the other part of it can be uncomfortable. I always hesitate assuming that she was happy to like never be mentioned ever, because I mean, I was a fan of Merchant Ivory and I never thought about her. Never, ever, ever. And I feel like they could have, without disturbing her privacy, they still could have said, "and also this woman!" more. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah, 

BRIGITTE: But they didn't.

KIM: I think we could have easily said “Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala.” Come on.

AMY: We could have made it roll off our tongues. 

KIM: We totally could have. It would have, it would be so natural. So anyway, she died in 2013. In addition to all these screenplays she wrote, she wrote 21 novels and volumes of short stories.

AMY: You know, speaking of screenwriting, Brigette, we've been talking about it a lot, but I want to find out a little bit more about Disenchanted. When is it coming out, and also, what was it like writing a movie musical? I think that was a first for you, right?

BRIGITTE: That was a first, yes. It was very fun and challenging. I got to work with amazing people. Alan Menken, who is a Disney legend. And Stephen Schwartz, who was the lyricist who, you know, created Wicked. So I felt imposter syndrome every day of that experience, but it was probably a once in a lifetime. I don't know how much I'm allowed to say about what it is about, except that it's a musical and that it's really fun and big. And then it comes out on the Friday after Thanksgiving. So Black Friday basically, and it's a family movie. Everyone in your family will enjoy it. Um, and yeah, but all I can think about right now is that I need to write a lot of novels and short stories because woman's leaving me in the dust!

AMY: No, I feel like you're having your musical screenplay training, so that we're now going to go back and do "we don't talk about Bruno...

BRIGITTE: Right.

AMY: Well, "we don't talk about Livia"

BRIGITTE: I should pitch myself for this project. It's a perfect fit.

AMY: Because the first movie wasn't very good. 

BRIGITTE: No, 

KIM: I know, it needs to be redone. 

AMY: Yeah. Anyway, I am sensing another viewing party to watch Disenchanted. We can't wait for that. Brigittte, thank you so much for being a guest with us. We loved hanging out with you!.

BRIGITTE: Oh, thank you so much. It was so fun. I'm so glad that we don't have to see each other from what was that? 20 feet away

AMY: Oh my gosh.

BRIGITTE: Yearning for human contact.

AMY: I'm glad I had you. I'm glad I had you.

BRIGITTE: Ditto.

AMY: And also, as we mentioned earlier, Kim and I want to keep this Merchant Ivory kick going, so join us back here next week, because we're going to be giving you a rundown of some of their lesser known films. And we'll tell you which ones we think are worth your time. 

In the meantime, if you're liking our podcast, don't forget to give us one of those five-star reviews because it really helps new listeners find us.

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.