By the mid-sixties, ten years later, when I wrote the novel, a number of things were different. There were plenty of western students doing their year at Russian universities, together with postgraduates like my protagonist Paul Manning, and visiting businessmen like his old friend Gordon Proctor-Gould. But the underlying feel of the city remained much the same. I’d been back as a journalist by then, covering the visit of the British prime minister Harold Macmillan in 1959, and had written an account of walking round Moscow which had attracted a front-page article in Izvestia describing me as ‘a stinking rocket of the Cold War’. I subsequently went back several more times, on various missions, and each time my despairing Russian friends would say, ‘This place must change! It can’t go on like this!’ But it did, year after year, and the Moscow in which my novel is set is still pretty much the city that first etched itself so sharply upon my consciousness in 1956.
I look now at the dog-eared notes I laboriously typed up each evening during that first visit, and try to remember who all the people I mention were. It’s often difficult, because I changed the identifications of anyone who spoke at all freely, on the assumption that anything I wrote would be found and read.
Some of them, though, are easier to reconstruct because they have fictional counterparts in the novel. The well-worn assurance at the front that the characters and situations ‘are, of course, entirely imaginary’ isn’t quite true. Is it ever? But the originals in this case, given the nature of the Soviet state, needed disowning more than most.
The Sasha in the story is not entirely unlike the graduate student who was responsible for us: serious, anxious, loyal, charming – a born head boy. I see him with hindsight as a bit like Gorbachev, who had graduated from Moscow University the previous year; I don’t think we realized when we set out on our adventure that MGU (the G is for ‘State’) was the academy of the Soviet elite. Some of the students had developed a version of the flippant and laconic whimsy that was fashionable back in Cambridge – in both cases, I suppose, the playfulness of the privileged. One of them was the original for Raya, with her correspondence written on old playing cards and her teasing invitations to take part in the local hooliganism. But then my Katya is a bit like another girl who attached herself to us, and whose style was entirely out of keeping – a vulnerable innocence and simple religious belief that set her at odds with everyone and everything around her.
My Konstantin, too, had a prototype – a student who was reading philosophy. For some reason he decided he could trust me, and over the course of the month he talked to me with astonishing frankness. He was an officer of the local Komsomol branch, and it was he who told me how all those supposedly chance encounters had been set up. He assumed that if we were anywhere indoors we might be overheard by microphones or informers, so he would talk only in the open air, walking round the streets. This is one of the reasons I got to know them so well, and before we left I had worn the heels of my shoes down to the soles.
Even these unmonitored walks must have left a shadow of suspicion, though, because after we’d gone and he’d graduated the only job he could get was as a shop assistant. Then, in the inscrutable Soviet way, he was apparently rehabilitated, and put to work in the new field of computer design (which in 1956 had still been denounced as a ‘bourgeois pseudoscience’). He was a remarkable man, and for many years we kept in touch. I suppose I hoped my disclaimer in the novel, ten years later, would discourage the awakening of any retrospective interest in our conversations. Perhaps it worked. I managed with great difficulty to find him again when I was back in Moscow in 1973, and discovered that he was now a senior civil servant in Gosplan, the State Planning Agency. He was plainly embarrassed by my attempt to renew our acquaintance, and I didn’t pursue it.
A month or two after the novel came out Michael Powell bought an option on the film rights. He and Emeric Pressburger, in their long collaboration, had been among the boldest and most interesting British film-makers. The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Tales of Hoffmann – they had all escaped the confines of cinematic naturalism and taken off into a more imaginative and fantastical world. His most recent film, though, Peeping Tom (made without Pressburger), had been cruelly dismissed by the critics for supposedly exploiting the voyeurism that was its subject. It has now, I think, been reinstated in the canon, and Powell’s reputation restored. But at the time his career was in low water.
It seemed to me unlikely that my novel would be the means of reanimating it, but I was taken by his bouncing enthusiasm and optimism. I was also intrigued by the archaic glamour of the world in which he moved. Our discussions often focused less on the film than on the restaurants that it would involve us eating in and the hotels we would be staying at. We needed to meet Pressburger, who was to write the screenplay, and who now lived in Austria. Should our rendezvous be in Vienna? If so, should we favour the Bristol or the Sacher? Or try the newly opened Palais Schwarzenberg? On the other hand, Paris might be more fun; dinner at the Tour d’Argent would surely help to get our imaginations working. At one point Alec Guinness (already in his fifties) was going to play Proctor-Gould (presumably still in his twenties). At another point it was Peter Sellers. Powell describes in his memoirs, Million Dollar Movie, how he and I drove out to the country in his ‘quivering black, open Bentley’ (tuned, he told me, by his personal mechanic) to pitch our project to Sellers. It was a freezing February day. Powell, if I remember rightly, was wearing goggles and a flying helmet. I was not. He arrived as assured and full of himself as ever, I almost too close to death to take much part in the negotiations.
I realized, when I read the memoirs, that his enthusiasm for the book had been more sincere than I suspected, and characteristically generous. One of the things that had attracted him was his love of the Russian character. But the Russians he had known seemed to be mostly the extravagantly eccentric members and hangers-on of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo, and remarkably unlike the dour Soviet citizens in my story. This, and all the discussions of restaurants and hotels, made me a little uneasy. A more immediately practical problem was how to do the Russian dialogue so that it was comprehensible to an English-speaking audience, when the point of so much of it was its incomprehensibility to Proctor-Gould and Manning’s waywardness in translating it for him.
Another, and even more fundamental, difficulty: how to represent the cityscape of Moscow, which features so largely in the story, when there was not the slightest prospect of getting permission to film there. The usual stand-ins for Moscow at the time were Dundee or Helsinki; and in Black Narcissus Powell and Pressburger had most magically conjured up an even more exotic location – a monastery in the high Himalayas – out of even more homely materials: studio sets and locations among the rhododendrons of Surrey. I can’t remember now why Pressburger, when we finally met him at his home in the Tirol, rejected all these ways to go. Instead he proposed using locations which were quite openly and recognizably parts of London, but with a little man on a bicycle who would cycle round changing the street names for each scene – covering up ‘St James’s Street’, in the particular instance that Pressburger offered, with a sign reading ‘Gorky Street’. This seemed to me wonderfully bold and witty, and very much in the fantastical spirit of his earlier films with Powell; but also totally ridiculous.