Frederic Raphael: The wondering Jew

After 37 books, Frederic Raphael has finally written about his own childhood. He tells Dina Rabinovitch why a thin skin drove him to write

After a lifetime of creating fiction, deliberately sitting down each morning to make stuff up, Frederic Raphael at 72 has taken up truth-telling. Following his recent account of scripting Eyes Wide Shut for Stanley Kubrick, this month he publishes a memoir of his childhood: A Spoilt Boy (Orion, £12.99).

He has broken the writing habits of a lifetime, and he did it without help; he is not a diary-keeper. So how accurate can it be? "My son Stephen," says Raphael, "said how can you remember the initials of the people you were at school with? To which I'm afraid the answer is, well unfortunately how can I not remember them – they are linked to their initials. And I can see them all, even though they were all children, and I see that, yet I still see them as dangerous to me now as they were then."

The anti-Semitic bullying to which he was subjected by teachers and boys in his English public school is the background to the story. The overt bullying – racist jibes and being "frozen out" – could have driven a child, let alone a hyper-sensitive only son, to suicide. It made Raphael grab a pen – a way of getting even. The covert anti-Semitism (as he is rejected for school places he should have been given, because of his Jewishness) he recognises, even though he is so young. So it doesn't succeed in leaving him unsure of his ability.

This self-confidence makes him quite brave. At the end of A Spoilt Boy, Raphael describes the evening a visiting preacher cracked an anti-Semitic joke while speaking to the boys in chapel (which Raphael, an unaffiliated Jew, attends regularly). This is in 1949, and the schoolboy Raphael sits down right after the speech and writes a letter to the preacher saying that his remarks were a particular disgrace in the War Memorial Chapel, where so many were remembered for fighting prejudice.

Within days, Raphael is summoned to see the headmaster and accused of insulting a guest of the school:

"I have seen fit to point out that he said something he shouldn't have said. Or do you think he should? Sir."

"I am not going to be drawn into that. It's a question of manners."

"Were the gas chambers a matter of manners? Sir."

"I advise you to be very careful, Raphael."

The head tells Raphael to write to the cleric and apologise. Raphael refuses, and the head asks him about his university plans. He is aware that any reference is in the head's gift. "Eligibility," says the headmaster of Charterhouse, "is not a matter merely of being clever enough." Raphael continues to refuse to apologise, and is not recommended for the Oxford scholarship exam his teacher had told him was his for the taking.

It is this blend of bolshie confidence, combined with an acute sensitivity that can still feel the schoolboy's danger, which characterises the writer I meet. It is not an easy mix, and you sense his moods can change rapidly. But, writer that he is, Raphael knows himself, and so goes to great lengths to put people around him at ease. I have interrupted his normal working practice – writing in the morning, other stuff in the afternoon – but to accommodate my school pick-up times, he's doing this interview during his regular writing-time, without demur.

We meet at his family home in Kensington. His son opens the front door; there is a real lunch being cooked behind another door. There are books, papers and videos in tidy heaps, and on the walls the dark but luminous portraits painted by the Raphaels' daughter Sarah – whose brilliance was cut short when she died aged 40. "People say it [the pain] will get better," Raphael says. "But it doesn't." How can it?

Raphael is in the middle of being photographed. While arranging his chin this way and that, he is coursing through several conversations in his grainy voice. He is talking pictures with The Independent's photographer, placing me in his mental index, dropping juicy film titbits. "Always smile with your mouth closed, that's what actors do, never see them smile with their teeth showing," says the man who has worked with everyone from Sydney Pollack to Nicole Kidman. (Funnily enough, when Raphael does smile with his mouth open, instead of set in a firm line, he immediately looks warmer.)

He sits slightly hunched, wearing the shabby-good clothes of the successful man who works from home: the pink American-style button-down shirt under a richly patterned but much-worn cardigan. In one of his novels, it'd be a Missoni sweater, but I don't get round to asking him. His fawn slippers exactly match the colour of various battered sofas around the flat. He tells me later that clothes are important: it's the dressed ape, not the naked ape, that makes humans interesting – the disguises we hide behind.

Successful and prolific, Frederic Raphael is not quite the household name – not the Rushdie, Amis, or McEwan – that his CV merits. There have been 19 novels, interspersed with essays, biographies and translations. Let's not forget the 17 screenplays, including Darling, which won him an Oscar, and also confirmed – courtesy of Julie Christie – mini-skirt mania.

The mini was not his only bit of zeitgeist. His novel The Glittering Prizes was turned into a television series (scripted by Raphael) which it is not completely far-fetched to call the Friends of its time. Though it was only one series, instead of eight, it similarly gripped viewers with its story of a group of youngsters negotiating their late teens and early twenties.

His territory, then, is relationships, which has not exactly gone out of fashion. And yet, in our current 10-a-penny first-novel culture, much of Raphael's backlist is out of print. Even on Amazon, it takes two weeks to get hold of The Glittering Prizes. This is a loss – and I speak as someone who gets sent a first novel a day by PRs.

If, though, it is his slightly difficult personality which keeps him from the centre of literary celebrity, it is his sensitivity which has made him a writer. In A Spoilt Boy, he describes what may be the source of this rawness: being parted from his mother at the age of eight. He has cruised through a move from the US to an England which didn't know Americans, then an appendix operation, both experiences made easy by his security as his parents' beloved only son.

But in 1939 the war threatens to close down his daily primary school, and he fails to pick up warning signs that he is going to be sent to one of the seven best prep schools in England. When it comes, boarding school could not be a worse shock:

"My pale fingers had to be prised from the white paintwork of the nice clean bannisters. My mother's face was clenched and thick with blood. She blushed for me, and I suspect, for herself: what was less likely for an American (Jewish) mother than to have to say goodbye to her only child at the age of just eight? Irene's inability to save me from an English fate was something like a betrayal; we were never again to be quite the friends that we were before."

It is strong language, and it is written some 60 years after the event. "I don't think I have a great capacity for not being wounded – I'm pretty good at being wounded," Raphael says a little wryly. In English literary circles, he knows he has a reputation for being thin-skinned. But it is typical of him as a writer that as he is describing his own eight-year-old distress, he is also seeing it from his mother's point of view.

It is his writer's mark, this multitude of perspectives, explained perhaps by the discontinuities in his upbringing: fragmented by moving from America to England; internally split because of being Jewish in an anti-Semitic environment. "Being easily wounded is an aspect of observing life," says Raphael. "But whether the observing of the life comes after the wound, or the wound comes as a consequence of the observing, I don't know.

"The sensitive surface, like the photographer's surface, takes on as much or as little light as hits it – whereas some people don't even notice the things that are going on. What I did with this book is review the footage of my memory. A lot of people just don't have that footage – at all. Well, I do."

Biography

Frederic Raphael was born in Chicago in 1931, though he describes himself as a middle-class Central Park West New York Jewish kid, having moved there when he was four years old. His father, who worked for Shell, was transferred to England when Raphael was seven. He was educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge. He is the author of 37 books, including his many novels, several story and essay collections, biographies of Byron and Maugham, and translations of poetry and drama from Latin and ancient Greek. His numerous screenplays include the Oscar-winning Darling, White Mischief, and Eyes Wide Shut. His memoir A Spoilt Boy is published this week by Orion. Married, with three children, Frederic Raphael divides his time between London and his home in south-western France.