Jeremy Brooks
Encyclopedia
Jeremy Brooks was a novelist, poet, and dramatist. Best known for his novels (particularly Jampot Smith, Henry's War and Smith, As Hero) and for his stage adaptations of classic works, particularly a series of Maxim Gorky
plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company
. His novels were praised for their lyricism and for their "Chekhovian mixture of comic concision and pathos". Anthony Burgess
, in The Novel Now said “Jeremy Brooks has come to considerable stature in Jampot Smith and Smith, as Hero: he has created one of the few really large picaresque characters in the post-war novel.”
After the war Brooks went on a navy scholarship to Oxford, where his English tutor was C. S. Lewis
. He then attended Camberwell School of Art, where his wife, the painter Eleanor Brooks (née Nevile), was also a student (although they did not meet at that time). He and Eleanor were married in 1950 and, after a spell on a Houseboat on the Thames, they eventually set up home in a near-derelict and remote cottage in North Wales on the estate of Clough Williams Ellis (the architect and creator of the Portmeirion
hotel), where his wife still lives today.
Throughout the fifties, living in near-poverty with three young children, Brooks pursued his writing. Critical success came with his second novel, Jampot Smith (recently republished in the Library of Wales classics series). This led to opportunities for paid work and the family eventually moved to London, with the manuscript of his third novel (Henry’s War, 1962) lying on the back shelf of the car (where a bottle of his wife’s ink slowly seeped into it for the duration of the journey, obliterating all but the edges of each page of tissue-thin typing paper – a disaster that Brooks later said had resulted in a better book).
Now settled in London, Brooks wrote his fourth novel (Smith, As Hero, 1964) and worked for the New Statesman, The Sunday Times and the Royal Shakespeare Company
at the Aldwych, becoming Literary Manager there in 1964. As such, he was closely involved with the important figures of the theatre world throughout much of the sixties and seventies, particularly Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn
, but also David Jones, Terry Hands, Adrian Noble, Clifford Williams, David Hare, David Edgar.
This was a period of great upheaval in establishment theatre, with ground-breaking productions coming thick and fast (Peter Brook
's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Marat Sade; works by Harold Pinter and Edward Bond; As You Like It with an all-male cast; Tom Stoppard's Rosancrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) and the politics of the counter culture sometimes interfering with the smooth running of the RSC. For Brooks the writer, this was too much distraction and he left the RSC sometime in the early seventies to concentrate on his own projects (among them an unfinished manuscript that deals in a highly personal and semi-fictionalised way with his time at the RSC). During all this time and on through the eighties, Brooks directed his creative energies largely towards theatre and film projects. He had never made any money from his novels (not even from Smith As Hero which spent time on the best-seller lists) and now with a family of four children, he needed to earn. He wrote screenplays (Our Mother's House
; Work is a Four Letter Word); television scripts for directors such as Karel Reisz
and Ken Loach
and a great number of important and memorable adaptations of classics for the stage (The Lower Depths, The Government Inspector (with Paul Schofield), Enemies (with a young Helen Mirren
), The Forest, A Child's Christmas in Wales (co-written with Adrien Mitchell), The Cherry Orchard, Medea, The Wind in the Willows and many more). The majority of these were for the RSC, where he worked closely with the director David Jones, but in later life he formed a fruitful relationship with Theatre Clwyd at Mold. This took him back to North Wales, where he died in 1994.
Throughout his life, Brooks also wrote poetry (as a schoolboy he had won an Eisteddfod poetry competition) and although during the 1950s many of his poems were published in poetry magazines such as Elegebra, he subsequently never sought its publication, poetry being, for him, a very personal and private pursuit. Moreover, only his earlier poetic work survives (collected in a privately published edition, Wales 1950, Rugosa Press, 2008), an unpublished collection of his poems written throughout the 1960s having been stolen and never recovered.
, in The Novel Now, said “Jeremy Brooks has come to considerable stature in Jampot Smith and Smith, as Hero: he has created one of the few really large picaresque characters in the post-war novel.”
Micheal Kustow, in his obituary for The Guardian, said “His fiction aspired to, and often achieved, a Chekhovian mixture of comic concision and pathos. Jampot Smith is a small classic about the delight and pain of sexual awakening; it will outlast its period and provincial setting.”
In ‘The Test of Time – What makes a classic a classic?’ (Waterstone’s, 1999), Adrian Mitchell
chose Jampot Smith as one of his classics, referring to Brooks as “a very underestimated writer”.
The Irish Times wrote, ‘Jampot Smith is exact, funny, sad and beautiful; it is, I think, a masterpiece.’
Smith, As Hero:
Brooks’s follow-up to Jampot Smith, Smith, As Hero, received glowing reviews in the national press in the UK and literary stardom seemed assured. As luck would have it, the novel then suffered a fatal blow when it was launched in the United States during a newspaper strike. The resulting lack of publicity has contributed to the book’s near-invisibility, despite its being his most mature and accessible work.
One reviewer, Isabel Quigley in The Sunday Telegraph, wrote: “The crashing of serio-comic novelists between two stools is a familiar sound to novel reviewers, since few funny novels with serious intentions manage to be either funny or serious enough. Many try to pull it off, for it looks so easy (think of the disarming simplicity of a book as deadly, deadpan and complex as ‘A Handful of Dust’ say). But few succeed. Among the few I would put Jeremy Brooks with his ‘Smith, As Hero’, sequel to the much-praised ‘Jampot Smith’. It seems to me, though in a totally different style, quite as funny as the early Waugh, and with a flavour indescribably mixed, strong, attractive and alarming... ...It is part of Brooks’s extraordinary skill at mixing his levels of feeling, intensity and response that he can end this wildly comic novel with an appalling scene aboard a post-war immigrants’ hell-ship to Palestine, and make it seem a part of all that has gone before. Smith has, by then, grown up a little.”
The above is typical of the reviews he received at publication in the UK, yet perhaps Brooks himself contributed to burying this book. He had never been a good salesman of his most personal work (the novels and poems) and, in speaking of Smith, As Hero, he often lamented what he saw as a formal error in the book; this was a foray into metafiction
with the introduction in a late chapter of a character called Jeremy Brooks (a device used two decades later by Martin Amis
in Money). This experiment was partly driven by his desire to distance himself from the protagonist Bernard Smith, but soon after publication he came to think of it as a mistake – a hole in what was otherwise a watertight ship. But it was too late. Great reviews did nothing to mollify him – on the contrary, they disturbed him. Typically, he was being too hard on himself (and perhaps also on those reviewers who had failed to upbraid him for his perceived mistake). It may be that to some extent Brooks subsequently 'lost his voice', or his muse, as a novelist and, apart from the four novellas collected in Doing the Voices (1986), never published a major work of fiction again.
There may have been another reason for his never having completed another novel: the period generally known as ‘the sixties’ had altered the world to such an extent that his voice, forged in wartime Britain, suddenly seemed outdated. The American beat was in the ascendant; literature had to be hip, had to address the new consciousness and speak to it in its own tones. Writers like Ken Kesey
, Robert Stone (a close friend of Brooks), Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegutt, spoke the language that people wanted to hear. Many British writers (contemporaries like Kingsley Amis, for example) simply carried on regardless in the old tones, but Brooks perhaps felt the change too deeply. With teenage children and many American friends, the ‘new’ was all around him and yet he could find no place for it in his fiction; no place for Bernard Smith in this brave new world.
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs 700 staff and produces around 20 productions a year from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon and plays regularly in London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and on tour across...
. His novels were praised for their lyricism and for their "Chekhovian mixture of comic concision and pathos". Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
, in The Novel Now said “Jeremy Brooks has come to considerable stature in Jampot Smith and Smith, as Hero: he has created one of the few really large picaresque characters in the post-war novel.”
Life and work
Jeremy Brooks was born in Southampton in 1926 and went to Brighton Grammar school until, with the onset of WW2, he was evacuated with his family to Llandudno in North Wales, where he attended John Bright school. School was followed immediately by military training and service in the Navy, where he saw the last years of the war from the deck of a minesweeper in the Mediterranean (an experience that provided material for his novel, Smith, As Hero).After the war Brooks went on a navy scholarship to Oxford, where his English tutor was C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
. He then attended Camberwell School of Art, where his wife, the painter Eleanor Brooks (née Nevile), was also a student (although they did not meet at that time). He and Eleanor were married in 1950 and, after a spell on a Houseboat on the Thames, they eventually set up home in a near-derelict and remote cottage in North Wales on the estate of Clough Williams Ellis (the architect and creator of the Portmeirion
Portmeirion
Portmeirion is a popular tourist village in Gwynedd, North Wales. It was designed and built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis between 1925 and 1975 in the style of an Italian village and is now owned by a charitable trust....
hotel), where his wife still lives today.
Throughout the fifties, living in near-poverty with three young children, Brooks pursued his writing. Critical success came with his second novel, Jampot Smith (recently republished in the Library of Wales classics series). This led to opportunities for paid work and the family eventually moved to London, with the manuscript of his third novel (Henry’s War, 1962) lying on the back shelf of the car (where a bottle of his wife’s ink slowly seeped into it for the duration of the journey, obliterating all but the edges of each page of tissue-thin typing paper – a disaster that Brooks later said had resulted in a better book).
Now settled in London, Brooks wrote his fourth novel (Smith, As Hero, 1964) and worked for the New Statesman, The Sunday Times and the Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs 700 staff and produces around 20 productions a year from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon and plays regularly in London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and on tour across...
at the Aldwych, becoming Literary Manager there in 1964. As such, he was closely involved with the important figures of the theatre world throughout much of the sixties and seventies, particularly Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn
Trevor Nunn
Sir Trevor Robert Nunn, CBE is an English theatre, film and television director. Nunn has been the Artistic Director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and, currently, the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. He has directed musicals and dramas for the stage, as well as opera...
, but also David Jones, Terry Hands, Adrian Noble, Clifford Williams, David Hare, David Edgar.
This was a period of great upheaval in establishment theatre, with ground-breaking productions coming thick and fast (Peter Brook
Peter Brook
Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH, CBE is an English theatre and film director and innovator, who has been based in France since the early 1970s.-Life:...
's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Marat Sade; works by Harold Pinter and Edward Bond; As You Like It with an all-male cast; Tom Stoppard's Rosancrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) and the politics of the counter culture sometimes interfering with the smooth running of the RSC. For Brooks the writer, this was too much distraction and he left the RSC sometime in the early seventies to concentrate on his own projects (among them an unfinished manuscript that deals in a highly personal and semi-fictionalised way with his time at the RSC). During all this time and on through the eighties, Brooks directed his creative energies largely towards theatre and film projects. He had never made any money from his novels (not even from Smith As Hero which spent time on the best-seller lists) and now with a family of four children, he needed to earn. He wrote screenplays (Our Mother's House
Our Mother's House
Our Mother's House is a 1967 British drama film starring Dirk Bogarde. The screenplay was by Jeremy Brooks, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Julian Gloag.-Plot:...
; Work is a Four Letter Word); television scripts for directors such as Karel Reisz
Karel Reisz
Karel Reisz was a Czech-born British filmmaker who was active in post–war Britain, and one of the pioneers of the new realist strain in 1950s and 1960s British cinema.-Early life:...
and Ken Loach
Ken Loach
Kenneth "Ken" Loach is a Palme D'Or winning English film and television director.He is known for his naturalistic, social realist directing style and for his socialist beliefs, which are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as homelessness , labour rights and child abuse at the...
and a great number of important and memorable adaptations of classics for the stage (The Lower Depths, The Government Inspector (with Paul Schofield), Enemies (with a young Helen Mirren
Helen Mirren
Dame Helen Mirren, DBE is an English actor. She has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, four SAG Awards, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards.-Early life and family:...
), The Forest, A Child's Christmas in Wales (co-written with Adrien Mitchell), The Cherry Orchard, Medea, The Wind in the Willows and many more). The majority of these were for the RSC, where he worked closely with the director David Jones, but in later life he formed a fruitful relationship with Theatre Clwyd at Mold. This took him back to North Wales, where he died in 1994.
Throughout his life, Brooks also wrote poetry (as a schoolboy he had won an Eisteddfod poetry competition) and although during the 1950s many of his poems were published in poetry magazines such as Elegebra, he subsequently never sought its publication, poetry being, for him, a very personal and private pursuit. Moreover, only his earlier poetic work survives (collected in a privately published edition, Wales 1950, Rugosa Press, 2008), an unpublished collection of his poems written throughout the 1960s having been stolen and never recovered.
Critical response
Anthony BurgessAnthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
, in The Novel Now, said “Jeremy Brooks has come to considerable stature in Jampot Smith and Smith, as Hero: he has created one of the few really large picaresque characters in the post-war novel.”
Micheal Kustow, in his obituary for The Guardian, said “His fiction aspired to, and often achieved, a Chekhovian mixture of comic concision and pathos. Jampot Smith is a small classic about the delight and pain of sexual awakening; it will outlast its period and provincial setting.”
In ‘The Test of Time – What makes a classic a classic?’ (Waterstone’s, 1999), Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell FRSL was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British anti-authoritarian Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's anti-Bomb movement...
chose Jampot Smith as one of his classics, referring to Brooks as “a very underestimated writer”.
The Irish Times wrote, ‘Jampot Smith is exact, funny, sad and beautiful; it is, I think, a masterpiece.’
Smith, As Hero:
Brooks’s follow-up to Jampot Smith, Smith, As Hero, received glowing reviews in the national press in the UK and literary stardom seemed assured. As luck would have it, the novel then suffered a fatal blow when it was launched in the United States during a newspaper strike. The resulting lack of publicity has contributed to the book’s near-invisibility, despite its being his most mature and accessible work.
One reviewer, Isabel Quigley in The Sunday Telegraph, wrote: “The crashing of serio-comic novelists between two stools is a familiar sound to novel reviewers, since few funny novels with serious intentions manage to be either funny or serious enough. Many try to pull it off, for it looks so easy (think of the disarming simplicity of a book as deadly, deadpan and complex as ‘A Handful of Dust’ say). But few succeed. Among the few I would put Jeremy Brooks with his ‘Smith, As Hero’, sequel to the much-praised ‘Jampot Smith’. It seems to me, though in a totally different style, quite as funny as the early Waugh, and with a flavour indescribably mixed, strong, attractive and alarming... ...It is part of Brooks’s extraordinary skill at mixing his levels of feeling, intensity and response that he can end this wildly comic novel with an appalling scene aboard a post-war immigrants’ hell-ship to Palestine, and make it seem a part of all that has gone before. Smith has, by then, grown up a little.”
The above is typical of the reviews he received at publication in the UK, yet perhaps Brooks himself contributed to burying this book. He had never been a good salesman of his most personal work (the novels and poems) and, in speaking of Smith, As Hero, he often lamented what he saw as a formal error in the book; this was a foray into metafiction
Metafiction
Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...
with the introduction in a late chapter of a character called Jeremy Brooks (a device used two decades later by Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
in Money). This experiment was partly driven by his desire to distance himself from the protagonist Bernard Smith, but soon after publication he came to think of it as a mistake – a hole in what was otherwise a watertight ship. But it was too late. Great reviews did nothing to mollify him – on the contrary, they disturbed him. Typically, he was being too hard on himself (and perhaps also on those reviewers who had failed to upbraid him for his perceived mistake). It may be that to some extent Brooks subsequently 'lost his voice', or his muse, as a novelist and, apart from the four novellas collected in Doing the Voices (1986), never published a major work of fiction again.
There may have been another reason for his never having completed another novel: the period generally known as ‘the sixties’ had altered the world to such an extent that his voice, forged in wartime Britain, suddenly seemed outdated. The American beat was in the ascendant; literature had to be hip, had to address the new consciousness and speak to it in its own tones. Writers like Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey
Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a...
, Robert Stone (a close friend of Brooks), Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegutt, spoke the language that people wanted to hear. Many British writers (contemporaries like Kingsley Amis, for example) simply carried on regardless in the old tones, but Brooks perhaps felt the change too deeply. With teenage children and many American friends, the ‘new’ was all around him and yet he could find no place for it in his fiction; no place for Bernard Smith in this brave new world.
Novels
- The Water Carnival, 1957.
- Jampot Smith, 1960.
- Henry’s War, 1962.
- Smith, As Hero, 1964.
- Doing the Voices (collection of short novellas), 1986.
- (for children) The Magic Perambulator, 1965.
Television
- Day’s in the Trees, from a stage play by Marguerite Duras.
- Enemies, from a stage play by Maxim Gorky, for American Public Service TV.
- An Artist’s Story, from a short story by Anton ChekhovAnton ChekhovAnton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
, directed by David Jones.
- On the High Road, from a short story by Chekhov, dir. Karel Reisz.
- A Misfortune, from a short story by Chekhov, dir. Ken Loach.
- The Grand Inquisitor, from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
- Death Happens to Other People, an original television play.
Stage adaptations
- Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, for the RSC, directed by Peter Hall, starring Paul Schofield.
- Maxim Gorky (all from literal translations by Kitty Hunter-Blair): Enemies, for the RSC, dir. David Jones; The Lower Depths, for the RSC, dir. David Jones; Summerfolk, for the RSC, dir. David Jones; The Zykov’s, for the RSC, dir. David Jones; Children of the Sun, for the RSC, dir. Terry Hands; Barbarians, for BAM Theatre, Brooklyn, dir. David Jones
- Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov (with Kitty Hunter-Blair), for the RSC, dir. David Jones.
- Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, for the Haymarlet Theatre, dir. Clifford Williams.
- Strindberg’s Comrades, for the RSC at The Place, dir. Barry Kyle.
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Love Girl and the Innocent (with Kitty Hunter-Blair), for the RSC.
- Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Forest (with K H-B), for the RSC at The Other Place, dir. Adrian Noble. Transferred to the Warehouse Theatre, then to the Aldwych.
- Dylan ThomasDylan ThomasDylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales (with Adrian Mitchell), dramatised version of the poem, directed by Clifford Williams.
- Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, for Theatre Clwyd, Mold, dir. Christopher Sandford.
Radio
- Smith, As Killer, original radio play.
- Just Like Home, original radio play.
- A Light Shines in the Darkness, from an unfinished stage play by Leo Tolstoy
External references
- Jampot Smith: http://www.libraryofwales.org/english/low_detail.asp?book_ID=32
- My Guide as a Dramaturg: http://language.home.sprynet.com/theatdex/jeremy.htm
- Obituaries, etc. http://www.alibi-books.com/xl/jbrooks/
- Obituary: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-jeremy-brooks-1411179.html
- Poetry: http://www.gwales.com/goto/biblio/en/9780954901707/