In 2000, I was awarded some money by the UK National Lottery and the Arts Council of England to put together a collection of short stories. I worked with a literary agent called Deborah Rogers, whose fame as a literary agent was only exceeded by her generosity as a lover of new writing and a supporter of new writers. She would sit in her manuscript piled office in London’s Powis Mews and talk about your work in a way that suggested that it mattered to her as much as it did to you – even though at the time I was a barely published writer, and she was a highly successful literary agent. She already represented future Nobel Prize Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. She represented Ian McEwan and Peter Carey and Hanif Kureishi. She had once represented Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie. And none of that is name dropping, because those names are merely a few from a bigger list of considerable writers that found their way to Deborah Rogers’ door at Rogers, Coleridge and White Literary Agency.
I arranged through Deborah to republish a story by Peter Carey, called ‘Crabs’ – it intrigued me with its critique of car-bound Australian suburbia – and a story by Hanif Kureishi called ‘My Son the Fanatic’, that piqued my interest by beginning with the word ‘Surreptitiously’. Through a connection to the Welsh university where I was working, at the time called the University of Wales, Bangor, I arranged a Foreword by Richard Attenborough. That is, Lord Richard Attenborough, actor, director and producer, the man behind Ghandi (1982), winner of eight Academy Awards, and Cry Freedom (1987), among a long list of directing and producing accomplishments – and later, of course, playing the wealthy John Hammond in Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequels, to add to his equally long list of notable acting roles.
I then wrote an Introduction to the collection, which included a number of other new writers, much like me. It is here the issue arises, and my apology begins.
The collection I named Swallowing Film, because in it I wanted to talk about how fiction and film spoke to each other. To explore a little how the acts of creative writing and the acts of creating a film communicated. How they communicated when people received them too: that is, to consider the entanglement of literature and film in the world. The writers in the collection – me included – wrote to that idea. We wrote in light of that idea. We wrote directly relating to it, or we wrote obliquely recalling it. The works I republished, with the kind assistance of a very generous literary agent and her clients, had filmic references. Peter Carey’s story, ‘Crabs’, for example, which appeared in his 1974 collection The Fat Man in History, features a drive-in movie theatre. The story was later adapted for the screen as the film Dead End Drive-In (1986)
Swallowing Film was a limited edition, one-off. Never to be repeated. In keeping with the theme, in the Introduction to the book I mention a number of films: Duck Soup (1933), Love Before Breakfast (1936), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), also an adaptation, in this case of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 novel, and almost two handfuls more. Among those films, I refer to the adaptation of Laura Esquivel’s novel Como agua para chocolate [Like Water for Chocolate] (1989) – except, and here’s the crux of the matter, I refer to that film adaptation as Like Water from Chocolate.
From chocolate?!
I didn’t notice the typographical error. No one else noticed the typographical error. This one-time, generously supported, impossible to repeat Arts Council of England funded publication went to print that way. It has haunted me ever since.
So often we write to extend our knowledge – of subjects and of events, of experiences and of observations, of ideas and of emotions. We write to explore, and we write to discover. But we also in writing inadvertently reveal to ourselves some things we hoped not to know. That is, we situate ourselves in the world – at a point in time – and all that this involves, the good and the bad, the attentive and the inattentive, the astute and the dozy. Creative writing is particularly revealing on this front because it so often combines the conjectural with the factual, the exploratory pushed by us to the written edges of what we can perceive – which is the same place our keenness of eye and our circumspection exist.
For these reasons, I wish the mistake I made had not been in my critical Introduction to Swallowing Film but in a piece of creative writing instead; because, although it would be no less a mistake, it might have been considered part of some greater imaginative plan. My bold, untethered, enigmatic, creatively powered investigation. In it maybe I was suggesting something magical, an exchange bordering on alchemy – a gold from lead type of thing. There is of course something attractive about being able to turn on a tap and get the main ingredient for a box of truffles. Maybe I was referring to an earlier Laura Esquivel work, a recently discovered manuscript perhaps, found in a battered old tin trunk on her grandpa’s rustic farm, in which she had used the slightly different title (consequently creating a prompt for future genetic critics to seek find out why she did).
In reality, none of that was the case. The expression ‘como agua para chocolate’ (like water for chocolate), heard in Latin American countries, refers literally to the fact that when made with water not milk (as is common in such countries as Mexico) chocolate will only become a drink when the water is boiling. Water is brought to the boil several times in the process. Figuratively, the reference is to someone’s emotions boiling over, and though it can also be a reference to passions, to excitement, it is used in Esquivel’s novel to portray the protagonist’s anger. Tita, the novel’s protagonist, is boiling mad.
And so … My considerable apologies to Laura Esquivel. And my thanks also to Laura Esquivel. I have missed other typos and I have made other mistakes, and plenty of them. Almost certainly I will make more. But it will be to my 2000 reference to Like Water for Chocolate that I know for sure I will always return. It was there that I discovered the haunting that begins with all of our writing – a reminder that we work at the edge of permanence, not so much in what might one day be fading pages but in the etching of our writing on our minds.