A touch of the Gogols: When Kenneth Williams read Russian literature

Written by: Graham McCann
Published: Sunday 14th January 2024

It might have been somewhat surprising at the time, but now, looking back at it, it seems quite an apt connection: a diarist drawn to a diary. The diarist in question was Kenneth Williams, and the diary was Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madman.

It was a project that began in the early Sixties, when the actor was more or less at his peak, but only reached a conclusion at the start of the Nineties, several years after his death, and it was one of the most interesting and impressive things that Kenneth Williams ever attempted. It is a pity, therefore, that relatively few people now seem to know much about it.

It was an adventure initiated by another Williams - Richard Williams. Probably best-known these days as the Academy Award-winning animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Richard Williams (who died in 2019) had a long and distinguished artistic career that encompassed such things as the animated short A Christmas Carol (1971) - another Academy Award winner - along with the design of the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? (1965), Casino Royale (1967) and two of the later Pink Panther films, as well as a stint as artist-in-residence at Aardman Animations.

Born in Toronto, Canada, he had spent a period in the Fifties in Ibiza, pursuing his passion for painting, before moving to London and joining his fellow Canadian George Dunning's company, the Dean Street-based T.V. Cartoons Ltd, as an animator. Developing his own projects in his spare time, he launched his solo career in 1959 with The Little Island (about three men on a desert island, each representing a single virtue, be it truth, beauty or goodness), which won that year's BAFTA for Best Animated Film.

It was his next project that first brought him into contact with his namesake, Kenneth Williams. Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, which reached the screen in 1962, was a ten-minute fable about the nature of affection, animated by Richard and narrated by Kenneth, and it performed well enough at the box office to enable the filmmaker to establish his own company, Richard Williams Animation Ltd.

The two men already greatly admired each other's talent and quickly became good friends and confidantes. Richard was certainly very keen to find another project on which they could collaborate, and, within a few months of finishing the first, had fastened on something that he felt was perfect for the second.

This was Gogol's short story Diary of a Madman. First published in 1835, it was a strange tale about a lowly pen-pushing civil servant named Poprishchin who continues to record his frustrations in his daily journal as his mind begins to fragment.

Kenneth, at that time, was between series of the radio show Beyond Our Ken, as well as between Carry On movies, and, as someone who was always craving an entrée into what he believed was a more 'respectable' level of culture, was very much open to the kind of project that Richard was now proposing. He had envied Tony Hancock when the comedian appeared in another of Gogol's satirical dramas, The Government Inspector, back in 1958, and then felt humiliated when his colleague arrived for the next rehearsal of Hancock's Half Hour only to dismiss his own characterisations as mere 'cartoons'. Diary Of A Madman now offered him, in his eyes, a kind of artistic redemption.

Kenneth must have found the story's protagonist a figure with whom he had much in common. A solitary, lonely, middle-aged individual, with 'a caricature of a face', forever complaining about the 'uneducated boors' who surround him and fail to appreciate him; a man so fastidious that he has to protect his 'olfactory nerves' by holding his nose as he walks past other people's doors, and whose only pleasure is to be had by losing himself in the theatre. Indeed, some of Poprishchin's early diary entries sounded eerily like Kenneth's own, sniping about colleagues while moaning about doing work that is beneath him for an insultingly modest wage.

Drawn in by such similarities, he would surely then have been fascinated by the dramatic potential of a plot that sees the mundane slowly eaten into by the surreal, as dogs start to speak and correspond with each other, brains evaporate in the wind, noses find sanctuary on the moon, and the progressively paranoid Poprishchin succumbs to delusions of grandeur. For a man who confided in his own diary at the time that he was feeling manipulated by others, treated like 'some clay for a potter to throw', the sense of mounting paranoia must have seemed more than a little familiar.

The plan, at this initial stage, was for Kenneth to narrate a thirty-minute animated film of the story. Richard would work on the vision, plotting the progression of the key images, and then Kenneth would provide the voice, and then the detailed animation would follow.

Richard went ahead and commissioned a dramatised version of the story by James Burke, along with an orchestral score by Peter Shade. Kenneth, meanwhile, purchased a paperback edition of the relevant Gogol collection, walked back to his apartment - 76 Park West, on Edgeware Road - and started working his way through the words.

The more he read, the more excited he became. This, he thought to himself, was the kind of thing that he used to do - performing in a play by George Bernard Shaw, working with Orson Welles - this was art, this was quality. He could hardly wait to start.

In his diary entry for Tuesday 14th May 1963, Kenneth wrote:

At 11.30 this morning I've got Dick Williams coming to discuss the Gogol script for his film Diary Of A Madman. He came. I read the pieces. V. good I think, and he brought two LPs with music by Shade (Peter) for the film. It is superb. His music for Love Me was marvellous enough but this is a dream. This sort of music makes me want to give thanks to God, it shows Him in people, it shows the beauty and the redemption. It gave me buoyancy for the rest of the day.

Suitably inspired, Kenneth now proceeded to prepare his own contribution - a process which, of course, first involved finding the right voice for the characterisation. For Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, he had used a style of enunciation similar to the one he had employed most recently for the character of Francis Courtenay in Carry On Regardless (1961) - a deep, fruity, educated style of delivery that was his go-to tone whenever he wanted to affect the air of an intellectual. For Diary Of A Madman, his first instinct was to go for the same tone, which would then gradually evolve into a kind of gothic version of his 'snide' voice as sanity gave way to madness. On further reflection, however, he decided that something much gentler and softer was required to suit the personal and private nature of the diarist's confessional context, so the 'snide' aspect was dropped and the 'intellectual' voice was made more subtle and vulnerable.

Richard Williams, meanwhile, was busy with his team working on the time-specific storyboards for the film. This stage in the production, sometimes referred to as the 'animatic', involved sketching out a very basic visual preview of the film's structure, linked to the voiceover and music. The reason it was done in this order, rather than the actor being hired after the film was finished, was that (aside from the fact that the actual animation always takes so long to complete) it is much harder to 'time' speech while animating without recourse to a recorded voice track, and the actors prefer to perform their characterisations without being constrained by any particular visualisation. The sound, therefore, was the priority.

On Thursday 23rd of May, the two Williams thus met at a studio to record the whole piece. It did not, according to Kenneth's subsequent diary entry for that day, go at all well:

We were at it solidly from 10.30 to 5. It was diabolical. I think it is almost impossible to do this well. Every time it is a compromise between art and technical requirement. Every speech having to be exactly timed within seconds. All the really mad sequences requiring speed and clarity.

It appears that Kenneth, after having initially been energised by Richard's drive to get things right, had gradually been worn out by his relentlessness. As he would later explain, in a letter to a friend written in 1971:

It was very exciting to work with him because he is one of the very few professional directors who really does know what he wants. And he keeps on till he gets it. He is of Canadian origin and has all that energy and zest of the North American. It is very attractive and infectious when one first meets with it, but after a while I begin to long for the cynical lassitude of the European. It is more restful.

Still fretting over his performance, Kenneth sought some distraction the following month by departing for a two-week foreign vacation, spending time in Italy, Greece, Turkey and Croatia before returning to England on 19th June. His mood by now, however, was even worse than it had been before the trip.

'Inside', he wrote in his diary, 'I'm like a cauldron of despair':

When I hear polite banalities being exchanged, I could scream with anger. I feel that I want to escape from the world that I know, into some primitive ordinariness where there is time & atmosphere for people to be important: not things. And yet I know that I can't escape anywhere. Wherever you run you take your problem with you.

A few days after writing this entry, he found himself stuck in the stuffy darkness of a small Soho recording booth, obliged to trot out his 'snide' voice for yet another TV commercial. Niggled by the director, who (in stark contrast to Richard's passionate pursuit of the highest artistic standards) clearly only wanted to go through the motions and move on to the next commission, Kenneth reflected that he would have liked 'to have kicked him up the arse'.

One week later, however, he was pleasantly surprised when Richard Williams played him the edited version of his Gogol recording. 'I thought it was marvellous', he would later record in his diary. 'It really did suggest the mind gradually disintegrating. I was v. impressed with my own work'.

He had every reason to be impressed. It was a remarkable reading, easily the most understated and subtle performance he had so far delivered, slyly and precisely opening up all of the nuances of the words and lines as they start to slide from the factual to the fantastic.

Absent was his normal habit of handling language with too rigid a grip. Here, in contrast, he allowed the prose and its meanings to manage his sounds, modulating the softness and sharpness, the chill and the heat, while the structure moved him on through the rhythms. Usually so fearful of the vulnerability that comes with openness, here, for once, he embraces it, by embracing the text.

One of the finest sections of the reading came midway through, as the protagonist, now seeming little more than a spectral presence in the society he describes, punctuates his speech with sighs as he reflects on his sense of alienation:

As he moves, slowly, through these lines and their hesitant repetition, he sounds as though he is starting to notice and reflect on his own thoughts, his own visions, his own urges, from the outside, from some other place, sensing, briefly and imperfectly, the tracks that are being traced into shadowy incoherence. The sensitivity that Williams shows here and elsewhere in the recording, the quiet discipline and deftness of expression, is arguably the most impressive demonstration of the depth of his talent that his career would ever witness.

At the time, however, he hoped that it was simply the start of a whole new phase for him. This performance, he felt, could serve as the springboard he needed to escape from the kind of comedy he sometimes claimed to despise (dismissing it as 'the most depressing sort of would-be funny rubbish'), and propel him into darker, richer, more intellectually stimulating dramatic territory. The only problem was how long he would have to wait for the production to reach the public.

While Richard toiled away in his studio, therefore, Kenneth was obliged to keep doing more of the same: more Beyond Our Ken, more Carry Ons, more commercials. As time thus ticked on, it was as if the sense of frustration in Gogol's story was bleeding into Kenneth's own mind: while Poprishchin's diary entries recorded his longing for a proper meeting with the woman of his dreams, Kenneth's keep registering his hopes for achieving greater artistic credibility.

The many delays, for Richard, were simply part of the process. An uncompromising perfectionist, he was well-accustomed to interruptions, as the main means of financing his own projects was to accept a succession of commissions to work on other people's productions - which led to the irony that he often had to devote more of his time to the latter than he ever could to the former.

Kenneth, on the other hand, was used to the immediacy of the theatre and the rapid turnover of recordings on radio and television, and even his Carry Ons were shot and edited at an exceptionally rapid pace. He tried his best to keep his frustration about the animation to himself, but as the wait went on for more than a year he was struggling to contain his impatience.

It was his admiration for his colleague that encouraged him to keep the faith. Considering himself a compromised idealist, 'slumming it' in the commercial world, he regarded Richard's artistic integrity as positively heroic. In 1965, he even wrote an article in his honour for a film journal, emphasising how much he admired his achievements.

The two men would indeed remain great friends for the rest of their lives. Kenneth would encourage Richard in his various other projects, and sometimes act as an intermediary whenever the film-maker wanted access to another actor. Richard, in turn, would listen sympathetically to Kenneth's long and often anguished monologues about his chronic and complicated emotional anxieties, and do his best to push his hesitant friend in a more positive direction.

In one diary entry, for example, Kenneth would write: 'I talked about sexual frustration and he said I should go off and do it somewhere. He said that's what aeroplanes are for. He said it's as if jets had been deliberately designed to rush people off to sexual adventures. Of course it's just a lovely idea. I don't know though'.

Kenneth, as time went on, grew far more reconciled to the idea that the gestation of animated films can sometimes take longer than the lives of those who supplied the voices. In his last diary entry concerning Richard, written in April 1985, he reflected on a visit to his friend's rabbit warren of an office on Soho Square to see the latest rough cut of The Thief And The Cobbler, a movie (to which he was also one of the contributors) that, like their two earlier collaborations, had started production in the Sixties. 'It was extraordinary to hear the voice of Felix Aylmer', he wrote, 'alas, he's now dead'.

The Thief And The Cobbler only reached the cinemas, albeit still unfinished, in 1992, after multiple deadlines had been missed and Miramax removed it from Richard's control and butchered the footage for a commercial release. Diary Of A Madman, sadly, would not even make it that far. Kenneth thought about it every now and then, and sometimes inquired as to its current state, but, mainly through the ongoing failure to find sufficient funding, the animation remained incomplete and the soundtrack stayed stuck up on the shelf.

When Kenneth died, on 15 April 1988 at the age of sixty-two, it seemed that the work - one of the precious few of which he was proud - had died with him. The many obituaries made mention of the Carry Ons, Hancock's Half Hour, Beyond Our Ken and Round The Horne, some of the stage plays, the revues and the talk show performances, but no one seemed to know about the reading of Gogol.

Late in 1990, however, something serendipitous happened. A BBC radio producer, Ned Chaillet, was recording an interview with Richard Williams about his current work when the animator mentioned in passing the unfinished Diary Of A Madman project.

Greatly intrigued by the revelation that Kenneth Williams had been the narrator, Chaillet asked Richard if any of the audio had survived. Richard confirmed that it had, and, a day or so later, arranged for a sample of the recorded material to be transferred on to disc and dispatched to Chaillet's office at Broadcasting House.

As he listened to the recording, the producer was soon convinced that it would make for a memorable radio broadcast. When Richard then informed him that all of the music along with Kenneth's performance existed on 35mm soundtracks, it proved fairly easy for the producer to persuade Radio 4 to agree to let him prepare it as a programme.

Delighted at the prospect of finally salvaging something from what was now a twenty-eight-year-old project, Williams proceeded to send the crates full of the 35mm film to Broadcasting House. It was there that Chaillet arranged for the sound engineer John Whitehall to transfer the recordings digitally and edit the material for broadcast.

There was a moment of some anxiety when Whitehall discovered that one reel of film was missing. His response to the setback, however, was inspired. He went back through all of the existing tracks, sampling sections until the gaps were filled-in and the full performance by Kenneth was, more or less, back in place.

The soundtrack of Diary Of A Madman was thus broadcast by Radio 4 on 3 February 1991. It was hailed by the critics as the triumph that Kenneth, all those years ago, had always hoped it would be, with the Sunday Telegraph rating it as 'the performance of his life'.

'His vocal range was at its most dazzling, his timing impeccable', observed his fellow actor Jonathan Cecil, 'above all, the manic paranoid hysteria which informed much of his comedy was there in chilling earnest'.

The poignancy of the performance would come to seem all the more powerful two years later, when Russell Davies' edited collection of Kenneth's own diaries was published. Now all of the parallels between the subject and the speaker, which Kenneth himself had appreciated as soon as he first read the book, were open to inspection and reflection.

Kenneth had always been fascinated by the story of his fellow diarist's descent into derangement but, no matter how desperate his own private reflections became, he remained adamant that he would never suffer a similar fate. Whenever he did ponder the prospect of madness, however, he managed to make the preservation of sanity sound like an even sadder fate.

'I don't think I could ever go mad,' he reflected in his own diary. 'I see myself too clearly. I know even at the moment of no return that it is that moment. I generally know about tomorrow too. I know that nothing is new. I know that nothing remains. I know that all the things we do are largely inventions to pass the time. Sleep is a relief. No wonder some take pills'.

There was, nonetheless, a tragic kinship between the reader and the role, and Kenneth had known it from the first time he pondered the text ('It's truly ironic that I should do the sound track to Diary Of A Madman', he had written shortly after the commission. 'Perhaps madness is the last refuge of the over-sensitive: perhaps it's the cover of kindness that the world draws over you when you can fight no more'), and he could never really dismiss it. Both of them relentless self-voyeurs, glowering at themselves from the gallery, there was always a sense that they were drawn together through their mutual distaste for the wild world that was so rudely whirling around them.

'Why do they torture me?' Poprishchin exclaims as he nears the end. 'What do they want from one so wretched as myself? What can I give them? I possess nothing. I cannot bear all their tortures; my head aches as though everything were turning round in a circle. Save me! Carry me away! Give me three steeds swift as the wind! Mount your seat, coachman, ring bells, gallop horses, and carry me straight out of this world. Farther, ever farther, till nothing more is to be seen!'

'Saw the news', Kenneth wrote on his own final night alive, 'watched the dreary saga of murder & mayhem. By 6.30 pm pain in the back was pulsating as it's never done before...so this, plus the stomach trouble combines to torture me - oh - what's the bloody point?'

Poprishchin, having convinced himself that he is the new King of Spain, ended up in an asylum. Kenneth, despairing of ever realising his loftiest dreams, spent his final years in something similar of his own making, deep inside a mansion block on Osnaburgh Street. The destiny for both of them was to withdraw from the world, and retreat deep into their monkish chambers, into their locked and lonely room, and, ultimately, into the dubious intimacy of their diary, where, with only the echo of their singular soul to keep them company, there was no one left to question, or help overcome, their sadly distorted outlook on themselves and their life.

The recording that survives is both a memorable evocation of the story, and, even more so, a moving epitaph for its narrator. What a great shame it was that he never got to enjoy any of the applause it earned him.