#d m thomas

[aranazo]

The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas with a Peter Till cover.

[thatrickmcginnis]

D.M. THOMAS Toronto 1990

British author and poet D.M. Thomas was a very big literary deal when I was an undergraduate studying literature in the early to mid-‘80s and became a literary phenomenon with the publication of his novel The White Hotel in 1981. I photographed him at a time when writers were still celebrities, and the English student in me was very impressed at the assignment, near the end of probably the most productive and memorable years of my career as a photographer. I was – at least in my own mind – arriving in the big leagues in terms of subjects, documenting the sorts of cultural figures I had only dreamed of putting in front of a camera a few years earlier.

Donald Michael Thomas was born working class in Cornwall in 1935 and came of age at one of the few times when real class mobility was possible in Britain. He learned Russian doing National Service and went to New College, Oxford, where he published his first short story. He made his reputation as a poet until the publication of The White Hotel, which was shortlisted for a Booker Prize and only failed to win because rules prevented it from tying for the prize with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. An erotic, dreamlike book about Sigmund Freud, set in Europe between the wars, it was the kind of serious, ambitious book that once made its way from book supplements to bestseller lists to college curricula.

D.M. Thomas was in Toronto publicizing Lying Together, his latest novel, in which he was a character, and when I wrote about this shoot in my old blog I said that I expected him to be “serious and intimidating” but found him in a good mood, “making jokes about doing an ‘author face’ while we shot and bantering with the publicists on the sidelines.” He looked very like what I’d expect a writer to look like, down to the tweed and the Byronic white hair (and the cigarette! inside! it was a different time), and I rose to the occasion with a series of very authorial portraits in the soft window light of the (unremembered) hotel room. There were several attempts to make a movie out of The White Hotel by everyone from Barbara Streisand to David Lynch, Terence Malick, David Cronenberg and Pedro Almodovar, but none of them ended up getting filmed. D.M. Thomas died at home in Cornwall in 2023.

[shelbycarpenter]

[shelbycarpenter]

[literaryvice]

The White Hotel: In which ChatGPT writes my review and/or This Book Is Extremely Weird

What a strange, strange book. I must have started – and stopped – D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (first published in 1981, so don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it) fifteen times. Why did I persist you ask? Because m. named it as one of her favourite books, and loaned me a copy with Please Return underlined and so I thought, okay, okay. I’ll try again. And why did I keep giving up? The intensely…

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