When she’s finished, he bounds to the lectern, and out it comes pouring – a great spool of a poem made up of bits and pieces of his life and his reading, mixing up Kipling, Marvell, nursery rhyme and snatches of obscure family business. His voice is a weird instrument, high and yelping like a dog’s, frisky, nervy, questioning. Tom Paulin, he of the wild and unnerving stare, looks like some small, shocked animal caught in the headlights as he sits in his chair, nursing his script, listening to the presenter listing his manifold and glorious achievements as poet and critic. His knees are squeezed tight together, his fingers steepled. “But my head says wait until you have enough skill.”It’s that Harry career tornado again.`Hope Floats’ is released on 13 November. THERE ARE few things more unnerving for a poet than preparing for the moment to begin.

“Not for the $20m,” he adds, hastily, “but for the opportunity to select what I want to do.” Then what? The canvas chair and the riding crop “My ego and my ambition wants to direct,” he says. Move into movies, he’s thinking, since you don’t have it in you to make a pop record, and make it really big-time like your fellow top-gun in Independence Day, Will Smith (a cameo role there for Harry). Instead, he laughs, waves his big hands, does his gregarious, love- me Harry thing. Whatever his mysterious crisis was, it ended in 1994, with marriage, a new album and a US tour happening almost simultaneously.The triple-platinum ambition is untarnished It’s telling when he finishes a question for me. Would he like to be Will Smith? “Sure, he gets $20m a movie, that’s what I’m working so hard to achieve.” He visibly collects himself.

It’s clear that he’s really been mulling it over in his head, and it’s been bothering him somewhat. “It seems to me that however fine your music is…” “It’s not gonna get any bigger, yeah.” Which seems to indicate a certain frustration with the genre of music for which he is the crown prince, big-band swing. “You can get my statement from the police department,” he says Your “missing years”? He doesn’t acknowledge them. “It borders on sennimentality and she was not a fan of that.” Hooo! This man is wonderfully off-message for someone on a slick PR junket (“I think there were a lot of things that were undeveloped about my character,” he tells me later, “which was kind of frustrating.”)His mother would have liked his celebrated role as a serial killer in Copycat, he says with some confidence. And no doubt his next role – as a rapist being let out of prison, would also intrigue her, as a former state judge from NYC, “whose favourite colour was black”.I ask him about the gun He stalls. Whatever.”I find dark themes attractive,” he tells me, conspiratorially “I’ve seen a lot of darkness and I find it more interesting.

When I sing “Oh I Love, You!” – that’s nice – but when I sing about death, disease, I like that. I’d love to play slow tragic songs all day; I love it”.Sandra Bullock has mentioned that “there’s so much pain in Harry’s past”, referring to the death of his mother of ovarian cancer when he was only 13 It affected him deeply. Harry himself has even speculated that the overtly “boyish” side of his nature is the result of some kind of “arrested development”.I asked Harry whether his mother would have liked Hope Floats, in which he plays a blue-collar Texas stud who saves the returning prom queen Sandra Bullock from the despair of a wrecked marriage (the sort of role a pre- lapsarian Rock Hudson so often performed) Harry doesn’t blink as he replies “Maybe not,” he concedes, with unexpected truthfulness. Perhaps a race memory surfaced as he tickled the ivories on that sunny Berkshire afternoon: the pogroms of Prince Philip’s Romanov forbears, Cossacks riding down Connick’s distaff ancestors back in old Kiev. What was he thinking? He tells me, unconvincingly, that he had a sudden, inexplicable urge to earn a degree as he “never was educated”. Yet his biography shows that from the age of 18 he attended New York’s Hunter College and the Manhattan School of Music – where he learnt, among other things, the complex and highly cerebral art of orchestration.He claims he hates the work of his fellow New Orleans denizen Anne Rice, but I suspect that Harry has a southern Gothic streak to his soul, souped up by an Irish-Jewish gene-pool inheritance.Try Jewish alienation and Irish melancholy.