Richard Hoggart

Richard Hoggart0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Richard Hoggart0:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My Castaway this week is an academic and author. He was born and brought up in poor working class conditions in Leeds. His father died when he was very small, and he came home one day to find his mother dead from T B.

Presenter0:42

Nevertheless, he went on to university and into academic life, experiences which prompted him to write nearly forty years ago now an enormously influential book called The Uses of Literacy. Its thesis that the working class want more and deserve better in educational and cultural terms than society chooses to give them has accompanied him ever since. As Professor of English at Birmingham University, as Assistant Director General of UNESCO, and as the warden of Goldsmiths College in London, he's waged a ceaseless battle against a society founded on popular consumerism, what he's described as the corrupt brightness of mass entertainments, a world in which progress is conceived as a seeking of material possessions and freedom as the ground for endless, irresponsible pleasure. He is Richard Hoggart.

Presenter1:31

When you warned of those influences, Richard Hoggart, back in the fifties, the worst examples you could quote of them then were The Gang Show and Tit Bits and The Daily Mirror. And now, of course, there's a plethora of such stuff about us. You must feel entirely defeated.

Presenter1:48

No, I don't feel defeated. I feel depressed, but I'm depressed by the the weight of the material that's coming on now. I mean, I wrote before television, and if you look at the worst of television, and I believe it's getting worse all the time, then uh it reinforces, I'm sorry to say, what I was saying all those years ago. It's a curious kind of balancing act. On the one hand, there is massively more

Presenter2:12

Stripe for most people.

Presenter2:15

which I'm afraid they consume because it's tasty, like a hamburger.

Presenter2:19

And the better provision for the 10% who are educated as people in a democracy should be.

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is in a way a spin-off of the

Presenter2:29

Larger, poor provision for the masses. It's a it's a product of technology, it's a product of communications technology. So the people you're saying, the people at the bottom of the pile are as ill-served as ever?

Richard Hoggart2:35

So the p

Presenter2:39

Rather more, rather more ill served than many things that are good. Most people are bet give we have a great many people who are on the streets and and who are living on Social Security.

Presenter2:49

By and large, most people have more money. They eat they travel more. They know more about other people around the world. They travel more and they travel to the great honeypots.

Richard Hoggart2:53

They know more about other people around the world.

Presenter2:59

And that travel is often enough to depress anyone. Do you know that in the Costa Brava at the cheapest hotels at the end of a week, usually it was British?

Presenter3:08

working class people. They pull out the bits of furniture and hose the room down.

Presenter3:12

That's really a shocking thought. But I don't think the consumer himself, the ordinary man who goes to the Costa Brava, comes home feeling depressed. I think he comes home feeling he's had a nice time, doesn't he?

Richard Hoggart3:14

But uh

Presenter3:21

Possibly, yes. Well, so what's wrong with it? Well, what's wrong with it is that there are nice times which are bad for you and nice times which you could face for you. And I realize as I get older and older and older that I am an an old Puritan moralist. And your critics say you're elitist, don't they? Elitism is a dirty word nowadays.

Presenter3:39

If you say, look, in spite of everything, and it's a pity that most people don't read George Eliot, she is nevertheless the greatest of English novelists, women or men.

Presenter3:49

You're not making an elitist remark, you're making a judgment which you're prepared to substantiate. And I say that. And if to be an elitist means that you say some things are better than others, yes, I'm an elitist, but that's a good one, not a dirty one. Right. I want to talk much more about it. But first of all, I want to explore you on this desert island. Tell me about your first record and why you'd need it.

Presenter4:11

Yes, the first one is A Record by Ella Fitzgerald. It's a depression song, not a depressing song. My wife and I, we were courting at the university at the time in Leeds. We first heard it then. It's a lovely

Presenter4:23

Defiant, cocking a snoop, turning your thumb in your nose at the upper classes as they think themselves. And so it's one of the first songs I remember which is not only witty and bouncy, and we used to bounce up the road back home after the library closed singing it, but it's the first one w which gave me a kind of invigorative sense that one can go into the whole class business with a great cheerfulness.

Presenter4:47

Uh

Speaker 34:47

Let's go slumming

Presenter4:49

Take me slumming.

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Let's go slumming on!

Speaker 34:56

On Park Avenue Let us hide behind a

Richard Hoggart5:04

A pair of fancy glasses And make faces when a member of the classes passes

Presenter5:17

Ella Fitzgerald and Slumming on Park Avenue. Let's come at your thesis, Richard Hoggett, from another angle, if I can, because it seems to me, if I understand it aright, that one of the fundamental messages was that the working classes of which you wrote were and are naturally more discerning than the ruling classes allowed for, that they don't just swallow whole what they're fed, that they can make judgments on what they're getting.

Presenter5:41

That's true. Let's just say they do have very strong resistances. They have a kind of

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Gravity, which makes them

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Bite a coin twice before they buy it, as it were. There's a lot of that built in. My argument would be that this is being gradually eroded.

Presenter5:59

Because the pressures are so very strong the other way. So it's a drip, drip, drip effect. It is a drip effect.

Richard Hoggart6:02

Cause it's

Presenter6:04

And nobody ever knows that they've been affected. There's a lovely cartoon from The New Yorker where two people are sitting saying

Presenter6:11

Everybody's saying that we're being made into apes by Telly, but it never happens. And they're watching Telly, and when you look at at the back of their heads, they've got the heads of apes. It's it's a nice little point.

Presenter6:21

Now you you felt and feel all these things very deeply because you are a working class boy yourself. You were brought up in the back streets of Leeds, but obviously you had a a a first class brain. Did that make you very unhappy as a child? Did you feel even then these kind of frustrations? Did you sense the limitations of your upbringing?

Presenter6:42

When you're I suppose up to twelve or thirteen, you don't notice you're you're naturally happy, cheerful, you're you're in good health.'Cause you don't know anything else. No. And uh I was the only kid in the district who went to I was the first boy ever to go to grammar school from that uh s slum school. Uh the boys laughed at me a bit, but they didn't dislike me. They threw my cap off every day, so I put it in my pocket. But they were they thought you were a swat? Well, it's a swat, yes, and going to grammar school with a funny hat on.

Speaker 37:03

Yeah.

Presenter7:08

Uh but it was all right. Uh I didn't share their pastimes, but well, I d I d I never thought that. But you didn't have parents, as I said, your parents had died when you were about eight and you went to live in what you've described as a very unhappy household. It was basically unhappy. There was my grandmother who'd had ten children.

Richard Hoggart7:20

Yeah.

Presenter7:24

And three of them unmarried were in their forties and earties.

Presenter7:28

We're living with her and that's a recipe for unhappiness.

Presenter7:31

There was an aunt who had a violent temper.

Presenter7:35

I still think of it. And uh she was the eldest she could make a row out of anything. And there was an a much tenderer, softer aunt who was very nice, but she was no match for the first aunt. And there was an uncle who took to the bottle.

Presenter7:49

And this was a great recipe, as I say, for a Saturday night barge up, because he'd come back rolling drunk and the the first hand would go for him and oh, it was terribly unhappy. But m in the middle of it was my grandmother, who was pushing eighty, uh sitting in an armchair, sort of agonizingly rubbing her hands together because she you know, she was made unhappy by it, but she loved me dearly and uh

Presenter8:11

and that she was a still focus of love.

Presenter8:15

For me, uh as a child, I think I would have had a hard time surviving without being unhappy if if I hadn't known that in the in that arm chair by the side of the fire there was there was this figure who who exuded love, and so it's like everything else in life, it was a mixture.

Presenter8:32

Tell me about record number two.

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It was a bookless home. That's obvious. It was also a musicless home.

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Uh we didn't have a radio till I don't know when very late, anyway.

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But somebody gave me a wind up grammar phone and I took it up to the attic and a few days later I bought for, I don't know, threepence or something.

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An old record.

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And it turned out to be the prelude to Traviata, and it's the sort of music which this soft hearted aunt of mine always referred to as

Presenter9:03

She used to say E, it's music which makes you want to give all your money away, and since she'd never had anything in her life, it was a very meaningful sentence.

Presenter10:07

The prelude to Verdi's La Traviata played by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Roberto Patanostro.

Presenter10:14

You've made a remark before now that it it's almost always the women in working class life who see and encourage academic potential. Why is that?

Presenter10:24

The women were much more important. The the archetype of this is misses Morrell in Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, of course. Um they were in the middle of the household, they managed the money, and managing money in a working class household is a is an economic miracle almost.

Presenter10:37

The husbands tended to be not of course there were some very good husbands, but they tended to be somewhat feckless or to be a bit tricky about the booze. And so it had become a tradition in those districts that the woman was the was the focal point.

Presenter10:51

She made the decisions, and it was almost always that the wife, either with or without the husband's consent, said, Well, if he's clever, he must go on. You mentioned sons and lovers, and somebody has compared you to D. H. Lawrence before now as being, as you've described him, a good, decent person. Is that kind of how you see yourself? Do you like the comparison?

Presenter11:12

I don't like to be called a good decent person because I know I'm not, and we all know w what our sins are. But I love the word decent because I think it's a word which you have to fight hard to give any meaning to today. That's what you're stressing, isn't it? The decency of those working classes, the decency of your grandmother and other people around you. I mean there was a decent headmaster in your life, wasn't there? People who were willing to give you a leg up.

Richard Hoggart11:24

We got sw-

Richard Hoggart11:27

If you're grandma

Richard Hoggart11:29

And other

Richard Hoggart11:32

Life was

Presenter11:36

Yes, that's true. There was the headmaster.

Presenter11:39

Bullied the local education authority to let me go to grammar school.

Presenter11:43

Why did they need bullying? Did you fail the eleven plus? Well I failed the eleven plus because they never taught me maths. And he sh he was an old man, and he went down to the office in Leeds and said

Presenter11:53

This boy's written this essay give him a scholarship.

Presenter11:56

and either they read it and said E, this is a bright lad, or they said it's an old man, he's nearly retiring, let him have at least one scholarship. So I went, anyway. And there the English master got hold of me, and tells you such a lot about grammar schools in those days.

Presenter12:10

In my third year he pointed out of the window, the upstairs window of the school, across Leeds.

Presenter12:17

where the posh areas are. And he said, If you pay your cards right, Hogger, you can live in Roundy. You see well, I don't live in Roundy. But that was his.

Speaker 312:25

To live in Farnham was his farmer.

Presenter12:30

And um that soft, lovely aunt of mine married a a widowed miner with six children, and she became the focus of that household, and she had a happy life after that, generally speaking.

Presenter12:41

And I went to the Working Men's Club with her and her husband. It was a club in in near Castleford.

Presenter12:46

And there was a big miner there sitting next to me drinking and they he kept saying, E, you must be clever'cause I was at Grammars. I think I was at university there.

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and every time he got a drink he passed me half a crown.

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And uh that was a lot of money. Uh two or three pounds, huh?

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And I said, Oh more perhaps yet. I got embarrassed and he said, Hey, well, don't you bother. I'll only waste it. Miners do, but you can make good use of it and so I had a pocketful of half crowns by the end of the year.

Richard Hoggart13:01

Uh

Speaker 313:01

Two more, I think.

Richard Hoggart13:02

Yeah.

Presenter13:13

Record number three.

Presenter13:15

Well, that's Castleford, the m mining area outside Leeds, which where this aunt of mine went with her husband and the six kids.

Presenter13:24

And it it's also a a very interesting thing about English leisure, which I'm fascinated by. I mean, the English are the most leisure

Presenter13:32

taking and inventing people anywhere in the world, I think. And the the leisure is often very eccentric and baroque. They love dressing up, especially men dressing up as women.

Presenter13:42

And this song by Jake Thackeray, who went to the same university as I did, is part it's not dressing up, it's dressing down because they strip off.

Presenter13:51

I was a mamma this aunt of mine who had eleven children, she had a son who used to saw his wife in half every weekend at the working men's clubs.

Presenter14:00

And he got his mother to go one day to see him in action, and she was preceded by a stripper.

Presenter14:05

Now this aunt with eleven kids was extremely puritanical, and I thought she'd be outraged, but she wasn't. She came back and she said, you know, she took everything off, and all she'd got left were three tussles. And I thought, what's coming next? and she said,

Presenter14:20

But you wouldn't believe what she could do with them tassels. So

Presenter14:24

Now, this is Jake Thackeray talking about the Castleford, that's the mining town, Castleford Lady's Magic Circle.

Presenter14:31

And it's very interesting. It's a very affectionate song.

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Their husbands potter it snooked down the club

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Unaware of the devilish jiggery poke and rubber dub dub While Elizabeth Jones and Lily O'Grady and three or four more Married ladies are frantically dancing naked for BLZO

Speaker 215:00

Uh

Presenter15:00

And after the witch's picnic and the devil's grog, After their savage pantings, their hysterical leapfrog, Well, Elizabeth Jones and Lily O'Grady, And three or four more married ladies go back home for cocoa

Presenter15:19

Jake Thackeray and the Castleford Ladies' Magic Circle. Sir Richard Hoggard a scholarship to Leeds University, a first in English and then the Army. nineteen forty, the Royal Artillery. You didn't fit in, did you?

Presenter15:31

Well, I suppose I I didn't. When we had the passing out parade, the colonel shouted from the rostrum, Lose that man, he's congenitally incapable of being in step, which I thought was a very nice remark.

Presenter15:43

But but the forces reinforced your view about society being class ridden? Yes, they were. I I hope they've changed a bit. Um the point was that uh the the army was expanding very quickly and therefore the officers tended to become quickly

Presenter15:57

First of all, the old territorial army people.

Presenter16:01

They were immensely conventional. They weren't bad tempered, but they were very conventional and and uh they hadn't asked a question uh to save their lives.

Presenter16:09

But there was another bunch who were the new ones. That's people like me who'd been drafted in because they needed officers. And you always found some whom you could get on with. So you saw action in Italy. You got married, I think, in 1942, and then after the war, babies began, and you took a teaching post in adult education. And then it was during those years, the second half of the forties and early fifties, that you began to develop the idea for this book, The Uses of Literacy. Now, I I wonder why that happened then. After all, it was a very frugal time. There were few cars, few televisions. I mean, a long distance telephone call was a kind of major event in one's life, wasn't it? Why did you spot this consumerism coming?

Presenter16:53

Immediately after the war, a whole group of us went into adult education, university adult education, because that was expanding.

Presenter17:00

And we all went in teaching our subject and we were immediately faced with an extraordinary discrepancy between the academic view of our subject, which we were taking out extramura beyond the walls, and the lives of the people we were persuading in the evenings to come and listen to us for two hours or so or talk to us. And you tried to write about that. That's what I was writing about. That that book began as a text book on

Presenter17:24

How to read popular newspapers and women's magazines. But it ended up being all about you as well and your life. I ended it because the second half was written first, the textbook bit. And then I thought, I can't do this, it's snobbish.

Speaker 317:29

Live

Presenter17:35

Just to look at these things tidbits of women as though you had a peg on your nose while she held them up. The first half of the univer uses of literacy was my attempt to come to terms with not

Presenter17:46

being snooty about the stuff people read and setting it in its context and saying, All right, this stuff is pretty trivial, but the people who who, as it were, look at it, read it, are not themselves trivial, they do things with it. And it made your name overnight. There was no great fuss because we were in America.

Presenter18:04

when it came out. It had been an expensive business. The pay in America was so poor that uh it we had to use what bit we had in the bank. But I came back to the first royalty payments, which I think were all of about seven hundred pounds, and that made us just just right we could buy another car and set up the house again.

Presenter18:21

But I got a lot of invitations after that.

Presenter18:24

Including to give evidence for the defence of Lady Chatterley's lover, which I want to ask you about in a minute. But tell me first about your next record.

Presenter18:32

It's uh Jacqueline Dupre playing that cello concerto, which is a f a famous recording, of course.

Presenter18:38

I'm very interested in television, and there's a certain snootiness about music on television. There is a a television.

Presenter18:46

Film of Jacqueline Dupre, and when it reaches this point in the concerto, they move in, the cameras move in.

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And

Presenter18:55

It struck me v enormously powerfully that what you see there is a human brain which has recorded all that she's not watching, she's not have she doesn't have a score.

Presenter19:05

That brain is pushing this stuff out through her imagination and her heart and all that, all the organs of feelings she has, whatever they are. And you can see it going through her arms and her hands, through the bow, onto the cello. It's an extraordinary instance of

Presenter19:20

Totally absorbed creativity by an artist. And at that moment when I was watching it at home, I thought, well, without television one could simply not see this happening at all, and that is a great gift.

Presenter20:33

Part of Elgar's cello concerto played by Jacqueline Dupre with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barrenboim.

Presenter20:40

So it was nineteen sixty and you were given a walk-on part in the Lady Chatterley trial. You've said that you were a sort of Ebar Gum figure. What do you mean when you say that? They were very clever, uh the solicitors for Alan Lane. They decided not to bring on all sorts of arty bohemian types like Kelleth Tynan and so on, and they were looking out for different types.

Presenter21:00

And I think I was the provincial lecturer, a sort of plain man's DH Lawrence, or something of that sort.

Presenter21:07

And when I got there the solicitors told me to to dig my heels in because they just made one of the witnesses cry a woman that he was a nasty man.

Presenter21:16

Griffith Jones is dead now.

Presenter21:18

And he tried to patronise me. You come from Leicester as though he was dropping a dead cat in your lap, you know. But the great moment was when he kept reading what he conceived as dirty bits.

Presenter21:30

And would I say that that wasn't dirty? Would was it virtuous? And I that sort of pushed the boat out without thinking and said I would say in fact it's puritanical.

Presenter21:38

And the moment I said it I knew that I had really given an enormous hostage to fortune.

Presenter21:43

And the great moment came afterwards, the next day, when EM Forster was called in and eat this little man in a clean macintosh.

Presenter21:52

Very old, well over eighty or something like that. And and Jeremy Hutchinson, the number two in our defense case.

Presenter21:59

Took a very bold gamble. He said, Mr. Forster, a previous witness has said that this book, far from being obscene,

Presenter22:08

is indeed virtuous and puritanical.

Presenter22:11

The Puritanical is an odd word, what do you think? And I thought if Forster says,'Well, that's a load of old rubbish, I'll go through the floor'. In fact, Forster looked up at the sky and said

Presenter22:22

It may at first seem rather paradoxical

Presenter22:26

but on reflection I think it could be regarded as just.

Presenter22:30

And I thought, There's the boy That was wonderful, you see.

Richard Hoggart22:30

There's the

Presenter22:33

They said you turned the trial. Well, that's what they said. I think it was turning anyway.

Richard Hoggart22:33

Yeah.

Speaker 222:33

They said you

Richard Hoggart22:34

Uh

Presenter22:38

Record number five.

Presenter22:41

That phase of of our lives after Chatterley and when we were moving across Birmingham, it's the period at the turn into the sixties when our children were in their teens, they hadn't fled the nest, and one thing they did, of course, was to play records very loudly, and one of them amused me, no, and it was Clown Frogman Henry singing. But I do.

Speaker 223:03

Don't know why I love you, but I do.

Speaker 223:11

I don't know why I cry so, but I do.

Speaker 223:20

I only know I'm lonely And that I want you only

Presenter23:34

Clarence Frogman Henry, and I don't know why I love you, but I do. So a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It was your invention, nineteen sixty two. It was a term that didn't exist before then.

Presenter23:46

This was presumably a continuation of what you've been talking about, your desire to build a bridge, as it were, between academic study and

Presenter23:53

Culture in the general sense, yes?

Presenter23:55

Yes. The idea is to look at many of the phenomena of modern life newspapers, women's magazines, popular novels, cartoons.

Presenter24:07

and popular songs, all the the great massive phenomena of modern life, and to understand them better.

Presenter24:13

That was one of the core ideas. The other was for me. It wasn't for others who came along.

Presenter24:17

was that one way of understanding these things was to apply to them your methods of literary criticism which you which you put into studying hardy. It was language used in a certain way and structures and symbols and images and myths, and you could apply these methods which you'd been trained in in traditional English studies. So that was it. And and and it certainly worked. I mean it it took off. It it swept the world really, the whole this whole concept of cultural studies, isn't it? They're all over. The trouble is I don't understand a lot of them now.

Speaker 324:36

Yeah.

Presenter24:45

Uh

Presenter24:46

They've moved over into a great deal of theory, either Marxist very often or Marx Jan plus Gramsci and Aldi's constructionist and so on. But that's my point, really. I mean, in a sense, it's been hijacked, hasn't it? It's been hijacked, it's become overtly political. It isn't that they've hijacked it, it's that they've fallen in love with theory. It's like having a waffle iron, and you shove this waffle iron on top of the material and say that fits, but to make it fit, you have to chop bits off it. But it must be saddening. Because these are the kinds of people who are, as we were saying earlier on, attempting to equate.

Richard Hoggart25:17

Uh

Speaker 325:17

Because these

Presenter25:23

Middlemarch with EastEnders or The Beatles with Beethoven and saying that you can compare these things, that there is no such thing as great art and great literature and great pieces of music.

Presenter25:32

You see, what happens if they use the theory like that and if they say that everything is Christoire Mill?

Presenter25:39

They end by being totally relativist.

Presenter25:42

And that's a disaster. You've called them moral cretins. Oh yes. No, no, I didn't call them moral crettings. That's wonderful. No, a chap came along and and said not me, most neighbours now he said that a lot of people in modern cultural studies are moral cretins. I think that's extravagant. Uh i they aren't moral crettings. But what is point here is something important, that they're afraid of making moral judgments.

Presenter26:05

Record number six.

Presenter26:08

Auden, WH Auden, has been one of my favourites ever since I was a young man.

Presenter26:13

Still is.

Presenter26:14

He's as obsessed as I am for that matter, come to me. He was when he wrote this poem about the fact that this century has been, I suppose, one of the worst centuries ever.

Presenter26:23

I mean, you think of the Holocaust, you think of what's going on now in what was Yugoslavia, the sheer capacity for inhumanity and artlessness is quite terrifying. And this poem of Orden, the Shield of Achilles, is about those who become the victims of that and for whom a a force which they don't understand and which is entirely inhumane towards them just does away with them. That's the people being executed at the beginning, and then towards the end he looks at a a group of urchins and says

Presenter26:51

These are urchins in in modern life who, as it might be, the inhabitants of the inner cities.

Presenter26:57

who have no sense of

Presenter26:59

belonging to one another at all, and there is no love anywhere.

Presenter27:03

It's a very sad poem, but very powerful.

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A ragged urchin, aimless and alone

Presenter27:09

loitered about that vacancy.

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A bird flew up to safety from his well aimed stone.

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That girls are raped.

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The two boys knife a third.

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were axioms to him.

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who had never heard of any world where promises were kept.

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Or one could weep

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Because another whip.

Presenter27:31

WH ARDEN reading an extract from his poem The Shield of Achilles.

Presenter27:36

You've been married, Richard Hoggart, to the same woman for fifty three years, your wife Mary. You've had three children. I wonder in the light of the deprivations of your childhood which you described, I wonder what kind of father you've been? I remember the younger youngest, the younger boy, once asking me for extra pocket money to buy some stamps.

Presenter27:57

And um I gave him some. I'm a bit soft, I should say, as a father. That's one consequence.

Presenter28:04

as my wife will tell you. But then he came again and and I said to him, Come on, Paul, you can't this is the third time you've come and uh he said, I've I've looked in your wallet, you've got some pound notes there and I said yes and I gave him a little lecture on them.

Presenter28:17

how it's all m accounted for.

Presenter28:20

You know, this is for that, that's for food, and so on. And he said, Look, come on, get forget the back streets of Leeds and just give me the money.

Presenter28:26

Which I thought was at least a sign that he'd uh he'd not been overborne by that. And and what about as a grandfather? Are you an even nicer grandfather? As usual, that's what grandfathers are, isn't it? But again, I look at them and and love them all very dearly indeed and wonder how they're going to go along.

Richard Hoggart28:33

Nicogram as usual.

Presenter28:42

Try not to interfere.

Presenter28:44

What about you yourself? You've written before now that you've served on all these committees and things, an enormous number of them, because you've always found you were unnaturally glad to be wanted.

Presenter28:56

Yes, I think that's true. Because I was an orphan, because I was outside, and because indeed people in my with my background they they um you tend to be treated rather snoopily sometimes by some people. I mean they say to you

Presenter29:09

If they discovered you've written something, what college were you? And they'd they just mean Oxford or Cambridge, you see, and I say Leeds.

Presenter29:15

I am very, very thin skinned about slights like that, slights to do with snobbery, and I think therefore I was pleased to to be on various committees, to be asked to be on them. Record number seven.

Presenter29:29

After that Alden poem, which almost makes me cry every time I hear hear it and he reads it so well.

Presenter29:36

I feel myself pretty well in the depths, because it's so true.

Presenter29:40

And then I and then you bounce back and you think, Well, there is more to life than that. There's love and there's affection, there's loyalty and fidelity and neighbourliness and all that.

Presenter29:48

And when I think of that, I think of Beethoven's Fidelio and that great.

Presenter29:53

Marvelous tune when the the prisoners are let out from their underground prisons.

Presenter29:58

It's a movement from despair to hope, so more than anything, to oppose, as it were, in however

Presenter30:05

Provisional way, the truth behind the shield of Achilles of Orden I would want, dear Fidelio.

Presenter31:33

Part of the Prisoner's Chorus from Act One of Beethoven's Fidelia with the orchestra and chorus of the Vienna State Opera conducted by Christopher von Dornani.

Presenter31:43

Our papers, according to you, are full of increasing vulgarity. We enjoy what you call a lot of rubbish. Is there any hope for us? I mean, can we be?

Presenter31:53

Rescued from this despair. There's always hope, and there are a lot of people who give you hope, whatever they are, whether they're educated people or not. But they're all fighting against the sheer weight of this. Well, what is triviality for commercial reasons? It's you really you really have to come back and say simple things. And if you if you put the most important cultural

Presenter32:14

elements in a society into the hands of commercial people who want to make a profit, they will bring it down to the lowest common denominator. It's their nature, they can't help it. But I go back to the point I made to you earlier, what happened to your faith in the people? You know, your belief that we know innately that there is such a thing as great literature, we know innately when there is quality and we know when we're eating rubbish. Can't we bounce back against it? Well, I hope so. I'll do a bit of bouncing myself. But I think that the situation now in a world in which at every level, whether at high intellectual levels or others, where we're told that nothing is better than anything else, there'll be much less disposition to bounce back. I think what Forster and Auden call the ironic points of light in society, they're being squeezed all the time, but they have to fight back, they have to argue against it, they have to say this is balance, this is nonsense, this is trash.

Presenter33:04

You can't do it by legislation, but you can stand up and say nuts to you. And I trust the capacity for people to say nuts to that. It's a good British spirit.

Richard Hoggart33:14

Lost record.

Presenter33:17

The uh Beethoven, the Fidelio was um

Presenter33:20

The great musical expression of the fact that against everything.

Presenter33:24

One hopes.

Presenter33:26

Larkin, Philip Larkin, in that lovely poem on a Rundle Tomb, and surprisingly enough, says something similar in poetry instead of in music.

Presenter33:35

I'm surprised at that because he was a very dour and rather pessimistic and sad man throughout his life.

Presenter33:40

Whether he believed what he was saying there, I don't know. I'd like to think he believed it, and I'd like to think I believe it. Otherwise chaos has come again and it's all empty. It's one of the great moments where you say, Well,

Presenter33:53

Against everything there is love, and uh whatever happens after that I don't know. And this is why the Larkin poem is so often quoted, because at the end he he brings out that marvellous phrase, What will survive a verse is love.

Presenter34:07

I don't know if it's true, but I'll certainly buy it.

Presenter34:10

Time has transfigured them into untruth.

Presenter34:15

The stone fidelity they hardly meant

Presenter34:18

has come to be their final blazon.

Presenter34:22

and to prove our almost instinct

Presenter34:25

Almost true.

Presenter34:28

What will survive of us?

Presenter34:31

is love.

Presenter34:33

Philip Larkin, reading part of his poem An Arundel Tomb.

Presenter34:37

If you could only take one of those records, which one would it be?

Presenter34:42

That was a problem. It would be either the Elgar or the Beethoven.

Presenter34:47

But I think, English or not, it would have to be the Beethoven.

Presenter34:51

And Shakespeare and the Bible are there. What extra book would you like to take?

Presenter34:57

I'd like to take the completes of Montaigne.

Presenter35:00

He's a wonderful mixture of the dry and the serious and the comical. He's extremely compact and he's very weighty. I remember one passage where he says

Presenter35:09

When I play with my cat, I wonder whether I'm playing with her or she with me. Curious mad surrealist thought. And what about your luxury?

Presenter35:19

Well, if the first thought was a lot of paper and a pen, but a fountain pen, not a ball pen. And then I thought that probably a lot of people opt for that. It's probably a bit routine. So I'll go for one of those nice bird feeders which have a cage outside to keep squirrels out. I've got one at home and it brings in things like nuthatches and heaven knows what it would bring on a desert island.

Presenter35:41

Richard Hoggart, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Richard Hoggart35:51

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Dists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.