Sir Frank Kermode

Speaker 30:00

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

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a critic. He was born in 1919 on the Isle of Man, and grew up a clever, introverted boy in that remote and insular part of the United Kingdom. After university and wartime service in the Navy, he went into academic life, becoming one of the most influential critics and teachers of his age, and serving as professor of English at both London and Cambridge universities. Anyone who's studied English literature, however briefly, has probably heard of him. But he remains disenchanted by his eminence. Looking the part, while not being quite equal to it, seems to be something I do rather well, he says. He is Sir Frank Kermode.

Presenter1:11

Professor Commode, I I suspect most um men and women of achievement feel like that, that they're not quite all they're cracked up to being. Isn't that all you're saying, really? Or is it something more than that?

Sir Frank Kermode1:20

Well, no, I think I would certainly agree that uh that puts the case for me. I wouldn't like to judge it for other people. I dare say it would be very pleasant to be convinced that one was uh exceedingly bright and worthy of all the attention one got.

Presenter1:35

But you you you suggest in your autobiographical writings that that that you've been rather blown about through life, that you're rather like tumbleweed, you fetched up in these places, although they've been very eminent. They are a very eminent places.

Sir Frank Kermode1:48

Well, that is true. I have sort of drifted about uh

Sir Frank Kermode1:52

mostly within the university system in this country and in the United States. I've never stayed longer than eight years in any job, and that's very unusual in an academic profession. And I can't really explain it, a kind of natural a quickness to be bored with whatever one's got. That's usually the explanation. Other explanations, of course, are quarrelling with people. But what else might you

Presenter2:17

But what else might you have been?

Sir Frank Kermode2:18

And my ma

Presenter2:19

Uh

Sir Frank Kermode2:19

Yeah.

Sir Frank Kermode2:20

I don't know. I I used to think I might have been a musician. Uh there was no evidence that I could ever have been a musician. I was extremely untalented uh at everything musical that I tried.

Presenter2:31

You tried the violin, I think.

Sir Frank Kermode2:32

Tried violin, tried the clarinet.

Sir Frank Kermode2:35

And uh I had no particular gift. In fact, I had an the obverse of a gift to the clarinet.

Presenter2:44

But I mean, to be clear, we're not just talking about your your professional career here. I mean, again, you've talked about when you've written about your life as a sailor in the war and as a husband and as a father, and if I can quote you to yourself, you talk about failures and half failures as a husband and father, academic mistakes, and much time and spirit wasted in epochs of unease.

Sir Frank Kermode3:05

I think when you write about yourself, you know, you uh if you are a writer, you tend to uh let the book write you in a sense. There's an example. That sentence is obviously chiseled out as a very good sentence. That may have more weight than its actual content.

Presenter3:21

Oh really? So it was you were writing rather than telling the truth?

Sir Frank Kermode3:24

And I think that must be so. I think what what what's difficult to understand about autobiographies is that w what you're writing is about now. You're not writing about the past at all. You're really writing about the moment at which you're writing.

Presenter3:36

And your perception of the poem.

Sir Frank Kermode3:37

Yes, and and and it's how you feel at that moment somehow. I mean if you feel like producing a good sentence, you do.

Presenter3:44

We shall explore. But but tell me about your first piece of music, because as you've indicated, music is uh has played a not inconsiderable part in your life.

Sir Frank Kermode3:51

Well, I chose this part of Handel's L'Alegro et Il Penzaroso, partly because, strangely enough, I first heard it sixty years ago in the Isle of Man, which you might not, from your opening remarks, have thought to be a place where you would hear unusual music played. But in fact, I did hear it and I remembered it ever since. It's now become very celebrated because of the Colosseum performances recently. I also chose this bit of it because Michael Ginn or Ginn is a boy soprano, and I was a boy soprano. And so altogether it seemed to me a suitable way to start the list.

Speaker 44:32

If I give thee honour due, both I'd be tree of thy crew.

Speaker 45:15

Oh, thou beat me all thy crew.

Speaker 45:23

O Lord be me of the King, thus admit me.

Presenter5:31

Michael Ginn singing part of Handel's L'Alegro edil Pensoroso with the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Elliott Gardner.

Presenter5:39

So, Frank Kermod, you sang in the choir as a boy. Was there music in the house? Did you have a gramophone or radio?

Sir Frank Kermode5:46

Yes, we had we had a gramophone of the kind with the big horn on it. Uh

Sir Frank Kermode5:51

And radio, I think my father built one of the first radios in the Isle of Man, in fact, yeah, in the very, very early days. And there again we had to listen through a horn, you had to put your ear in the horn.

Presenter6:02

And what did it play to you, do you remember?

Sir Frank Kermode6:04

Well, it played. That's where I first heard uh um promenade concerts, for example, which were very important to me in my youth. They weren't interesting to my family, but they were to me.

Presenter6:15

But you weren't apparently the um the son that your father wanted you to be, or you felt you were.

Sir Frank Kermode6:20

I think he was baffled by me really because I couldn't do anything. Even th all the things that he thought boys and men should be able to do, I was quite unable to tackle.

Presenter6:30

What sport?

Sir Frank Kermode6:31

Well, I did play well, not very well. Well, of course, he didn't like me for not being able to play very well because he could.

Sir Frank Kermode6:41

He no, he just thought I was sort of so hopelessly impractical, which indeed I was and am. It's not going to be very good on the island now.

Presenter6:49

And what about books in the family? Were what any books that they have?

Sir Frank Kermode6:52

Very few, very few. Some my mother was interested in s poetry and particularly in the the local poet T E Brown, the first poet I ever read or was or had read to me. Nobody bothers about him any more either.

Presenter7:08

And did you then have a a a feeling and again it's something you've written about that this this sense of of not belonging then, of being in the wrong place?

Sir Frank Kermode7:16

Yeah, well I I think I've always had that. Uh and of course there was a good deal about my life as a child that wasn't miserable. Uh on the other hand, there was a good deal that was. And there was always I always had a sense, I think, that I would have to leave.

Sir Frank Kermode7:32

Uh home.

Sir Frank Kermode7:33

And I always had that sense. That's why I've moved about so much actually.

Presenter7:36

But but England was a foreign country.

Sir Frank Kermode7:38

England was a foreign country, uh I mean uh w we the the best uh the only visits we ever paid were day trips to Liverpool.

Presenter7:47

Tell me about your next record.

Sir Frank Kermode7:50

The next record, like some of the others that I'd chosen, has to stand as a symbol of a great deal of other music, the whole of Schubert's piano music in fact. But all I could choose was one short piece. And I've always particularly admired the way Clifford Curzon played this impromptu.

Presenter7:59

The house

Presenter9:09

Clifford Curzon playing part of Schubert's impromptu in A Flat Major.

Presenter9:13

By the sound of it then you emerged, as it were, blinking into the world when you arrived in Liverpool. Humming City, was it?

Sir Frank Kermode9:20

Well, it was a lively place, and the university was a lively place. Quite lively enough for me.

Presenter9:25

Hmm.

Sir Frank Kermode9:26

Yeah.

Presenter9:26

Certainly livelier than anything you've known.

Sir Frank Kermode9:28

Yeah.

Presenter9:28

And and the Philemonic Hall, I think.

Sir Frank Kermode9:30

That was important, yes. I sold tickets there. Not I mean, I showed people to their seats or sold programmes there, and therefore got in for nothing.

Presenter9:39

But what about people? I mean, they must have been so everything must have been a revelation to you after this rather cloistered

Sir Frank Kermode9:44

It was. Even even the trains looked enormous. It was uh it was uh a very strange transformation. Of course it did me good and I I think uh I flourished as an undergraduate.

Presenter9:57

Did you did you then, for one small moment, feel you were in the right place?

Sir Frank Kermode10:01

Yes, I think I did. I did understand, however, that all these other people were far more sophisticated, smarter than I was.

Presenter10:09

But at some point during this time, anyway, a few years on into Liverpool, you wrote your first book, didn't you? A study of a man called Aaron Hill. Had you tried by this stage writing a novel or a publication?

Sir Frank Kermode10:19

Yes, I had. I was uh very busy. I wrote plays and novels that are all no good. And so of course I gave gave up doing it.

Presenter10:26

Did people tell you they were no good?

Sir Frank Kermode10:27

No, I didn't give them a chance.

Presenter10:29

Did you then decide that you wouldn't be a writer? That you

Sir Frank Kermode10:33

Well, I knew I wasn't uh any more than I was a singer or a violinist or anything else, so I I fell back on criticism, I suppose you want to say.

Presenter10:42

But have you perhaps thought since then that that was the wrong decision?

Sir Frank Kermode10:46

I had I mean wr writing that the book you've been quoting from was fun because it was uh not constricted by the usual uh conditions of writing, academic criticism or reviews, which I do a great deal of, you know. And so it was that was more fun to write than anything else I've ever written, I suppose. You're also good. And so perhaps I should have done more of it.

Presenter11:04

You're also

Presenter11:07

But not just for that reason, but because it's actually the the writing itself, apart from the content, has been much praised by distinguished writers themselves, you know, David Lodge, John Updike. Perhaps you were too hard on yourself.

Sir Frank Kermode11:19

But

Sir Frank Kermode11:22

I think I should have I should have let go a little earlier, yes.

Presenter11:24

Do you know, but do you really feel it?

Sir Frank Kermode11:25

I do think that, uh, yes.

Presenter11:28

That you could have done some creative writing.

Sir Frank Kermode11:30

I think I might, yes. I don't think I'd ever be a good novelist'cause I'm not very good at noticing things. Uh or indeed getting on with people, uh knowing people is a difficult thing.

Presenter11:40

But you don't have to get on with people or know people to write creatively. I mean, you you just have to be imaginative.

Sir Frank Kermode11:45

Well, you have to have a certain amount of know-how about how human beings behave and interact, and I don't think I have much of that.

Presenter11:52

Record number three.

Sir Frank Kermode11:54

Record number three is from the creation, which I think is a lovely work and everybody knows a lot of it, I think. But what they don't know because it's very often omitted, I think, in amateur performances, is the wonderful duet between Adam and Eve towards the end of the oratorio, which is sort of the finest, sort of most radiant celebration of unspoilt married love that you could possibly find in music, I think. Of course it didn't last very long. I think it was all over about a day later, wasn't it?

Speaker 412:49

Alright.

Speaker 413:02

Uh

Presenter13:22

Editor Gruberova as Eve and Robert Hull as Adam, singing part of Haydn's creation with the Vienna Symphonic conducted by Nicolas Anancour.

Presenter13:31

You've um written, Professor Kermod, that in the war you learned to deal with the madness of captains. Can you explain that?

Sir Frank Kermode13:39

Well, I had a rather strange war. I think it's quite I I never met anybody else who had uh a similar experience, but I did find myself acting as secretary to people who were crazy and drunk a lot of the time. And uh

Sir Frank Kermode13:54

I think I learned a lot from this.

Presenter13:55

You were the kind of ship scribe when

Sir Frank Kermode13:57

Yes, I was the I was the captain's secretary and uh f for the longest time when we were anchored in a fjord in Iceland I had to deal with this maniac uh who turned out to be uh actually a rather selfish maniac as he was accumulating stores for sale on the black market when he got home.

Presenter14:15

But they weren't just mad, these captains. I mean, they they did ridiculous things like shooting themselves. I mean, a lot of them died or fell down.

Sir Frank Kermode14:20

Another fell down a flight of stairs. Their antics were unbelievable and but not so surprising to more seasoned seafarers than I. I mean, they rather expected a lot of this from captains.

Presenter14:35

And you spent, it seems, um, a good part of the war, two and a half years, I think, trying to put a boom across a an Icelandic

Sir Frank Kermode14:42

Nice.

Sir Frank Kermode14:44

Yes, for two years we tried to lay a boom across a fjord in in Iceland.

Presenter14:44

Yeah, as we

Sir Frank Kermode14:48

I think it was in fact an impossible task.

Presenter14:51

And you failed.

Sir Frank Kermode14:52

And we failed, and

Presenter14:53

Mm.

Sir Frank Kermode14:54

And having wasted vast quantities of material, all sunk at the bottom of the field.

Presenter14:58

It does sound quite incredibly absurd.

Sir Frank Kermode15:01

Well, it's all part of the d you know the the element of sheer craziness in in war is well i i it's forgotten. I mean we know it's terrible and that millions of people get killed, but the silliness is quite extraordinary too. But I do think my experience was a bit freakish. I've been talking of late to some uh American friends who were fighter pilots in the Pacific and they really, you know, flying from carriers, they had a totally different kind of war. They were really mixed up in uh world-changing battles and so on. Not messing about on the fringes that me.

Presenter15:35

But when you signed up, you were full of expectation, weren't you? You you thought you were going to change the world.

Sir Frank Kermode15:42

I'm not so sure about that. You know, the summer of nineteen fourteen was such a peculiar time when it is perfectly possible that by autumn we would have been occupied by Germany. So in fact nothing seemed very serious at the time. You thought what you might do in the circumstances. And one of the things I mean she in a way going to sea seemed rather a good idea.

Presenter16:07

Record number four.

Sir Frank Kermode16:09

Record number four.

Sir Frank Kermode16:11

Uh is

Sir Frank Kermode16:13

A representative again of Mozart's operas which are truly important to me and I think Cosifantute is possibly the most beautiful opera ever written. So it's very difficult to pick a piece of it that will have to stand for all the rest. However, this wonderful little trio from the first act will have to serve.

Speaker 416:47

God's wait.

Speaker 416:51

So

Speaker 417:27

I wish we could.

Presenter17:33

Part of Suave Si Ilvento from Mozart's Cousifan Tute, sung by Leila Kubelli, Cecilia Bartoli, and John Tomlinson with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

Presenter17:45

So too um academia, Frank Kermode. Um you've written about looking up from reading a poem in a lecture theatre and seeing faces gleaming with the experience of poetry. How often did that happen?

Sir Frank Kermode17:58

Not very often, I don't think. I I I think that as I

Presenter17:58

Yeah.

Sir Frank Kermode18:03

In fact, in my retirement, I've been teaching a good deal and doing it very differently from the way I used to do it, because I think now what one does is get a group of people together round a table and bury them in some poems. And the hell with all this nonsense about the intellectual background and so on. We just read poems together. And this is when it's taken me a long time to find this out, you'll agree. This is when something actually there's a transaction of some importance between the teacher and the taught, which you don't get in the rather stiff situation of the of the university lecture system which has been so dominant in our academic tradition.

Presenter18:49

So it it's that moment of something understood is

Sir Frank Kermode18:53

That's right, that's right. And o also I I believe people uh are interested and surprised sometimes to find that there is quite a heavy technical aspect to good poetry, which they've tended not to be told about in the past.

Presenter18:54

Yeah.

Presenter19:07

Yeah.

Presenter19:08

But but what has happened to the teaching of English in our universities over the past twenty five years, as you just indicated, is that that something different occurred, that something that some would say legislated against that something understood, because the and I I get into deep water here, but so you'll have to help me, but the the new literary theory which you helped in many ways introduce

Presenter19:29

Um

Presenter19:31

Did, as I say, well, define it for me, if you will, first of all.

Sir Frank Kermode19:35

Well, this was really this kind of uh major change came over the theoretical aspects of of literary criticism in the 1960s. I I won't specify them, it would be very boring to do so, but mostly they originated in Paris. And they seemed to me at that time extremely interesting, uh but of course what's happened to them is what what happened in the past to other uh nostrums for for literary criticism and philological what's happened is that it they it has taken attention away from the texts themselves, so that people are now much more interested in refining theoretical positions which are totally out of touch with literary texts.

Presenter20:18

So that the study of the linguistics or the social conditions in which the piece was written.

Presenter20:23

Become so analyzed and so studied that the value is in that analysis itself and ceases to be in the literature, as it were.

Sir Frank Kermode20:30

Well, that's right. That's right. I mean, even that degree of contact with the text is sometimes uh given up altogether. I I've had very good students who've said they're really only taking courses in literature in order to get out of it and and study what they now call theory. Theory in with a capital T, which is not literary theory anymore. It's theory of everything. And fine, as long as we can still have some people who are susceptible to the effect of good literature, particularly of poetry.

Speaker 420:35

Given up

Presenter20:52

Yeah.

Presenter21:01

You must, or or perhaps you don't. Do you feel a little guilty that you helped bring all of this in, as it were, because you had a ringside seat. You were very active.

Sir Frank Kermode21:09

I did. I I did, I suppose. Well, I was that was when I was in London. No, since then I've really become I've I've uh in politics I've never taken the the track from left to right which is supposed to happen, but I have in this respect, and and I'll spend a good deal of time giving lectures denouncing this this business.

Presenter21:10

Uh

Presenter21:30

Next record.

Sir Frank Kermode21:32

I I didn't know what to choose from Figaro. The obvious choice would be Susannah's wonderful ara in the last act, but this little letter song sung by the Countess and Susanna in Act Three will remind me of all the rest.

Speaker 422:06

Sungly gifts from the sketch.

Speaker 422:16

Somebody who scared me.

Presenter22:44

Charlotte Margiono and Barbara Bonnie, singing part of the duet from Act Three of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. Um there have been various moments in your career, Frank Hermode, when you've found yourself hitting the headlines, and on each occasion I suspect you'd rather not have done. Um the most recent was last autumn when you moved house in Cambridge and boxes of your books were taken away and pulped by refuse collectors. What what exactly, first of all, did you lose?

Sir Frank Kermode23:10

Well, I lost uh a lot of irreplaceable uh things, um some manuscripts, uh not my own manuscripts, for example I lost uh a manuscript which had been given me some years ago by Stephen Spender, uh which is a valuable manuscript, that was destroyed. But a great many books, about two thousand books in fact, were destroyed, and this this takes the heart out of a library. Uh unfortunately the boxes that were destroyed all came from the room where I kept my best books. And anyway, it's a sad tale. But how did it happen? But it's a typical piece of these idiocies invade my life. It happened a confusion between removal men and and uh garbage collectors.

Presenter23:43

But how did it happen?

Sir Frank Kermode23:54

I I still go to the my shelves for a book and know and then discover that it isn't there. And of course I now learnt that the the the dam the area which is most devastated, you know, I know not to look. And I and I'm trying slowly to replace the

Presenter23:59

It's one of those.

Presenter24:10

Another headline hitting moment was back in the sixties when you co-edited the magazine Encounter and and were m misled about the magazine's CIA connections. You were you were duped, really, weren't you?

Sir Frank Kermode24:20

Yeah, so

Presenter24:21

Top and the bottom of it.

Sir Frank Kermode24:22

Even

Presenter24:22

You've admitted as much.

Presenter24:25

You seem to be quite du dupable, if I

Presenter24:29

If there is such a word, and if I can make that observation, do you feel you are?

Sir Frank Kermode24:34

Well, I don't know. I think in in a a rather long life by now one learns to suss out some of the more obvious attempts to swindle. But uh I I think circumstances have been such and perhaps my basic naivete is such that you're right in what you say. I won't deny it.

Presenter24:52

That that that you

Presenter24:54

Usually tend to believe people when they say something. If they appear to be decent and amiable, you believe what they say.

Sir Frank Kermode24:57

Exactly.

Sir Frank Kermode24:59

Yeah.

Sir Frank Kermode25:00

Yes, I want to please them, and I please them by pretending I believe them, or actually believe them.

Presenter25:06

Blackwood number six.

Sir Frank Kermode25:08

Well reckon number six is uh the actus tragicus is a wonderful uh uh cantata about death. Uh I've sung in it and loved it for a great many years, but I th the it has of course many times been recorded, but the recording that we're going to use here seems to be the most beautiful of them, partly because of the exquisite singing of Teresa Stitch Randall.

Speaker 425:36

Your maze of the music is a little bit more.

Speaker 426:02

He's over.

Speaker 426:08

And babies are for me.

Speaker 426:23

Finger.

Speaker 426:26

Let's see which part.

Presenter26:34

Part of the Actus Tragicus from Bach's cantata BWV one oh six sung by Theresa Stitch Randall with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Felix Proasca.

Presenter26:46

Um and so to Cambridge you went in nineteen seventy three, which was to be your last full-time post. You became King Edward the Seventh Professor of English Literature.

Presenter26:55

But you didn't have a secretary, and you didn't have an office, and you were forbidden to give tutorials. I mean did did nobody tell you this was how it was going to be?

Sir Frank Kermode27:02

Uh well I did people did in fact. I remember Lord Annan telling me that uh I should rapidly rethink the position before I took it up.

Sir Frank Kermode27:12

But I did go, and I should have found out more about you. I don't think people were positively unkind. Cambridge is k i where I live and which I like very much, can also be a very chilly place, uh, moral and socially, and I guess perhaps morally too, I'm not sure about that.

Presenter27:30

But worse than that, wasn't it? I mean, again, let me quote yourself to yourself A cauldron of unholy hates hissed about me.

Sir Frank Kermode27:36

Tissed about me.

Sir Frank Kermode27:37

Well, that's meant to be a joke based on Saint Augustine's remark that when you got to Carthage a cauldron of unholy loves rates all about him. That was a very odd time that first year at Cambridge because they'd set up everything for the f for the following year. They'd given I had no place in any of the plans. And of course I'd been used to something quite different, having been head of department for something like fifteen years before I went there. I thought I would actually have something to say in the way things were done, but I had none at all. And so I was a little bit f to find that one hasn't an an office even, that was very surprising, let alone a secretary. All the time I was at Cambridge I wrote all my own letters, either typed them or wrote them by hand.

Presenter28:22

It uh it all finally came to a head nearly a a a decade later, really, didn't it, when you championed a young Don called Colin McCabe, said then to be a a structuralist, someone who who who believed in this new theory.

Sir Frank Kermode28:29

Said then.

Sir Frank Kermode28:33

But he

Presenter28:34

whom the faculty wouldn't give a job and and the result was in the end you went, you resigned, but effectively you were finally forced out, weren't you?

Sir Frank Kermode28:43

Well, I I simply got so fed up with it all. I was also not very well. I had very

Sir Frank Kermode28:48

bad eye troubles at the time and there were all sorts of reasons why it seemed a very cosy thing just to to pack it in so I did.

Presenter28:56

But it was all, wasn't it, campus politics at their most ruthless or

Sir Frank Kermode29:01

Well, they were they were, in fact. Yes, that that is quite true. And I'm you you you have to give your heart and mind to that kind of thing to succeed, I think. I'm never willing to do that.

Presenter29:12

Record number seven.

Sir Frank Kermode29:14

A record number seven is the the

Sir Frank Kermode29:17

Really, I suppose I chose it again as a representative, but also because it is the last part of Beethoven's last sonata, the sort of general idea of lastness creeping in here.

Presenter30:29

Alfred Brendel playing part of the Arietta from Beethoven's Piano Sonata, number thirty two.

Presenter30:35

So you still live in Cambridge, although you haven't taught in the faculty since you resigned?

Speaker 430:39

Yeah.

Presenter30:40

You you live alone now and again, you've written like Tristram Shandy, you sleep diagonally in your bed. Yeah.

Sir Frank Kermode30:46

Yeah, that's

Presenter30:47

Do you enjoy your solitary state?

Sir Frank Kermode30:50

For the most part, yes. Uh um it's it's softened by um friends and um people come to stay sometimes. No, I I'd rather I mean I've very I'd rather be like uh Adam and Eve in the creation, but I'm not. I'm Adam before uh his rib was removed.

Presenter31:12

But do you feel now at last that maybe you're you're you're at the right table as opposed to the wrong one? That that is to say your own table by yourself? Is that?

Sir Frank Kermode31:21

Yes, it's a it's a wonderfully um free life. Uh all I have to occupy me is work, really. And so then it it's as if work had taken the place of pleasure.

Sir Frank Kermode31:33

No, and company. So I do work hard, not because I feel any need to, but because there's nothing else to do, really.

Presenter31:41

But what conclusion then do you come to ab about yourself if we're following this theme about your having been always in slightly the wrong place? I mean, perhaps, you know, that was your role. Perhaps you are you are an outsider, is that what you're meant to be?

Sir Frank Kermode31:55

Well, in a sense I am, yes, I think. Uh although it seems silly to say so when I've had so many allegiances and associations, but um on the whole I think I'm really better off now than I've ever been before.

Presenter32:10

Tell me about your last record.

Sir Frank Kermode32:12

The last records as far as I venture into the 20th century. I'd have chosen many more, but this is a lovely moment, I think, from De Rose and Cavalier, the presentation of the Silver Rose. And just for old time's sake, I've asked you to do the recording by Elizabeth Schumann, made in 1933, which was the first one I ever heard.

Speaker 433:01

Oh, I didn't mean

Presenter33:41

Elizabeth Schumann as Sophia, and Maria Olsevska as Octavian, singing the duet The Presentation of the Rose from the second act of Der Rosencavalier by Richard Strauss, with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Robert Hager, and that was recorded in september nineteen forty three.

Presenter33:57

Now, if you could only take one of those eight records.

Sir Frank Kermode34:00

Oh, it would have to be the uh Bach, I think, the actus tragicus.

Presenter34:05

And what about a book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Sir Frank Kermode34:09

Well, book I thought about this. I thought it had to be a very long book. Um, probably a book that I ought to have read by now and haven't, like Gibbon's Decline and Fall. So I just I voted for Gibbon.

Presenter34:21

And your luxury.

Sir Frank Kermode34:23

But there again, I gave this a lot of thought. I imagine what I would like is something very beautiful.

Sir Frank Kermode34:31

It represents a climate and an environment quite un unlike the one that I'm in on the desert island. So I decided to ask you to persuade the trustees of the Tate Gallery to part with a painting by Samuel Palmer called Moonlit Landscape with Sheep. I'll settle for that.

Presenter34:48

I'm sure they'll deliver it. Direct. Sir Frank Kermo, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island is.

Sir Frank Kermode34:54

Well, thank you.

Speaker 335:02

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