Andrew Motion

Speaker 10:00

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.

Speaker 10:08

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

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a poet. Now the Professor of Creative Writing at East Anglia University, he's won many of the top literary prizes, not just for his poems, but for his biographies of other writers too, particularly his Life of Philip Larkin, which came out in 1993. He's written poems since he was a child, but his childhood itself was dominated by an accident that happened to his mother while she was out riding. It was, he says, the greatest defining thing of my life. Everything that's happened since has happened in relation to it in some way or another.

Presenter1:05

His latest work, A Life of John Keats, has been immensely well received, but its author still thinks of himself as a poet rather than a biographer. He writes a poem every month, a process he describes as absolutely primitive, emotional, basic. He is Andrew Motion. Is it as biological a process as that makes it sound, Andrew?

Andrew Motion1:25

It does make it sound a bit biological putting it like that, doesn't it? But I've always have felt

Andrew Motion1:30

about writing poems that it was

Andrew Motion1:33

As you

Andrew Motion1:34

Quote me saying, an entirely visceral thing.

Andrew Motion1:38

Which is, to put it another way.

Andrew Motion1:40

Something that happens out of a part of your mind that does know what it's doing and is educated and manipulative and interventionist and sophisticated and all all of that.

Andrew Motion1:52

Um

Presenter1:53

So it's in gestation, as it were, but you don't know it's there?

Andrew Motion1:55

Well, what happens with me is that that side of my mind manages to strike up some sort of relationship with the side of my mind which is

Andrew Motion2:02

a primeval swamp, very murky, and the bubbles in it are things coming up from God knows where in my unconscious, subconscious, um and that somehow a relationship is created between that, as it were, ignorant part of my mind.

Andrew Motion2:15

and the less ignorant part of my mind, and that produces the poem.

Presenter2:18

But how do you know when it's there, when it's cooked, as it were? Do you wake up one morning to be simplistic about it and say, This is the day when I

Andrew Motion2:24

More or less, yes. I mean, it is with me, it has always been an absolutely

Presenter2:25

Yeah.

Andrew Motion2:29

physical thing. I mean, it's like knowing you're gonna get a cold or feeling a headache coming on, except that it's a good deal more pleasurable than either of those two things. Pleasurable and nerve wracking, because maybe you'll mess it up or it'll go away or

Presenter2:42

What about the poem of the about the death of Diana? Diana Breathless Hunted by Your Own Quick Hounds? I mean, o is that one that that disproves the rule?

Andrew Motion2:51

Well, perhaps it is in a sense that it was a kind of public poem written for a particular occasion. I mean the news the Times rang up and said would I write a poem? and I said yes.

Andrew Motion2:58

I've always incidentally felt rather pleased to be commissioned in that sort of way.

Andrew Motion3:04

I mean, I think I'm there's a bit of me which thinks I'm a carpenter, I make tables, and I should do it when b an order comes through.

Presenter3:10

There's also a part of you, isn't there, that's pleased if people write to you to say that they've been comforted by your poems. You like the idea, which I think Keats did, that they're medicinal, restorative in some way.

Andrew Motion3:18

And then dis

Andrew Motion3:20

Yes, physicianally, in some sort of broad sense. I do feel that passionately, strongly. I mean, this is a hubristic thing to say, I guess, but.

Andrew Motion3:30

If you ask yourself the big questions about what art is for, the most satisfactory answer that I can come up with for myself is to do with.

Andrew Motion3:39

How they help other people in moments of particular emotional crisis.

Andrew Motion3:45

So I hope that the various poems I've written about my mother and her accident, for instance, or the poems I've written about

Andrew Motion3:53

Friends who've died, or whatever, will put certain words in a certain order which will be.

Andrew Motion3:59

sort of emotionally valuable to the people who are reading them.

Presenter4:02

Tell me about your first record.

Andrew Motion4:05

My first record is Love Minus Zero by Bob Dylan in a live recording.

Andrew Motion4:11

Dylan is.

Andrew Motion4:13

In my book, A Poet, and There's No Argument About It. I mean, there are people who argue about that, but I don't. I mean, he is a poet, and a very good one, I think.

Andrew Motion4:21

This song is a simple little lyric which goes round in its wheel, but it's very beautiful and charming, and whenever I hear it actually in any recording, but I think especially in this one

Andrew Motion4:32

It makes me think about being young. It makes me feel young and as though my life is still in front of me.

Presenter4:39

My love, she speaks like silent.

Presenter4:45

Was that ideal so violent?

Presenter4:50

Doesn't have to say she's faithful

Presenter4:55

Yeah, she's true like ice, like fire

Presenter5:01

People carry roses

Presenter5:06

Bob Dylan and Love Minus Zero. Can we talk about your mother's death?'Cause it seems to me very difficult not to because as you've said, it's such a a defining

Presenter5:18

thing in your life. Uh you were about sixteen or or seventeen or so when the accident happened. Can you just describe to me, you know, life before that? What kind of mother was she?

Andrew Motion5:29

Well, to be perfectly honest, I find it extremely difficult to remember her before the accident, and this is, I suspect, one of the reasons that I go on writing

Andrew Motion5:36

the sort of poems that I do write. I mean

Andrew Motion5:39

My sense of it is that.

Andrew Motion5:41

The effect of the accident was to really annihilate quite large parts of my memory.

Andrew Motion5:48

I can see her in little kind of photographic.

Andrew Motion5:50

Poses before about sixteen. But I c I can't get the whole story worked out.

Presenter5:55

But you know you were close to you know you had a very large

Andrew Motion5:58

I was extremely fond of her. We were very, very close. Um and in those little photographic sort of shots that I have of her, she is.

Andrew Motion6:05

Beautiful.

Andrew Motion6:07

Kind.

Andrew Motion6:08

all the things that a sort of ideal person is. And I realize that I probably do idealize her rather, but.

Andrew Motion6:14

Um I don't mind about that.

Presenter6:16

And then what happened?

Andrew Motion6:17

Well, it was a rural sort of childhood. I mean, it wasn't posh rural at all. It was ordinary middle class rural. But it was country and there was riding and some shooting, not very much, and fishing and walking in the

Andrew Motion6:31

Walking around in the fields and dogs and all that sort of stuff.

Andrew Motion6:34

And one day riding she fell off and hit her head very hard. Her hat came off as she fell.

Andrew Motion6:41

and she was unconscious for something like three years.

Andrew Motion6:45

They did an operation almost immediately to remove some blood clots on her brain, and as they did it, a large part of her brain came away as well.

Andrew Motion6:52

Um and after about three years she started very, very slowly.

Andrew Motion6:56

to resurface.

Andrew Motion6:59

But of course meanwhile this beautiful free spirit had turned into this.

Andrew Motion7:04

Very

Andrew Motion7:05

traumatized and

Andrew Motion7:06

Upset and

Andrew Motion7:08

sort of inaccessible.

Andrew Motion7:10

Person.

Andrew Motion7:11

And then, after almost exactly ten years, three of which had been unconscious and seven of which had had this sort of slow resurfacing, she died.

Presenter7:20

So she died when you were a man of twenty six?

Presenter7:23

And she now has gone on, occurring and recurring in your poetry. I mean, you're now a man of 45.

Presenter7:31

And you published only last year that she is the shadow dragging at my heels.

Presenter7:36

Is it a shadow you want to be rid of, or is it

Andrew Motion7:38

Well, I know that poem says that she's the shadow dragging at my heels, and there are times when I want to shake the shadow off, because it is inevitably inhibiting in some respects.

Andrew Motion7:49

At the same time, it is much more often a liberating thing. I mean, what I try and do when I write about her is bring her back to life.

Presenter7:58

Except that you say she makes you think all of the time about death.

Andrew Motion8:01

Well, she does, of course, but you can have one and the other at the same time, can't you? I mean, you can have life in death or death in life.

Presenter8:08

But do you think, you know, as we talked that that you are

Presenter8:13

Obsessed by death.

Andrew Motion8:14

Yes, I think that's probably fair to say. And I don't want to sound too kind of quick to agree, because it's not a very happy thing to be obsessed by.

Presenter8:19

Yeah.

Speaker 18:20

Yeah.

Andrew Motion8:21

The evidence of my writing is to me that I am obsessed by it, and I'm worried about it happening. It's the one thing we know that is going to happen, as many people have said before me. I mean nobody gets let off. I think there was a little bit of my mind when I was young that used to think perhaps some really nice people did get let off, but we know that's not true.

Presenter8:36

Yeah.

Presenter8:38

Tell me about your next record.

Andrew Motion8:40

Well the next record is um.

Andrew Motion8:43

In a sense, for me, about my mother, about how you contend with, in her case, very acute suffering.

Andrew Motion8:50

Um and how you look for some sort of consolation in it. And the consolation here is a is a religious one, a Christian one.

Andrew Motion8:58

And I think she did have that comfort. I I wish that I could say that I did, but I but I don't.

Andrew Motion9:04

It's the Khrostab cantata which we're just going to hear the beginning of, and it's perhaps useful if I translate the first few lines of this, which go Gladly I bear the cross which God's loving hand has assigned me

Andrew Motion9:18

After my troubles it leads me to God, to the promised land, where I shall bury my sorrows, where my Saviour Himself shall wipe away my tears.

Speaker 19:38

Should be large.

Speaker 19:42

Uh

Speaker 110:02

Yeah.

Speaker 110:07

And Lord Mercy.

Presenter10:16

Dietrich Fischer Dieska singing part of Bach's Kreutchstarp Cantata, number fifty six, with the Munich Bach Orchestra, conducted by Karl Richter.

Presenter10:24

When did you decide, Andrew Motion, that you were going to be a poet?'Cause it wasn't in the script, so to speak, was it? Your family background?

Andrew Motion10:30

This is very much not in the script. My family.

Andrew Motion10:33

Really aren't bookish.

Andrew Motion10:35

On the other hand, they know a lot of things that I admire them for knowing. My f the sort of shorthand way of speaking about this that I use to myself is that I think my father knows the names of all the woods in the part of the world that he lives in, and I I'm very impressed by that.

Presenter10:47

So who was it that pressed the button or threw up the window?

Andrew Motion10:49

Well, God knows. I mean, actually I can be helpful about that in one respect, which is that I had and I think a lot of writers have the same story to tell about this, I had an English teacher who switched all the lights on, a man called Peter Way, who I'm still in quite close touch with. I mean, we write to each other and all this.

Presenter11:05

But can you remember him first putting a poem in front of you that made you feel, my God?

Andrew Motion11:08

Absolutely, I can remember that precisely. He put in front of me a poem by Hardy.

Andrew Motion11:14

called the self unseeing.

Andrew Motion11:16

And I'd never seen it before, and I'd certainly never had much time for poems before, I thought they were

Andrew Motion11:22

Yeah.

Andrew Motion11:23

Not for me.

Andrew Motion11:25

And what happened to me then is what Huisman describes in The Name and Nature of Poetry, which is that all the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I thought, by the time I'd got to the bottom of it, I want to do that.

Presenter11:33

But what was it about it? Was it was it is it such a brilliant poem or?

Andrew Motion11:37

It's not Hardy's best poem, but it's a beautiful little object.

Andrew Motion11:41

It made me feel

Andrew Motion11:42

like you feel when you look up at the stars on a clear night, that you could sort of see beyond the universe, into age and perhaps beyond age and

Andrew Motion11:51

That's sort of rather indeterminate, but

Andrew Motion11:54

kind of stellar feeling it gave me.

Presenter11:56

And did you start writing your own immediately?

Andrew Motion11:58

Yes, more or less that afternoon, I think, probably.

Presenter12:01

What kind of stuff?

Andrew Motion12:02

Oh, awful. Like I dare say a lot of young poets' works are awful, very self absorbed, vain, egotistical. I mean, e egotism can be very important for writers, of course. Vanity is usually disastrous for them, but egotism can be very important.

Presenter12:16

Next record.

Andrew Motion12:18

Well, after I'd uh got my degree.

Andrew Motion12:21

I'd got fed up with being in Oxford. It felt sort of bandaged and soft and I wanted adventure and difference and all that.

Andrew Motion12:27

And a job came up at the University of Hull, and there was of course an extra reason for going there, because that's where Larkin was the librarian, famous for never appearing, reading, travelling much, etcetera. And I thought if the mountain didn't move towards Mohammed Mohammed, better go to the mountain.

Andrew Motion12:42

And quite early on in our first conversation, Larkin discovered that my father's family had been brewers, and I think he rather liked this because.

Andrew Motion12:51

I mean, perhaps this is fanciful, but my feeling about it is that

Andrew Motion12:54

He thought he comes from stock who produce things that people really want, alcohol, rather than rather than things which people can take or leave, poems. Um so he's probably okay.

Speaker 313:06

Here

Speaker 313:09

Swerving east from rich industrial shadows and traffic all night north,

Speaker 313:16

Swerving through fields too thin and thistle to be called meadows,

Speaker 313:21

And now and then a harsh named halt That shields workmen at dawn.

Speaker 313:27

Swerving to solitude of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares, and pheasants,

Speaker 313:35

and the widening river's slow presence.

Speaker 313:39

The piled gold clouds, the shining, gull marked mud,

Speaker 313:44

gathers to the surprise of a large town.

Speaker 313:48

Here domes and statues.

Speaker 313:51

Spires and cranes cluster beside grain scattered streets, barge crowded water.

Presenter13:58

Philip Larkin reading part of his poem Here.

Presenter14:01

Tell me about your relationship with him, Andrew. It sounds to me as if you drank a lot together, whatever else.

Andrew Motion14:06

Yeah.

Presenter14:06

Yeah.

Andrew Motion14:06

Well, he did like drinking, and uh I like drinking too.

Presenter14:10

But did you laugh a lot together? Or were you gloomy? Were you poetic together?

Andrew Motion14:11

Or were you gloomy? Were you poetic? Well, not very, I think, probably. I mean, he was certainly the funniest person I've ever met. Brilliant mimic, um, fantastically good at telling stories, sort of elaborating little things that had happened so that they became

Andrew Motion14:25

much sort of funnier than they were at face value.

Andrew Motion14:29

Very

Andrew Motion14:29

good at being rude about people in a sort of hilarious, exaggerated, self-knowingly exaggerated way and so on.

Presenter14:36

And you judged a competition together, didn't you?

Andrew Motion14:38

Yes, we judged this was really what sort of accelerated our friendship, I think, quite soon after we'd properly met. The Hull Daily Mail organized a competition called

Andrew Motion14:48

Bard of Humberside, as though that person hadn't already been identified.

Andrew Motion14:53

Um and we had a wonderful evening together, and I'm afraid I can remember very little about what happened, except that he I do remember him saying

Andrew Motion15:01

I could win this.

Andrew Motion15:02

The pons have to be about the Humber Bridge. I could win this.

Andrew Motion15:05

I put my luncheon in the fridge And go and look at Humber Bridge

Presenter15:11

Very good. What did you think of your poetry?

Andrew Motion15:15

Um, well, I sort of know what he thought about the early stuff. Um

Andrew Motion15:22

Because he read my first book of poems, which came out, I think, in my first term at Hull, which was called The Pleasure Steamers, and I think he liked some of it, but thought that the edges needed sharpening up a bit, and he was quite right. And I hope that if he were alive now to read them, he'd think that the edges were a bit sharper.

Presenter15:40

When he died and it wasn't that much later, actually, he died in 1985, didn't he? It fell to you to write his biography.

Andrew Motion15:43

Yeah.

Andrew Motion15:44

Yeah.

Presenter15:48

Which became a very controversial business because you decided to.

Andrew Motion15:48

I'm sorry.

Speaker 115:48

Yeah.

Presenter15:52

To reveal him warts and all.

Presenter15:55

possibly um exposing bits that he didn't intend to be made public. Um you know, his racism, his sexism, his sexual fantasizing. Why did you decide to do that to someone who was a friend?

Andrew Motion16:07

Because I didn't think there was anything I mean, I agree that the book caused a great controversy, but at the same time I didn't think that I was revealing anything.

Andrew Motion16:15

That was criminal or deeply peculiar or

Andrew Motion16:20

Really against the grain of grain of ordinary human

Presenter16:22

It upset people though, didn't it?

Andrew Motion16:24

Well, it upset a lot of people who had been reading the poems in a very

Andrew Motion16:28

partial way, I think. I mean, to be perfectly honest, what I the thing that surprised me most well, two things surprised me about it. One is that people work who, as I might say, ought to have known better, made a curious conflation of the life and the work, as though

Andrew Motion16:43

Art is merely a convulsive expression of personality. Well, among the many things we don't know about art, one of the things we do know is that it never is that.

Presenter16:50

So that the most horrible people can write the most beautiful poetry.

Andrew Motion16:53

Yes, it can happen.

Presenter16:54

Hmm.

Andrew Motion16:55

Um I mean it

Andrew Motion16:57

There are connections which you want to talk about often, um but there are often separations you want to talk about as well. Well, that was one thing that surprised me, and the other thing that surprised me is that I would have thought that anybody reading the poems with their eyes as properly open would see that this was somebody who

Andrew Motion17:13

Might have held.

Andrew Motion17:15

Um

Andrew Motion17:17

Old, as he would have said, true blue.

Andrew Motion17:20

Believes

Presenter17:20

I think perhaps they were surprised because the implication from his will seemed to be that he didn't want

Presenter17:26

The warts to be seen and all.

Andrew Motion17:28

Well, there are about a thousand different ways of reading that will.

Presenter17:31

But he did have a lot of diaries shredded, didn't he?

Andrew Motion17:34

He well, when I agreed to be his literary executor, which I think was in nineteen eighty-three, a couple of years before he died.

Andrew Motion17:41

Um

Andrew Motion17:42

I said to him, I am not going to destroy anything.

Andrew Motion17:46

And he said, Don't worry about it, because I when I see the Grim Reaper coming up the garden path, I will go to the bottom of the garden and, like Hardy, have a bonfire and get rid of everything that I want to.

Andrew Motion17:57

And get rid of

Presenter17:58

History has it that you were while you were writing this biography put a match to your own private doodlings.

Andrew Motion18:03

Well, I did get rid of some things, but I've decided now that it's vainer to destroy them.

Andrew Motion18:08

Preserve, so I now keep everything.

Presenter18:11

Number four.

Andrew Motion18:14

Number four is Vaughan Williams's or bit from Vaughan Williams's on Wen Lockhead.

Andrew Motion18:20

Vaughan Williams actually, as it happens, was one of the classical composers that Larkin most enjoyed, and I often think about him when I'm listening to this piece.

Andrew Motion18:28

But I also think about my great friend Alan Hollinghurst.

Andrew Motion18:33

He educated me more than almost anybody else about classical music, and this was a piece that he liked very much, too.

Speaker 318:42

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 318:43

Afron and morning.

Andrew Motion18:52

Yeah. Bendy Gold.

Andrew Motion18:55

Love wind and sky

Andrew Motion19:03

Who's

Speaker 319:03

The staff of life to mater

Presenter19:11

Uh

Speaker 319:11

Yeah. Mm.

Speaker 119:26

Oh for a brave italy No yet dispersive

Presenter19:37

Adrian Thompson singing from far from eve and morning, part of Vaughan Williams on Wenlock Edge accompanied by the Delmay String Quartet and Ian Burnside playing the piano.

Presenter19:47

You um married for the second time, Andrew, during the eighties, while you were working in publishing for Chatto and writing a book about the Lamberts, and you had children.

Presenter19:57

You have children. What what effect did it have any, having children of your own, have on the memory of your mother?

Andrew Motion20:05

It was very complicated, the effect of the children on me, I think.

Andrew Motion20:11

Um I fell in love.

Andrew Motion20:13

with my wife very

Andrew Motion20:17

sort of quickly. I mean I saw her and I fell in love with her and

Andrew Motion20:20

Uh we got married quite quickly and we had the children quite quickly.

Andrew Motion20:25

Um, so my life completely turned itself round.

Andrew Motion20:29

And at the same time I was as all this was happening, I was beginning to

Andrew Motion20:33

Think about Philippines.

Andrew Motion20:35

for the book and go and talk to people and

Andrew Motion20:37

There was so much about his life and his beliefs which was at odds with my own circumstances then that it really was quite strange writing there.

Andrew Motion20:46

The book

Andrew Motion20:47

And also

Andrew Motion20:48

Their presence somehow reminded me of my own childhood in ways that I'm sure having children does for the majority of people.

Andrew Motion20:54

So the pretty rich stew of things was created by theirs.

Andrew Motion20:59

And when I look at the poems that I was writing during this time, they are

Andrew Motion21:03

stressed, I think I can say, by

Andrew Motion21:06

all these new things coming into my life.

Presenter21:09

You also wrote some fiction, I think, at some point during the course of the 80s, a couple of novels.

Andrew Motion21:12

Of course.

Andrew Motion21:13

I wrote a couple of novels, that's right.

Presenter21:15

And you have said since that they were absolutely hopeless.

Andrew Motion21:17

Yeah, well they're not quite hopeless, but they're not up to my high standards, etcetera, etcetera.

Presenter21:21

But you're now, as I said at the beginning, Professor of Creative Writing at East Anglia in the footsteps of Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury.

Presenter21:28

Does it make you a more sympathetic teacher, then, that there are bits of it you can't do?

Andrew Motion21:32

I hope so. Um it certainly makes me admire my students in a special way. But I think probably is a kind of background to that.

Andrew Motion21:40

Though I perhaps shouldn't say this about myself, but it doesn't necessarily follow that because you can do a thing very well, you're necessarily very good at teaching it. It can often be the case that.

Andrew Motion21:48

Having tried to do something known, your shortcomings and all that can make you very

Andrew Motion21:52

Can make you a better teacher.

Presenter21:54

Record number five.

Andrew Motion21:56

Is

Andrew Motion21:58

The

Andrew Motion21:59

Adagio from Beethoven's sonata number twenty nine in B flat, the Hammer Clavier.

Andrew Motion22:04

This piece in particular and this

Andrew Motion22:07

moment in this piece seems to me

Andrew Motion22:11

in one sense depressed and

Andrew Motion22:15

Inverted.

Andrew Motion22:16

And

Andrew Motion22:18

got down by life, and in another and simultaneous sense, heroically determined to continue trying to

Andrew Motion22:26

Find a way through life.

Andrew Motion22:28

And hang on to the idea that even in the midst of suffering, personal suffering, and which I think lies behind this piece.

Andrew Motion22:36

international political ferment.

Andrew Motion22:39

Lies.

Andrew Motion22:40

the need to persist in believing in beauty.

Presenter23:44

Alfred Brendel playing part of the Adaggio Sostenutto from Beethoven's piano sonata No. twenty nine in B flat, the Hammer Clavier.

Presenter23:52

Let's turn, Andrew, to Keats, your most recent work of biography. Keats died of consumption in Rome in 1820, aged

Presenter24:00

aged twenty five, having travelled there by sea from England, a journey which you attempted to do yourself in a similar vessel.

Andrew Motion24:08

Yes, I did. It took me sort of

Andrew Motion24:12

something like five or six years to write this book. And as I was getting to the end of doing the research for it, I thought, Well, I must go and look at all these places, and that's not very difficult to do, and there aren't so many of them that survive. And I'd been to Rome and seen the house in Rome before, and been to the grave in Rome, and

Andrew Motion24:27

Trogged round Scotland a bit.

Andrew Motion24:29

And then I thought, actually what I should really do is find this boat as like the boat that he went to Italy in and sail there.

Presenter24:35

Except that he he didn't write any poetries, he went and you did.

Andrew Motion24:36

Yeah.

Andrew Motion24:38

No, he was too

Presenter24:39

He was love sick for Fanny Braun.

Andrew Motion24:40

Turniporn.

Presenter24:41

You were a happily married man.

Andrew Motion24:42

We're happily married then.

Presenter24:44

He was dying.

Andrew Motion24:45

I know, and as far as I knew I wasn't.

Presenter24:47

But it then turned out that you thought you were.

Andrew Motion24:50

Well, actually, as it turned out, I thought I was, but I didn't quite realize that until I got back. I was beginning to feel a bit ill.

Presenter24:56

How will

Andrew Motion24:58

Well, my I started to get very bad pins and needles in my legs and I thought, uh oh um and I said to Jan, my wife, that I

Andrew Motion25:06

think this is no ordinary cold.

Andrew Motion25:09

Um

Andrew Motion25:10

And I

Andrew Motion25:12

did a sort of deal with her whereby I would go and see my doctor as soon as I finished writing the book because I knew if I went to see the doctor now the chances were that I would have to go into hospital and then I would

Andrew Motion25:22

get the book finished on time and then I'd run out of money and

Andrew Motion25:25

Anyway, she

Presenter25:26

What about the fact that it might be something really very serious that needed immediate attention?

Andrew Motion25:29

Well, I didn't want to know. I feared that, but I didn't want to know. And and then I eventually did finish the book and I

Andrew Motion25:37

Uh went to see my G P and he stuck a

Andrew Motion25:40

unbent paperclip into my leg and said, Can you feel that? And I said, no.

Andrew Motion25:44

And he said Ah and I thought Oh dear

Andrew Motion25:48

And it turned out I'd got a tumour on my spine.

Andrew Motion25:51

And I did have a very frightening few weeks not knowing whether I

Andrew Motion25:55

was gonna die of it, whether it was cancerous or

Andrew Motion25:59

Whatever, anyway, it was benign.

Andrew Motion26:02

And uh

Andrew Motion26:04

I'm okay.

Presenter26:05

Is there a suggestion, though, in in all of this that perhaps you wrote a better book, or one that had greater empathy because you, like Keats, thought you were dying? Well, he knew he was dying.

Andrew Motion26:18

Well, it's true that all the time that I wrote the book, I thought that I might have had it.

Andrew Motion26:24

probably in a much less focused way than he thought that he'd had it for his last the last part of his life.

Andrew Motion26:31

Um it did make me think about his circumstances in ways that I wouldn't otherwise have done. I mean, Keats spent his whole life feeling short of time, and then ran out of it in the most spectacular way in the last part of his life. I've always felt a bit short of time, too.

Andrew Motion26:46

And I think that that probably motivated me as I was writing the first part of his story. And then undoubtedly, this being ill did.

Andrew Motion26:53

Enlighten me with darkness, I can put it like that, as I wrote the last part of it.

Presenter26:58

Record number six.

Andrew Motion27:00

Well record number six is rather to do with that sort of feeling.

Andrew Motion27:04

It's Berg's violin concerto, the the beginning of it.

Andrew Motion27:08

This is a piece of music which I

Andrew Motion27:11

also particularly admire, and seems to me at once.

Andrew Motion27:16

astringent and ravishing, and that's not a bad combination.

Presenter28:18

Isaac Stern and the New York Philharmonic playing part of Albenberg's concerto for violin and orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. It's it's it's very beautiful, but it's terribly anguished. Andrew, is that how it's going to be on your desert island?

Andrew Motion28:32

Some of the time, other times not, other times lying in the sun and

Andrew Motion28:35

Fishing.

Presenter28:36

Do you think I mean, you manage those um weeks at sea, um, being becalmed and sometimes bored, and but also being having to be a bit of a Boy Scout, didn't you? I mean

Andrew Motion28:45

Okay.

Presenter28:46

Do you think you've got what it takes to survive on a desert island?

Andrew Motion28:49

Well, I know that poets are sort of conventionally hopeless at this sort of thing, but I've always rather prided myself on being practical about things. And I sometimes think that I once built a banisters going down a stairway when I was ages ago when I was living in Oxford, and I sometimes think about that and wonder whether it's still there, and therefore also wonder whether when I'm lying on my deathbed I'll think that's the one thing I've made which will outlive me.

Andrew Motion29:12

And I hope it isn't the only thing, but

Presenter29:14

But what you hit on on that sea voyage, and you might hit on a desert island, is.

Presenter29:19

Nothingness. It wasn't boredom. It was worse, wasn't it? It was a kind of I think you could describe it as the antechamber to death.

Andrew Motion29:26

Yes, well there is the other side of boredom.

Andrew Motion29:29

something vast and empty and

Andrew Motion29:32

A nothing made solid, if you like, a nothing made real, a nothing which is a thing.

Andrew Motion29:37

and that I encountered on that voyage in an extended way, because there was, as you might say, the opportunity to do it. I mean there were days and days and days when nothing happened or when nothing happened, I should say.

Andrew Motion29:48

Um

Andrew Motion29:49

And we all know that those moments occur in our lives too, though usually you can kind of ring up a friend or turn on the telly or have a drink or whatever it is and get rid of it in some way.

Andrew Motion29:57

But I expect there will be times like that.

Presenter30:01

Number seven.

Andrew Motion30:02

Well, number seven is Cassandra Wilson singing Van Morrison's song Do Below Honey, which I think will, when I listen to it on the island, make me think of.

Andrew Motion30:11

Having had friends round, they've gone.

Andrew Motion30:14

And I'm trying to put off the washing out by listening to this.

Andrew Motion30:18

It's a swing.

Andrew Motion30:23

It's too below, honey.

Andrew Motion30:28

Use an angel love

Presenter30:31

Yeah.

Andrew Motion30:32

Fuck.

Presenter30:37

Is as sweet.

Presenter30:41

That's to below, honey.

Presenter30:45

Cassandra Wilson singing Van Morrison's song Tuperlow Honey. Is it possible to summarise, Andrew, the art of?

Presenter30:54

Good biography. I mean, is it the ability to immerse yourself in someone and to make connections that haven't been made before?

Andrew Motion31:02

That's part of it.

Andrew Motion31:04

Every life, I mean, how whether it exists in terms of event or inwardness, is.

Andrew Motion31:09

Absolutely pricelessly important. And one of the things which endears me to biography and makes me want to go on.

Andrew Motion31:17

writing it and which energizes me when I am writing it is thinking that

Andrew Motion31:21

It's the apparently insignificant things in people's lives.

Andrew Motion31:25

Which matter j in a sense just as much as the significant things. I mean, the important days are not.

Andrew Motion31:31

Only the days when

Andrew Motion31:33

You meet the person who matters to you more than any other person, but there are also the days when apparently nothing is happening and you're just sort of stewing around. Um

Andrew Motion31:41

And one of the responsibilities that biography has.

Andrew Motion31:45

is to give due value to those days. In other words, to produce an account of somebody's life, which in some important sense admits that it can't know everything and is, as I was saying in a different context earlier, full of separations, insisting on the separations between a life and the work that arises out of it, as well as on what connections can be made.

Presenter32:05

But when you're old and and bald and the children are off your hands, it's poetry you write, isn't it?

Andrew Motion32:13

I sincerely hope so. I hope I mean every time I write a poem, I think maybe that's the last one. I'm sure every poet thinks that.

Andrew Motion32:19

I mean, the bird might fly away, you know. It came to me out of nowhere, I think, and it might go back into nowhere.

Presenter32:27

Last record.

Andrew Motion32:29

The last record is.

Andrew Motion32:31

Bach's cello suite, number six. This is the second piece of music by Bach that I've chosen, as you've noticed.

Andrew Motion32:39

Um he is by some distance the composer who means most to me.

Andrew Motion32:44

And this is

Andrew Motion32:46

Sublime noise.

Andrew Motion33:31

Uh Uh

Speaker 133:38

Uh

Presenter33:40

Yeah.

Presenter33:48

Maurice Chandron playing part of the Prelude to Bach Cello Suite No. Six in D. If you could only take one of those eight records, Andrew, which one would it be?

Andrew Motion33:57

It would be that. It would be the Bach Cillo Suite.

Presenter34:00

What about your book?

Andrew Motion34:02

I found this very difficult.

Andrew Motion34:05

Um

Andrew Motion34:07

And in the end I've decided that I want to take the Penguin edition of Wordsworth's Prelude, which has.

Andrew Motion34:13

The eighteen oh five

Andrew Motion34:15

Version of the prelude.

Andrew Motion34:17

Facing the eighteen fifty version.

Andrew Motion34:21

I think the prelude is one of the two or three poems which means most to me.

Presenter34:25

And you're luxury.

Andrew Motion34:27

Well, I'm a very keen fisherman, and I nearly decided to take

Andrew Motion34:32

a large number of fishing flies, because I imagine I'd be spending a great deal of time fishing on this island and I would like it a lot.

Andrew Motion34:39

But I don't think that I could not write, so I'm afraid it's rather dull, but I'm afraid I just want to take

Andrew Motion34:45

Some pencils and paper.

Presenter34:47

Andrew Motion, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 134:59

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