Les Murray

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.

Speaker 30:08

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

Presenter0:32

My Castaway this week is a poet. Born sixty years ago in the Australian Outback, he's the only son of a farmer who forgot how to read and a mother who died when he was a boy because the doctor refused an ambulance to get her to hospital. After university and a few years drifting, he became a full-time poet and has earned his living ever since with his poems about nature, the Aborigines, Spacemen, Broad Beans, everything in fact, he says, that models the way we really think.

Presenter1:00

Deeply Catholic, prone to depression, but above all an Australian deeply rooted in his native land, he is today regarded as one of the greatest living exponents of the poetic strength of the English language. He is Les Murray. Facts which altogether, Les, make you sound like a very serious person, a VSP, when in fact you're also full of humour.

Les Murray1:20

I was awed at myself. I I stood there beside myself watching myself.

Presenter1:25

But let let's you know, I think we should start by asking you to read a poem that displays that kind of humour. And you've written one called The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever, so just for flavour, give us a snatch of it.

Les Murray1:33

I'll give you give you a a sample from that.

Les Murray1:36

To go home and wear shorts for ever in the enormous paddocks in that warm climate, adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass.

Les Murray1:44

To camp out along the river bends for good, wearing shorts with a pocket knife, a fishing line and matches or there where the hills are all down below the plain, to sit around in shorts at evening on the plank veranda.

Les Murray1:57

If the cardinal points of costume are robes, tat, rig, and sconge, where are shorts in this compass?

Les Murray2:04

They are never robes as other bear leg outfits have been the toga, the kilt, the lava lava, the mahatmas cotton doty.

Les Murray2:12

Archbishops and field marshals at their ceremonies never wear shorts. The very word means underpants in North America.

Presenter2:19

And so it goes on for another 11 stanzas. But sconge, it's a great word. What does it mean? It means that kind of.

Les Murray2:25

Kind of clothes that are so casual you don't notice you've got them on. You know, they're the things that uh where you're not making any statement about yourself, you're just slouching about and being comfortable.

Presenter2:33

The other great word is is sprawl. You've written a poem called The Quality of Sprawl. What is sprawl for you?

Les Murray2:38

Oh, it's a kind of generosity of nature, uh, but in a casual scungy way, you know, driving a person an extra hundred miles home.

Presenter2:45

So it's being relaxed, it's being easy.

Les Murray2:46

It's

Presenter2:48

Being informed.

Les Murray2:48

Being expansive, uh um but not for not for show, just for uh j just for the the generosity of it.

Presenter2:56

And it's kind of the antithesis of style, isn't it? It's the antithesis of being buttoned up and fastidious and and and wearing and doing what you ought to.

Les Murray3:03

Yeah, yeah.

Les Murray3:04

Yeah, there's nothing uh there's nothing tight of buttock about it.

Presenter3:09

Which is exactly, of course, how we, the Brits, think of the Australians, isn't it? I mean, are you not just underlining the clichéed view of the Aussie here?

Les Murray3:19

I probably play uh having fun with it, in fact. A lot of Australians are very buttoned up indeed. They'd die rather than say mate, you know. I'd say they're they're almost a majority now. That that old gesture is uh getting a bit hard to find, but uh

Presenter3:30

Yeah.

Les Murray3:31

Partly I provide a a museum of uh of such attitudes so that they shouldn't die.

Presenter3:36

Tell me about your first piece of music.

Les Murray3:39

O Fortuna

Les Murray3:40

From Carlos Carmina Burano. I love it because it's got such a wonderful opening. It sounds like all the churches, you know, opening up into glory.

Presenter4:31

So she is

Presenter4:41

Is the summer thing mold lounging?

Presenter4:48

Oh, for tuna the opening of Karloff's Carmena Burana, performed by the Rutgers University Choir, with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormondy.

Presenter4:57

How do you feel? Because people do put you in that super league, don't they, with Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. How do you react to those kinds of judgment? Do you feel intimidated, flattered?

Les Murray5:07

No, I don't really believe it. Ag again, I stand beside it. It's uh it's it's part of the publicity and uh um it's uh part of the fame.

Presenter5:08

Punch it again.

Presenter5:14

But does it mean you make a better living these days'cause you're now recognized?

Les Murray5:16

Oh yeah, it does mean that, yeah. Uh you've got to c travel to collect it, though. The main living you get out of poetry is in readings. We've been known occasionally to survive on prizes for a year.

Presenter5:26

Uh Yeah.

Les Murray5:27

That that is taking it right to the edge, ducking and diving, making a living out of it.

Presenter5:27

Then then

Presenter5:30

When did you first realize that poetry was your thing?

Presenter5:34

Was there a moment that you could

Les Murray5:35

Yeah, it would have been about

Les Murray5:38

december sixth or seventh, nineteen fifty six, beside the Kolloogealook River in New South Wales, sitting in an old mill which has now fallen down and disappeared. Looking out on the on the river, you know, with mayflies come rising off it.

Presenter5:50

But why then? Why did it come to you?

Les Murray5:52

Well, I hadn't taken much notice of poetry in school. That was just the end of high school. And right towards the end of my two years in that bad high school, something very good happened. The English master mentioned that there was such a thing as modern poetry, which was not then taught. And then the sports master mentioned that there was such a thing as modern Australian poetry. And suddenly poetry became relevant. And it wasn't just daffodils in England 200 years ago.

Presenter6:16

But what kind of books were in the home? Were there any?

Les Murray6:19

My mother had won several school prizes about girls at English boarding schools in the early part of the century, so I kn knew all about the the up upper fifth and the remove and being a brick and all that.

Presenter6:31

And how to play hockey.

Les Murray6:32

Yeah, that's the one. And uh I I was very well trained to be a girl at Rodine. But uh apart from that there were books like the Angus Stud book and uh Stanley Gibbon Stamp Catalogue and uh

Presenter6:37

But uh

Presenter6:42

But you divide it all.

Les Murray6:43

And

Presenter6:43

If it

Les Murray6:44

I d complete lack of a discrimination.

Presenter6:46

So words, words, words were always what you were after.

Les Murray6:47

Yeah.

Les Murray6:48

Yeah.

Presenter6:49

But you were pretty solitary, you were an only child, spent a lot of time with nature, with animals.

Les Murray6:54

And the farm animals and all, yeah, I still write a lot about cattle and things because I know them well, they were they were my friends.

Presenter7:00

And you once, in fact, wrote a whole sequence of of poet I think forty poems where you imagined yourself to be all these different animals and insects.

Les Murray7:07

Oh, I just uh well, I was running away from uh a nervous breakdown. I was having a bad depressive time, so I thought I want to get to some subject matter which takes me away from myself and uh I went into the uh

Presenter7:17

Hmm.

Les Murray7:19

uh the lives of animals and translated them into language as far as I could.

Presenter7:23

Do you want to give us an example of that? Yeah, there's one.

Les Murray7:26

It'll seem unusual to people who are, um, I suppose not practised in this kind of poetry, using poetry as a kind of paint to to make a closely uh uh figured all over pattern. Um uh usually this poem is better read on a page, but uh well we'll give give it a try. Called Honey Cycle.

Les Murray7:45

Grisale of grisle lights in a high eye of cells, Ex chrysalids being fed crystal in six sided wells Many sweating comb and combing it, seating it sexaplex The unique she sops lines of descent in her come down from sex And drones are driven from honey, having given their own They're overer with her over or not, He's relearn the loan. Rules never from bees but from being give us to build food, Then to be stiff guards, hair trigger for tiffs with non brood.

Les Murray8:15

Next grid eyes grown to gathering rise Where a headwind bolsters Hung shimmering flight, Return with rich, itchy holsters And dance the nectar vector. Bristling collectors they entrance Propel off our stings strung And when we its advance Beyond wings or water, Light gutters in our sight lattice, And we're eggs there again spent fighting suits tighten in grass.

Presenter8:39

Necta vector is a great phrase, that isn't it.

Les Murray8:41

And

Presenter8:41

And that was all written, as you've just said, really, as a way of getting away from yourself because.

Les Murray8:46

Based on an ancient Irish poem, which is Crystal of Crystal, a poem of the 18th century. That's what gave the start-off for it, but it's just so densely woven, you know.

Presenter8:54

You've got to see it on the page to hear that over and over.

Les Murray8:56

Evere and over and over. You see that something in Irish and Welsh poetry a lot, that tight uh uh cross-lacing and patterning. Yeah.

Presenter9:03

Yeah.

Les Murray9:03

which has done as much as anything for the fun of it and the music of it.

Presenter9:06

Well, yeah, but it was also you you being a bee.

Les Murray9:10

That was the day I was a B ya.

Presenter9:10

That one looked

Presenter9:11

That was the day you would be, and you were escaping from yourself because of this black dog, which I want to talk to you about. But let's pause for some more music. Tell me about the next one.

Les Murray9:18

I think we need some Ravi Shankar. Ravi Shankar can do no wrong. I first encountered him when I was a young derelict in Sydney and I drifted into a house with a mate of mine and a few people and my sleeping place was an overcoat in the hall of the house with a breeze blowing in. I remember lying there and listening to this wonderful endless hypnotic music and it did me a tremendous amount of good.

Les Murray10:08

Uh

Speaker 110:08

Uh

Speaker 110:09

I'm sleepy, sweet, sleepy.

Presenter10:42

Ravishanka playing his Sandhya Raga. Um you were twelve years old, Les Murray, when your mother died. Um how did it happen?

Les Murray10:51

My mother had had a number of miscarriages. I was a bit late arriving and they induced me in the old simple way that they had and I've always had the horrible fear that maybe they damaged my mother's reproductive abilities and after that she had three miscarriages of which the third killed her. She began to hemorrhage and she couldn't be got to the hospital fast enough and the doctor wouldn't send the ambulance. In those days the ambulance service wasn't independent. The doctor had to authorise the ambulance to come and he said, oh the country people are using the ambulance as a as a taxi service. So at the time my father managed to get my mother to hospital she'd lost a tremendous amount of blood.

Speaker 111:25

Uh uh

Presenter11:32

And you've written a poem about it, of course, called The Star.

Les Murray11:34

I read a long, agonised sort of poem about it, which is altogether too long, but it was getting it out of my system, and a couple of shorter ones which are quite good, I think, reasonable poems in her memory.

Presenter11:43

Cold steel hurried me from her womb.

Les Murray11:46

It started off with the idea that she that I am now older than she, but she was I'm older than my mother.

Presenter11:49

Frewers.

Presenter11:50

But you didn't just l lose your mother that day, obviously. You you inherited a guilt.

Les Murray11:56

He died 44 years later never having forgiven himself. The message was strong in the air that sex causes death, you know, and that'll give you a neurosis.

Presenter11:56

Oh yeah.

Presenter12:00

Yeah.

Presenter12:12

Can you explain that sex causes death?

Les Murray12:14

Well, you know, you get some one pregnant and they die of it.

Presenter12:17

Hmm.

Les Murray12:17

And um uh that was heavy in the air. That wasn't exactly stated, but it was the implication was there.

Presenter12:23

But that's what you felt as a twelve year old. That's the link you made.

Les Murray12:27

Yeah, yeah, I guess so. I've made it unconsciously. If you make these links consciously, of course you can get over them, but if you fare down in your unconscious, they do you a whole lot of no good.

Presenter12:35

And you

Presenter12:36

I mean,'cause you also felt if you not only guilty of matricide but of fratricide as well, didn't you? Again, in the poem you say the steel of induct induction killed my brothers and sisters.

Les Murray12:41

You said that

Les Murray12:44

That's right, yeah. And killed my father, and killed everybody.

Speaker 112:45

And Silver.

Les Murray12:47

Shut up.

Presenter12:47

Huge weight for a adolescent boy to carry around.

Les Murray12:49

Yeah.

Les Murray12:50

I didn't know I was carrying it.

Presenter12:52

So it just fested in your head.

Les Murray12:54

I suppose so. Yeah, and it oh, I came down with it as a depression when I was about nineteen. Uh at last no, about no, about twenty, twenty one, uh, when I came down with it in a sort of benign form which left me, you know, sleeping for uh for weeks on end. And uh

Speaker 113:01

Yeah.

Presenter13:09

But it festered throughout your teens and and completely scuppered your school life, really.

Les Murray13:13

Well, not most of the school life. I was fairly happy at most of my schools except the last one and I ran into this odd school where um I I just uh didn't get the wavelength of the kids, you know, I got it wrong, so uh they kept um making fun of me all the way through it. And I pretended it wasn't reaching me. I pre pretended to turn the other cheek and it didn't work. And uh I didn't realise that did me a lot of harm as well.

Les Murray13:36

A depressive attack feels a bit like the first scene of Macbeth, you know, you chase away the witches, shove your head in the in the caldron, boil it for a couple of hours, and then take it out and say, I'm going to do that again to morrow.

Presenter13:48

But it doesn't feel as funny as that at the time anyway.

Les Murray13:50

It's black stuff in that pod, I can tell you.

Presenter13:52

More of this to come. Let's have some uh let's have some more music. Number three.

Les Murray13:55

The screen

Les Murray13:56

Um Mozart, clarinet concerto.

Presenter13:59

Why?

Les Murray13:59

Oh, it's such a beautiful thing. It is just so stunningly beautiful. It also makes me cry. You know, you need to cry.

Presenter15:00

David Campbell playing part of the adagio from Mozart's clarinet concerto in A with the City of London Sinphonia conducted by Richard Hickox.

Presenter15:08

I'd like to hear just a bit more, if we can, Liz, about d you at high school. And y y you've written that you were friendly, puppy like, as well as a brain and a show off, but the unanimous verdict was that I must be reminded that I was fat and ridiculous.

Presenter15:24

Apparently it was the girls who were crueller than the boy.

Les Murray15:26

Yeah, the principle is that if you're being harassed at a high school or in any place, the harassment by the other sex is the one that does the damage because you can't fight it.

Presenter15:36

And of course, if you believe, as you said you did, that sex equals death, I mean, one way or another, you know.

Les Murray15:40

Yeah, I was pretty buttoned up and I would I would be polite and and and uh and uh kind of non committal towards this this performance, but uh I guess it was partly because I was polite and non committal and not pursuing them that uh that it was done.

Presenter15:53

And did none of them ever break ranks, or was it always a total conspiracy against you?

Les Murray15:57

Total. Total. You got two you've got two attitudes. You've got the uh the offensive and you got the the icy reserve where um nobody ever looked you in the eye. They never said more than half a you know, more than a a a sentence to you um because you were poison. Uh you um

Les Murray16:12

You're an untouchable. I remember once uh funny incident. I walking downtown one night when I was staying in the town, you know, and uh a fella came alongside me, likewise wearing shorts and bare feet, and we walked down through the dark talking. And when we got down right down the town it turned the fella turned out to be a girl. And uh so we walked on into the lit lit part of the town and parted company and went on our way. And uh next day at school I saw her in her box pleated tunic and being earnestly spoken to by several other girls and looking in my direction. She never looked at me again, she never said a word. Obviously she got her orders. This fella was not to be consorted with in any way.

Presenter16:51

And it eventually all caught up with you, as you say, because you went off to university, but eventually when you were twenty two, twenty three you had a kind of breakdown. But it was all of that, wasn't it? It was down to all of that.

Les Murray16:59

I suppose so, because I didn't know what I was having for. It ju it wasn't particularly painful the first time, it was uh just a tremendous loss of energy and uh I went from being uh an ordinarily untidy student to being a bit more extreme. I got thrown out of my hotel which was uh uh for untidiness and then uh started sleeping on golf links and uh in building sites and stuff. I was sleeping rough for quite a while.

Presenter17:21

You became a drifter. You were again rich.

Les Murray17:23

And then eventually I drifted round Australia.

Presenter17:25

D read me a bit about A Recourse to the Wilderness, I think you talk about.

Les Murray17:28

Yeah, it's an early poem, yeah. Yeah, I was in South Australia at this point.

Les Murray17:33

Later that night the horror of hell stared down at me for a great time, silent with horns, till I reared awake and found myself bedded down on hay in a dawn wet paddock with twenty curious rams foregathered round me.

Les Murray17:46

Under that augury I hitchhiked on all that day out of the fenced and fertile South East districts, and just on sundown entered the Waterless Kingdom.

Les Murray17:56

In the silent lands time broadens into space. Approaching Port Augusta, going on, iron brown and limitless, the plains were before me all day burnt mountains fell behind in the glittering sky.

Les Murray18:09

At dawn the sun would roll up from his lair in the kiln dry lake country, fire his heat straight through the blind grey scrub, awaken me beside wheel tracks in some one's car, and I would travel on.

Presenter18:21

It's great.

Les Murray18:22

It was me it was great fun. In fact, I enjoyed it.

Presenter18:24

The great irony is, though, that by the time you got back to Sydney and finished your degree, your own poetry was on the syllabus.

Les Murray18:31

Oh yeah, yeah.

Presenter18:32

Or did you write essays about your own poetry?

Les Murray18:35

No, I was only doing German and linguistics. I wasn't doing English, but uh they were starting to set me on their courses.

Presenter18:41

More music.

Les Murray18:43

This is known to everybody, of course, as the Janedan line music. It's uh Cachaturian the Sp uh Spartacus adagio.

Presenter19:48

The opening of Catachurian Spartacus with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Aram Catachurian.

Presenter19:54

You eventually married Les and you had five children, so presumably you overcame your fear of women, or was it just the same thing?

Presenter20:03

Didn't just abate for one woman.

Les Murray20:05

It abated for one woman and stayed abated for a long, long time, and it gradually crept back on me because it had to be solved.

Presenter20:10

Are you still friendly to women?

Les Murray20:11

Uh no, but um I suppose it n no more than most men are afraid of women.

Presenter20:20

You are, as I mentioned in the introduction, les a Catholic. When did you convert to Catholicism?

Les Murray20:26

I I converted the first day I heard of Catholicism, I think.

Presenter20:28

When was that?

Les Murray20:29

1957 when I went to university. I hadn't particularly noticed it before, but I got talking about it and studying it, and I thought I belonged to that. Why? Oh, it just felt it felt like home. The religion I was born into was Free Presbyterian, and a stern form of Calvinism in which there wasn't much forgiveness. And you were sort of rigidly either amongst the saved or the damned, you know. But when I heard of Catholicism, it it involved things like forgiveness, and it involved particularly the wonderful that wonderful defiance of rationalism, transubstantiation, in which bread and wine can be made into Jesus.

Speaker 120:54

But when I heard a topology,

Presenter21:07

Why did you find that so attractive in that moment?

Les Murray21:09

I suppose it's because words can be turned into uh into po poetry. Uh I love transformations and that seemed to me the supreme transformation.

Presenter21:16

So you you heard about it when you were, what, eighteen, nineteen? You converted formally when you were twenty-four, you're now sixty, you're as devout as ever?

Les Murray21:19

I see you.

Les Murray21:24

It's the binnacle compass around which I steer my uh my life as far as I can. I rarely ever try to proselytize anybody. I just try to l um to hold to it, you know. I hold to it sometimes with desperation, uh, like a rope in a in in a shipwreck.

Presenter21:41

But it was your salvation from everything you said then, you at at the age of eighteen, nineteen, when you just

Presenter21:48

Weren't coping too well with life. All of a sudden along comes this huge great prop.

Presenter21:53

And you just

Les Murray21:53

It helped. It most certainly did help, yeah. Also I think I think vanity to a degree too. I I wa didn't con I didn't consent to go under because I had work to do. I had uh uh poetry to write. Uh that's been my other great rope in the shipwreck.

Presenter22:07

Next record.

Les Murray22:09

The next record

Les Murray22:10

It would probably seem unusual. It's Psalm 73. It's an example of lining of the old Gaelic way, of Scots Gaelic way of singing psalms in church. And when I first heard it, it absolutely fascinated me. I thought it came out of Central Asia, because I hadn't heard of it before. My wife heard of it, and when I came home one day, we were living in Inverness, and she said, Listen to this and tell me what it is. And I had no idea.

Les Murray22:35

And yet, only two or three generations before it had been done in Australia in our region, but it had been forgotten.

Speaker 122:43

Afosa Yian and oyan

Presenter22:59

Here you are.

Speaker 123:07

This kind of near hello

Presenter23:18

Uh

Presenter23:40

Part of Psalm seventy three, led by Ian Murray, and recorded at a Gallic service in Dornoch in Scotland, in nineteen fifty. Time for another poem, I think, Les Murray. I'd love you to read the one called Performance, but tell me first how you came to write it.

Les Murray23:54

I suppose we'd just gone to a a nice firework display over in the neighbouring village of Cranbeck in midwinter, and I came home and described it. Transmuted it, I suppose, into into an image of of uh performance, and uh the end of it says something about uh how depression works.

Les Murray24:15

Performance.

Les Murray24:17

I starred last night, I shone I was footwork and fire work in one A rocket that wriggled up and shot darkness with a parasol of brilliance and a pee wee descant on a flung bit.

Les Murray24:28

I was busters of glitter bombs expanding to mantle and aurora from a crown I was feet, falls of blazing paint, paraflares spot welding cloudy heaven, loose gold off fierce toeholes of white, a finale red tongued as a harker leap that too was a butt of all right.

Les Murray24:47

As usual, after any triumph, I was, of course, inconsolable.

Presenter24:52

So acclaim, applause, recognition, don't do anything.

Les Murray24:56

They used to they used to leave me feeling absolutely wrecked.

Presenter24:59

Really?

Les Murray24:59

Yeah. You'd have you'd have a really good time and you knew you were gonna have to pay for it. No longer true. I haven't got depression anymore.

Presenter25:05

Which I want to talk to you about, but I want to know first of all how how you write. I mean is that a pleasurable experience or is it

Les Murray25:10

It's wonderful, there's nothing else like it. You're right in a trance and the trance is completely addictive, you love it, you want more of it. Because once you've written the poem, you've had the trance and polished it and so on, you can go back to the poem and have a a trace of that trance, you can have a shadow of it, but you can't have it fully again.

Presenter25:24

But how'd you get into the trance in the first place?

Les Murray25:27

It seems to be a knack I discovered as I went along. It's an integration of the body mind and the dreaming mind and the daylight conscious mind. And all three are firing at once. They're all in concert. You can be sitting there, but kind of inwardly dancing, and the breath and the weight and everything else are involved. You're fully alive. You're fully there.

Presenter25:48

So there's movement and there's rhythm, and you're just alert to yourself in a wonderful alert. Can you just flick a switch and get into that?

Les Murray25:51

Can you just flicker it?

Les Murray25:55

It takes a while. You you you you have to have uh some key to go into it, like uh say a phrase or a few phrases or um uh s a subject matter or um uh maybe even a tune or something to to get you started going towards it and it starts to accumulate. Sometimes it starts without you knowing.

Speaker 126:12

So magic.

Les Murray26:15

uh that you're you're getting there and it builds up in your mind like a pressure which I once described as uh like a painless headache. And you know there's a poem in there, but you've got to wait until the other words form.

Presenter26:27

Record number six.

Les Murray26:28

Ah one of my great uh old loves from my twenties and early thirties, Jacques Brell. He died all too all too young, I think, Belgian genius. And uh the the one of his I like best of all is called La Val Samiltin.

Speaker 126:42

Oh, pour me.

Speaker 126:44

Dans de la val c

Speaker 126:48

Toutuser tout surine des jard.

Speaker 126:52

Au promier tant de la val ce suisseur.

Speaker 126:58

Me je taper soi et paris, qui balla, mousieu, ro Paris qui, mosieu, nei.

Les Murray27:09

Yeah.

Speaker 127:09

De Faris.

Presenter27:10

Very

Presenter27:11

Jacques Breille and La Val Saint Milton, that's quite a performance and a and a and a poem and a half, really, isn't it?

Les Murray27:16

It is a poem, yeah. I was amazed at myself earlier on that I got through Honey Cycle without stumbling on any of the words, but he does so much uh more. That uh cycling, speeding up, the circling, circling uh rhymes of it, and uh never losing it as he goes, you know, just the utter precision of the voice that he has to maintain to keep on it.

Presenter27:33

Yeah.

Presenter27:34

Now this black dog of yours that we've mentioned uh so much, you you took the Churchill phrase, didn't you, the black dog from the depression. It didn't go away for decades. Um the last time it visited was about, what, ten years ago when you went back to live, very near where you were brought up. You said in a funny old kind of way, you probably went home to go mad. How mad did you go?

Les Murray27:55

Yeah, unconsciously I didn't realize that's what I needed to do. But if your demons are in a p particular place you do know you need to go back and make peace with them and deal with them.

Presenter28:03

Did did did you go pretty mad? Oh, I went real mad.

Les Murray28:07

Uh I came down with uh a big uh breakdown. I met one of my old school colleagues, a girl who uh had some particularly fine names for me and she told me one of them and I started to come apart immediately. I'd gone to a reading that night and it was a good reading. But within a day or two I was driving around in the car with tears streaming down my face. I was crying out.

Les Murray28:28

Just mentioned one of the names, yeah. And uh then uh smoking gave me up, which was wonderful. It meant that my body chemistry had shifted. Uh I couldn't smoke any more. Uh then I started having uh phantom heart attacks, hundreds of them.

Les Murray28:41

And they really scare the daylights out of you the first couple of times you have those. So I was really quite sick and I went to the psychiatrist and he said, Yes, if you had an accident on the way home and we sectioned your brain, he said we'd find the chemistry in it quite different from an ordinary brain. I said there's a cheerful thought And he told me how it worked, how you overload your brain with adrenaline, it's the jammed sort of functioning of the fight or flight reflex.

Presenter29:04

You've written a lot of poems about it, but Corniche, I think, is particularly descriptive, isn't it?

Les Murray29:08

I'll read you bits of Cornish.

Presenter29:09

Yeah.

Les Murray29:10

I work all day and hardly drink at all. I can reach down and feel if I'm depressed. I adore the Creator because I made myself, And a few times a week a wire jags in my chest. The first time I'd been coming apart all year, Weeping, incoherent. Cigars had given me up. Any road round a cliff edge I'd whimper along in low gear. Then, cardiac horror, masking my pulse as calm, lubbed up.

Les Murray29:36

It was the victim sickness adrenaline howling in my head, the black dog was my brain. Come to drown me in my breath Was energy's black hole, depression, compere of the pre dawn show, when, returned from a pea, you stew and wilter in your death.

Les Murray29:50

Laugh who never shrank around wizened genitals there or killed themselves to stop dying. The blow that never falls batters you stupid. Only gradually do you notice a slight scorn in you for what appals.

Les Murray30:02

The terror of death is not afraid of death. Fear, pure, is intransitive. A Hindenburg of vast rage rots though above your life. See it, and you feel flogged. But like an addict, you sniffle aboard to your cage, because you will cling to this beast as it gnaws you, for the crystal in its kidneys, the elixir in its wings, till your darlings are the police of an immense fatigue. I came to the world unrehearsed, but I've learned some things.

Presenter30:29

You therefore knew you had a condition, as it were, but you rejected drugs, you rejected.

Les Murray30:35

Now they rejected me. I tried'em, but they didn't work.

Presenter30:37

And you rejected analysis, and you decided in the end, didn't you, to write analysis?

Les Murray30:41

I did my own analysis. They offered me uh electro shock too.

Presenter30:42

They are f

Les Murray30:44

You remember?

Presenter30:45

Your own analysis through poetry you did, did you?

Les Murray30:47

Yeah, that's the meth that's the method I had to hand. I had the sharp point of a pen and I dug the depression out of myself with it. And finally broke its back with a poem called a burning wand.

Presenter30:57

Burning want. But something else happened, didn't it, Les? Something, you know, something else big happened to you. You suddenly got really sick. And this was a very good idea. That was a bit after.

Les Murray31:05

That was a bit after, or would have been about two years after burning what I was still having attacks. And I came down with a liver abscess. And they took a while to diagnose it because it was unusual. And finally took me to a large hospital down in Newcastle, a wonderful hospital called John Hunter. And as I was being wheeled into the theatre, I heard them saying, We may well lose this one. It's funny, your hearing goes last, you know. I woke up half an hour later, and it was three weeks later. I'd missed the Olympics.

Speaker 331:28

Uh

Presenter31:35

But you'd had a kind of form of E. coli, hadn't you?

Les Murray31:38

Yeah, E. coli had got out of uh a a momentary breach in my bowel, apparently, and started eating the nicest piece of offal it could see, which was my liver. And they ended up cutting about a quarter of the liver off, but it's grown back since. But I took a while to come back from that, and uh I the first thing I realized was, The black dog's dead, it's gone. That was the food.

Presenter31:55

That was the first thing you realised. How did you know it had gone?

Les Murray31:58

Just f I just felt completely different. I thought, um, my brain's my own at last, you know.

Presenter32:02

But also when you woke up, if I understand it aright, after three weeks, which you thought was kind of half an hour, uh there were lots of messages, there was a kind of flood of good feeling towards you, an affirmation of everything you had.

Les Murray32:12

What are we doing now?

Les Murray32:14

I had thought that I was down to about uh six or eight friends, you know, in the whole world. Uh I felt completely besieged and uh and set upon. And uh the world was one huge schoolyard as far as I knew. And then when I came back I found all these flowers and uh telegrams and

Presenter32:29

So isn't that the reason the Black Dog had gone?

Les Murray32:32

Now the black dog disappeared chemically sometime while I was in that uh coma and I s I suspect I may have even had the coma in order to kill the black dog.

Presenter32:41

Record number seven.

Les Murray32:43

Sergio Mendes in Brazil 66, Moish Kenada. My wife and I used to love this in the 60s and I picked it in order to go back and visit the 60s.

Presenter33:24

Sergio Mendez and Brazil sixty six with Maish Quenada. This is the point at which we cast you away, Les Murray, um, to a desert island we know not where. Have you thought where it might be?

Les Murray33:34

I come from the biggest and best desert island in the world.

Les Murray33:37

I'm all as happy to get back there.

Les Murray33:39

But y if you want I take it you want a small one. Desert can just mean uh there's no other people there, I take it. It could be Heshgeer off the coast of uh Isle of Lewis if you like, but maybe that's a bit cold and wet.

Presenter33:44

Grund.

Presenter33:50

Have you thought what you might do there?

Les Murray33:52

I'll stare at the uh stare at the horizon and uh w miss the family, and uh write poems in a in in a big ledger book.

Presenter33:59

And do you think you would, you know, take charge of your life and hit out for home, you know, get into the water and go or or or would you sit and fester and die?

Les Murray34:08

No, I wouldn't fetch it in Festrant. I have had lots of offers of that and I never did it, so uh um ha I'd get home, I reckon. But I can go to a desert island in my head and uh and and uh any old time to write. But if you want a literal desert islet, yeah probably one on the Barrier Reef, say.

Presenter34:23

Would you be bad? Last record.

Les Murray34:26

Jupiter, the bringer of jollity. After being professor of depressive studies, I think I uh I need a bit to put a bit of jollity into this programme. It's by um by Holst, Gustav Holst.

Presenter35:39

Part of Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, from Holst's Planets, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by John Elliott Gardner. Now, Les, if you could only take one of those eight records to your desert island, could you settle for one?

Les Murray35:52

Oh, Lord, that would be hard that really would be hard.

Presenter35:55

Yeah.

Les Murray35:56

Probably probably uh Jacques Brill, but I'd want the whole C D.

Presenter35:59

Well, we'll we'll negotiate. What about your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Les Murray36:03

Well, I wanted to take Matthew's Chinese Dictionary with me and learn Chinese characters, because I started Chinese a long, long time ago and had to give it up because I uh my my mind fell apart. But uh another book I need to take is uh is a big sort of ledger or something to write poems in. So in in the end I'd have to take that, a big blank book with lines in it and and a supply of pencil.

Presenter36:22

And what about your luxury? Because that sounds like a model.

Les Murray36:22

Yeah.

Les Murray36:23

That's a marble four poster bed.

Presenter36:25

Oh, oh, why?

Les Murray36:26

Marble. Oh, it I only think it'll stand up to the harsh climate on the desert island.

Les Murray36:31

I've always wanted a four poster. I might as well have a marble one. After I die they can bury me under it and there'll be a classical ruin right there.

Presenter36:37

There's Murray, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Les Murray36:41

Thank you.

Speaker 336:48

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