Michael Holroyd

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 the year two thousand, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a biographer. The son of parents who married little and often, he was sent to school at Eton, but studied literature, as his Who's Who entry explains, at Maidenhead Public Library. His fragmented upbringing taught him self-effacement, and it's through writing about others that his fame has come. His lives of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John, and George Bernard Shaw are modern monuments to great achievers in our past, and in their unashamed honesty of every aspect of their subjects' lives are said to have transformed biographical writing in this country. His latest work is his autobiography, a sign presumably that he's overcome the horror of scrutiny which led him to become, as he's put it, absorbed in lives quite different from my own. He is Michael Holroyd. Michael, your desire for invisibility was so strong for so long it's a minor miracle you wrote this autobiography, isn't it?

Michael Holroyd1:24

Well, some people say it's a um extended act of concealment, self-concealment, uh and that they don't recognize me from it, and other people say it's a way of stopping anybody else writing.

Presenter1:36

Well, yes, I suspect that. But how difficult was it to write in comparison with writing biography of others? More difficult, I suspect.

Michael Holroyd1:43

I never intended to write it. I thought I might write an essay or something like that after my parents' death. And I started away. And suddenly I found myself going on and on as if it was a book that needed to be written. I then found after the first draft that I had to go back and do a lot of research about myself. I thought at one time of writing a letter to newspapers and asking for any information about myself which might help.

Presenter2:11

You say needed to be written Your need, perhaps.

Michael Holroyd2:14

My need. I didn't realize I had that need, but as soon as I started to write, it all came out as if there was a great need to

Presenter2:20

Mm.

Speaker 12:20

Uh

Michael Holroyd2:23

Rediscover my parents after their deaths to find out more about them. All the questions that I had never asked my parents.

Michael Holroyd2:30

While they were alive.

Presenter2:31

And a coming to terms because it's a very unhappy book in many ways.

Michael Holroyd2:35

I hope it's a um I considered it to be a t uh a comedy, but when I gave it to my wife to read, she ended it in tears, so I now call it a tragicomedy.

Presenter2:43

An eye quote

Presenter2:46

Whatever it is, it certainly didn't take as long as some of your biographies. Seventeen years it took you to do Bernard Shaw. Why so long?

Michael Holroyd2:53

Well, he lived into his mid nineties, and it took me only seventeen years to complete the same course, and I hand it to the reading public in a way that can be read in a month or two, which seems to be a miracle of compression.

Presenter3:07

Lot of hoo-ha, of course, when it was said that you received this enormous amount of money, six hundred twenty five thousand pounds in advance in nineteen eighty eight, broke all the records, but of course divide it by seventeen, not much at all.

Michael Holroyd3:17

Not a great deal. It was a middle-aged pension, uh which was paid to me over a dozen years or so while writing it and um enabled me to have more time, to buy time. But there was less hoo-ha when I got my first advance for Little Straitsy, which was fifty pounds, as I recall. I wish there had been a bit more hoo-ha about that.

Presenter3:35

I wish that

Presenter3:36

That was what in the mid sixties when and also, of course, what you famously did was discuss Strache's homosexuality, which had been, well, taboo before, hadn't it?

Michael Holroyd3:46

Yes, I, in my ignorance and innocence, didn't know I was doing something new, which is always the best way of doing something new, I think and I discussed it in my book, and made it as important in the book as it had been, I thought, in his own life, which was quite important.

Presenter4:01

What

Presenter4:03

But we take it for granted now, of course, in biography, in in the second half of the twentieth century, we took past tense now it for granted that that a subject should be discussed, Watts and all, his his family, his friendships, his hidden motivations, his sexual proclivities. Would you claim some credit that that was could be said to have been before and after Holroyd?

Michael Holroyd4:23

I uh was just at the beginning of the spirit of the times very much, and it was part of the sixties, part of the loosening up of things, partly of rewriting the agenda, and I suddenly was in step, perhaps quarter of an hour ahead of uh the time.

Presenter4:40

Tell me about your first record.

Michael Holroyd4:41

My first record is Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. six, and it's a record that I used to listen to very early on my home in all places in the garage where the records were kept.

Michael Holroyd4:58

It moved me tremendously, and it still does.

Presenter6:00

The Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer playing part of the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. Six in B minor, The Patetique, and an image of you, Michael Holroyd, sitting in your maidenhead garage, wartime. You'd have been, what, eight, nine, ten years old?

Michael Holroyd6:13

Yeah, something like that.

Presenter6:15

Sitting in an old Ford Eight.

Michael Holroyd6:16

Uh a Ford Eight, which we didn't use any more. In fact, the garage was filled with all the bric a brac of the past that was uh obsolete. There was a car, there was bits of china and glass and b mildewing books, and for a child it was all obvious treasure. And there was a a grammophone, which was so interesting, my aunt's gr uh grammar phone there, and um it was a place where I could hide out and have adventures of my imagination.

Presenter6:47

and dream to the music.

Michael Holroyd6:48

Yes, I used to sit in the car, turn on the grammophone, and fill the dark cavern, really, with this wonderful sound.

Presenter6:58

And if the garage was a dark cavern, I think the house was a bit too, really, which is why the music wasn't played in it, wasn't it?

Michael Holroyd7:05

There was no music played in the house. My family were profoundly unmusical. You could get my father to rise to his feet and stand to attention if you told him a piece of Gilbert and Sullivan was God save the King or Queen or whatever it was.

Presenter7:17

But it wasn't played because it was such an unhappy place inside that house. Relationships were difficult.

Michael Holroyd7:21

My sh

Michael Holroyd7:23

Yes, relationships are very difficult. The house resounded to a cacophony of arguing and shouting. We didn't bother to go from one room to the next in order to disagree with someone. We shouted from one room to the next. Um and it was perpetual disagreement. It was deeply unhappy. A ritualised disagreement about everything. Very trivial things. The washing up.

Michael Holroyd7:49

Had it been properly done or had it not? That could go on for, what, three quarters of an hour.

Presenter7:53

Yeah.

Michael Holroyd7:53

and everything else.

Presenter7:54

This was your grandparents, your aunt, your father.

Michael Holroyd7:58

Yes. My father was there intermittently because there was occasionally things like a a water fight or a business to run into bankruptcy. And because my parents were divorced, I stayed with my um grandparents at Maidenhead during my so much of my childhood and indeed my adolescence.

Presenter8:17

Incredibly timid, very passive, very alone. I mean, as well as sitting in the garage, you ran races against yourself, playing. Yes, I should have.

Michael Holroyd8:23

Yes, I didn't have friends. It was difficult to invite friends from school, shall we say, back because my par my grandparents were so old and it was um not easy and therefore it was a solitary life. But I'm a I devised games for myself. There was one game uh against the garage door uh which I played uh with a tennis racket and tennis ball, winning and losing simultaneously.

Presenter8:49

But there was a kind of well, horrendous from what I've read, collective unhappiness about the existence, which eventually you wrote about you wrote a novel based on it called A Dog's Life, which never saw the light of day in this country. Why not?

Michael Holroyd9:02

Well, my father considered it too autobiographical, too much revealing the family unhappiness, particularly perhaps his sister, my aunt's unhappiness and a sort of broken love affair. And looking back now, I'm rather thankful to my father. First of all, I see his point of view a little more strongly than I did at the time. And secondly, I don't think it's a very good novel. But but he threatened to take it to court, didn't he? He threatened to take me to court, and so it had to be withdrawn before publication in Britain. And it was published in the United States. And when my father was in a very dicey position financially, I helped him out with the royalties from it, which was a fine act of revenge.

Presenter9:47

Now your next record I think is reminiscent of that period of your childhood, as well.

Michael Holroyd9:51

Yes, it's Miss Otis Regrets, and this was one of my aunt's records that I found in the garage. And I had no idea then why she put all the music in the garage and played nothing, but it was because she had an extremely unhappy uh love affair, and perhaps this record symbolizes that.

Speaker 410:16

And from under her velvet gown

Speaker 410:21

She drew a gun and shot her lover down.

Speaker 410:27

Madam

Speaker 410:31

This owners regret

Speaker 410:34

She's unable to learn.

Speaker 410:37

Today

Presenter10:39

Ethel Waters singing Miss Otis Regrets and that was recorded in 1934. Not that your aunt shot her lover.

Michael Holroyd10:45

No, she may have dreamt of doing such things, but she never did.

Presenter10:50

Tell me about reading English literature in in Maidenhead Public Library. Why there, and what did you read?

Michael Holroyd10:56

I read everything. I discovered the library almost but by accident, and it was a wonderful palace, really, where all the latest magazines and books were paraded in alphabetical order in front of one. It seemed to me wonderful. And it was free, and you went in, it was warm, it was comfortable, and I read practically everything that came my way in no sort of order, almost randomly. And therefore, now I'm afraid I have great gaps in my reading, but I do know things that other people don't know.

Presenter11:29

But again a form of escape, obviously.

Michael Holroyd11:31

Yes, it was yes, it was. It was an alternative world, a world of the imagination, and to some extent the intelligence, and some extent the emotions.

Presenter11:38

But you obviously had a a natural interest in reading in literature. Uh when you went to Eton and the family kind of scraped the money together, I think, with a I think your mother's lovers throwing into the pot as well to get you.

Michael Holroyd11:50

Yes, they were very generous in one way and another.

Presenter11:53

But didn't di did you find yourself encouraged at Eton in your interest in literature at all?

Michael Holroyd11:59

For the most part, no. But there was one teacher towards the end of my time there, Peter Spano, who encouraged me and he made it all fun, and he made it full of interest. And suddenly I was top of the uh form, and that gave me a lot of confidence, I think, that I could continue with that.

Presenter12:19

Except that your father wanted you to be a scientist.

Michael Holroyd12:21

Yes, well my father was very sensible. He saw that all the jobs in the papers he being out of work was able to study the advertisements at leisure all the jobs were advertisements for scientists, chemical engineers, plasma physicists, such like. He didn't know necessarily what these were, but he knew that the future lay with that, so I must get into line with that. So I specialised in chemistry, physics, additional mathematics.

Speaker 112:38

I didn't know.

Michael Holroyd12:52

with a little astronomy thrown in at night.

Presenter12:54

Are you any good at it all?

Michael Holroyd12:55

I was absolutely hopeless at it, unfortunately. I say that not boasting, because I would like to be good at mathematics. But I simply was no good at all.

Presenter13:03

And meanwhile your your mother embarrassed you rotten by dancing on tables.

Michael Holroyd13:08

My mother enjoyed herself, which is very, very embarrassing for a teenager. And she danced on tables with waiters and she spoke several languages and made jokes in them and really behaved in a very eye-catching way. Whereas, of course, when one's in one's teens, one is self conscious and wishes not to catch the eye.

Presenter13:30

Yeah.

Michael Holroyd13:30

Yeah.

Presenter13:30

Equipment number

Michael Holroyd13:30

Uh

Presenter13:30

Two.

Michael Holroyd13:31

Yeah.

Michael Holroyd13:31

Record number three is Sebalius's Symphony No. Two, which really represents, I think, my Scandinavian side, my mother's side, um, and evokes that Scandinavian landscape so well for me.

Presenter14:47

Part of the first movement from Sibelius's Symphony No. Two in D major, played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir John Bob Raleigh.

Presenter14:55

I must say, Michael, at a glance, the names and places that populate your early life make it sound very glamorous from the family owned Lalique, glass showroom in Bond Street, a home in Basil Street behind Harrods, a mansion flat on the embankment, holidays in the south of France and Venice.

Presenter15:10

It all sounds wonderful. The reality was rather less alluring.

Michael Holroyd15:13

Well, the theme really of my book partly is the decline and fall uh of the family, and we fell from quite a high point at one moment.

Presenter15:22

But it means that you cut a rather strange figure because at one point you were touching into these glamorous bits or staying with your mother in Basel Street or whatever, and then you were at home in Maidenhead in this, you know, terribly drab kind of uncertainty.

Michael Holroyd15:34

Yes, very, very much. And also these extraordinary trips, of course, that I made across the North Sea to Sweden. I was always tremendously seasick. But when I got to Sweden, it seemed a very wonderful world. At least it seemed so to my school friends. Because I went to Paris a bit because my stepmother was French. I went to Sweden because my mother was Swedish. I went to the south of France because one of your

Speaker 415:49

So

Presenter15:56

I went to the south of France because one of your stepfathers took you there.

Michael Holroyd15:58

Yes. Took you there. Exactly. All that. But the trouble is that I didn't speak French, I didn't speak uh Swedish. Uh and it actually increased the area of one's loneliness, though it seemed very wonderful. I remember turning up once in Vienna.

Speaker 116:11

Yeah.

Michael Holroyd16:13

with one of my step parents uh and thinking how very wet the place was.

Michael Holroyd16:19

And of course it was Venice. I got it completely wrong. I didn't know where I was.

Presenter16:24

You didn't go to university, as you say. You did, in deference to your father, attempt to become a lawyer. You you you became an article clerk. What sort of jobs were you given?

Michael Holroyd16:32

Well, I was really sent the craziest people because in those days country solicitors are

Michael Holroyd16:40

performed a therapeutic role to some of their richer clients. There was one woman I remember who used to complain that that at twilight, and indeed at more revealing times, her neighbours were dancing naked in the garden. That sort of client was sent up to me for consultation. And I would make her a cup of tea and so on. I also served writs on people and was even shot at once. And I remember once I had to investigate the fridge of a butcher who said it was warmer than an oven and I had to s stand in there with the carcasses. He was exaggerating.

Presenter17:19

You are also in amongst all of this really pretty innocent. I think you'd you'd miss the headmaster's talk on the facts of life when you left school.

Michael Holroyd17:27

Yes, I had missed. I did write around to one or two of my friends who attended it, but their replies were curiously vague and unfocused and unknowing, so I'm not sure I would have gained a lot from it.

Presenter17:38

You think they didn't know either, or they just couldn't put it into words?

Michael Holroyd17:41

I think a bit of both. Uh that's what our education system uh achieved.

Presenter17:46

Did you have a sense there that you you were missing out somewhere or or was your was your innocence blissful?

Michael Holroyd17:53

I knew there was something that I wasn't in contact with.

Presenter17:58

Record number four.

Michael Holroyd17:59

Well, record number four probably represents everything I wasn't in contact with. It's Polly Garter's song from Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. I first read Under Milk Wood at the Maidenhead Public Library. I heard Emlyn Williams' uh performance on on radio, and it probably still represents now a hidden part of my life.

Speaker 418:20

I loved a man whose name was Town He swung the bear and two yards long.

Speaker 418:30

I loved a man whose name was Dick He was big as a barrel and three feet thick.

Speaker 418:41

And I loved a man whose name was Harry

Speaker 418:46

Six feet tall and sweet as a cherry

Presenter18:50

Bonnie Tyler singing Polly Garter's song from George Martin's production of Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. So you were still in Maidenhead Library, Michael Holroyd, in your twenties reading, browsing. Is that where you found the inspiration to uh become a biographer?

Michael Holroyd19:04

Yes, yes, certain years, I came across the work of a completely unknown writer called Hugh Kingsmill, particularly a b a biography of Doctor Johnson, which was just beautifully done. And I was much taken with this. And I

Michael Holroyd19:20

Really, uh thought, well, perhaps I could write a biography a bit. And I first thing I wanted to do was to collect Kingsmill's sort of uncollected writings, because he wasn't on any syllabus, he'd never been discovered by professors of English literature. He was my own discovery. And my first book, my first biography, a very bad biography, though nevertheless a labour of love, was on Kingsmill, who remained as unknown after its publication as he had been before it. Well, quite incredibly ambitious. I mean, to

Presenter19:52

Well, quite incredibly ambitious. I mean, to for an unknown biographer to write a a a biography of a little-known writer.

Michael Holroyd19:59

Well, it was explained to me by one of the sixteen publishers to whom I sent it that a a book by an unknown writer about an unknown author was not commercial, and if I could only find someone else to write about who was a little more commercial, then there might be some future for me. And Kingsmill, insofar as he wrote biographies, had partly been categorised, described as a follower, an imitator of Lytton Strachey. And so I got to know Strachey's work quite a lot. And so the Strachey book evolved from the Kingsmill book.

Presenter20:32

But you got a commission for that.

Michael Holroyd20:33

I think I said I got fifty pounds, um, which went much further than, but even so, not uh not really covering the seven or eight years it took to do it.

Presenter20:43

Quite that took that long. The shore, as I've said, took seventeen years.

Presenter20:47

What do you do then? Certainly, as far as the Shaw was concerned, you went and lived for two years where he lived and and and and

Presenter20:53

Soaked him up, felt it, drank it in, sat with these papers. Is that is that what you do? I mean, you're just soaking up, or are you interviewing people?

Michael Holroyd21:00

Yeah.

Michael Holroyd21:01

Yes, I certainly go to the places where uh my subjects have uh lived, been born, which were important to them, and you also have to pursue your subjects to places where they have never been, which is the great manuscript libraries in Texas and elsewhere, which now have their diaries and letters and so on, because I think it's very important to see the letters, the handwriting, the actual bits of paper, to touch them, to be in touch, and hope some magic comes from that.

Presenter21:32

But when you spend so long with one person like that, although he's dead,

Presenter21:36

You must be infected by them in some way.

Michael Holroyd21:39

I'm certain that's right, and I make a point of never investigating that, because uh you become

Michael Holroyd21:46

Shall we say, self-conscious, as opposed to using your unconscious self for the writing of things. I'm certain that I've changed as a result of the people I've been keeping company with.

Presenter21:55

It was very bleak, of course. It had a very dark side. Yes.

Michael Holroyd21:55

Well straightforward is very

Michael Holroyd21:59

Yes, but then he had an extraordinary love affair with Carrington, Dora Carrington, the painter of sixteen years, ending in his death and her suicide.

Presenter22:03

And the

Presenter22:07

He went on from Straitie to Augustus John, of course, again someone you might have come across as you went, so the kind of overlap.

Michael Holroyd22:13

Well, Gaston Strong was a significant minor character in the Strachian and evolved to become the subject of the next book. And that has been the pattern of one minor character in one book evolving, catching my attention, and it's as if they were choosing me rather than me choosing them.

Presenter22:17

And it

Presenter22:27

Oh, I see. But but also couldn't have been more different from Straita. I mean, notorious womanize. It must have been a great relief.

Michael Holroyd22:33

The only thing they had in common, I think apart from their beards, of course, was that they were, I thought at the beginning, utterly different from myself.

Presenter22:42

And did he inspire your relationship with women?

Michael Holroyd22:45

Um

Michael Holroyd22:46

I don't know whether that's true. Maybe I gained something from keeping company with him. Maybe people were attracted to Augustus and then hung on for me a little bit.

Presenter22:57

Next piece of music.

Michael Holroyd22:57

My next piece of music is Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. One of my first girlfriends was a ballet dancer, and she used to take me to the ballet, and that's where I saw Neurayev when he first came over dancing with Fontaine and the others, and it was a most wonderful experience.

Presenter24:15

JULIET'S FUNERAL FROM BOKOFYEFF'S ROMEON JULIET, played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrei Previn. You were forty, Michael Holroyd, by the time you published your biography of Augustus John.

Presenter24:26

And and you seem to have been dedicated to not marrying. I mean, presumably because your experience of your parents was so painful. Had you did you make that a firm resolution?

Michael Holroyd24:36

No, I didn't make any resolution at all in in anything, I think. Um probably I was affected by my parents uh remarrying so very much. I was not conscious of it, but I think it's inevitable because between the two of them they were married, what, uh, five or six times, always uh rather unhappily. It didn't work out, and that must have affected me in some way. So um I suppose I postponed uh I postponed things. I did live with someone for some years that we didn't marry.

Presenter25:09

Postpone marriage until you were forty seven and then True, really.

Michael Holroyd25:12

Really, I'm learning a lot.

Presenter25:15

Suddenly and secretly, as the world knows, you married the novelist Mar Margaret Drabble. Was there a reason for that change of mind, or was it just all part of your being a late developer?

Michael Holroyd25:24

I think it was probably part of being a late devil. I'd known Maggie sort of socially for quite a long time really. And then we had a honeymoon before the marriage in Hollywood, where we went to see a friend, Christopher Hampton's play, Tales from Hollywood, which had its premiere there. And then we came back and Deryl Bainbridge was our best man.

Presenter25:51

Uh

Michael Holroyd25:52

Yeah.

Presenter25:52

Boom! And he went on being unorthodox, because, again, as the world knows, you famously lived apart in separate houses, I should say, for thirteen years.

Michael Holroyd26:00

Well, I'm not sure. Can I interview at that moment? Had we um not been married, everybody would have said, Do you know they're living together? But since we were married, everybody said, Do you know they're living apart?

Presenter26:01

Had we

Presenter26:06

Do you know that?

Michael Holroyd26:11

We kept on uh uh my flat and uh Maggie's house, but we um

Michael Holroyd26:17

Well really that was for work reasons. Uh

Presenter26:20

Yeah.

Michael Holroyd26:20

Our offices are our homes, so I think this was somewhat exaggerated.

Presenter26:25

I mean you you were in the middle of your shore at the time I think so.

Michael Holroyd26:28

He wouldn't allow anybody else in except for sort of long weekends and evenings, really. And she was.

Presenter26:33

And she was in the middle of the Oxford Companion.

Michael Holroyd26:35

Yes, and exactly. And which involved I mean, she had a secretary, and then there were at least, I think, one and a half of the children still living there. And there's still space.

Presenter26:45

But the stories the stories of your making appointments to go and have dinner were just apocryphal, huh?

Michael Holroyd26:51

They were somewhat exaggerated.

Presenter26:53

But you have now moved in together anyway. Um do you still I mean do you work completely separately? Do you have to have that kind of exclusion zone?

Michael Holroyd27:02

Very much so. I work at the top of the house so that Maggie can't hear my cries of despair. And she works right at the bottom of the house, so I can't h hear her cries of triumph. Record number six. Record number six is Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. And I want Kirsten Flagstadt singing Dido's Lament. Kirsten Flagstad recorded this for Bernard Miles, I think, originally, at the Mermaid Theatre in about early 1950s. And everybody said that her voice was quite wrong for Purcell and Dido. But in The Lament, that dark tone voice gives it an extra resonance, I think. I love this.

Speaker 428:14

Yes.

Presenter28:41

Kirsten Flagstadt singing Dido's Lament from Act three of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, with the Mermaid Orchestra conducted by Geraint Jones. There's quite a lot of death in your music, Michael.

Michael Holroyd28:52

I hadn't spotted that, but I'm obliged to you for telling me.

Presenter28:55

You can see that though, can't you? There's a lot of people who have Juliet's funeral, and there's I think there's more death to come.

Michael Holroyd28:57

I could if I looked.

Michael Holroyd29:01

Yes, I think that probably is true. I think gre death is the great enemy and the point of biography is to retrieve people to some extent, at least on the page, from death.

Presenter29:12

Should they be retrieved in the way that you retrieve them, I suppose, is the question. I mean, it's fairly plain that you wouldn't like your someone else to write your biography.

Presenter29:22

What right have you to go searching into the kind of personal recesses of the lives of straitship?

Michael Holroyd29:29

Dean Shaw. Well, I might think quite differently when I'm dead. I do not believe in writing about the living, because I think we all need our sentimentalities, our lies, our prevarications to get through life, which is extremely difficult. But you pay a compliment to the dead when you say to them, could you contribute more to the living world than we could ask you in your life, now that you can no longer personally be hurt? You pay them a compliment, and I'm in favour of keeping the dead in employment.

Presenter29:59

But does it does it enhance our understanding of an artist's work, to know about his sexual proclivities, or his family, or his friendships? I mean, we know practically nothing about Shakespeare, but we appreciate his work.

Michael Holroyd30:11

My feeling generally is uh that if that between the lines of the text, invisibly, lie the lives of the authors.

Michael Holroyd30:20

And if you are able to

Michael Holroyd30:23

enrich the text by seeing something of the lives and something of the origin of the work, without reducing it. Then you will gain more from the work. But in the end a work of biography should itself be a work of art, an add a parallel work.

Presenter30:41

And the subject should be dead, you're saying, because it it does become has become, again in the second half of the twentieth century, rather a predatory business, hasn't it? You you know, you you do hear biographers of all kinds lining up, as it were, as somebody looks to be nearing their end to see if they can get in there.

Michael Holroyd30:57

Very much. The circling vultures. This I think is the second great age of uh biography. The first is Boswell and Johnson's time, I suppose. Um and I think that uh

Presenter30:59

Hmm.

Michael Holroyd31:08

As then, so now it is an unweeded garden, very fertile, with a great deal of appalling things growing, and some wonderful things at the same time. So who, as they say, are you doing next?

Presenter31:18

Yeah.

Michael Holroyd31:18

Yeah.

Michael Holroyd31:20

I'm not absolutely certain. I've got an idea of uh doing one of Rotin's models, a woman. Uh I've always liked writing about women. Um she's an unknown person, and it will be a portraited miniature.

Presenter31:33

Less of a marathon.

Michael Holroyd31:34

Exactly.

Presenter31:36

Record number seven.

Michael Holroyd31:36

My seventh record is something from Sati's Genopides. This is a Sati I came across quite late in life, and I was much taken with his very touching ingenuity and his beautiful humour. I um I really love his music.

Presenter32:54

Jean Pierre Armongo playing Sati's Gymnopody No. One.

Presenter32:59

Can you imagine yourself on a desert island, Michael?

Michael Holroyd33:02

With difficulty.

Michael Holroyd33:04

with difficulty. But I can imagine the sand and the amiable sun and um

Michael Holroyd33:11

all the best aspects of it.

Presenter33:12

And having lived alone for so long, I presume you can cook and look after yourself a bit.

Michael Holroyd33:16

That's very presumptuous of you. I am hopeless at cooking and I need what assistance I can get looking after myself increasingly, I think.

Presenter33:17

That is it.

Presenter33:26

And you've never danced because of that early embarrassment uh of your mother, might you?

Michael Holroyd33:31

Dance. That's a very good thing. Perhaps that will be my opportunity to lose one or two of these records.

Presenter33:31

Dance by the light of the moon

Presenter33:37

On the edge of the sand. And and and will you dwell?

Presenter33:41

Much on death? Do you dwell much on death?

Michael Holroyd33:44

No, I don't particularly think of that. I don't I hope, um, speaking as a Vice President of the Euthanasia Society, that I don't have to go through an awful long drawn out process. That I'm very much against.

Presenter33:58

Last record.

Michael Holroyd34:00

My last record is well, in fact, the last movement of Beethoven's last string quartet. It's something I've always loved. Must it be? It must be. It's both sad and exhilarating.

Presenter35:15

The Brodsky Quartet playing the last movement of Beethoven's last string quartet, number sixteen in F Opus one three five. If you could only take one of these eight records, which one would it be?

Michael Holroyd35:25

I think it has to be the Beethoven.

Presenter35:28

And what about your book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Michael Holroyd35:31

I'd like to take a book called The High Hill of the Muses, which is an anthology of English literature from Chaucer to the beginning of the twentieth century, compiled by Hugh Kingsmill, which was my introduction to literature, my guide, and still retains this magic for me.

Presenter35:47

And what about your luxury?

Michael Holroyd35:49

My luxury would be a bed.

Michael Holroyd35:52

I think if it was a desert island perhaps I could ask for a water bed.

Presenter35:57

Why not? Michael Holroyd, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Michael Holroyd36:01

Thank you.

Speaker 136:18

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