Robert McCrum

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

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a publisher and author. Brought up in exalted academic circles, his father was Headmaster of Eton and later Master of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, he performed as expected and got a first class degree. Talent continued to accompany him. He clearly understood other people's. As a publisher, he signed up authors such as Peter Carey, Garrison Keeler and Milan Kundere, and demonstrated his own writing successful thrillers such as In a Secret State and making an ambitious BBC documentary series, The Story of English.

Presenter1:03

Then five years ago, at the age of forty two, he suffered a major stroke.

Presenter1:08

His next book was very different from the ones that went before. Called My Year Off, he told the story of his journey back to ordinary life from the paralyzing crisis which changed him and his world forever. I'm improved, he says. Not much, but improved. He is Robert McCrum. What does that mean, Robert, that you're a nicer person than you used to be?

Robert McCrum1:30

I think I'm more tolerant. Um I hope so. I think I was unaware, really, of disadvantage before, certainly in f in physical terms. And I think that m I was living life at such a pace that I was missing out on all kinds of nuances. And I think that the effect of being very seriously ill

Robert McCrum1:49

Tuned me into the world of pain.

Presenter1:51

The perceived view of you um is of course that you were leading this charmed life, that you were one of the brightest stars in in literary London, and then suddenly you were you were cut down. Were you really

Presenter2:04

Were you really as dismissive and arrogant as they said you were before?

Robert McCrum2:08

I think that's to do with the fact that I got this job at Faber and Faber at a very young age. I was twenty-five and did it for twenty years or thereabouts. And I came into a company which had rather lost its way, frankly. And it needed to have leadership and clarity. And leadership and clarity really means being rather arrogant about saying what's right and what's wrong, what's good and bad, and the rest of it. And one had to be dismissive, because it seemed to me that the most important decisions that you made were probably the ones where you said no rather than said yes. And so I think I was quite...

Speaker 32:43

Yeah.

Robert McCrum2:47

Keen to establish the list as a very strong, good list.

Presenter2:50

But to be reduced, therefore, by a stroke to the physical indignities, the psychological frustrations of as you say, having been this editor, having chosen some of the brightest authors in the land suddenly to be reduced to pushing plastic letters around a board like a child.

Presenter3:08

must simply make you a different person. I mean it must be just life changing in the largest sense.

Robert McCrum3:13

It was a colossal, it was a terrible shock and it was an extraordinary experience. And it made me aware of what I'm sure is very of w of something which many people are aware of, which is, you know, we live in our bodies and it's something which w which which women know very well, but I think it's not so familiar to men. And um it made me aware of the very thin line between

Robert McCrum3:38

being active and alert and alive, and really being

Robert McCrum3:41

An incontinent vegetable, which is what what I rarely was.

Presenter3:43

So

Presenter3:45

And as a result of writing about it, you've become, as you've put it, a a lightning conductor for that thunderstorm of physical calamity.

Presenter3:54

What form does that take? Everybody now writes to you?

Robert McCrum3:56

Everybody now

Robert McCrum3:58

I wrote the book because when I was in hospital I was desperate to know more about I was in a terrible state and I was desperate to know more about my condition and I couldn't get any information out of the doctors and I couldn't find a book which would tell me how I was going to be in a year's time, or two years' time and so forth. And stroke happens an awful lot, happens probably during the course of this interview, probably to about ten people in Britain. And of those ten, one-third will die. I mean it's a very, very serious affliction. And I've now become, as you said, a lightning inductor for people who want to explore these issues. And I get letters every single day. Yeah.

Speaker 24:37

Mm.

Robert McCrum4:37

There's one which I find very upsetting even even to recall, which is from a woman in Wales whose daughter Veronica died of a stroke about two years ago. And the letters generally start, they st they tend to say, Dear Mr McCram, I read your book, blah, blah, blah, I liked it, you know, you spoke to me, or whatever. And um then the second paragraph is always their story, which is always far worse than mine. And this one described

Robert McCrum5:01

The experience of a twenty-five-year-old girl who had.

Robert McCrum5:05

Had leukaemia.

Robert McCrum5:07

Then suffered as a consequence of the leukemia, and ultimately died of pneumonia.

Robert McCrum5:14

And the third paragraph begins, Now we are in hell. It's the most moving thing I've ever ever come across, actually.

Presenter5:21

Mm.

Presenter5:22

Tell me about your first record.

Robert McCrum5:25

I'm a writer who wants to pay tribute to an English master. When I was at Sherbourne School, I was taught English by Lionel Bruce, and he wasn't a particularly charismatic man. He wasn't particularly sort of famous teachers, but he had a great love for the English language and for the English literary tradition. And he played Britain's Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings to us, and it contains a rendering of Blake's The Sick Rose.

Robert McCrum6:06

Yeah. Yeah. Uh Is able one that blind

Speaker 36:11

Rise in the night.

Speaker 36:15

In an awful

Robert McCrum6:20

Uh

Speaker 26:22

Uh

Robert McCrum6:22

Yeah.

Speaker 26:22

A five bed of crimson joy.

Speaker 26:31

And he's gone.

Speaker 26:39

Love.

Speaker 26:45

Yeah.

Presenter6:56

Peter Pears singing the elegy from Benjamin Britton's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, with Dennis Brain playing the horn, and the Boyd Neal String Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britton, and that was recorded in nineteen forty four. Benjamin Britton, an East Anglian musician.

Robert McCrum7:10

East Anglia is I chose it partly'cause I grew up in Cambridge and um I love East Anglia and if I think of anywhere as home it's East Anglia.

Presenter7:17

You've written that you were um as a boy put in for, as you call it, the English upper middle class handicap. Describe the race to me. What's the course?

Robert McCrum7:27

It's a pretty short course.

Presenter7:30

Not a hurdle, so

Robert McCrum7:31

With a lot of hurdles. I was born my my father was an academic. He was the senior tutor of Corpus Grace College, Cambridge. My mother was the daughter of the headmaster of Rugby School. So I was born into the upper middle class educated establishment essentially. And children in the fifties and children of that sort were sent to prep school, to public school, and ultimately to university. And so there were three big fences to close. The the common entrance fence, the public school scholarship fence, and finally the Oxbridge entrance fence. And everything was geared to that, really.

Presenter8:07

Hm, but the the hazards also included terrible misery at these boarding schools.

Robert McCrum8:11

I think so, yes, yes. I went sent away to school at the age of nine. I've discovered subsequently that my mother was against this, but in those days, you know, it was what you did. And I was one of the older boys. I can remember quite well lying in the dormitory of the prep school I was sent to, Horace Hill, and listening to seven and eight-year-olds around me with their teddy bears crying themselves asleep. This was a a world of cold baths, beatings, no change of clothes, um not seeing your parents for twelve weeks at a stretch, a lot of physical violence, bullying. It was a very, very tough it's like actually it was more like being in prison than anything else, in hindsight.

Presenter8:50

And all the time there was this pressure, this pressure to be upfront in the race, clearing the hurdles with great ease.

Robert McCrum8:56

That is with great ease.

Presenter8:57

How much was that pressure coming from without, or was it from within you?

Robert McCrum9:03

I think it came from within. I think I'm quite driven, and I want you know, I'm I'm quite a perfectionist, and I want to and I want to win.

Robert McCrum9:11

Whether that is I think for a long time I wanted to please my m please my parents, my father particularly, and to live up to his very high standards. I think now that that's that's faded somewhat, but I think it was a very powerful impulse all through my early years.

Presenter9:26

Tell me about your second record.

Robert McCrum9:29

My second record is um Bill Haley, Rock Around the Clock. I've mentioned my parents, I mean, they were young parents. My mother was in her early twenties when I was born, which now seems incredibly young to me. And they used to have parties in their house for the undergraduates and for their friends. And I can remember lying in bed upstairs in our house in Cambridge, listening to this music floating up from down below. And it seems to me to express the energy of the fifties and the and the and the sense of life returning to normal thus that's after the after the great deprivations of the war.

Robert McCrum10:00

1, 2, 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock, rock. 5, 6, 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock, rock. 9, 10, 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock, rock. We're gonna rock around. 10 o'clock tonight. What flag flags up? Join me hot. Having some fun when the clock strikes one. We're gonna rock around.

Speaker 310:19

Uh

Robert McCrum10:19

Uh

Speaker 310:20

Uh

Robert McCrum10:20

But they're like, oh no, no, no, I'm all around the fly.

Robert McCrum10:27

Five strikes blue

Presenter10:30

Little Haley and Rock Around the Clock and boyhood memories for you, Robert McCrum, of life in Cambridge.

Robert McCrum10:35

Hmm.

Presenter10:35

You obviously lived at quite a sophisticated li you said, I think, that in a sense the family lived above its station, because you're always in these beautiful houses.

Robert McCrum10:43

We always did live at our station, yes. We didn't have any money, I don't think, much. And um but my father, having been at Cambridge, then went on to become headmaster of Tunbridge School and then Eton, and we always ke we always had tied tied houses. And these were quite grand built you know, with butlers and servants and big rooms and dining rooms.

Presenter10:59

But you also would have been, therefore, quite socially adept as a boy, perhaps.

Robert McCrum11:04

Yes, I was exposed to meeting adults you know, um, academics and s s people who vi famous people visiting the s visiting the school or the or the university.

Presenter11:14

But your father

Presenter11:16

Was the headmaster? Obviously, you didn't go to his schools, but you would have mixed with the pupils who did. Was that quite compromising?

Robert McCrum11:24

Well, you always felt a little bit like a double agent.

Robert McCrum11:28

'Cause you were both of one side and of the other. You were both in the school, but also you were part of, as it were, the opposition. And as I would one w one would overhear conversations about how, you know, how he was this, that or the other. And that was quite upsetting. Well, they rubbish him to be. Oh yes, quite yes, I mean they'd say, Oh my go you know, my your father used to beat me, all that kind of stuff. That still happens occasionally, very occasionally.

Presenter11:41

Yeah

Speaker 211:43

Uh

Presenter11:48

Let's

Presenter11:50

Yes. So you were always crossing that divide between childhood and adulthood as w as it were. I mean, again, that's kind of had an echo later in life, hasn't it?

Robert McCrum11:58

Doesn't it?

Robert McCrum12:00

I think I've always led a kind of double life. I was working as a publisher and I was writing books at the same time, and I'm now I've I mean, funnily enough now that I'm at the Observer, the two parts of my life have come much more closely together. I'm I'm both a literary edit editor and a journalist and a writer, so that's much more of a focus than it's been for a long time.

Presenter12:19

But as a boy you were writing. I mean, in in all of this, both in the happiness and in the sadness, you were writing, weren't you?

Robert McCrum12:25

I was. Um.

Robert McCrum12:27

I can't really explain it except that I think that

Robert McCrum12:31

I must have been unh unhappy at school and certainly lonely, and I think that one of the things that one does in that situation is one retreats into a it run one retreats into a fantasy world.

Robert McCrum12:40

And you tell stories to yourself. I think I began to tell myself stories at quite an early age.

Presenter12:45

Tell me about your next piece of music.

Robert McCrum12:47

I also, like a lot of boys of my background, was made to learn the piano. And the height of my piano learning experience was I mastered the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I'm not going to choose that, because that'd be too corny. But I've come to love Beethoven's piano music, and I also love Beethoven. And it seems to me if I can't take a symphony or the Mrs. Solemnis, I if I can't take an oil painting, at least I can take a sketch. And so I want to choose another piano sonata, which is number seventeen.

Presenter14:20

Wilhelm Kempf, playing part of the third movement of Beethoven's piano sonata number seventeen in D minor, The Tempest. So um you got your degree, Robert, and you decided to to cut loose from this upper middle class handicap. You know, years rolled on a bit, but you started life in in a publishing house and quickly discovered you were good at spotting writing talent.

Robert McCrum14:31

It's upper middle class handicap, you know.

Presenter14:40

Is it a knack? Does it happen quickly? How do you do it?

Robert McCrum14:44

It's it's w it's a it's a very odd thing. I mean, there are s I've got a friend in Ireland who can spot horse flesh. And it's you can't explain you know, he look he can look at a horse and he'll say, That one will do well in the derby, that one will do you know, he can really spot them. And I've got this nag.

Presenter14:57

But is it a nose? Is it a

Robert McCrum14:59

It's an instinct. With me, I g I just I can re I can f I feel it physically at the back of my neck. It's very strange. I mean I really feel it.

Presenter15:05

It's very good.

Robert McCrum15:07

I think this is just I mean, I remember the first time I o you mentioned Garrison Keelaw in your in in your in your introduction.

Robert McCrum15:13

He's not a great writer actually, but he's a very, very good one, and he hadn't been published over here.

Robert McCrum15:19

And I read that and I thought this is extraordinary.

Presenter15:21

Lake Wobegon.

Robert McCrum15:21

Lake Wobegon. Um and the same happened with Paul Auster, um same happened with Peter Carey, Kazuhigu. I mean, a really a really good writer will grab you, as it were, by the by the lapel and say, Listen to me, you know, pay attention.

Robert McCrum15:38

I'm going to hold your your your you know your imagination in the palm of my hand for the next two hundred pages.

Presenter15:45

But you must have backed some losers in your time as well, or you must have been.

Robert McCrum15:47

I have backed some great and I won't be speaking about those, you can be quite sure.

Presenter15:52

But if you overbid violently for people.

Robert McCrum15:52

Um

Robert McCrum15:56

I once overbid for again this is Garrison Keelor I late Webagon days which that beg became ultimately a huge bestseller.

Robert McCrum16:03

Was submitted to a number of publishers in London in 19, whatever it was, 85 or 84, 86. And I got it, and I never heard of this guy. Sat down to read it and was very struck by it. And I had this shiver-up-the-spine experience and thought, well, I must acquire this. And I thought everyone else will want to acquire this too. So I made a very rash bid. I forget what the figure was now, £10,000, which shows you how things have changed. But it was much more than we'd ever paid at that time for a work of fiction by an unknown. So I splashed out my advance, and thinking I would have to bid maybe up to twelve and a half to beat off Fierce Opposition. And then I discovered that nobody else had bid. And I didn't tell anybody. I just kept it to myself. And this is maybe going back to what we were saying at the beginning about arrogance. I just kept it to myself. And the book came out, and I twisted a few arms and got some reviews, and it all worked out. But it was a nervous moment.

Robert McCrum16:57

Next record. I went to America at the age of twenty one or thereabouts, and I'd never been much abroad, and suddenly I'm in this extraordinary country, and I sort of fell in love with it overnight. It was and I think people English people who go there, they either hate it or they love it. And if you love it, it's a very deep affair. And for me, um the

Robert McCrum17:16

composer who expresses that love affair is Gershwin. Um I I say that because in that year of being away in America I discovered American writing for the first time Twain, Hemingway, Updyke, Bellow and Woody Allen. And whenever I hear Gershwin I always think of Manhattan.

Presenter18:33

Andrei Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra playing the opening to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. You really had it made then in the eighties, Robert McCrum. Writing, publishing, some journalism. You you took a break sometimes and went to some of the world's nastier places in Cambodia, East Timor, I think.

Robert McCrum18:45

The wind was not

Robert McCrum18:47

East Timor, right? East Timor, yes.

Presenter18:48

Uh

Presenter18:49

For the Guardian, you just did a bit of journalism.

Robert McCrum18:52

I think I was I don't quite know why I did that actually, but I I I th looking back on it, I think I was I I was uneasy about the I felt as though I wasn't really in I wanted to see th the the sharp end of life, and I wanted to be exposed to risk and to danger and to see uh see the desperate parts of the world.

Presenter19:09

So it wasn't just that you were restless, it you were uneasy about what l living the good life.

Robert McCrum19:13

Well you know, I th I think I was living uh the life of of the editor-in-chief of Faber and Faber was incredibly luxurious, very privileged, very spoilt. I think I think I did feel spoilt.

Presenter19:23

Hmm

Robert McCrum19:23

And I wanted, as it were, to put on some jeans, get out of my suit.

Presenter19:27

Hmm.

Robert McCrum19:27

And rough it a bit.

Presenter19:28

You did that. You'd also been writing, I mean, both in in the eighties and later on in the nineties, you wrote th political thrills really from in a secret state. I mean, again, quite

Robert McCrum19:34

Yeah.

Presenter19:38

Left wing stuff for an establishment chap.

Robert McCrum19:39

For an establishment chap.

Robert McCrum19:42

I think I've always had a a a leftish.

Robert McCrum19:44

A slant to my um perception of the world, when I was at school in the late sixties, I was the only Maoist in Dorset.

Presenter19:54

There's a claim to fame.

Robert McCrum19:56

And I and I had my little Red Book and I believed passionately in the the sayings of Chairman Mao and I and two or three friends would would meet to discuss the the rev you know revolution in our time.

Presenter20:07

Close.

Robert McCrum20:08

And it still lingers a little bit.

Presenter20:10

So let's move on then to the mid nineties, and you were by then writing, I think, maybe your fifth novel called Um Suspicion.

Robert McCrum20:21

Yeah.

Presenter20:21

Um and it's

Presenter20:23

It's very bleak, it's very dark, isn't it? And and and the narrator is is a coroner.

Presenter20:28

Who says that he thought of himself as the angel of death. And this is the book that you were writing.

Robert McCrum20:35

This is the book which I was writ writing right up to the point at which I fell ill. And it reflects, I think, a dark period of my life. I hadn't yet when I began to write it, I hadn't uh the book begins describing a man living on his own, which is very I mean, I don't think the book is autobiographical, but it certainly reflects my mood at that time. I hadn't met Sarah, my wife.

Presenter20:38

Yeah.

Robert McCrum20:53

Um and I was living a solitary life in London.

Presenter20:57

In your early forties.

Robert McCrum20:57

In my early forties. Probably feeling a little sorry for myself, I s I suspect. And um the book reflects that mood. It's it's kind of hitchcocky and thriller is what it inte it what it intends to be.

Presenter21:07

But there's a lot of death in it. I mean, one just wonders whether there's a kind of premonition. I don't know.

Robert McCrum21:09

Just wonders whether it's a kind of

Robert McCrum21:11

I have thought about this a million times, I have no idea, but it is spooky, the extent to which.

Robert McCrum21:16

I describe myself in the book as the angel of death, the coroner. And then the next thing that happens is I'm have this very severe brush with death.

Presenter21:19

Uh

Presenter21:24

But there were other things going on as well. I mean, you you touched on your kind of dissatisfaction um with life, although everybody thought you know you were, as I say, bright and wonderful and successful and so on. But you've you've written since that um I'd reached a point in my professional life where I could almost literally not see my way forward.

Robert McCrum21:41

I think I I'd got this job as editor in chief of Faber at a very young age, and I'd done it for a long time. I I was frankly bored, essentially. I I mean I I felt as though I'd done it. I'd had this extraordinary experience of living through the literary explosion of the eighties. I'd had I'd had a ringside seat.

Robert McCrum22:00

Yeah, I mean, when they come to write the history of of English literature of the twentieth century, what happened in England during the Thatcher years will will always be it'll always be a a paragraph, a very and a very important one. It's the the the time wh when we saw the emergence of Salman Rushdie, Khazir Shikuru.

Robert McCrum22:18

Um Michael Andarchi, Vikram Said, you know, a whole range of writers from all over the world, many of whom are my friends, many of whom I've published, and when it was over, life lit was a little bit dull.

Speaker 222:21

You know

Presenter22:30

Let's pause there for record number five.

Robert McCrum22:33

Well I was born in 1953 and I I um bitterly regret I wa didn't really experience the sixties. And I I I grew up as a child in the sixties but I wasn't really I I belonged to that very short decade of the seventies. The seventies actually is a very sh it begins in 1973 and ends in 79. It's a very short decade. But I am of that kind of in-between generation. But nonetheless there's only one music for from that time, the greatest songwriter ever, Bob Dylan.

Speaker 323:01

And one day the axes failed So it drifted down to New Orleans where I lugged it with a B employee

Speaker 323:09

Uh

Presenter23:09

Working for a while on a fishing boat right outside of the Delacroix But all the while I was alone, the past was close behind

Presenter23:19

I've seen a lot of women, but she never escaped my mind, I just grew

Presenter23:26

Triangle of the blue

Presenter23:30

Bob Dylan and Tangled Up in Blue. So what happened, Robert, at the end of July, nineteen ninety five? What was the first you knew about not functioning properly?

Robert McCrum23:40

Well, I have gone out to dinner um with a very old friend from America.

Robert McCrum23:45

Actually, to talk about my disaffection with life generally, and to talk about what I might do in the future.

Robert McCrum23:51

And we had dinner and as the meal came to an end and we s got up to go, I was aware that my legs felt very heavy, as though they were kind of encased in lead, or I was walking through treacle. And I thought no more of it and went home. And I was alone in the house, and um I woke up the following morning and I was completely paralysed, couldn't move.

Robert McCrum24:15

And it was a very str it str it was very I mean, all I could move was my right arm and my right leg, but that was that but they were barely moving either. And overnight I'd suffered a hemorrhagic infart, a stroke.

Robert McCrum24:27

The brain

Robert McCrum24:29

Is all of you. It's your gestures, your character, your nature, your inflections, your body language, everything. It is who knew who you are. It res is held in this 1.4 kilograms of you in your head. And when you have a stroke, you have an earthquake in your head. And it's an extraordinary experience. It's not painful, but it's very, very disorienting. You're turned upside down, you're thread about, as it were. And you're also paralysed. I mean, paralyzed and incontinent, unable to speak, completely polax, actually.

Presenter25:03

How did you raise the alarm?

Robert McCrum25:05

So then, as I'm lying in bed I can hardly move.

Robert McCrum25:10

Um and there's a phone on the bedside table.

Robert McCrum25:13

And

Robert McCrum25:14

I think, well, I must try and ra I'd the other thing was I'd arranged to meet my parents that that morning, that was a Saturday morning, in Cambridge, where we where they live. And I thought, well, I must call my mum.

Robert McCrum25:25

And tell her I'm going to be a little bit late. I mean, th th this is the un the unreality of the whole thing was I just thought this is a a bit of a here's a fine thing. Um I can't move, but anyway, I have to get up I have to get up myself up and go go to Cambridge. Um so I rolled to the edge of the bed to try and get to the telephone. I fell out of bed onto the floor. I mean I was like Alice in Wonderland, you know, in the l reaching up the glass table. I can't reach the phone.

Speaker 225:47

I can't rem

Robert McCrum25:48

Because my right arm couldn't reach, my left arm is paralyzed, I'm on the floor.

Robert McCrum25:53

I'm I'm vomiting. I'm you know, all kinds of stuff is going on, which I which I've forgotten about, but uh apparently was happening. Um but I know there's a phone downstairs.

Robert McCrum26:04

I knew there was a phone on the floor downstairs, so I thought, well I I'll go down and I'll go I'll go down the stairs to the phone. So I crawl under the bed this takes hours and hours and hours crawl under the bed and then down the s down the down the stairs to the mezzanine landing, down the stairs again. And by the end of that Saturday afternoon, at about six o'clock, six thirty, I'd got myself downstairs to the phone.

Presenter26:26

Call day.

Robert McCrum26:27

Took all day.

Robert McCrum26:28

And interestingly I never thought of calling nine nine nine, I called my mother.

Presenter26:32

How much of a your phrase monster of dependency did you become?

Robert McCrum26:37

Well, I I mean, I became very dependent. I mean, yeah the awful thing about the stroke is it's it's a word which is accompanied by the words divorce, separation, unemployment, or you know, it it tends to bring in its wake a terrible catalogue of disaster, personal disaster for those who suffer strokes.

Speaker 226:46

Uh

Speaker 326:46

Uh

Speaker 226:46

Yeah.

Robert McCrum26:52

But I think in our case, in Sarah's my case, it was it was the making of us. It was a challenge which we had to rise to the occasion, and we did.

Presenter27:03

Echo number six

Robert McCrum27:05

When we were when Sarah and I were, as it were, courting, as they say, um she was living in America, in New York, and she's a true New Yorker. Um

Robert McCrum27:15

And I would fly over there to see her and we b we would spend whole days watching films. And one of the films that we saw was a marvellous film which we both loved, Clueless, which is um a remake in a sense of the Jane Austen novel Emma. It's set in California. And there's a song in in that which whenever I hear it brings back both that time, it brings back Sarah, it brings back America and it brings back the beginnings of our relationship.

Speaker 327:46

Silly things you've done to drive Don't you ever choose Don't ever choose

Presenter27:58

Never turn, never turn, never to change, never

Presenter28:11

The lightning seeds and change. How long did it take Robert to return to the real world, even if it was a different one from the one you'd inhabited before?

Robert McCrum28:20

Well, the odd thing is that in when I look back on my diary which I kept at the time,

Robert McCrum28:24

It was really only about six months. At the time, it seemed interminable. It just seemed like a life sentence. It seemed to go on and on and on, stretching out forever. But actually.

Robert McCrum28:33

I fell in in July twenty-ninth and really by the January the following year I was back at my desk. So, you know, it wasn't that long.

Presenter28:40

Yeah.

Presenter28:41

Although a different

Robert McCrum28:42

Different desk, um, and a different life and I wasn't really capable of doing it. But I was back in the wo you know, I was walking with a stick and life was very difficult. I mean, I think it I think the truth is it took me at least a year to get over the first effects, and it took me probably four or five years to get right through it. Which is where we are now.

Presenter28:42

Different.

Presenter28:57

Which is where we are now.

Robert McCrum29:01

Up to speed. I'm about 90% of my old self, I think.

Presenter29:03

What what is the ten percent that's missing?

Robert McCrum29:06

Well, it's things to do with. I might walk with a slight limp.

Robert McCrum29:11

The the stroke itself occurred in the basal ganglia in the brain and um I always had a slight stammer and I now find talking more difficult than I used to and I have a slight stutter um as a result of the affliction. Um and when I'm

Robert McCrum29:30

Talking in groups, I find it more difficult than I used to. I used to be quite articulate, and I feel less articulate than I used to.

Presenter29:35

It's uh frustrating, must be

Robert McCrum29:37

Sometimes it's very difficult.

Presenter29:44

But tell me, you you've obviously been brushed with death. You you've heard the the rumble of distant thunder.

Robert McCrum29:48

We've had

Robert McCrum29:50

I have heard the rumble of distant thunder.

Presenter29:52

Picnic. How does that change your attitude to death?

Robert McCrum29:57

It makes me less afraid of it. I think I'd always thought about it a lot, um, as some of my books have suggested. Uh it's I think I've always I've always seen the skull beneath the skin the the the worm in the heart of the rose, if you like, and um

Robert McCrum30:16

So and I feel as though I've got closer to it by being in this in extremis. And I've seen that it's.

Robert McCrum30:24

It's bearable in a sense. Um but it it but I think I'll always look on the world through the eyes of somebody who nearly died. And I think I'm very conscious of mortality and and and and and um decay and and I occasionally you know, I I sometimes feel a little bit like the the little boy in the sixth sense, you know, you can see bodies.

Presenter30:45

Extra call.

Robert McCrum30:50

In the course of my time at Favours I met many great men, but there was nobody greater in my mind than Ted Hughes, who has real majesty, real grandeur, and also tremendous humanity.

Robert McCrum31:00

When I was ill, he and his wife Carol came to visit me, and I thought this was a a gesture of such supreme generosity. And if I'm going to be on this island, away from the sound of English speech, I want to hear the speech of England as it might have been expressed in Shakespeare's day, or you know, I want to hear a different voice. Fear no more.

Speaker 231:22

or the heat of the sun.

Speaker 231:25

This is a song from Cymbeline by William Shakespeare.

Speaker 231:29

Fear no more the heat of the sun.

Speaker 231:32

Nor the furious winter's rages

Speaker 231:35

Thou thy worldly task hast done

Speaker 231:38

Whom art gone and tain thy wages.

Speaker 231:42

Golden lads and girls all must As chimney sweepers come to dust.

Speaker 231:49

Fear no more the frown of the great.

Speaker 231:52

Thou art past the tyrant's stroke.

Speaker 231:55

Care no more to clothe and eat.

Speaker 231:58

To thee the reed is as they owe.

Speaker 232:01

The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this and come to dust.

Speaker 232:08

Fear no more the lightning flash

Speaker 232:11

Nor the old dreaded thunder stone

Speaker 232:13

Fear not slander, censure, writhe

Speaker 232:17

Thou hast finished joy and more.

Speaker 232:21

All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee and come to dust

Presenter32:29

TED HUGES, reading from Shakespeare's Cymbeline. I know, um, Robert, that you lay in bed in hospital playing this desert island game. Did you decide where it was and what it looked like?

Robert McCrum32:39

Well I want this island to be um tropical. I've always wanted to live by the sea, and so I want it to have a nice beach. I want it to have a cave which is nice which is dry and sufficiently large for me to live in'cause I'm too lazy to make it make a make a shelter. Um and I want it to have some very, very elderly fertile chickens who will lay a lot of eggs and and then drop dead so I can eat eat ch eat chicken and fish from the sea presumably until I get myself off the island on the boat.

Presenter33:05

So you survive, you escape.

Robert McCrum33:07

I definitely plan to scheme.

Presenter33:09

Hmm.

Robert McCrum33:10

In some form. I don't know how I'll do this, but I'm gonna have a go.

Presenter33:13

And your music while you're there, again, it sustains you in hospital. It's obviously a very important part.

Robert McCrum33:17

It's obviously a very important part of the world. On the other hand, I would want to be reminded of my family and friends and my past. So I think I that this selection would reflect that.

Presenter33:39

Tell me about the last record.

Robert McCrum33:42

Well the last record is music which I think is both tremendously profound and also intensely erotic, and it's barks shallow suites.

Speaker 334:06

Uh

Speaker 334:12

Yeah.

Speaker 334:14

Yeah.

Speaker 334:31

Da da da da da da da da.

Presenter34:50

Paul Tortellier playing part of the Prelude to Bach's Cello Suite No. 3. If you could only take one of those eight records of it.

Robert McCrum34:57

Maybe th it w it would be the bark thing.

Presenter34:59

Yeah.

Robert McCrum34:59

Yeah.

Presenter34:59

Uh What about your book? You've got the Bible, you've got the complete works of Shiva.

Robert McCrum35:03

Which is in a sense all I need,'cause I think that's I think Shakespeare is is the combination of those two, the iron rations of the of the Bible and the corn Ucopia of Shakespeare is fine. But I think I'd want to be reminded of England.

Presenter35:04

Yeah.

Robert McCrum35:16

And I wanted to be I want I want a funny book, so I would take three men in a boat.

Presenter35:21

And what about your luxury?

Robert McCrum35:22

My luxury comes out of my recent experiences, and I would want to take some Hypericum, some Saint John's wart,'cause I think I might get a little bit depressed on there, and I would want to keep myself my spirits up, and Hypericum does that, keeps you cheery.

Presenter35:36

Robert McCrum, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Speaker 335:47

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