Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin0:00

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.

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The programme was originally broadcast in the year two thousand, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

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My Castaway this week is a writer. Her work has matured with her life, from clever Cambridge graduate through motherhood and a highly successful journalistic career, to her position today as the respected author of literary and historical biography. All this has been accompanied by personal tragedy. Two of her children died and her first husband was killed in the Yom Kippur War.

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Her work has triumphed. Her first book about the eighteenth century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft won a Whitbread Prize, and more prizes and literary acclaim have come with subsequent ones. Writing books, she says, is mostly sweat, pain, and panic. You sink down into the mud until you feel you know enough to start. She is Claire Tomelin. So where's the fun, Clare? Where's the excitement that redeems the toil?

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Well, the fun is the research. A book starts because you're curious about something and you you want to explore it and you set off on this journey and um it's very often a journey in England because England is full of old papers. People living in houses in various distant parts of the country with boxes of old papers under their beds. You're you're like a detective. And I had one wonderful incident when I

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tracked very, very carefully, and finally thought there might be some letters in some remote part of the country, and wrote

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and got a letter saying if I cared to to visit them I could sit in the estate office and read them. You're not saying who this is about? No, I'm not allowed to say who this is about because um

Claire Tomalin2:04

This is about

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I promised I wouldn't.

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And you will see why. I sat in the Estate Office, and then a message came to me that there was a member of the family, an elderly lady, in, as it were, one of the turrets of the house, who was confined to her room, and who herself was interested in writing and history, and who would like to talk to me.

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And so I was taken up to her, and she looked at me and said, Ask to see the pictures.

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And I was led into some vast building and through many doors and into a completely dark room.

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And the lights are switched on, and I look round, and there were amazing paintings of your subjects including two of my subjects, but a lot of other a lot of other wonderful paintings too.

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And they agreed that I could have a one I wanted photographed, but they said I must never say where it was. Uh uh quite understandably, because people go with vans nowadays and and

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And burgle, don't they? But but one also therefore is made to think about Nellie Ternan, whom you wrote about, who was Dickens' mistress, the invisible woman. Because sh because she was his mistress, a lot of the evidence was destroyed by the families, wasn't it? It was incriminating because it was such a scandal. Well, just about all the evidence. I mean, in fact, not a single letter has survived between Dickens and Nellie Turnan. I would say between Dickens and the Turnan family. But long after the book was published last year,

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A letter came to light from Dickens to Nelly Turn's mother. And that was a very pleasant moment for me, because there is still sort of opposition to the idea that the great Charles Dickens and he is a great man and a great writer, should have had an affair with this little girl who was so much younger than him. Who was so much younger than him and so much lower than well, she had been an actress, her mother was an actress, her sisters were actresses.

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First record

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This is my mother's setting of Yeats's poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

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And she was living in London.

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Um and one of the things I think about it now is that it does express a yearning. Uh Yeats is talking about being in London, on the pavements grey, and wishing he were out of London.

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And it came about that finally my mother moved not to a lake isle, but to Willingarden City. But also the Lake Isle is a metaphor for getting away from all the demands and constraints of life into the world of your imagination, which my mother needed to do, which I need to do, which makes people who are trying to write music or words into solitaries.

Speaker 44:55

Yeah.

Claire Tomalin4:55

It's all agree.

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Evening the fold of the linnets green

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I will arise and go now, for always night and day, I hear lake water lapping With low sounds by the shore.

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While I stand on the roadway

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All of the pavements grave.

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I hear it in the body.

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Uh

Claire Tomalin5:49

Keep hearts quick.

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Richard Lloyd Morgan, accompanied by Bill Lloyd, singing Lake Isle of Innisfree, Yates's poem, Set to Music, by my Castaway's mother, Muriel Herbert. So, Claire Tomlin, music obviously very much part of your childhood. Did she go on composing when you were born? Do you remember her as a child at the piano?

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Yes, I remember her very well. I think having two children put a great break on her um composing.

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She composed much less, but she did she did go on.

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Um

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And indeed, I mean, we used to sing, my sister and she and I would sing together all the time. But you've talked about the solitariness that was necessary for composition of whether it's music or words. And you've talked before about your your your mother having this inner life, uh uh retreating as it were to the the citadel inside herself.

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So that real life and the children and, you know, daily throng couldn't get at her. That's you, is it, as well? That's where you go. You go somewhere else.

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Yes, forcibly. I go to a library or to my study or or I become obsessed with my subject. And it is a problem for women, I think. I mean, people have talked a great deal about problems of working mothers.

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When my children were small, I had jobs which allowed me to be with them a certain amount. I worked in publishing as a reader.

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But I'm a very bad working grandmother now. I'd love to spend more time with my grandchildren. But I have to protect my working time very much. But you mentioned when you were when your own children were very young, and I do have again this image reading things that you've written or listening to things that you've said, of you washing soggy nappies. I'm wondering if this was it. Is this all life had to offer? Well, I went with enormous enthusiasm into a very young marriage. I was twenty two and uh Nick was twenty three when we got married and we'd met at Cambridge.

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And at Cambridge one was a sort of starry girl because there were so few girls, so if you had anything, you were a star.

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And you got married, and suddenly you had dropped out of the world, and you were washing nappies. Do you think?

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That's why eventually, because you'd had this awful shock of being submerged into domesticity, that that when you did find work it became hugely important to you.

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Yes, it was very important to me, um, in itself, because I like working. I have a Protestant work ethic.

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And also my marriage was in quite bad trouble and um

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I needed another world.

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Nick was a bolter, you know. Nick was a bolter. He was absolutely charming, very good looking, and

Claire Tomalin8:29

Nick was a bolter even.

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Deeply lovable man. But we had married very young. He was working in journalism. He was surrounded by pretty girls and he loved pretty girls. And, um

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I think he thought he had a sort of right to them. He didn't think I had a right to anything except marriage and babies, really. But, um.

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It did seem a rather unequal situation to me. So work somehow became your refuge, really, from all of that. Yes, and my excitement. Not just a refuge. I mean, it was positively. It developed, yes, but but you you said something which I think um some people, and perhaps me among them, would find quite shocking. You said, My work is, I would say, just about as important to me as the love of my family.

Claire Tomalin9:02

Yes.

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It developed it, yes, but

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That's true.

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I think most people who produce something like a book or a

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String quartet or?

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Television programme, radio programme.

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have to feel that. You don't work for fun, really. The fun you may have fun while you're working, but you work out of some other compulsion. Yes, you may love your work, but to say that it's on a par with the love of your family seems to me to be a very large thing to say. You may lose all your family, but you don't lose your work.

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You may lose your work, but as long as your family goes on existing, what does it matter? But you don't lose your work. My mother's song is still there. She's dead, but her song is there.

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Tell me about your second record.

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The Marriage of Figaro, the greatest opera ever written. It's written at the time of the French Revolution. It tells us about how

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Wit and

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Brains are more important than class and rank. In this opera, Figaro and Susanna defeat the Count, and this is absolutely marvellous. And it's also a feminist opera, and it speaks to me a little. I used to think that my dear husband Nick was rather like the Count in the Marriage of Figaro.

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charming, terrific man, but very much with double standards. And when you see in Figaro Figaro the servant, Susannah also the servant, and the Countess, the abandoned, deceived wife, making their alliance

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Uh it is absolutely terrific.

Claire Tomalin11:35

Praise the spirit of spirit in love.

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Yeah.

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Graziella Schutti and Sena Urinat singing the duet between Susanna and the Countess from Act three of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro with the Gleinborn Festival Orchestra conducted by Vittorio Guy.

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You were obviously quite a a difficult child, Claire. You became very rebellious in your teens. What was that all about? Doesn't everyone become rebellious in their teens? But more so than your sister, I think.

Claire Tomalin12:24

But Moses

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Yes, my sister was the good one. She was head girl and and so on. And it was difficult. My father was away in America with the United Nations and my parents were divorced and it was difficult for my mother.

Claire Tomalin12:36

Yeah.

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Anyhow, it was sort of decided that I should um leave my very, very good girls' grammar school and go to Dartington. But Dartington Hall very progressive.

Claire Tomalin12:44

But does it

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For me it was like heaven because

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All the children were very tolerant, uh and as soon as I got there all these sort of rebellious feelings just disappeared. And you were put in early for the Cambridge exam. Yes, I was put in for a trial run.

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And I got in.

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I got in, I think, because we only put in for Cambridge.

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And when I went for my interview, um, well, everybody said, Well, Mr Lavnay, we see you haven't applied for Oxford.

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I was sixteen, I said.

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But one doesn't want to go to Oxford, does one?

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I think on that basis I got into Cambridge. And do you remember the call coming? Was it a telephone call, telegram? What happened? It was a telegram. I was with my mother.

Claire Tomalin13:24

Ready?

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The telegram came. I think don't think you ever forget that ma'am.

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Record number three.

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Bach Goldberg Variations, perhaps the piece of music I listen to more than any other.

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There is something so

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in a way abstract about it is like a piece of abstract sculpture.

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You start with a small piece, and then there are thirty variations, and Bach branches out into more and more extraordinary shapes and forms.

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and takes you on this journey through the variations.

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I was thinking about it.

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The other day, I was thinking it's a bit like biography, that biography starts from the shape of one human life.

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or perhaps male and female lives are different two shapes. And

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Each one then turns out to be completely different, as different as as Bach's variations in the Goldberg, with extraordinary patterns and surprises.

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Glenn Gould playing the twentieth and part of the twenty-first of Bach's Goldberg variations. Can we talk a little bit more, Clara, about your first husband, Nick, who, um, as you've explained was pathologically unfaithful. But he always came back, and people will say, why did she have him back when he behaved so outrageously? And he went off for months, didn't he?

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Yes, but he did love his children and.

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He did he did love me. Um and I had a great belief, I suppose, in the family life.

Claire Tomalin15:55

I see.

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It's very hard when you look back to know exactly what your reasons are for doing things, but I think overwhelmingly I thought, um, somehow the family mattered more than the relationship between him and me.

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I'm not sure.

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if he'd lived, whether that would have gone on being so. But in between times in all of this, you know, you you'd lost one child, hadn't you, who died when he was one month old. Yes, he was born. And then you had a second son who was born with spina bifida.

Claire Tomalin16:31

Yes, it was bad.

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It's such an enormous amount to bear. Di again, where was the release valve? Did you write about it?

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Well, I know, I was writing children's book reviews, the sort of things you got you got given if you were a young mother and you were jolly grateful for it. And then I was writing publishers' reports because I worked in publishing, and then I began to think, well, I might as well be in journalism. Instead of just writing private reports for my bosses in publishing, I might as well write bigger reviews. I thought you wrote a motoring column at the time. Yes, yes. I was woman at the wheel. Yes. Catherine Whitehorn, who'd been at Newnham before me, at Cambridge before me, got me that job. And I did write this fairly absurd column. I didn't last very long. What was different about women at the wheel as opposed to men at the wheel? Well, I think we were so I took it that we were supposed to write about the special problems of women, so I would write things like

Claire Tomalin17:05

Uh

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How you drive yourself to a dance, and you I said you sit on lots of crumpled up tissue paper to keep your dress from getting crushed.

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How you entertained your children in the car. Women's driving topics. But then came 1973. Nick had come back.

Claire Tomalin17:44

Yeah.

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Yes. Um, and then he went to the Middle East on an assignment. That's right, yes. And he was killed.

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Um, in the most cruel way, he was um in the Golan Heights and he was turning round the car. He was with a group of um other journalists, and the car was hit by a heat-guided missile.

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and he nobody came to him except um the photographer, Don McCullen, who was not with him, heard he was somewhere near by, and with extraordinary courage he went there.

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got out of his car and he ran to Nick's body to see if he was alive or dead, and this I shall never forget. It was so brave of him. He picked up Nick's glasses, with one of the eyes blown out.

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He saw that Nick was dead, and he said at that moment he became terrified.

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Record number four.

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Ella Fitzgerald, one of the great, great voices of the century, Cole Porter, one of the great writers of lyrics and of music.

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And in the still of the night is I thought of having one of his light, witty songs, but this song is raw emotion.

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It's about that awful moment at three in the morning when you look out and you see that yellow moon in the sky and all your fears come to the surface.

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And it made me think of a whole line of English poems about the moon. I mean, Philip Sidney uh thou sad steps, O moon thou climbst the skies and

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poem of Larkins, which is called Sad Steps, which takes up this theme of seeing the moon in the night. And Philip Larkin has this terrific line in his poem about the moon, which he says it is a reminder of the strength and pain of being young.

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That it can't come again.

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but is for others undiminished somewhere.

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On the rim of the hill.

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In the chill still of the night

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Ella Fitzgerald and co porters in the still of the night.

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You obviously, Claire, you grieved for Nick, you mourned for him, and still do in many ways, I'm sure. But in another sense, I suppose if I were your biographer, I would read all about it and hear what you said, and argue that professionally it was the making of you.

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It must be said that I was I had just finished writing my first book when he was killed, and that he encouraged me to write it, that he left me this legacy, which I am acutely aware of, that he said, I think you should try and write this book on Mary Wollstonecraft.

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And he was killed really just as I

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Finished writing it.

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Yes, well, we all mourned and grieved, but it is true that I then had my youth. What do you mean? Well, I mean that I was then free, and I had a job, and and a marvellous job, at the New Statesman. I was literary editor of The New Statesman, I was commissioning articles I could

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I telephone any clever woman or man in the country and ask them to write something for The New Statesman. And because my book came out and I was very lucky, the book sort of hit a sort of feminist wave. I think it was about Mary Wollstonecraft. And so I was tremendously lucky with the reception of the book. So how were you treated by all these brilliant young men, again glittering talent that surrounded you at The New Statesman, Martin Amis, James Fenton, Craig Rain, all not very much known then at all? Oh, well I was extremely fortunate to work with people like that and I think we had a lot of fun. We enjoyed ourselves. You must have been very competitive, quite difficult. Yes, they are all competitive people because they're all very cle they're very, very clever, very brilliant writers. But it was extremely enjoyable.

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Record number five.

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Martin Jarvis reading one of my husband Michael Frain's columns, and it's about just trying to set off from the house and how one always finds one has forgotten something. Michael wrote a film called Clockwise, which also describes a man who has immense difficulty in getting from place to place.

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And this is rather true of Michael. I mean, I think one of the first times we went away together he was taking me to Berlin for the weekend and we set off for Heathrow. And when we got to Heathrow we found we should be have been at Gatwick. And this is not the only time it has happened.

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Now, have I got everything? Shoulder-bag with my various bits and pieces in? Yes, on my shoulder. I think that's all I need, isn't it? I'm only going to Tunbridge Wells. I'm only going to be away for two or three hours. Oh, a keys, of course. Not still lying on the hall table, are they, as has been known to happen occasionally in the past. No, here in my hand, just where they ought to be. Very satisfying. I do believe that for once I'm setting out in reasonably good time for something. I'm going to catch the train without any hurry at all. So just set the burglar alarm, and I can.

Speaker 423:22

Oh, hold on. Uh better check. I've got some money in my pocket. I did pick up my wallet.

Speaker 423:27

Yes, I did. And my little organizer thing, and my penknife. I don't want to find myself in Tunbridge Wells for two hours without a penknife. Yes, everything's under control. Oh, have I closed the bathroom window?

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Ready, steady, no, one of Michael Frayne's columns read by Martin Jarvis. Tell me, Claire Tomlin, about being literary editor of the Sunday Times, which you became, I think, in the late seventies. You had a great time under Harry Evans. Like being at the court of Louis XIV, you said. Explain. I think in any organisation, when somebody has supreme power, people do tend to be in love with the person. In love in a fairly broad sense. And I think Harry had that charisma. So everybody, that's why he was such a good editor. Everybody wanted to do well for him. You all wanted to be his favourites. We wanted to be his favourites. And he had that marvellous gift of when he spoke to you, you were right there in front of him. He concentrated entirely on you, and you felt that somehow he saw something in you that no one else saw. And then, of course, he walked away and you'd be forgotten. But he would write to my contributors if he liked a piece. He he really paid a lot of attention. He took a lot of notice. And you didn't feel the same about Andrew Neill, who came a bit later on. Well, a very able man, Andrew Neill. But I felt his certainly his view of the literary pages was rather different from mine.

Claire Tomalin24:14

Bam.

Claire Tomalin24:36

Yeah.

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He told me that he thought books were a sunset industry, and I felt I was always fighting for books really. And I would say, Yes, but books power everything else. All the things you think are sunrise industries take their meat from books. Didn't Rupert Murdoch defend uh you against him? This is my story. I mean, we were on the stone, that means we're in old-fashioned printing, and I saw Murdoch standing with Neil, and I was looking at my pages, and um.

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And Neil was always going on about how I had too much grey matter on my pages, meaning r written words, and he wanted all uh beefed up. And I think I heard Murdoch saying, Oh, leave the book pages alone, nobody reads them anyhow and I decided that that was a sort of defence, that it was all right to have this little enclave of old-fashioned culture in the paper. But in the end, you left. In the end, you you couldn't take it.

Claire Tomalin25:46

Well, I

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I knew I was going to have to leave because I wasn't able to write books while I was doing that job. And then whopping came and the the the sort of change of the whole structure sometimes and it seemed to me a good time. I didn't want to go to whopping, fortress whopping. I um I wanted out. So I left.

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Record number six. I chose Death and the Maiden with some difficulty, um and pain.

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Not just because it's such a great piece of music.

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Because I was thinking of my daughter who died young. My daughter Susannah, named after Susannah in the marriage of Figaro, who was

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a very brilliant and lovely girl.

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And when people die young, they tend not to get talked about after they've died.

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And I wanted to talk about her, and I wanted to say something about her.

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Um, Death and the Maiden, I suppose, is a very obvious way of approaching her. I think the pain never goes away when you see somebody who is absolutely exceptional, who has died young.

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Music allows you in some way to live with pain, I think, because

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Even if you cry while you're listening to it, it contain it is a contained thing, the piece of music, and during the course of the music you live through that pain and then the music comes to an end. Schubert, we all know, writes about

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the joy of life and the constant presence of death and therefore he speaks to us ver at a very, very deep level, and I think allows us to live with pain.

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The Lindsay String Quartet playing the opening of Schubert's String Quartet No. fourteen in D minor, Death and the Maiden.

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The question that that that all biographers must be asked would you hate it if someone wrote your biography? Michael, my husband says that nobody likes to be written about. I think it's quite true. I think you don't want to think that someone else is summing you up.

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Um

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All I can say is about trying to write other people's biographies, I would never write about somebody still alive or even somebody recently alive. I think the distancing of history does make it a little less intrusive, a little less impertinent. And I always feel

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are fond of my subjects so that I

Claire Tomalin29:13

Say

Presenter29:15

I hope I write about them with sympathy. But, nevertheless, as we know, you know, one can read about somebody and draw all sorts of threads together and arrive at conclusions which, in the end, although perfectly logical, are a distortion of the truth. And that's the great problem with geography, isn't it? Yes, it is. That is absolutely true. I think.

Claire Tomalin29:30

Yeah.

Presenter29:35

Tone, as in all writing, is very important, and I think one says one does one's best. I mean, I remember being asked by someone on BBC Television before I'd started writing about Jane Austen why I thought she w how she'd become a genius, and my answer was I don't know, which was duly put out in the television program. I think you do have to say sometimes I don't know.

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But you can nevertheless set them in a context which which I think is is fair and you can uh present them in some way.

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Within the world they live in. Record number seven.

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I've chosen Derek Jacoby reading from the Iliad for several reasons, and one is because Michael and I

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listened to this recording when we were on holiday in Greece, and the bit I've chosen is when Achilles, after his friend Patroclus has been killed, he's finally agreed that he will go back into battle.

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He dons his armour, and he's getting into his chariot with his two horses.

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and one of the horses speaks to him.

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and tells him that he is going to be killed.

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And Achilles answers

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Well, I know I am going to be killed. I know that this is fated.

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So it is an eerie moment, but an extraordinary moment, and

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Of course, not at all realistic, and yet it seems to me this is the way one feels in life. Sometimes you know something is going to happen, and this is how it is.

Speaker 331:12

Yes.

Speaker 331:13

We will save your life, this time too, master, mighty Achilles.

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But the day of death already hovers near

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And we are not to blame.

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But a great God he is, and the strong force of Fate.

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Our team could race with a rush of the west wind, the strongest, swiftest blast on earth, men say.

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Still you are doomed to die by force, Achilles.

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Cut down by a deathless god and mortal man.

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He said no more.

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The Furies struck him dumb.

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But the fiery runner Achilles burst out in anger.

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Why Rhone Beauty?

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Why prophesy my doom?

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Don't waste your breath.

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I know, well I know, I am destined to die here, far from my dear father, far from mother. But all the same I will never stop.

Speaker 332:06

Till I drive the Trojans to their bloody fill of war.

Presenter32:11

Derek Jacoby, reading from the end of book nineteen of Homer's Iliad. And so, um, we prepare to send you off to the desert island, Clare, although it does seem to me, hearing about your life, that you know quite a bit about desert islands in one form or another. I think if I have books and music, that will keep me fairly happy on a desert island, though I would naturally prefer to have um my family too. What about your family? Now you're a grandmother. What of your two surviving daughters and your son? Do any of them write?

Presenter32:41

My eldest daughter is a mathematician and she teaches she has a very big social conference. She teaches in a college of further education in Sheffield. She's absolutely wonderful. She worked for two years in Mozambique. I'm very proud of her.

Presenter32:54

My youngest daughter is an engineer, so they've gone in other directions. Turned away from you and your turn. And are they musical?

Claire Tomalin32:58

Stand away from from you and your turn.

Presenter33:02

Um yes. Uh

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Joe um has really learnt to play the piano quite well.

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uh later in life. But my granddaughter Rosa is the real musician.

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She plays the piano, she plays the recorder, she plays the violin, and she's now.

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Playing the oboe.

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And we have given her Nick's oboe, her grandfather, whom she never knew. She has got his oboe and we've had it reconditioned.

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And I must say I find that very satisfying. I love the shapes and patterns of life, as you can probably tell, and I find it deeply pleasing that my granddaughter should play her grandfather's instrument.

Presenter33:43

And indeed that here it is in your last piece of music, hmm?

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Here it is in the Haydn, and that is really partly why I chose it. I chose it because it's a joyful piece of music.

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and Haydn wrote it when he was sixty, a Sinfonia Consertante for violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon.

Presenter35:00

Part of Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante for violin, cello, oboe, bassoon, and orchestra, with the Chamber Orchestra of the Saar conducted by Karl Ristenbart.

Presenter35:10

So, Claire, if you could only take one of those eight records, I think this is the hardest choice of all records.

Presenter35:16

I take the marriage of Figure out.

Presenter35:18

And um you've got, as you know, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. Which book would you take?

Presenter35:24

Well, I think I take the complete diaries of Samuel Pepys. Now, it's true that I'm working on the book about Pepys, but.

Presenter35:33

They do give you ten years in the life of a young man of twenty seven between sixteen sixty and sixteen seventy.

Presenter35:41

and they are the nearest thing to entering into the life of some one else I have ever read.

Presenter35:48

I feel if I'd read them when I was young I would have understood men much better, because he was all man. And what about your luxury? Well, my luxury. Like everyone, I hesitated. I thought

Presenter35:59

Shall I ask for a London taxi? Because something I really like is driving through London in a taxi. Or shall I ask for my husband? That would be a great luxury to have Michael with me. You're not allowed him. I'm not allowed him. And you could have a taxi that doesn't move over here.

Claire Tomalin36:08

You Muslim.

Presenter36:12

So what I settled for was a garden.

Presenter36:15

Now it might be difficult to make a garden on a desert island, but that would be the point, because to make a garden is it involves all the things that you need to be using, hard work, muscle power, imagination, and a lot of hope and a lot of disappointment. So it's a very, very good emblem for life. But when you do get a few things to grow, you've made a a little paradise for yourself.

Presenter36:38

Claire Tomlin, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.

Claire Tomalin36:49

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