James Ellroy

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My Castaway This Week is the writer James Elroy.

Presenter0:37

A colossus of crime fiction, his bestsellers include White Jazz, LA Confidential, The Black Dahlia and American Tabloid.

Presenter0:46

Yet the crime that's obsessed and defined him remains unsolved. His mother was murdered when he was ten.

Presenter0:52

After her death his life veered onto a new trajectory. He said I lived to read, brood, peep, stalk, skulk, and fantasize.

Presenter1:03

There was always a voracious appetite for literature, even throughout the years of drug abuse and prison, he nursed private thoughts of becoming a great author.

Presenter1:12

He says his mother's murder absolutely defined my life. I wouldn't be what I am to day without that murder and I hope that in mercilessly exploiting it, with pit bull tenacity, I have honoured my mother's memory. You tell us so much in that, quote James Elroy, and you spare us nothing.

Presenter1:32

Do you think people are sometimes taken aback by your honesty?

James Ellroy1:36

Pit bulls are wonderful animals that by and large like human beings, and I have that kind of tenacity, but I like people, and I have the ability to exploit misfortune.

Presenter1:49

People are scared by pit bulls though, maybe even though they shouldn't be.

James Ellroy1:53

It's absolutely true.

Presenter1:55

Um do you think you're right? Do you think your mother would feel honoured by what you've done? Do you think she would be proud of your writing career?

James Ellroy2:01

I don't know if she would like specifically what I wrote about her because I was quite candid.

James Ellroy2:08

But she might have felt the honour that people feel quite often when you accurately portray their life.

Presenter2:17

You say that you're a person built for obsessiveness. Well what are you obsessive about?

James Ellroy2:24

The work that I do.

James Ellroy2:26

classical music, which I'm sure we'll discuss today.

Presenter2:31

Um, does that make you someba I mean, workaholic's a glib little phrase, but does that make you a difficult person to live with? Do you think your obsession with work?

James Ellroy2:40

I'm not much of a cohabitator, I'm a damn-good obsessor.

Presenter2:46

And many would say a damn good writer. Do you think you have to be obsessive to write the sort of books that that you write? I mean, they're they're low down and dirty. Do you shine the light where most people don't even want to know life exists?

James Ellroy2:58

Yes, but they're suffused with redemption and salvation, and bad men in love with strong women, and they're densely packed with American history, and they're exultant in the end.

Presenter3:13

So you would say you're optimistic in what you write?

James Ellroy3:16

Uh

Presenter3:16

Yes. Romantic?

James Ellroy3:18

I am the most romantic guy who ever lived, which is why the music I've chosen is all from the Romantic composers.

Presenter3:27

As we will find out. There's a definite theme here, as people will realise by the end of the eight tracks. T tell me a little about the first piece of music that we're going to hear today and why you've chosen it.

James Ellroy3:37

It is the beginning of Beethoven's third symphony, the arroga, the two hammer blows that begin it.

James Ellroy3:46

Are the revolutionary announcement of the romantic era?

James Ellroy3:52

Nothing that came before it.

James Ellroy3:55

Was this dark, this deep, this heroic, this large?

James Ellroy4:04

This important

James Ellroy4:07

This passionate.

Presenter5:01

The opening of Beethoven's third symphony, The Eroica, played by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karrihan. I carry my thoughts about with me for a long time before writing them down. I turn my ideas into tones that resound, roar, and rage, until at last they stand before me in the form of notes. Now I'm sure that you recognise that as Beethoven, I think, that seems to chime with the creative life that you have led.

Speaker 25:22

Uh

James Ellroy5:22

Um

Speaker 25:22

Uh

James Ellroy5:26

Yes, yes. My favorite Beethoven quote, and it's the epigraph for the Hillaker Curse.

James Ellroy5:34

is I will take Fate by the Throat.

James Ellroy5:38

which is what Beethoven said when he began to go deaf.

Presenter5:41

What is it about Beethoven that that speaks to you, that is so important to you?

James Ellroy5:45

He is the voice of God. He is the most unfathomable genius ever created by civilization. Sometimes

James Ellroy5:56

I think there is only him and me.

James Ellroy6:00

And that he speaks to me personally.

James Ellroy6:03

Beethoven was always writing for his immortal beloved.

James Ellroy6:08

Quite often when some one asks me why do you write, I quote Doan Thomas's poem in my Arder Sullen Craft, and one day I had no energy to recite it, and some one said, Why do you write? and I said so women will love me.

Presenter6:25

Okay.

James Ellroy6:26

Beethoven knew that.

Presenter6:27

But does it help?

Presenter6:29

Do you think it works?

James Ellroy6:30

Writing?

Presenter6:31

So his women will love you?

James Ellroy6:33

I finally met the woman.

James Ellroy6:36

I'd met a few in the interim, but they were wrong.

James Ellroy6:40

It's taken me a long time. I never said I was smart. I just said I was persistent.

James Ellroy6:48

That will prevent

Presenter6:49

Fail in the end. We might talk a little more about the woman and indeed. The love that you've found later. But first of all, let's understand a little bit about where you came from. 1948, Los Angeles.

Presenter6:59

That's where and when you were born. Tell me a little bit about the early days of of home life, when your mother and father were still together.

Speaker 27:01

Uh

James Ellroy7:01

Come on.

James Ellroy7:06

She was a good looking red haired nurse from Wisconsin. He was a hunky and Homeric hung drifter from Lynn, Mass. They were a great looking cheap couple like Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum. My parents hatched me in a cool locale, L A, the Film Noir Epicenter, at the height of the Film Noir era.

Presenter7:29

You say that your parents are a good looking cheap couple, which is a a wonderfully descriptive and beautifully turned phrase, but it it seems they were so much more than that, too. I mean, these were people they were both educated people, they were people who between them spoke a number of languages.

Presenter7:44

What?

Presenter7:45

What went wrong? Because it seemed like they were two people who did not fulfil their potential, even as young adults.

James Ellroy7:53

She liked bourbon and cheap men.

Presenter7:56

Right.

James Ellroy7:56

He liked women. A lot of people get married that shouldn't.

Presenter8:02

So she would nurse a bourbon at home.

James Ellroy8:04

She would nurse suburban and brood.

Presenter8:07

So much of of um what you've written about in terms of your background in your home life is clearly, profoundly unhappy. But as a little boy, did you have a lot of friends? Did you have people over to play? Did you go and play in other people's yards?

James Ellroy8:22

Very rarely. I talk to animals a lot.

Presenter8:26

And were you aware of the rumbling unhappiness between your parents? Was it something that was lived out in front of you? I'm profoundly aware. Right.

James Ellroy8:31

Profoundly aware. Right. Yes. They were an acrimonious couple. They had each other's number.

James Ellroy8:40

She knew that he was weak, slothful, fanciful, and duplicitous he knew that she was alcoholic and promiscuous. They couldn't quite let each other go. Then she got tired of his antics and pulled the plug first.

Presenter8:58

Tell me about your second piece of music today, then, James. What have you chosen?

James Ellroy9:01

The fiord like

James Ellroy9:04

Icy, distanced romance of Jean Sebelius' one violin concerto. Listen to it. It is the essence of romanticism and chill.

Presenter10:08

Itzak Parman playing the beginning of the first movement of Sebelis' violin concerto in D minor with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrei Preven. James Elroy, how old were you when you first thought of writing?

James Ellroy10:23

Eight or nine years old I figured my destiny was to become a novelist. It took me twenty one years to get around to it.

Presenter10:32

When you were eight or nine, then, I I have a picture of somebody

Presenter10:36

who was living quite a solitary life, a life in his head, where there was an unhappy home, and you were sort of did did you was it where you retreated to inside your head and the thought of writing books?

James Ellroy10:47

I wanted to do well, surpassingly well, at what I most loved to enjoy, which was read.

Presenter10:55

Right.

Presenter10:57

And did your mother and and and your father encourage you to read

James Ellroy11:01

They were both big readers. My father taught me to read when I was three.

Presenter11:04

Okay. Oh, so you are a you are a very smart little boy.

James Ellroy11:08

It wasn't that I was smart, it was that I could read damn young. I was a great big kid with poor social skills, a very dim social sense, very little awareness of the world around me. But I was a disciplined thinker, and it is something that has aided me immeasurably in my life as a writer. I can sustain concentration, I can lay in a dark room and think.

Presenter11:36

Do you find plotting easy, then, the thing that so so many novelists say they find extraordinarily

James Ellroy11:39

So any number

James Ellroy11:41

I love to plot. I write by hand, then I send it out to be typed.

Presenter11:46

Is it right you don't own a computer, you don't own a cell phone?

James Ellroy11:49

No cell phone, no computer.

Presenter11:50

Why?

James Ellroy11:52

I deliberately isolate myself from the culture so that I might more efficaciously live in my head past periods of American history in order to recreate them better for my readers. I don't go to the store, I don't go to the dry cleaners, I don't go to movies or watch television.

Presenter12:14

Ever

Presenter12:17

Do you like feeling that different? I mean, most of these things are the things that are the sort of tent pegs that sort of support most people's lives these days, doing all those things.

James Ellroy12:25

I like to brood.

James Ellroy12:28

I like to think. I like to lie in the dark and do absolutely nothing.

Presenter12:35

Fair enough. Tell me about your next piece of music.

James Ellroy12:38

A part of

James Ellroy12:40

The third movement of Beethoven's magnificent and largest piano sonata, the twenty ninth, the Homer Clavier, it creates

James Ellroy12:51

the Romantic Piano Movement. It predicts syncopation, ragtime, and jazz, and Beethoven wrote it Stone Daph in eighteen sixteen.

Presenter13:58

Emil Gillel's playing part of the third movement of Beethoven's piano sonata number twenty nine in B flat major.

Presenter14:05

So, James Elroy, you were you six when your parents divorced?

Presenter14:10

And they did the thing that every parent who divorces now is told absolutely not to do, which was to attempt to um denigrate the other parent in front of you. They both said very mean things about each other.

James Ellroy14:21

They did, yes, they did.

Presenter14:21

Yeah.

Presenter14:23

Did you side with one or the other?

James Ellroy14:24

I sided with my father against my mother.

James Ellroy14:28

Years later on he revealed himself to be everything she said he was.

Presenter14:35

How did you learn about her death?

James Ellroy14:38

I came back from the weekend with my dad on the fateful Sunday afternoon of June 22nd, 1958.

James Ellroy14:46

I saw cops in the front yard of our house, police cars. I knew immediately that she was dead.

James Ellroy14:54

Policeman

James Ellroy14:56

Kneeled down to my kid's eyes and said, Son, your mother's been killed.

Presenter15:03

Did you understand at that point that she'd been murdered, or did you think it was an an act?

James Ellroy15:06

He told me immediately after.

Presenter15:08

Okay.

James Ellroy15:09

Yes.

Presenter15:10

Can you recall what went through your head at that point?

James Ellroy15:14

I was relieved.

James Ellroy15:17

I hated my mother and lusted for her at the time of her death, and at the time of her death my one desire was to live with my stupid, permissive father and get my own way.

James Ellroy15:31

So my bereavement was complex and ambiguous, and I have spent half a century in a dress of my mother's memory, writing about her.

Presenter15:44

And so it launched you your mother's murder launched you on this I described it as a sort of trajectory, a path that was riven with it seems to me so much unhappiness, certainly a lot of very self-destructive behaviour. Tell me about the beginnings of that as a teenager.

James Ellroy16:05

I used to peep, I used to

James Ellroy16:08

I lived on the edge of a very ritzy neighborhood named Hancock Park.

James Ellroy16:14

And my dad and I never had dime one. We had an unhouse broken dog. I would walk the dog late at night from our crummy little shack and look in windows and purve out on prep school girls, and I always liked their mothers more than the girls themselves. And I was always a

James Ellroy16:38

emotionally hungry, sex crazed, little kid with crazy notions of art, always looking for my own internal truth.

Presenter16:47

You said I was the poster boy for the If You Can't Love Me, Notice Me chapter in all child psychology textbooks.

James Ellroy16:53

I would do any antic to get attention. I was a big, geeky, strange kid, so, since I wasn't an athlete socially adept a good student,

James Ellroy17:07

In order to get attention, I joined the American Nazi Party. Right. And I got a lot of attention.

Presenter17:13

I bet.

James Ellroy17:13

And I got my ass kicked quite a quite a few times.

Presenter17:16

You were eventually expelled from school.

James Ellroy17:18

I was eventually expelled from Scotland.

Presenter17:19

Okay, so what did you do? I mean, were you delighted to be expelled? Was that?

James Ellroy17:22

I was thrilled to be expelled from school and I wanted a girlfriend, so I joined the army. My father became grievously ill and died while I was in the army, so I came back to L A and went about my merry path.

Presenter17:37

Yes, more of the Merry Path in just a moment. You're not even twenty yet at this point in the story, I I should remind

James Ellroy17:41

No, and I'm so out of it that I listen to classical music and not rock and roll.

Presenter17:47

Blink, tell me about the next piece of music then. What are we listening to next?

James Ellroy17:50

We are now listening to the

James Ellroy17:53

Beautiful elegaic.

James Ellroy17:56

Tribute to the death of Rickard Wagner, written by Anton Bruckner, the second movement of his seventh symphony.

Presenter19:05

The opening of the second movement of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, played by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Eugene Jochem. So you've taken us James Elroy very neatly, although you're still only you're just sort of nudging twenty, to a point in your life when you were

Presenter19:20

Out of the armed forces and back again living in LA. And this was a time in the, would that be the mate, the sort of mid to late 60s, when a lot of people your age.

Presenter19:28

were uh you know wearing tie-dye and growing their hair and smoking a lot of pot. You were in Ivy League threads, you were I mean, you didn't look like a typical twenty-year-old, it doesn't sound like

James Ellroy19:39

I was bombed out of my gourd, but I had short hair, yes.

Presenter19:42

On Benzedrex inhalers, though, not on Benzadz.

James Ellroy19:44

Benzedrex inhalers were little cotton wads. I got them at the drugstore.

Presenter19:50

And they came in cheap, what were they, sixty nine cents a pop?

James Ellroy19:52

Sixty nine cents a pop with the Coca-Cola and you'd fly for twelve or fourteen hours.

Presenter19:52

Sixty nine

Presenter19:58

Okay. Did you know you weren't well?

James Ellroy19:59

Uh

James Ellroy20:01

I knew that I had certain problems and was not exactly living the life of most of my peers, but my inward journey was so compelling.

Speaker 220:15

Right.

James Ellroy20:15

My mind was so attuned to fantasy, my health had

James Ellroy20:22

failed to deteriorate yet, that I found this horrifyingly self destructive lifestyle sustainable, because I was so driven

James Ellroy20:33

By inward thought.

James Ellroy20:36

and by the notion of becoming a great writer,

James Ellroy20:40

And all my crazy ideas of women.

Presenter20:42

So through all of this you were still thinking about writing, where you I imagine you were unable to actually do any writing.

James Ellroy20:49

I never did any writing.

Presenter20:51

I thought about it continually. So by the late sixties then?

Presenter20:55

Homeless, profoundly addicted to drugs.

Presenter20:58

And then you did get very ill.

James Ellroy21:01

Yeah, I had a lung abscess on my left lung the size of a big man's fist. Quit drinking, quit using drugs, cleaned up.

James Ellroy21:10

Started writing books.

Presenter21:11

It w it couldn't possibly have been as simple as you make it sound to I mean that.

James Ellroy21:14

Well, I had read and read and read and read and read and read and read and I just had it.

Presenter21:21

I'm thinking about the cleaning up bit, actually. I mean, people struggle with addictions for many, many years, and you were profoundly addicted, and as you say, you've been tripping for, you know, twelve, fourteen hours at a time. How did you stop?

James Ellroy21:33

It was the extremity of my addiction and the imminence of death that more than anything else simply scared me sober.

Presenter21:38

Right, go.

James Ellroy21:43

I turned almost overnight from a self-destructive buffoon to a highly disciplined.

James Ellroy21:50

Meticulous creative force, and before you knew it I was writing books.

Presenter21:56

Okay, so much to talk about, let's get some music in, tell me what's next.

James Ellroy22:00

Ah Quartetto Italiano

James Ellroy22:03

Playing

James Ellroy22:05

Beethoven's Grossfugue.

James Ellroy22:09

There is nothing like the Grossa fugue nothing sounds like it nothing is as discordant, as beautiful, no string quartet is as revolutionary. Beethoven wrote this near the end of his life.

Presenter23:22

The Quartetto Italiano playing part of Beethoven's Grosser Fuga. Um this is clearly an oversimplification, but but I w I wonder if it was almost sort of transferring the the power of your behaviour and the power of the addictions to something else, the p the power of being addicted to forming a piece of of work.

James Ellroy23:37

Absolutely correct. I only go at things obsessively. I love to fight. I hate to lose. I don't care if I get hurt. And I never give up.

Presenter23:52

Right, so it was marshalling those innate characteristics into a force that was much more positive, rather than the Benzadex inhalers and

James Ellroy23:59

Right. The superhuman persistence that led me to almost kill myself assumed a more positive form.

Presenter24:04

Yeah.

Presenter24:06

Your first book then came when you were thirty, Brown's Requiem. Do you remember holding the proof copy in your hand for the first time? Do you remember what that how that

James Ellroy24:14

Yeah, I was caddying at a country club in Los Angeles and I I fatuously thought that they gave you a lot of money for a first novel and I was grossly mistaken. How much did they give you? Three thousand five hundred scoots. I bought a junk car, paid my back rent, took my girlfriend away from the weekend and had five bucks left for a hamburger at the end of the day.

Presenter24:37

But three and a half thousand dollars, I mean that's a lot of caddying. You said you were working as a caddy. It must have been a

James Ellroy24:41

It must have that was that was good. That was good bread. I've never had that much bread in my life before.

Presenter24:45

Okay. How long did you keep caddying at the golf clubs in in uh

James Ellroy24:49

I caddied up through the sale of my sixth novel, yeah.

Presenter24:49

I can

Presenter24:54

How extraordinary. How did that life feel to live? On the one hand, creating what you felt to be these important pieces of work and what were clearly selling, and on the other hand, having to

Presenter25:06

Put somebody's clubs on your back and do it.

James Ellroy25:08

I was grateful to be published. A slow, slow, slow build in readers was occurring.

James Ellroy25:16

And I had to earn a living. It was a gas.

Presenter25:18

Did you think about writing while you were walking around the courses? Is that what you're right? So that's what that was your time?

James Ellroy25:21

That was right.

Presenter25:24

Okay. Um so you've sold millions upon millions of books. You've been translated into thirty languages. You were described in the New York Times as the author of some of the most powerful crime novels ever written. Do i is that enough for you, the obsessive character who has superhuman qualities?

James Ellroy25:44

I want to write a memoir of my life with women, which will be published next year. It's finished.

James Ellroy25:52

This is the one that's going to be called The Hilliker Curse, isn't it? The Hilliker Curse. That's correct, yes. Then an even larger quartet of books set.

Presenter25:55

They have

James Ellroy26:02

in an even earlier decade in twentieth century America. So the older I get, the more ambitious my creative designs become.

Presenter26:13

James Elroy and his women coming up in just a second after this piece of music. Then, tell me about your next piece of music, what have you chosen?

James Ellroy26:20

The beginning of the first movement of Anton Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, The Romantic. It's the Berlin Philharmonic, again conducted by Eugen Joachim, and the magnificent beginning of this symphony.

Presenter27:33

The beginning of the first movement of Gruppner's Fourth Symphony, The Romantic, played by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Eugen Jochem. When we were talking um earlier, James Elroy, you said that your work and maybe your life, I'm not sure if you said your life, were defined by heroics and redemption, by men in love with strong women.

James Ellroy27:52

Yes, so women will love me. That's why I do everything that I do.

Presenter27:58

There there can be a great danger and certainly disappointment in having a view of women as

Presenter28:07

Elevated creatures on a pedestal. Are you one of one of those men?

James Ellroy28:11

I'm very discerning.

Presenter28:13

Right.

James Ellroy28:13

Right. It's as if

James Ellroy28:15

I have always wanted to know who she.

James Ellroy28:20

My mother was.

James Ellroy28:23

I look for women with her attributes.

James Ellroy28:28

Who have overcome

James Ellroy28:30

Her demons.

Presenter28:33

And so your mother defining all the relationships you ever have with women seems that's not an overstatement, is it, you would say?

James Ellroy28:42

She's the pointer. It's as if a highly attuned hound.

James Ellroy28:50

with perpetually cocked ears, is always walking out in front of me, leading me.

Presenter28:58

How compromised do the women that you fall in love with and have relationships feel?

Presenter29:04

by the thought that your relationship with with any woman is being defined by this unfulfilled relationship with your murdered mother.

James Ellroy29:14

The odd thing is I have met the final woman in my life.

James Ellroy29:21

I've always spent time laying in the dark conjuring women.

James Ellroy29:26

This woman, whose name is Erika.

James Ellroy29:29

has conjured me with considerable more force than I conjured her.

James Ellroy29:36

And it took us two and a half years to realize fully the mutuality and to get together in the flesh.

Presenter29:46

That so intriguing phrase has conjured you. Can can you explain it to me, unpack it a little bit, and tell me what you mean by that?

James Ellroy29:52

I met Erika at a book fair in Los Angeles in April of 07.

James Ellroy29:58

Erika thought to herself at the time, I'm the only woman on this earth woman enough for him.

James Ellroy30:06

I'm thinking.

James Ellroy30:07

Man, that is one big good lookin' woman. So we went looking for each other at parties, and we spent a lot of time separately thinking of each other,

James Ellroy30:21

Events interceded six months ago.

James Ellroy30:24

And here we are.

Presenter30:26

Tell me how Erika looks, can you describe her to me?

James Ellroy30:28

Eric is forty five years old.

James Ellroy30:31

Erika has reddish blonde hair.

James Ellroy30:34

Is five foot ten inches tall.

James Ellroy30:38

And is

James Ellroy30:41

Stern featured.

James Ellroy30:43

With her looks undercut by a brilliant and funny humanity.

Presenter30:48

Let's have some music for now. Tell me what our next piece of music is then.

James Ellroy30:52

The beginning

James Ellroy30:54

Of yet another late Beethoven string quartet.

James Ellroy31:00

The one thirty one in E flat, again performed by Quartetto Italiana.

Presenter32:03

That was the opening of the first movement of Beethoven's string quartet in E flat, performed by Quartetto Italiano. You were describing then at the are you sixty, sixty one now? Sixty one?

James Ellroy32:13

Sixteen one, yeah.

Presenter32:14

This moment that you've reached, a moment of uh well, probably as close to perfection as any of us get, you feel you've met the woman that you will be with until your dying day. I mean, you could have a good thirty years yet, but it's quite late in your life to meet to meet the person you always want to be with. Do you fear death?

James Ellroy32:31

I will finish my life's work, and I will exist. I'm a Christian, I believe in heaven, I believe in heavenly reunions with loved ones, but I am in no great hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil, because it's such a groove.

Presenter32:49

Um tell me a little bit about your faith then. You you you say you you're you're a Christian. Do you think then that your mother will be waiting there for you to at last embrace?

James Ellroy32:59

I think she may take me to task for having exploited the misfortune of her death, but I'm sure we'll work it out in the end.

Presenter33:01

Cat.

Presenter33:09

But I mean quite genuinely, do do you feel that that will be a moment when you will reach the peace that you've always sought?

Presenter33:16

Do you talk to your mother?

James Ellroy33:19

Occasionally.

Presenter33:20

Right.

Presenter33:23

Is that is that more difficult than comforting?

James Ellroy33:23

Is that

James Ellroy33:28

I talk to her when I feel especially candid.

James Ellroy33:32

or when I feel a new level of awe pertaining to her and her presence and importance in my life.

Presenter33:42

I touched on the fact that certainly I have found in in reading your work the honesty almost sometimes unbearable. I'm wondering what

Presenter33:50

What part of yourself you keep?

Presenter33:53

To yourself. Are there many, many things that we don't understand and know about James Elroy from his writing? Are there all sorts of things that you choose not to reveal?

James Ellroy34:04

I've revealed a great deal of myself.

James Ellroy34:08

to the world intellectually.

James Ellroy34:11

There are emotions that I withhold, the expression of emotion that I withhold.

James Ellroy34:20

For a very few people.

Presenter34:23

And, although twice married, you've never had children. Would you like to have children?

James Ellroy34:28

I went through a big period of wanting to have a daughter. It didn't pan out.

James Ellroy34:34

But Erika has two daughters.

Presenter34:37

Ah.

Presenter34:38

And how did you get along with them?

Presenter34:42

You'll be alone on the island then. I I was thinking originally, because you say you don't have a cellphone and you don't use a computer, you don't have a television, that you'd be absolutely fine. Of course you won't, because you'll be without Erika, without her daughters. How will you what will it be? An internal dialogue again, I suppose?

James Ellroy34:56

Yeah.

James Ellroy35:00

It will be a continual internal dialogue, a great deal of prayer to get to get off the island.

Presenter35:08

Okay.

James Ellroy35:08

Okay.

James Ellroy35:11

I will have discs, won't I, eight of them.

Presenter35:14

Yeah well, you know.

Presenter35:15

What do you think?

Presenter35:17

The worst moment of your life has been.

James Ellroy35:21

It would be.

James Ellroy35:23

The heart of my self-abnegation and drug addiction in the early mid-nineteen seventies.

Presenter35:30

And the best

James Ellroy35:32

Past few months have been transcendent.

Presenter35:35

That seems a good point at which to introduce your final piece of music then. Tell me about your your eighth disc, James Elroy.

James Ellroy35:42

The concluding disc is the beginning of

James Ellroy35:46

What can I say the most magnificent piece of music ever written the Ninth Symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven the Berlin Philharmonic, again conducted by Herbert von Carion.

Presenter36:55

That was the beginning of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, played by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Kerrigan. So, James Elroy, we come to the point where you're about to be marooned on the island, and I'm going to give you a copy of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can choose a book of your own to take. What would you like to take?

James Ellroy37:13

Libra by Don DeLillo His meditation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which was the inspiration for my Underworld U SA trilogy.

Presenter37:24

Okay, well that's your book then again.

James Ellroy37:25

And get awesome.

Presenter37:28

At least make life alone on the island a little bit more bearable. What we

James Ellroy37:31

Sun block.

Presenter37:35

Especially for the head, there's that a lot of

James Ellroy37:36

For my bald head.

Presenter37:38

And if you had to choose just one of these eight tracks, which one track would it be?

James Ellroy37:44

It would be the slow movement Gillel's playing, the slow movement of the hummer clavier.

Presenter37:49

Okay, it's yours. James Elroy, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

James Ellroy37:53

What a great pleasure.

Presenter39:08

You've been listening to a download from the BBC.

Presenter39:11

You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4