William Boyd

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:46

My castaway this week is the writer William Boyd. He's the award-winning author of 18 novels, 5 short story collections and numerous screenplays, which have made him one of Britain's most successful writers. He's made the genre of whole life novels pretty much his own, writing four of these cradle to grave narratives, including Any Human Heart, which became a BAFTA winning television series.

Presenter1:09

Perhaps he was always destined to become a writer. Growing up in the 1960s between the family home in West Africa, where his father worked as a doctor, and his Scottish boarding school, he developed what he's called the curious eye of the permanent visitor. His critically acclaimed breakthrough, A Good Man in Africa, drew on the world of his childhood, in Ghana and Nigeria.

Presenter1:30

His books combine broad historical sweeps with the intricacies of everyday life and interrogate what he calls the vast indifference of the universe. The role of luck, good and bad, also intrigues him, particularly how his characters deal with the forks in the road that go on to determine their destiny. He says, We are all walking on thin ice. It can crack at any time. I think if you do realize that, you go through life with a totally different point of view. It can be empowering. You have to relish the present. Do things now. William Boyd, welcome to Desert Island Disc.

William Boyd2:03

Thank you very much. Very happy to be here.

Presenter2:05

So William, you have been described as hard to classify as a writer because you have written so many different types of novels, a wide range of styles. How do you describe yourself, when people ask?

William Boyd2:16

Well, it's I could call myself a serious comic novelist. I I do see the world through a comic lens. It can be a dark lens, or darkly comic, or it can be absurdly comic. I don't see life as a tragedy. I see it as absurd, something to laugh at.

Presenter2:25

The document

Presenter2:34

And you often spend years researching before you actually put pen to paper. And then when you do that, you write your first draft in long hand. What kind of resources do you turn to when you're first thinking about a new novel?

William Boyd2:47

Well, I get the idea and then I start researching it and usually that involves buying masses of books, much to my wife's irritation, because we have a serious book storage problem. Yes, I mean, all sorts of things are helpful. I wrote this novel, a whole life novel, called Sweet Caress, which is a story of a woman's life, in fact, from the point of view of a woman photographer through the 1920s into the 1970s. And a friend of mine was standing at a bus stop in Southwark, and he noticed a scrap of paper on the ground. He picked it up. It was a photograph of a young woman in the 1920s wearing a bathing suit and standing in a pond somewhere. And he sent it to me, because he knew I was collecting anonymous photographs. And I used that as the frontispiece of Sweet Caress. And I said, this random woman who was found near a bus stop is my character.

Presenter3:37

So each book that you write generates what sounds like a mini library of its own, as you mentioned, much to much to your wife's displeasure. So tell me how extensive is this? How many have you got? And how many does each book create, if you say we want to?

William Boyd3:50

Well, I think I must have about ten thousand books in our house, and some of them are in boxes, because the books I buy for the individual novels in a way cease to be interesting once a novel is written. But you can't just chuck books on a skip, you know. You have to look after them and cherish them. But I'm not going to read the history of turnpike roads in the north of England in the nineteenth century again, but it was very useful at the time to cherry-pick a few facts out of.

Presenter4:16

Yeah.

Presenter4:21

You begin your novels with the ending in mind. Why do you write like that?

William Boyd4:26

I think I think the reason is simply fear of writers' block in a way, or else fear of abandoning a novel. A lot of writers start novels and they're not going well and they just stop them and put them in a drawer and wait to see if they can kick-start them again. But I've never abandoned a novel because of this method I have. And then I can write with confidence, not particularly quickly, but I know where I'm going and I have no excuse not to write more importantly. If I'm in the middle of chapter eleven and not feeling great that day, I've got no excuse. I have to buckle down and keep going. It's a doggy business. You need a lot of stamina to write a novel.

Presenter4:56

Yeah.

Presenter5:01

You can see the last page on the horizon. You've got to get yourself there.

William Boyd5:04

Yeah, and sometimes I actually write the last paragraph before I start on page one, because I know exactly the kind of tone I want to hit at the end, the right kind of catharsis I want the reader to experience. So let's get started.

Presenter5:16

Uh Yeah. Yeah.

William Boyd5:16

Yeah.

Presenter5:16

Your first choice, what's it gonna be?

William Boyd5:18

It's by Stephen Sondheim and this is from Sunday in the Park with George which is an extraordinary piece of work unique in musical theatre I think, a Seura painting coming to life in front of your eyes. And this is a song called Sunday and it's one of these songs that I think almost makes you not cry but brings tears to your eyes. There's something about the sequence of notes that has that effect.

Speaker 35:46

Purging close of dream

Presenter6:15

Sunday from Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, performed by Mandy Patinkin and the original Broadway cast. William Boyd, you were born in 1952 in Ghana, West Africa, which back then was a British colony known as the Gold Coast. Your father Sandy was a doctor who specialized in tropical medicine and he worked at one of the country's universities in Accra, the capital. He was Scottish from Fife, as was your mother Evelyn. How did they find life as expats?

William Boyd6:44

It was a rather idyllic life, to be honest, because you had a big house, you had lots of servants, of course, in those days. We had a cook, gardener. And the great thing about the British colonies in West Africa is they were totally integrated. There was absolutely no racial tension at all. We lived in a rather nice house on the edge of what's called Orchard Bush, which is sort of savannah. And I just wandered around and played games and had friends and get on my bike and go cycling off somewhere. No mobile phones. And my mother would say, make sure you're home by one, darling. And then as I got older and as we moved from Ghana to Nigeria and I became a teenager, I could walk through the centre of Ibadan, huge city in western Nigeria, at midnight. Can you imagine how exotic that was? Get the odd shout at me, you know, white boy or something like that, but completely unafraid and everybody really friendly. In fact, when I look back on it now, I realise how extraordinary that experience was.

Presenter7:47

And tell me a little bit more about your dad. Were the two of you close?

William Boyd7:51

Yes, we were close. He died very young. He died when he was fifty-eight. And I had been away at boarding school for at least ten years before he died. And so we didn't see that much of each other. But we got on very well. But he was a classic East Coast Scot in a way. And he always encouraged me to don't get married until you're thirty, always get a proper job with a decent pension. Always save one-sixth of your income. Advice I completely ignored. But my great regret is that he never saw my success as a writer, because he was highly dubious that I would ever make it in such a ridiculous profession. But I would love to have proved him wrong, but that wasn't to be.

Speaker 38:20

Nord.

Presenter8:34

As you mentioned, William, you moved from Ghana to Ibaden in Nigeria, where your father worked at a much bigger university and your mother became a French teacher there. Tell me about her. What was she like?

William Boyd8:47

Well, she lived to a ripe old age, my mum. She died at the age of 92. And she was a devoted mother and devoted wife. But because she was working in the university, and when me and my sisters, as it were, left home, she thought, what am I going to do? And so she did a degree in French and English, and then she ended up as a teacher of French in Nigerian schools, which she found incredibly satisfying. But she when my father died and we left Nigeria, she went to teach in a school in Switzerland, which was like a whole different chapter of her life. And she saw she sort of changed, you know, she became more sophisticated.

Presenter9:25

Is that one of your characters?

William Boyd9:27

She she became more sophisticated and European. But then in Switzerland you have to retire at sixty two if you're a woman, so she came back to Scotland and uh

Presenter9:36

And then stopped another chapter.

William Boyd9:38

That's that exactly. She became a sort of extramural student at the St Andrews University, going to courses and writing essays and so

Presenter9:46

So she wrote.

William Boyd9:47

She wrote novels which I've read which are incredibly sentimental and with absolute 100% guaranteed happy endings. So there's no sort of irony or darkness in her work, but they never got published. But maybe it's I get whatever my artistic side from her, because she grew up in a very interesting family. Her father was the editor of the Scottish Sunday Express, and two of her sisters became artists. And my cousins are artists and architects.

Speaker 19:57

But

William Boyd10:21

On the Smith side is where you find the art.

William Boyd10:24

On the Boyd side, they're all serious professionals, Scots, you know, with proper jobs, with a good pension.

Presenter10:31

It's time for disc number two, William. What have you chosen?

William Boyd10:34

It's Femi Kuti, who I think is a wonderful artist, but I saw his dad play, Fella Kouti. He came up to Ibaden to do a concert. This must have been the very late 60s, early 70s. And Fella Kuti came to town, but he was four hours late for his concert, and a riot was about to break out. And then he came on stage with this enormous band that he had, and he said, I'm going to play till dawn, relax. So it was one of the great concerts of my life. And it's interesting to see how the torch has been passed on to his son, Femi. The title is Sorry, Sorry. And it actually goes on to say, Sorry for Nigeria, sorry for Africa. That's the plaint, if you like, of the songs he's singing, but it's got such fantastic rhythm and energies to it that you kind of forget in a way that he's making a political point.

Speaker 110:50

And there was a

Speaker 110:56

Yeah.

Speaker 110:59

So it was one of the

Speaker 111:06

Amit.

Speaker 311:26

As them day taparu and they go

Speaker 311:31

Now some happy pool they follow I'm sorry sorry oh I'm sorry for Nigeria I'm sorry sorry oh I'm sorry for Africa

Speaker 311:47

I'm sorry for Nigerian

Speaker 311:52

I'm sorry for Africa.

Presenter11:56

Sorry, sorry, Fammy Cootie.

Presenter11:58

William Boyd, you spent the school holidays with your family in Scotland. How did you joggle your two lives? In later life you've talked about being deracinated, uprooted. Did you consider Ghana your home?

William Boyd12:12

Obviously it wasn't my country and we were strangers, if you like, visitors to it. So I wasn't at home there, but I knew how Ghana worked. I knew how these African cities worked much better than I knew how Edinburgh worked or how Aberdeen worked. So I always felt more at home in Africa than I did in the UK. And I remember once I must have come back on leave before the school holidays ended and I walked past a school in St Andrews full of kids my age who were playing in the playground. And of course they couldn't understand what I was doing not at school and so they got shouts and yells and I felt alien, funnily enough, because I was still living on my kind of African time and African persona and I suddenly felt strange and a bit unwelcome actually. And it may be because you always felt you were on the outside looking in, maybe that's a good position for a novelist to adopt. So I think it may have helped me scrutinise the world in a slightly different way as well.

Speaker 112:52

Yeah.

Presenter13:11

No, sir.

Presenter13:16

And what about your parents? Did they find it difficult fitting into Scotland in the way they once had?

William Boyd13:22

Yes, I remember once I was out in Edinburgh with my father. In Africa he was a very significant figure and revered by his patients. And I remember him buying a newspaper and fumbling with his change because he wasn't familiar with British coinage. And I suddenly saw him as a kind of ordinary man instead of this godlike figure who's curing people in Africa.

Speaker 113:40

Uh

Presenter13:44

The family moved to Nigeria from Ghana in nineteen sixty four, but of course in nineteen sixty seven the Nigerian Civil War, the Biafran War, began. At what point did you realize what was happening?

William Boyd13:55

I think I realised it was going on when our next-door neighbours dug a slit trench at the bottom of their garden because there was a fear that the tiny little Biafran Air Force, which only consisted of three light planes, was going to bomb Nigerian federal cities. Didn't happen, in fact. But you couldn't escape the war. So I would get on a bus in Ibadan, and there'd be twenty soldiers there with their Kalashnikovs and FN rifles. And one great event which really did shape and change my thinking was I was learning to drive and we used to drive on deserted roads at the edge of the campus with my father teaching me. And we were driving home and he took a shortcut and we passed a roadblock, a very flimsy roadblock. And my father spotted it, screeched to us, a halt, but out of the bushes came six or seven drunk soldiers with their AK-47s shouting and screaming at us because they thought we were trying to avoid the roadblock. So they ordered us out of the car, guns pointing at us. And that moment I thought this could all go horribly wrong because they were out of control, there was no officer, we were alone on a road in the bush.

Speaker 315:05

Mm-hmm.

William Boyd15:05

My father, to his great credit, said, Call that a roadblock, you useless bunch of soldiers. And he upbraided them and they started to laugh, and the whole thing was diffused. But I've never forgotten that moment of knife-edge, uh-oh, this could all end very, very badly. It's affected my work, and it's affected the way I look at conflict and the way I understand wars. Because even though I was never in any great danger, I did live in a country that was tearing itself apart in a civil war and saw and had friends in the Biafran army and heard their stories.

Speaker 115:25

It's a fairly good.

William Boyd15:43

And I realised that real war is nothing like the movies. And I actually wrote a novel a few years later when I was at university, which was called Against the Day, which was a very experimental war novel, which was trying to somehow transmute my experiences in Nigeria into a work of fiction. Never got published, quite rightly, but I did pillage it for another novel I wrote about war in Africa called An Ice Cream War, my second novel, but it's the First World War in Africa. But everything that's crazy and surreal and out of control in my novel came from my thinking and my experiences in Nigeria at the end of the sixties. So it was a life-changing moment or an art-changing moment for me.

Speaker 116:10

Warm a second.

Presenter16:30

And Africa continue to inspire your work. I'm thinking of your first published novel, A Good Man in Africa.

William Boyd16:36

Yes, I'd written two short stories featuring this rather overweight drunken English diplomat in a country that resembles Nigeria, which I call Kinjanja. And by then I had published quite a few short stories in magazines. I had them broadcast on the BBC. And I sent the collection off to Hamish Hamilton Publishers. And two of the stories featured this drunken diplomat called Morgan Leafy. And I said, as a PS, by the way, I've written a novel about this man. And I hadn't known I was lying. And my eventual editor wrote back saying, well, we'd rather publish the novel before we publish the short stories. Great day for me. But I told this white lie. And so I told another white lie, saying the manuscript's in an appalling state. I need to retype it. And I wrote A Good Man in Africa in a kind of white heat of dynamism in about six or seven weeks. Thank you, Morgan Leafy.

Presenter17:08

Hatchy?

Speaker 117:27

Uh

Presenter17:35

William, it's time to go to the music. Your third choice. What are we going to hear next and why are you taking it along to the island?

William Boyd17:41

Away Down the River, sung by Alison Krause. This is a song that sort of represents the Scottish side of my life experiences, even though it's sung by a bluegrass singer from America, but it's a song that's based on a a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, and it has a kind of folky Scottish feel to it.

Speaker 318:03

Baby dry eye

Speaker 318:11

There's no need.

Speaker 318:19

Buzzard C.

Speaker 318:20

You are girl.

Speaker 318:26

In my

Speaker 318:27

Be a while before you understand I'm just

Presenter18:34

Alice and Krause away down the river.

Presenter18:37

William Boyd, you were nine, I think, when your parents sent you to boarding school in Scotland. Looking back, how do you think that shaped you?

William Boyd18:45

It's funny. I think, in a good way, it made me very independent, and I think it makes you very self-reliant. But.

William Boyd18:52

There's no doubt that growing up in a society that only has one sex, it can turn sour. And there were examples of what I would call fascism, pure and simple, in the house I was in. We were terrorised. But as you got older, by older boys, you know, they'd steal your stuff, they'd break up your desk, they'd bully you. So when your housemaster went back to his flat, it became Lord of the Flies in a way, you know, and so you had to struggle to survive, but if you were a strapping lad and good at games, you had a better chance than our weaker brethren.

Speaker 319:08

Got older

Speaker 319:14

Uh

Speaker 119:19

Is it a way?

Presenter19:30

And then where did you fit?

William Boyd19:32

I was good at games, thank goodness.

Presenter19:34

You took your A levels and after that in nineteen seventy, you had started thinking about becoming an artist. So how did your parents react to that idea? They you described their kind of different temperaments.

William Boyd19:47

Yes, well I said to my father I'd think he'd quite like to go to art school, you know, explosion, dream on. There was no way he was going to let me do that. And I'm slightly ashamed to say I didn't rebel. I just switched from fine art to literature. And I'm sure I saw a movie with some actor sitting as a typewriter and typing away and then standing up and mixing himself a cocktail and stepping onto his balcony and looked at the hurrying crowds and thinking, this is the life for me. I didn't know how, but that was the plan. And he sort of tolerated that. But as a safety net, I had this.

Speaker 320:13

Yeah.

Speaker 120:13

Uh

Speaker 320:14

Okay, looking at

William Boyd20:26

parallel career of being an academic. And he'd worked in universities all his life and he could sort of understand that I could get a job, become a university lecturer, get a pension. It was just a safety net. I had no intention of following that career path.

Speaker 320:37

Yeah.

Presenter20:37

Yeah.

Presenter20:41

So you so you didn't intend to actually go there, but how did you feel? How did you feel about him vetoing your plan to paint?

William Boyd20:47

Well, he died shortly after that. And so it was, I had sort of managed to prove that I was not a totally worthless, useless artist dreamer by going to Oxford to do a doctorate. And I'd got a good degree at Glasgow University, where I'd been in Scotland. So he lived long enough to see me embark on that career. But I had published a couple of short stories, which he rather disdainfully agreed to read. But it was. Did he like them?

Speaker 120:58

Are you going to

William Boyd21:19

He never said he liked them or not. I mean, I remember he was not a a man to uh express much emotion or give overt encouragement, but uh he could see, I think, or he sensed that I was paying lip service to the idea of an academic career, but he never saw the outcome of it, so it was never an issue.

Presenter21:40

When you were eighteen you went to the University of Nice to study, which was a formative period for you. What did you get up to while you were there?

William Boyd21:47

I learned to speak French, I got a diploma, and it was massively transformative, not only because I was 18, 19.

William Boyd21:55

But because I was living on my own in a room in an old lady's flat, so I had to find my feet. And more to the point, I realized that my education had turned me into somebody I didn't particularly like. In what way? Well, I was unreflecting. I think it's true of all boys who left school in those days. You were unreflectingly right-wing, classist, sexist. And so going to Europe at the age of 18 and having friends who were

Presenter22:09

In what way?

William Boyd22:25

Young men and women like me, a lot of Scandinavians, Germans. I suddenly realized that even though I was super independent, I was super unsophisticated. And so I started to turn myself into a European and became very left-wing almost immediately and looked at the world with new eyes. And so it was a crucial period in my.

William Boyd22:50

personal development, but also that's when I seriously started writing, writing little vignettes and sketches. So Nice was the turning point for me.

Presenter23:00

I think we'd better have some more music, William Boyd. What have you got for us next?

William Boyd23:03

Well, this is a symbolic of my francophilia. It's a classic French song. It's pommes de cliché in a way called Coèse de Tille de Neuzamour by Charles Trunet. And the ingredients of it, fleur finé, faded flowers, vieux cloché, the old church bell, sort of summon up a kind of idyllic version of French, you know, rural village life. And actually, I live that life to a certain extent. We have a house, an old farmhouse in France, so it really reminds me of the French side of my life.

Speaker 323:38

Soi.

Speaker 323:40

Levant pama pours.

Speaker 323:42

Me par des amours mortes, the volley few quiet.

Speaker 323:48

That's what

Speaker 323:50

Citizen son.

Speaker 323:52

Nona mason

Speaker 323:56

Europons of Julieta.

Speaker 324:02

Google.

Presenter24:03

Mm-hmm.

Presenter24:04

Corester Thiel de Nosamour, Charles Trunet. William Boyd, in nineteen seventy one you started an English and philosophy degree at the University of Glasgow, and this was where you began to write in earnest. How confident were you that you had what it took to become a novelist?

William Boyd24:20

Well, I wasn't confident to be fair, but the first year English literature course at Gloucester University ran a short story competition. About 600 people entered it, and I won. I think I got a £10 book token. But it was a fantastic, if you like, vindication of my dreams that I could write something. It's all about me in Nice, actually, the story I wrote. And so I was able to say to myself, maybe I'm not kidding myself. Maybe I can do this. And I started writing a novel all about me in Nice, got that out of my system. I did a lot of student journalism. I appointed myself theatre critic and film critic of the university newspaper. I wrote a play, I wrote short stories, really just flexing those muscles.

Speaker 124:50

I can

Presenter25:11

So William, you said that at that point your work was autobiographical and you said you you had to get it out of your system. Tell me a little bit more about that then because you know, I mean, the saying goes, write what you know. That's isn't that where writers are supposed to start?

William Boyd25:23

They're supposed to start. It's kind of received wisdom, but I would actually say write about something you don't know. Use your imagination because you'll run out of material pretty quickly, as I did. In a way, all writers need to get the autobiographical first novel out of their system, because it's a natural thing to do, because you think you're the most fascinating person on the planet, and the world needs to find out about you. But once you've realized that's not true, then try making things up, is my advice.

Presenter25:43

Uh

Presenter25:51

Many of your novels explore how luck and folks in the road go on to affect our lives. Why do you find chance and happenstance such fertile territory?

William Boyd26:00

Well, I think it's because of my experiences and because I don't have a religious faith, you know, and I studied philosophy at the university. And so you sort of think, well, what are the guiding principles of the universe or the human condition? And I think things that happened to me, like that moment at the roadblock in Nigeria, or my father's early death, and my wife's mother's early death.

Speaker 326:19

Uh

Presenter26:25

And they were quite close together, I think.

William Boyd26:27

They're a month apart, so we lost half our parents very quickly. Showed me that the universe is a kind of random, unsparing place. So I came up with this idea that everybody has their share of good luck and their share of bad luck. And with most people, the two piles that accrue in their life sort of match up. But don't expect the road to be straight and narrow and clear. It's going to be very winding and bumpy from time to time. But if you know what makes you happy, just hang on to that.

Presenter27:06

Well, let's focus on the good luck. I think chance played a big part in how you met your wife, Susan.

William Boyd27:07

I think

William Boyd27:11

Yes, I was in my horrible flat. Term was about to begin. Susan was in the university library revising. And we both independently, spontaneously, thought, to hell with this, I'm going to go to the theatre. So we went to the Citizens' Theatre independently to see a production of The Crucible, jolly play, Arthur Miller. And I had spotted Susan on the campus, but she had no idea who I was, of course. She had a boyfriend. But luckily, there was a mutual friend in the audience. And in the interval, this mutual friend introduced us. It was a coincidence of us coming together at that play that night that started something that's still going strong 50 odd years later. So it was a remarkable stroke of good luck. It's the best bit of luck I've ever had in my life.

Presenter28:04

It's time for your next piece of music, William Boyd, disc number five. What's it gonna be?

William Boyd28:08

This is Daniel by Elton John. This is our song. It was released in January 1971, when we had just met, pretty much, and it was playing everywhere. You heard the top ten endlessly, and it couldn't go into a shop or anybody switched on a radio. So Daniel almost crept into our lives by its omnipresence. And it's sort of my Proustian Madeleine in a way in that when I hear that song, I'm whizzed back to being 20 years old at university and madly in love with the most beautiful girl in the world. So it's a great moment, a great trigger to bring back that moment.

Speaker 328:52

Can you just drivin' tonight on a plane?

Speaker 328:59

I can see the red to your lies Happy perspiring

Speaker 329:07

I can see Daniel waving goodbye

Speaker 329:12

God, it looks like Daniel

Speaker 329:17

Must be the clouds and

Presenter29:21

Elton John and Daniel. William Boyd in 1981, A Good Man in Africa came out. Getting the yes from a publisher for a first novel is no mean feat. How did you manage it?

William Boyd29:33

Well, it came out in January 1981. I was 28 years old. And because my publisher was very clever and he published it in early January, it's a very slack season in those days. I was reviewed on day of publication in three national newspapers and I got very good reviews. So that's another experience. You go down to the news agent those days, buy every newspaper, riffle through them hoping your book's reviewed, and my God, there it was.

Presenter30:01

And as we've heard, the novel is set in a fictionalized Nigeria, tells the story of the diplomat Morgan Leafy, and also features a character called Doctor Alex Murray, who is, as you've said, a two dimensional portrait of your own father. Why did you want to include your dad in the story?

William Boyd30:17

Dr. Murray is, if you like, the moral force of the novel. And

William Boyd30:22

Morgan is the amoral force of the novel, but they are forced together, and somehow they click, and somehow the example of Doctor Murray makes Morgan see the error of his ways, and at the end of the novel he is becoming a slightly better person than he was at the beginning.

Presenter30:40

It's interesting that you were writing about um these two very different characters and trying to understand your father. You know, from your description, you were very different to your dad, you know.

William Boyd30:51

Yes, that's a very good point. I think in a way it also reflected my relationship with him in the sense that I was going in a direction he disapproved of and not taking his advice. And yet we got on very well. You know, it was not a poisonous or fractious relationship, but there's no doubt that we were sort of chalk and cheese, though there is a lot of him in me. I think.

Presenter30:59

Uh

Presenter31:14

What aspects

William Boyd31:15

in stoicism and a a kind of doggedness which I think I inherited from him, and his kind of very dry sense of humour at the way the world worked.

Presenter31:26

Your your father had died before the novel came out, so he he didn't get to see your success. What what would you have thought of it, do you think, and and thought of the path that you've taken?

William Boyd31:35

It's very interesting. I asked my mother, you know, who I said, what do you think Dad would have thought about my novels and my success and the fact that I was earning a living as a novelist and I could lend him money if he wanted. And she said, I think it would have been difficult, very honestly. And I don't know why she said that. She then retracted it, but I always remembered it. And I think it's because I had sort of defied him and succeeded. And he wouldn't want to acknowledge that. So it might have been a bit fraught. I don't know. But we never had the chance.

Presenter32:08

But we never

Presenter32:09

How did she feel about it?

William Boyd32:11

Well, she was very proud of my success, I think. But she when When A Good Man in Africa came out, which is very closely based on the life we led, she was terrified I was going to be sued for libel. And she also sort of disapproved of the sex, if you like, not which we might find a point on it. But she came to really enjoy my literary success. She read all my novels, even if she some of them were a little bit extreme for her.

Presenter32:37

So you were off. Your career had started. You published more books and then in nineteen eighty three you were lauded as one of the twenty best young British novelists by Granta magazine. It was a vintage year. Martin Amos, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro also on the list. Did you enjoy being part of that new wave?

William Boyd32:54

We were all strangers in a way, and there we were being photographed by Lord Snowden in this studio and as this new wave of young writers. But we'd never thought it would come to anything. It would fizzle out after two or three weeks. We did a few vents together. But then it became a kind of roller coaster in a way. It took off, and the literary novel suddenly became cool, and writers were getting big advances, and everybody wanted to sign you up, and that sort of thing. So it was the beginning of something, and it's still rumbling on.

Presenter33:27

I wonder how fame sits with you, because you have said that anonymity is important. The ability to blend into a crowd and observe is crucial for a novelist.

William Boyd33:37

I'm just like a normal person. I mean some people might recognize my name if I mention it, but in every other regard I'm just like everybody else. And I think for a novelist to be able to just you know wander through London or get on the tube train or sit on a bus and not be recognised and just listen and look and gather material, which is what I do, is fantastically essential in your life. And I think fame in whatever regard, whether it's politics or music or showbiz, is a Faustian pact. But in a way, the novelist has his cake and eats it.

Presenter34:17

Let's have some more music, William Boyd, number six. What's next?

William Boyd34:21

This is Britain's violin concerto. Britain, I think, is possibly the the giant of the 20th century as far as classical British music is concerned. And I've come to love this concerto a lot. And I've actually written the libretto to an opera which will be get its world premiere in Aldborough, which is a the music festival that Britain founded. So I'm quite pleased that this my love of Benjamin Britain in a way has this component to it.

Presenter35:50

Part of the first movement of Benjamin Britton's violin concerto, performed by Janine Janssen, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pavel Yervi. William Boyd, you enjoy making fiction more real than non-fiction, and you took that to another level in the late 90s when you created a fake artist called Nat Tate. So it all started when you joined the board of Modern Painters magazine along with David Bowie. Tell me more.

William Boyd36:17

The editor of the magazine said, How do we get fiction into a serious art magazine? and I stuck my hand up and said, Why don't I invent a painter?

William Boyd36:24

So I did invent a painter who I called Nat Tate, an American painter, abstract expressionist, who was born in 1928, committed suicide in 1960, having destroyed 99% of his artworks, which is why nobody had ever heard of him. Couldn't do this now with Google and the internet, but back in the 90s it was possible. And I wrote this short monograph, which I illustrated with some of my found photographs and the few surviving artworks of Nat Tate's that I produced myself. And Bowie said, why don't we publish it as a book?

William Boyd36:57

Because he had his own publishing company, as as one does. And so we did, and he he they p produced this beautiful little art monograph, Nat Tate, an American artist, and I'd taken great pains to get real people to remember Nat Tate, all that sort of thing. So it was a very convincing read. But Bowie's idea was to have a launch party in Manhattan.

Presenter37:17

So the people that you'd you'd brought in to share their memories, people like friends of yours, Govidal, I think, was.

William Boyd37:23

Gorbidal, who I knew a bit, remembered meeting Nat Tate, and John Richardson, who I also knew, who's Picasso's biographer, remembers introducing Nat Tate to Picasso and Georges Brac. But Bowie's idea was to launch it in this glamorous party in Jeff Koons' studio in Manhattan. All the great and the good and the glitterati of New York invited. And an English journalist who was part of the small circle of conspirators went around the party asking people if they ever heard of Nat Tate. And of course, they all said, a lot of them said, oh yes, what a tragedy. He died so young. As people do, you know, you dig a hole and you jump into it. And then it was blown up in the British press and became a global news story for 24 hours. I was interviewed on Newsnight by Jeremy Paxman.

Presenter38:14

How were you unmasked? What happened?

William Boyd38:16

Well, the journalist who was asking the questions thought, and we won't do the same thing in London. So there was going to be a party in New York, party in London, hosted by Bowie, who wouldn't go to a party hosted by Bowie, and he realized he had too good a story to sit on.

Presenter38:33

And you got a grilling off Jeremy Paxman. How was that?

William Boyd38:36

Well, of course he was wise after that. I know I know Jeremy Paxman a bit, and he was saying, What appalling pictures How could anybody be hoodwinked by them? But it just was a sign that everybody loves a hoax, especially if you're hoaxing pretentious intellectuals, even better.

Presenter38:43

Right.

Speaker 138:43

Uh

Presenter38:51

Sticking with fiction, William, you're known for writing whole life novels, including Any Human Heart, Sweet Caress, and The Romantic. What is it about these sweeping narratives that you love?

William Boyd39:02

Various things, it's partly to make the fiction seem so real that you forget it's fiction. So you're getting a whole life which is unusual in novels. So you get to know that character in a way that's different from getting to know a character in an orthodox novel. I think that's my theory. You have all the information so that the character almost seems like a member of your family or a close friend to show how powerful novels are at doing the human condition. It's the art form that does us better than any other, I reckon. And the long form, the whole life novel, I think, takes it onto another dimension as far as readers are concerned.

Presenter39:45

And of course we you know, we know that character intimately and follow them throughout their life and they're often not the same person. You know, by the end, they're they're it's a collection of very different selves actually.

William Boyd39:56

Yes, I think there's maybe some inner personal quality that you never lose, but your experience of life makes you change your opinions and your attitudes and your value systems. Certainly true of me. I mean, I've been keeping a diary since I was 18, a huge multi-million word document. So I can go back and read about what I thought when I was 18, 19 years old. I just don't recognize myself. I felt very sorry for myself, give myself a hard time, but I don't recognize the sort of melancholic, brooding character that I clearly was then.

Presenter40:30

And your memory of yourself can be different as well.

William Boyd40:31

Yeah. And I if somebody said what were you like when you were eighteen, I'd have said, Oh, carefree, easy going, but the evidence of my diary suggests otherwise. So I think it's almost common sense, isn't it? You the things you experience change your attitudes, change what's important to you and thereby change you as a person to a certain extent.

Presenter40:51

William, it's time for some more music, your seventh choice today. What are we going to hear, and why?

William Boyd40:55

I've got Brahms' horn trio in E-flat major. This is just a kind of homage to Brahms, who I think is probably my favourite classical composer. I think I find his music fantastically uplifting and I listen to it time and time again. This little trio is beautiful. It's not one of his large scale works, but it's in a way it's a perfect distillation of his his genius.

Presenter42:20

Part of the Andante from Brahm's Horn Trio in E-flat major, performed by Georges Schebuc, Arthur Grumio and Francis Orval.

Presenter42:29

William Boyd, when does your writing day start?

William Boyd42:32

I'm not an early morning person. I'm not a lark. I'm a night owl. And so the mornings are usually sort of cranking up the engine. And then between lunch and the cocktail hour is when I tend to write. And I j I write seven days a week, you know, three hours a day, and everything sort of gets done. But it's, as I say, a lot of stamina, a lot of doggedness is required, as well as inspiration.

Presenter42:57

And when you're writing longhand, how particular are you about what you write with or on?

William Boyd43:02

Well, I have got a few fetishes. I have to write in narrow, faint, spiral-backed notebooks, A4, and I have a found the perfect writing implement, which is a Rotring architect's pen, a sort of technical drawing pen, because I've got tiny little handwriting and it fits my handwriting perfectly. And it's quite hard to read, but I write in long hand, leaving the left-hand page blank for second thoughts, and corrections, and emendations, and additions. And then I type up the long hand version onto my computer.

Presenter43:38

I'm about to send you to the desert island, so I'm going to invite you to imagine, since you're very good at that, what your island might look like. What do you see in your mind's eye?

William Boyd43:46

Well, I think it's a tropical island, maybe a clear water lagoon, palm trees. I might be able to brew a spirit from coconuts, you know. Got to have some kind of narcotic stuck on an island. Of course, my African childhood has sort of messed up my skin. The sun is my enemy. So I'll be sitting in the shade drinking my coconut brew, missing everybody and everything about the life I've left behind me.

Presenter44:12

What will you miss the most?

William Boyd44:14

Well, obviously I'm going to miss Susan, the one and only, and I think I'm going to miss the cinema of everyday life because I realize I'm an urban person. I love living in London. I love big cities. And the reason I love big cities and I think London takes the biscuit is you just see so much. I've used this image of a a novelist as a kind of blue whale with his or her mouth agape.

William Boyd44:42

Consuming in the krill of everyday life and making something of it. And so I think that I would really miss the passing parade, the cinema of everyday life, which I find immensely stimulating as I wander I walk everywhere, as I wander the city anonymously, taking it all in, not with my mouth agape, but noticing everything and relishing difference and relishing detail. And it's inspiring.

Presenter45:09

Well, before we cast you away, we'll allow you to choose one final disc, William Boyd. What is that going to be your final choice today?

William Boyd45:16

It's a song by a Spanish Uruguayan singer who I know called Jorge Drexler. He's a huge star in Spain and South America. And I've worked with him actually on a project that we're is still work in progress. But this is how I was introduced to him. I was meant to see the film Motorcycle Diaries, which is about the early life of Che Guevara.

William Boyd45:38

But at the end, over the end credits, this song was played.

William Boyd45:41

And you know, when you hear a song for the first time it often doesn't register.

William Boyd45:45

But in this case I thought this song is absolutely amazing. Who wrote it? And so I waited for this credit to come up and it was Jorge Drexler. Never heard of him. So I investigated Jorge, bought all his albums and became a huge fan. And actually he won Oscar for Best Song for this particular song. So he's a mighty talent and a delightful man.

Speaker 346:12

Jevo turret.

Speaker 346:16

Creo que vistonal.

Speaker 346:20

Alo tru lado del río.

Speaker 346:29

El dia leira pudiendo.

Speaker 346:33

Poqua Poqual Free

Presenter46:38

Allo Trolado del Rio, Joge Drexler.

Presenter46:42

So, William Boyd, I'm going to send you away to the island now. I'm giving you the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take one other book with you. This is going to be difficult because I know your library is substantial.

William Boyd46:53

Yes, it was very difficult. But I've actually chosen one of my favourite novels, a unique novel, written by Vladimir Nabokov. It's called Pale Fire, and it's unique because the novel consists of 999 lines of poetry and the notes, the footnotes to this poem. But the person compiling the notes has got it completely wrong and thinks it's all about him, but it isn't. But it's endlessly diverting and very, very funny. And I think I'll need a few laughs as I moulder away on my desert island.

Presenter47:31

You can also have a luxury item, what will that be?

William Boyd47:34

I was thinking, should I have an immense reservoir of chilled Sauvignon Blanc buried on the but I thought no, something more edifying. I'd choose a piano, because again, it goes back to my father, he always wished he could play the piano, so he was determined his son was going to be able to play the piano. So he made me have piano lessons when I was at school from the age of nine till the age of fourteen, when I finally begged him to let me stop trying to learn the piano. I was hopeless at it. But all those spare hours on the desert island with a grand piano sitting on the beach, I might actually, if I'm ever rescued, emerge with the talent of being able to pick out the odd songs, which is all he wanted me to be able to do. So I failed him on that score as well. But maybe in this case I would live up to his expectations.

Presenter48:22

And finally, William, which one track of the eight pieces of music that you've shared with us today would you rush to save from the waves first?

William Boyd48:29

Well, I think it it has to be Elton John's Daniel, if only because it's uh the part it plays in in my memory bank those early days of Susan and my love affair in Glasgow University, and it it'll sweep me back to that time and make me happy.

Presenter48:48

William Boyd, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

William Boyd48:52

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Presenter49:16

Hello, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with William, and I'm sure he'll get plenty of piano practice while he's on the island. We've cast away many writers, including David Nicholls, Ali Smith, and Bernardine Evaristo. Some of William's fellow Granta novelists of nineteen eighty three, including Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, are in our archive too.

Presenter49:34

The studio manager for today's programme was Duncan Hannant, the production coordinator was Susie Roylence, the assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky, and the producer was Paula McGinley. Next time, my guest will be the singer and songwriter Cindy Lauper. I do hope you'll join us.

Speaker 350:04

A billionaire Christian family is building a huge collection of artefacts for their Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. During that time there were thirty thousand items, probably. But a scholar turned super sleuth starts asking questions.

Speaker 150:21

The magnitude of what I found out is incredible.

Speaker 350:26

I'm Ben Lewis. I investigate the darker side of the arts and antiquities world, but nothing prepared me for this story.

Speaker 150:34

Something truly, truly wrong was going on.

Speaker 350:37

Looters, forgeries, and a scandal of biblical proportions.

Speaker 350:42

From BBC Radio 4 Intrigue Word of God. Listen first on BBC Sounds.