Vincent Brome

Vincent Brome0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy six, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

Our castaway this week is a writer, novelist, biographer, essayist, playwright, Vincent Brougham. Mr Brougham, have you ever endured loneliness?

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Well, I suppose I would say that uh loneliness is the occupational hazard of the writing game, you know, you're forced into it daily.

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What would you be happiest to have got away from?

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Noise.

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Traffic?

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importunate landlords. But you know

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That question's rather odd for me because I'm a Philistine type. I like urban life, and there are not too many things I would have liked to have got away from. Is music a major interest of yours?

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Major, but unfortunately I have never been able to concentrate or indulge it very much. Do you play an instrument? I used to play the piano, and was said to be moderate at the game, you know.

Vincent Brome1:20

But

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What sort of plan did you have, if you had a plan at all, in choosing your eight records?

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Well, I thought it'd be rather nice to try to recreate the high spots of my life so that I could slowly relive them again on the Desert Island. Where do we start?

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Well, we start with the piano philharmonic playing the overture to Tannhauser. When I was at school we had a music master. He was a very small man dressed in an ordinary black suit with a big club foot.

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He used to play an old honky tonk piano, as if it were a complete orchestra, and he did succeed, in my childish imagination, in filling that hall.

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with such an orchestration of positive music that I always remember it as the kind of thing which would encourage me later in life. Here was a little man

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Almost challenging the universe with the music of Wagner and bringing it off, and not only challenging it, but.

Vincent Brome2:21

But not only

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Teaching me to face up to great odds.

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The closing section of The Overture to Tann Heizer by Wagner, Schelte conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

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What's your second record?

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It's the Overture to Romeo and Juliet by Tchaikovsky. Why did you choose this one? Ah, well, now I was young and I was romantic and I was driving in an open car and the hay smelt good and the moon was high.

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And that magic moment of first romantic love overtook me, and I can remember it as vividly now as I did then, even though I have learnt that nothing could be more disillusioning.

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An excerpt from the Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, once again the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, this time conducted by Marzel.

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Mr Brim, you're a Londoner. Were you a bookish boy? Uh, yes, I'm afraid, very so lost at it, my brother thought I would go mad. Did you write as a youngster? Yes, write from a very early age, and that was rather sad. At school I contributed and originated a serial called The Sign of the Golden Cross, and the schoolmaster regarded it as so dangerously good that I must have lifted it from somewhere. This was in the school magazine. This was in the school magazine. And he came to me one day and he said, You must tell me where you got this from, because you do not understand there is a law of copyright.

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I said I had not got it from anywhere, but to my utter dismay he stopped the serial on the grounds that I pinched it.

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Did you visualize becoming a professional writer?

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Very early on that was my ambition, and even more exclusively, to become a novelist, yes. What was your first job when you left school?

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I never really had one. You see, I ran away from home at about fifteen and a half or sixty, only to find what a hard world it was.

Vincent Brome6:09

Very

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Had you got it clear in your head what sort of writing you wanted to do? Oh, yes, yes, it was to be literature with a capital L.

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There were in those days many more outlets for a young writer, surely a lot of fiction magazines and that sort of thing, which would have kept him going.

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Multiple outlets and the curious thing called a paragraph feature which I began writing for on the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle. They paid you seven shillings and sixpence per paragraph, and I somehow survived on those paragraphs for nearly six months. Was anybody encouraging you?

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One man I met by accident in a rather dubious club, he turned out to be my surrogate father, and he certainly encouraged me by buying a short story from me for twenty five pounds, a sum unheard of, in my limited income. This was your first success?

Vincent Brome7:05

Heard of

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This was my first real success in writing because it was an original short story and he actually printed it. In what?

Vincent Brome7:11

Rep

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It was in the Twenty Story magazine, which was an odd sort of amalgam of stories from very famous writers and stories from new writers. That was your first success, modest though it may have been. Let's break off at that point in your career for record number three.

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The uh third record is Mozart's The Overture to the Marriage of Figaro.

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It seems to me to express very much a vivid affirmation of life, and I was beginning, I suppose, the time when I first went to the opera.

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which must have been by now twenty, I was beginning to feel more confident, and somehow this expressed for me a wonderful affirmation and confidence which was beginning to seep into me too.

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The opening of the overture to Mozart's Marriage of Figura, Colin Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

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Now, you were in your lonely little room in in Barnard Street. You couldn't hope, obviously, without capital, to settle down to write a book. When did you first write a novel?

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Well, I used to spend half the night, a couple of hours at night writing fiction and uh

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Harry Leggard encouraged me to try and lengthen it, and he began to take short stories as long as ten thousand words.

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for which he paid a hundred pounds.

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But I never until very much later really got the opportunity when I made money over out of H. G. Wells to launch into a full scale novel.

Vincent Brome9:36

We had

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How many novels have you written? Eight.

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Which has been the most successful?

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Well, in terms of a discriminating novel that won status, the novel called Acquaintance with Grief, I think, was the best one. But in terms of sales, a novel called The Surgeon swept into about ten translations and sold a good

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A hundred and fifty thousand copies altogether. How long does a novel take you to write?

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It ferments for at least a year, but once I've done that, and once I've got four pages down on paper, like a life raft that I can turn to if I get lost, I can usually write them in three to four months. How much of a framework have you got before you start? I mean, do you know you know how it's going to end, but you know the development in the middle? Yes, I'm very cautious about that. I've seen so many would-be writers plunge into writing a novel without clearly knowing what's going to happen, and the result was they ended up in disaster. Now, I have to have a clearly defined life raft I can turn to if I find myself sinking.

Vincent Brome10:38

I have

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You wrote a book, Confessions of the Writer, an autobiographical book.

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Recklessly I did, and how dangerous it's turned out to be. I seem to be confronted by person after person.

Vincent Brome10:56

Thus

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who keeps telling me they just read that book, and I must say I allowed myself a freedom of expression I would never risk again.

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And of course you've written a number of plays and a lot of scripts for radio and television.

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Yes, uh I enjoy playwriting more than anything, actually, but it's an indulgence because I find it's the most difficult of all mediums to sell.

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You can take off on television in a couple of plays and then be dead for the next year with it. And radio is not so good these days. You've done a lot of work as a broadcaster yourself through the years. Yes, uh thirty or forty programmes, I suppose, some up to sixty minutes of different kinds. Usually on the third, uh sort of pseudo intellectual stuff I think it was.

Vincent Brome11:31

Yeah.

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Let's have record. Number four.

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Record number four is concerto number two in G minor by Saintson.

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Why'd you choose it?

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Well, this was closely connected with a novel I wrote called Acquaintance with Grief, the one I got all the status out of. It was a very sad novel in a way, and the music completely represents the atmosphere of the novel.

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Part of the first movement of the Sassance Concerto No. Two in G minor,

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The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormondy.

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Now, your biographies, of which there have been a number. What was the first?

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The first one I wrote was of Anairam Bevan, the politician, but that was pretty disastrous. He felt that it was a dangerous book to publish at the time. He was having his battles with the British Medical Association about the Health Service, and I had to put it on the shelf, and it remained on the shelf for five years.

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But that didn't discourage you.

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Well, it did. However, it so happened that a publisher came along and said to me

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Why don't you do a study of HG Wells? This was to be merely a ten thousand word uh pictorial biography.

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But I got launched into it and was so interested in Wales that it developed into a full scale job, and it became a a very scandalous chronicle which stirred up a lot of attention and got serialized in the newspapers.

Vincent Brome14:09

But

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And indeed provided enough money for me to write my first novel. There must be a vast amount of work in researching such a book, especially someone recently dead when everybody must be interviewed, all the works must be read.

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Biography is slavery in my view. It's tormenting, it's full of hazards, there's every kind of danger surrounding you.

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And uh you need a kind of industrious application that only a miner can have at the coalface. It's uh a very exhausting and uh dismaying process. As a result of the success of the HG Wells book, you were able to publish the Bourbon one.

Presenter14:52

Ah, partly that, and partly also that we outfaced Bevan's objections to it. It was decided that he was a public figure, and as such in the public domain, and open to criticism, so we went ahead and published. You wrote a very successful wartime biography about

Presenter15:10

Resistance The Way Back. That was about an intellectual doctor friend of mine who was a great hero in the war, and that really was a bestseller. We took off with getting on for a million copies in the end.

Speaker 315:10

Resistance.

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all over the world and various film options were bought, but we never got a film made of it.

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Another biography, Frank Harris. Now he wrote his own autobiography at such length, was there scope for?

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A dispassionate biography. Since he'd created a forest of half-truths, half-lies, and complete lies, the man biography made its way through this, exposing the half-truth, showing up the lies, and trying to get at the truth underlying it. But he was a beautiful subject. You could be witty and ironic about him. And he was so completely frank about everything that if you divided it by ten, you got somewhere near the truth. And you have a new biography just coming out? Yes, there's a fairly full-scale work on Carl Gustave Jung, which is being published here and in America.

Vincent Brome16:05

Yeah.

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These biographies must need a fair amount of travel.

Presenter16:17

Yes, it does. It takes you into many strange places, strange homes. You meet many people. Yes, all over Europe and America there's an unending source of material, and the great difficulty is to know where to stop. The problem of selection.

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Problem of selection and the problem of uh particularly to know when to stop going down cul-de-sacs in case you may find something new to put in the book.

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Record number five, please.

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This is the late Beethoven Quartet number sixteen played by the Hungarian Quartet.

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I think on this island, you know, this kind of music would replace the missing intellectual life to some extent. There's a kind of highly developed counterpoint in these late quartets which is like an intellectual conversation.

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And I have a feeling it would be a musical substitute for the intellectual talk I was missing.

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The opening of Beethoven's Late Quartet, number sixteen in F, opus one three five, played by the Hungarian Quartet.

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What are your writing habits, mister Brahm? Do you work regular hours, or a certain number of words, every day?

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Yes, I am almost a city clerk in this matter. Uh I if I am writing, I write six pages, full scap, long head, every day, and even if the last word is and on the sixth page, I stop.

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What are you working on now?

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Uh I mentioned that I have just finished a biography of Carl Gustav Jung.

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And I've simultaneously done something which satisfies the other side of my nature. It's a black humour comedy, a novel.

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Called the happy hostage.

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I think that will bring us to record number six.

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Dylan Thomas reading Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. You knew Dylan Thomas, did you?

Presenter19:16

I knew him, I drank with him occasionally, and this particular record I think would recall those Bohemian nights we spent together.

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Do not go gentle into that good night Old age should burn and rave at close of day Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning, they Do not go gentle into that good night.

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Delon Thomas reading his own poem, DO NOT GO GENLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT.

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mister Brom, I believe small boats are a hobby of yours.

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Well, there were I wish I could still practise it. You know, I had the greatest fun of my life on the Blackwater estuary, sailing and messing about in boats.

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But unfortunately the centre of London where I live hasn't got any oceans or seas or anything nearby. But it's very encouraging that you have had this experience. You know a little about navigation.

Vincent Brome20:15

Goodbye.

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Are you anything of a handyman? Could you, if pushed, construct some kind of craft? I I devised a sort of aphorism about life at one stage. I suppose I shouldn't uh push it too hard, but it read

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Learn to co operate with the inevitable and if I was confronted with the inevitable of navigating some roughly constructed craft in the hope that I might reach somewhere, I'd certainly have a girded.

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We got to

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Your penultimate record, and this is the Scott Joplin, isn't it? That's it. Scott Joplin, the ragtime dance.

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This always conjures up for me a a life of gaiety which I never managed to achieve, but always hoped to.

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Scott Joplin's The Ragtime Dance played by Joshua Rifkin.

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And now we come to your last disk.

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This is uh Bertrand Russell talking about Bernard Shaw.

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I'd like to think that I had as a companion through this record that wonderful old man with his cool, precise, wise voice encouraging me to keep alive at any cost. I knew a lady.

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who married a Russian and went to live out there.

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And in Stallions Purge.

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This Russian was taken away.

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and uh she never heard from him again, or heard of him, or didn't know what happened to him at all, and she was absolutely devoted to the man.

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And um she came to England to see if anybody could do anything to influence Stalin.

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And uh she came to me among other people.

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And I said, well, sure is persona crater in Russia.

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Perhaps she'll do something.

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And so we approached Shaw about it.

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And he wrote her a letter which I saw.

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saying, My dear lady,

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I have no idea.

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How comfortable Russian penal settlements are. I'm quite sure your husband is much happier there than he would be being nagged by you.

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I never spoke to the man again.

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Bertrand Russell talking about Bernard Shaw. If you could take just one disc out of that eight.

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Yes, I think it'll be Mozart, he's my great uh composer, the overture to the marriage of Figaro.

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And one luxury to take to the island with you.

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My idea of the perfect luxury would be an inflatable woman, preferably with a surface on which you could write.

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What a charming idea. Yes, indeed. You better have a supply of pencils, too. And one book apart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and big encyclopedias.

Presenter23:53

Oh, inevitably I come back to this man I over-idolize, uh Bertie Russell. Uh the book would be the history of western philosophy.

Presenter24:03

Thank you, Vince and Brougham, for letting us hear your desert island discs. And indeed, thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Vincent Brome24:17

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.