Richard Adams

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty 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 seven, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Speaker 20:32

This week, our castaway is the author, Richard Adams. Mr. Adams, have you ever daydreamed about being a Robinson Crusoe? Well.

Richard Adams0:39

Well, yes, I have uh qu and I've even realized this dream, I may say, for two years ago, having finished a promotional tour in America, I rounded it off with six weeks in Tahiti.

Speaker 20:45

At two.

Richard Adams0:52

And it wasn't just Tahiti, which is uh the main island in the group.

Richard Adams0:56

um where, you know, there's a certain amount of civilization. Other islands in the group are very remote indeed, and I spent some time on two of them, Moria, which is just down the wind from Tahiti, within sight of it, and a much more remote island, Bora Bora, which is about a hundred and fifty miles west of Gay.

Richard Adams1:16

These islands are very remote. From that experience, do you think you could endure loneliness for a long time? I'm quite sure I could. There are great compensations on these islands. Uh they're not desert islands, of course. They're populated by Polynesian natives. And th uh well, I mean, you know, they have a Chinese trader and sell you baked beans and this sort of thing. But they are very, very remote indeed, and you're a very long way in the blue.

Speaker 11:36

Yeah.

Richard Adams1:42

On one of these Pacific Islands. Now you have eight records to keep you company. How much does music mean to you? It means a very great deal to me, although I'm not a trained musician. Um I have at various times in my life tried to play various instruments. I can play the recorder a bit, I can play the guitar a bit, and once long ago when I was a little boy they even tried to teach me to play the piano. The result is that I can read music after a fashion and appreciate something like a change of key. Do you play discs a lot? I do a great deal.

Richard Adams2:12

What's the first one you've chosen among your eight? The first one I've chosen is A Mass by Palestrina.

Richard Adams2:19

I myself am not familiar with Palestrino's music, but what I do know about it is that it's very highly thought of indeed by people who do know about music.

Richard Adams2:29

On my desert island I would therefore have plenty of time to come to grips with Palestrina, and get to know it very well, and I am quite sure from all that I have heard about it that I would not be disappointed.

Speaker 23:32

The opening of the Agnos Dei from the Missa Papae Marcelli by the well thought of Palestrina, the choir of King's College, Cambridge, directed by David Wilcox. You were brought up in the country.

Richard Adams3:44

Yes, I was indeed. Uh I was born in nineteen twenty in a village south of Newbury in Berkshire. My father was a country doctor and a surgeon of the local hospital, and this is just on the edge of the Watership Gown country. It's a country of fields and little woods and copses in between. And I'm not happy, really, living in any town. I like the country. As a boy you were something of a naturalist. Yes, yes, you can say that. Although I'm not a trained naturalist. Um certainly never studied zoology or anything like that. I can honestly claim to know a certain amount about birdsong, wildflowers, and the like.

Speaker 24:22

You were at Bradfield and then

Richard Adams4:23

Then you went to

Speaker 24:24

Yeah.

Richard Adams4:24

Worcester College, Oxford. What did you read? I read history. With a view to what? I had no views at all. I hadn't the faintest idea what I was going to do. Neither had my father any ideas. And in fact, it was rather a good thing in some ways for me that the war came along when it did, because otherwise I don't know quite what I would have done.

Speaker 24:43

You did five and a half years in the army.

Richard Adams4:45

Yeah. Were were they eventful yet?

Richard Adams4:47

They were very eventful in terms of travelling, although I am one of thousands who never actually fired a gun at a German.

Richard Adams4:54

But I served in Palestine and Transjordan and Egypt, and also in France, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark, and in India, and in Singapore.

Richard Adams5:04

So I really saw a great deal of the world at the king's expense, for which I have always felt rather grateful.

Speaker 15:08

Which I've always felt

Richard Adams5:10

And when you were demobilized, what did you do? Then I went back to Oxford to take my degree. I did a fer I'd I'd done two years at Oxford before the war, but the king was prepared to give me a grant to spend another two years at Oxford after the war. So, um I

Speaker 15:22

Yeah.

Richard Adams5:24

took advantage of that and took my degree in nineteen forty eight. And then? Then I went into the civil service. I'd met the girl I wanted to marry, a girl who's now my wife still after twenty eight years, and um I needed some money.

Richard Adams5:39

And the civil service, of course, offers security and quite a good starting salary.

Richard Adams5:44

pensionable job and all that. And I went in for the competitive exam, was lucky enough to be offered uh a post and took it without further thought. In in which ministry? What were your jobs? I started in what was then the Ministry of Health, which was also the Ministry of Local Government in those far off days. As early as nineteen fifty it split into the Ministry of Health, which administered the National Health Service from then on, and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government.

Speaker 25:46

BAAP

Richard Adams6:09

which carried out the former local government functions of the Ministry of Health. I happened to uh to go into the latter category, and ever since that time I have been a local government man at central government level.

Richard Adams6:21

Another record, please. What next? Well, now I've chosen uh a madrigal. I've always liked madrigals very much. I feel that the ability to sing madrigals is the very height of civilized behaviour. The particular madrigal I've chosen is a very well known one by the great madrigalist Thomas Weelkes, as Vesta was from Latmos Hill Descending.

Speaker 46:45

Yes, the voice of that was given us and me. Come that was the most enemy. She's small, she's fine, she's my little sister. She's with us little single single.

Speaker 17:00

My little teacher

Speaker 47:11

Blessings are standing.

Speaker 27:37

As Vesta was from Latmos Hill Descending, sung by the Persal Chorus of Voices.

Speaker 27:43

Had you any ambition to write?

Richard Adams7:44

Right.

Richard Adams7:45

Not really, no. Uh from the age of about fifteen onwards I wrote poetry and this did excite enough approval among masters and senior boys at Bradfield for me to be encouraged. I worked my way up to be editor of the school magazine and I won the school poem prize, the sort of thing people said, you know, this boy will go far and the farther the better and so on. And uh I went on writing poetry as many adolescents do. Did you publish any? No, none. E except in uh slim magazines. You know, I published some poems in undergraduate magazines and once or twice in um national magazines, that kind of thing. But nothing that ever excited any real approval. Then I I dropped it when I was about twenty five or twenty six. It just sort of fell away. Now you told stories, George

Speaker 28:35

children uh as we all do, and you decided to write those

Speaker 28:38

Stories done. Was this a a a creative urge? Was it a desire to make money? I mean, what was your your motivation?

Richard Adams8:44

mister Plumley, it was the line of least resistance. I used to tell stories to my children to while away long car journeys. One day we were going up to Stratford on Avon to see Judy Dench's Viola in Twelfth Night, I rather think, if my memory serves me correctly and they asked for a story to while away the time, and I began improvising the story of Hazel and Fiverr off the top of my head.

Richard Adams9:07

And when it was all finished for it it continued beyond that afternoon and had to be finished on morning trips to school but when it was all finished they said well you ought to write that down, you know, Daddy, it's too good to waste. And I resisted this for about three months. But one night I was reading a book to them at bedtime and I threw it down in a rage and said my God, I don't know why they published this stuff. I could write better myself and Juliet said acidly Well I wish you would, Daddy, instead of keeping on saying so. So thus stung, I got some paper and began to write, and two years later I'd finished Watership Down. It took you two years? Eighteen months to write and about six months to top and tail. Then it took a year to find a publisher. Now you've called it a children's adventure story. I haven't. There's no such thing as a children's story or a children's book. I entirely agree with the great CS Lewis, who said a book that's not worth reading when you're sixty is not worth reading when you're six. The point about Watership Down was that it was meant to exemplify my own ideas in

Richard Adams10:06

Treating the child reader as a potential adult. The the book was not written with children in mind, it was written as a novel. But I knew that it was for my little girls, uh primarily. It was written for their pleasure, and I deliberately incorporated demanding and difficult passages in it, which were intended to

Richard Adams10:27

Let the child reader get his teeth into something solid, and give him, as it were, a kind of dummy run over the kind of greater literature that he would encounter later on when he came to grips with some of the great novels of the world. And it's very nice to find that this little idea of mine appears to have found favour not only with my own children, but millions, literally millions of children all over the world.

Speaker 210:51

Indeed.

Richard Adams10:51

Yeah.

Speaker 210:51

And a film has been made and it even on

Richard Adams10:53

Discs. Uh it is indeed, yes. Yes, not these discs though. Yeah.

Speaker 210:57

No

Richard Adams10:57

Uh

Speaker 210:57

Yeah.

Richard Adams10:58

Let's have another idea.

Speaker 210:58

Let's have another at these discs.

Richard Adams10:59

Yes, that's a good idea. Well, my next choice is one that I'm sure uh a lot of people will endorse and think is indispensable, and that is, of course, the Goldberg variations of JS Bach.

Richard Adams11:11

There's something very pure and beautiful about the Goldberg variations. They are, as it were, abstract music, the quintessence of music, pure music.

Speaker 212:21

The opening statement of Bach's Goldberg Variations, Helmut Walker, at the Harpsichord.

Speaker 212:27

Now, mister Adams, you had written a worldwide bestseller. It must have been very difficult to follow that.

Richard Adams12:32

Yeah. Yes and no is the answer to that. Certainly I knew perfectly well that I was never going to have another success like Watership Down. You can't expect that sort of thing in in in one lifetime. It's just not on. I just uh got on with another novel, having got into the bad habit of writing. I knew it wouldn't have the success of Watership Down and uh uh ne neither Shardick nor Plague Dogs. It's not reasonable to to expect it. But I love writing.

Speaker 212:57

But I like writing. Shardik, the story of of a giant beer, was top of the bestseller lists for many weeks.

Richard Adams13:04

Yes, it was indeed. How much it owed it to the success of Watership Down as we've read Watership Down we'll get the next one I really don't know. I like Shardick the best of all the books I've written. I think it's deeper, says more, but it is much more demanding, and of course it disappointed many people by not even trying to be a repeat performance of Watership Down.

Speaker 213:27

And you wrote this once again in the evenings after a day's work in Whitehall.

Richard Adams13:31

I did, mister Plumley, and it nearly killed me.

Richard Adams13:34

Morning after morning I would stagger into the office, you know, having had about four hours' sleep, to do a day's work, and then get back again to Shardick and uh perhaps another four hours' sleep, and it it began to affect my whole health after a bit.

Speaker 213:47

So that was why you decided to leave Whitehall?

Richard Adams13:47

So that looks

Richard Adams13:50

As soon as I was assured of the success of Shardik, I then said, Well, twice is enough to be sure that I ought to change my job, and I went to my masters and suggested that perhaps the time had come for me to leave the civil service, and they were very kind, very co operative, and I left to become a full time novelist.

Richard Adams14:08

Now your third

Speaker 214:09

Book Plague dogs. Once again, a a change of pace. The plague dogs. The plague dogs. A change of pace again.

Richard Adams14:14

There are two sorry.

Richard Adams14:17

I suppose it is a change of pace. Some people have seen it as a return from from Shardick to uh what's known as the Watership Down formula, by which they mean a real countryside, a real topography, animals talking to each other, though not to humans, and so on. Plague Dogs is a very different book from Watership Down. It's sadder, darker, more uh more tense and sombre altogether, and the the dialogue is much tautter.

Speaker 214:45

In between your three major novels, your

Richard Adams14:47

Your epics. You've published several short books. Yes, I rather enjoyed these. They were um stimulated by various things. I was asked by the man who has published uh Nature Through the Seasons, uh a very nice Hungarian called Felix Gluck, if I would collaborate in uh a simple book, Helping Children to Understand and Appreciate Nature. And then, of course, there are these uh picture books with um narrative verse. One is called um The Tiger Voyage, which was illustrated by a charming girl called Nicola Bailey, and the other, illustrated by the celebrated Alan Aldridge, called The Ship's Cat.

Richard Adams15:30

Record number four. Record number four is of all the eight records I've chosen the one with the most sentimental value, the the one that I've chosen for most personal reasons. It's a Haydn string quartet, uh one of the Oprah Sixty-four group, the one in E-flat, and it happens to be the first string quartet that I ever really got to grips with and understood, which I did at the age of thirteen as a new boy at my public school. It so happened that that year, that that term at Bradfield, the Michaelmas term of nineteen thirty-three, there was a concert by a visiting string quartet, and this is one of the quartets they played. The music master had helped us to understand it, taken us through the themes and so on, so that by the time we got to the concert we had a pretty good grip of what we were going to hear.

Speaker 217:14

The opening of the Haydn string quartet in E flat, opus sixty four, played by the Amadeus Quartet.

Speaker 217:20

Now, you are a professional writer. You're not having to work after a day's hard work in the office. Are you a disciplined writer? Do you work regular hours?

Richard Adams17:29

The

Speaker 217:30

Every day.

Richard Adams17:30

Yes, I do, and I feel quite strongly about this. I've treasured something for years that

Richard Adams17:35

Benjamin Britton said, or was reported to say once, he said that he compelled himself to go and work every day, apart from holidays, and he found that the quality of the work that he was doing, that he did when he was hating it, was no different from the quality of the work that he did when he was liking it.

Richard Adams17:55

And I'm quite sure this is true. You know, there's a a very small man with a lighted match somewhere inside, and you have to say, Now you you know

Richard Adams18:03

get down to work and jolly well do it, even if you sit looking at a blank sheet of paper for for three hours. In the main, do you write with facility? No. I write with great difficulty and um I write with a pen and ink on paper.

Richard Adams18:16

And I cross it out and alter it until it's virtually illegible, then some devoted soul types it, and I cut that to bits.

Speaker 418:23

Yeah.

Richard Adams18:23

And then she types it again, and bits of that are cut to bits, and what usually goes to press is a melange of the second and third type scripts. Let's have record number five. Well, record number five is part of Mozart's immortal opera, Not Sedifigaro. I've chosen the first act, which seems or has always seemed to me to be about the most perfect music that any human being could possibly hope to write. And the bit I've chosen to play is the splendid aria by Carabino. It's called Notza Pu Cosiso and Cosifaccio. I don't know where I am or what I'm doing, he says.

Speaker 419:21

Oh, in the morning in the back room.

Speaker 419:30

And it's not the border who is it all.

Speaker 419:52

Tomorrow.

Speaker 220:06

Ivan Minton as Cherubino in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. Let's go straight into your next record. What's that? What

Richard Adams20:12

would obviously have to take some Beethoven. And I pondered very long and deeply on this, and I'm not at all sure I've chosen the right thing now. There is you know, you want to take all the Beethoven there is. But after long and careful thought, I've decided on the fourth symphony, a symphony which expresses his maturity and his wonderful optimism and grace and musical power. And it has a wonderful happiness. Of all the of all the nine symphonies, I think it's the most purely joyous. It's like a kind of vision of heaven.

Speaker 221:41

Part of the first movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony

Speaker 221:44

SIR GEOREG SHELTY conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. mister Adams, as a naturalist, you would seem to have some advantages as a castaway. At any rate you would know what to eat and what not to eat.

Richard Adams21:56

I don't know. I wonder if I would. I'm not quite sure where my desert island is. But Where would you like it to be? I'd like it to be in the Pacific, in the South Seas. Done. Right. I can go there. How nice.

Speaker 422:06

Yeah.

Speaker 222:06

Ha sh

Speaker 222:08

Could you build a hut? Look after yourself in that way.

Richard Adams22:11

I think with the assistance of the local inhabitants. No local inhabitants at all. Well, you do get these heavy tropical rain storms.

Speaker 222:15

No local and

Richard Adams22:22

And you would be dependent, of course, on um cutting down trees and making a hut and I suppose you'd thatch it with uh the palm leaves and

Speaker 222:33

You'd have to pull them down, not cut them down.

Richard Adams22:35

Well, the Polynesians managed to do this when they first came to the islands thousands of years ago. Would you try to escape? Yes, I think perhaps one would try to escape.

Richard Adams22:45

Record number seven. Record number seven, and I'm sure you're beginning to get the cut of my jib by this time, is Schubert. I've chosen the famous uh B flat major trio.

Richard Adams23:00

And the bit I would like to have played is the scherzo, the third movement, which for its poignancy and wistful grace and charm is some of the most beautiful music that Schubert ever wrote.

Speaker 224:13

The beginning of the scherzo from Schubert's Trio in B flat major, opus ninety nine.

Speaker 224:18

Played by Yehudi and Hepzeba Menouin with Maurice Chendron.

Speaker 224:23

And now we come to your last disk. What have you saved until the end? Yeah.

Richard Adams24:26

I'll save until the end a nice piece of Richard Strauss. Richard Strauss is a composer to whom I came comparatively late. It was in the early nineteen sixties that I had the good fortune to be sent to serve uh a senior officer in the civil service who has remained a close personal friend. And it was he who really switched me on to opera. And it wasn't very long before he was able to show me uh what a magnificent writer of opera Richard Strauss is. And the quality I find in Richard Strauss I don't suppose there's anything very original about this is this extraordinary sensuousness. It's like being plunged into some marvellous bath of colour and light and scent and sexual excitement and it's as if you're at some wonderful party. And the piece I've chosen is from his opera Ariadne of Naxos, Ariadne on Naxos, which belongs to his middle period.

Speaker 125:18

But

Speaker 425:39

Who's the faith of?

Speaker 226:26

Gunda Lijanovitz as Ariadne in Richard Streis's opera Ariadne on Naxos.

Speaker 226:33

A recording conducted by Rudolph Kempe.

Speaker 226:35

If you could take just one disk out of your eight, which would it

Richard Adams26:39

It's a very difficult decision to make, Mr. Plumley, but the the choice would lie between the first act of Figaro and the Goldberg variations. I think I personally, perhaps being rather weak, would come down on the side of Figaro because of the sheer joy and pleasure that it's always given me and would continue to give me forever, I think. Figaro.

Richard Adams26:59

And one luxury to take to the island. Yes. Well, now, as far as I'm concerned, it would have to be a picture, a great and beautiful picture. The question is which picture? And after a lot of careful thought, I think the picture I would take would be Leonardo's Annunciation, which is in the Affizi Gallery, because of its marvellous blend of humility and dignity.

Speaker 227:22

Leonardo's Annunciation, and one book apart from that select list of the Bible and Shakespeare and big encyclopedias.

Richard Adams27:29

Proust, a la recherche du temp per dieu. Proust

Richard Adams27:33

Writes so beautifully. I hasten to say I wouldn't take it in French. I'd take it in the Scott Moncrief translation. A most beautiful book, quite inexhaustible, of great style, wit, grace, and so on. But s somewhat Gallic in tone, uh rather sort of jolts on Englishmen from time to time. It's a very very French book, of course. Bruce.

Speaker 227:52

In the English translation as time remembered.

Richard Adams27:52

Yeah.

Richard Adams27:55

Yes.

Speaker 227:56

And thank you, Richard Adams, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc.

Richard Adams27:59

Yeah. I've enjoyed it very much indeed, and my goodness, it certainly put me on the spot once or twice. It's just as well that I'm not really going. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 128:34

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