John Wain

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 10:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1978 and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

On our Desert Island this week is John Wayne, poet, novelist, critic, biographer, and for a short time yet professor of poetry at Oxford.

Presenter0:40

John, before we elaborate on all those facets of your work, let's have a record.

John Wain0:44

Don't you pay discs a lot?

John Wain0:45

Yes, I do. I need music all the time, though I haven't got any good musical taste or anything. Do you use disc as background?

John Wain0:53

Sometimes when I'm writing, I do. I never use it as a background to anything else. I mean, it

John Wain0:58

I might play some music while I'm struggling with the next bit that I'm writing, in which case it is really helping me. I never play records as a background when I'm just staring out of the window or adding up the family budget or anything like that.

Presenter1:10

I'm told you're a considerable performer on the mouth organ.

John Wain1:13

Yes, I pray The

Presenter1:14

But

John Wain1:14

Uh Superbly.

Presenter1:15

Yeah.

John Wain1:15

Yeah.

Presenter1:15

Good. Any other musical skill, any other instrument?

John Wain1:19

Yeah.

John Wain1:19

Right, what's your first record? Well, I think sometimes, however nice the Desert Island is, I might get depressed and lonely and the one musician who has never failed to take me out of a fit of depression is Fats Waller. So it would have to be Fats Waller and over the whole range of his recordings I think I would choose Your Feet's Too Big.

Speaker 21:41

Up in Holland, at our table for two.

Speaker 21:44

There were four of us. Me, your big feet, and you.

Speaker 21:48

From your angle up, I'll say you sure are sweet.

Speaker 21:53

From that down there's just too much feet. Yeah, it's your feet. Babe.

Speaker 22:00

No watch because you're being stupid.

Speaker 22:03

Can't use it cause your feet's too big.

Speaker 22:07

I really hate ya, cause your feet's too big.

Presenter2:10

The great fat swallow. Could you face a long ice

John Wain2:14

Isolation. Yes, I think so. I'm quite good at being on my own. I think that perhaps many artists are. You know, one one needs long periods of of uh isolation. I mean, I don't know how long this one's going to be, but I'm quite good at being on my own. In a practical sense, could you look after yourself? I can cook quite well. I wouldn't kill any animals. I detest the thought of killing animals, and I would not kill anything, but I would

John Wain2:40

I would eat birds' eggs. I'm going to assume there would be birds' eggs. I make nice omelettes. And I hope there would be something that I seem to be always reading about when I was a boy, reading R. M. Ballantyne and authors like that. They always seem to be eating something called breadfruit. I've no idea what breadfruit is, but I hope there'll be a lot of it. And I shall eat a lot of breadfruit and cook omelets. And I'm very good at all that. Could you run up some kind of shelter? No, I've very little manual skill. I just have to get down among the bushes and I have no manual skills. Would you try to escape?

John Wain3:11

Not unless it was intolerable, unless the breadfruit turned out to be wrapped and sliced, or something like that.

Speaker 23:17

Yeah.

John Wain3:17

Second record.

John Wain3:18

Oh, well, it must be Mozart, who, all things considered, is my favourite composer.

John Wain3:25

And I'm quite happy with perfectly hackneyed Mozart. It doesn't have to be anything unusual. I think perhaps something from the manager figaro, uh Voike Sappeti. And if I'm to have that, I must have it sung by Sina Urinak, that wonderful Yugoslav singer, with that thrillingly pure voice that can almost make you believe that a woman's voice can be as beautiful as a nightingale's.

Speaker 24:04

Why this affair was a holy

Speaker 24:20

God in this He or

Presenter4:43

The Wois of Zena Urinatz, Woaike Sapete from Mozart's The Marriage of Figura.

Presenter4:48

Yeah.

John Wain4:48

You're from the Midlands, aren't you, Dr. Yes, from Stoke on Trent. In the steps of Arnold Bennett. Yes, God bless it. Wonderful place to grow up in. You ran your own magazine when you were very small. Well, I don't know what you're referring to, but I

John Wain5:02

I

John Wain5:03

I produced a magazine sitting at the kitchen table, of which I was the chief contributor, but I also edited a magazine when I was an undergraduate. Oh, yeah. I had the editing bug in those days. I'm talking about the early one, presumably on a jelly press, was it? Well, no. It was in exercise books, and the contributors had to write their own contributions down. I mean, I would say

Presenter5:09

Oh yeah.

John Wain5:22

You would have t uh four pages this week, and they would have to write four pages. There's only about two of the others. I wrote all the rest and illustrated it. Were you good at school?

John Wain5:30

No, I was very bad at school. I was backward, I was inattentive.

John Wain5:34

I failed a lot of examinations. I'm not being proud of this, I'm rather ashamed of it, but the fact is that.

John Wain5:40

I went to Oxford because my father had the money to send me. I didn't go to Oxford because I got scholarships, and yet I I would have been willing to I would have been willing to work hard, but somehow school and I didn't get along. And Oxford in

Presenter5:51

In wartime you read English.

Presenter5:54

Was writing already in your own mind your intended

John Wain5:58

Uh literature was. I went a slight detour when I got to Oxford because I fell in love with Oxford. I fell in love with scholarship.

John Wain6:06

I admired the men of learning that I met there and and for a time I wanted to be a scholar. I always wanted to be a poet, but I wanted to be a kind of scholar-poet like Hausmann, which actually is not me at all. It it it was one of those youthful mistakes. But Oxford worked on me, and I'm not a bit ashamed of it. I think I would have been very unnatural if it hadn't. But but it was a strange time in one way, because I expected to be in the army. I am the generation who would have had the last two years of the war.

John Wain6:37

But when I went for my medical in nineteen forty three they turned me down for things wrong with my eyesight, so I found myself with the rest of the war to spend in Oxford and I just my undergraduate life was basically all in Oxford.

Presenter6:51

Uh

Presenter6:52

Yeah.

John Wain6:53

You are writing verse. Who

Presenter6:54

Yeah.

John Wain6:55

influenced you m

John Wain6:57

Well, uh you know, I think that spectators see more of the game than players, and I think it is very difficult for a writer to say who influenced him.

John Wain7:05

I was reading the classic modern poets. I was reading Ezra Pound and Eliot, and I was influenced by Orden a great deal. But when I say I was influenced by Orden, you know, my youthful poet, what are you to say? I I was also very influenced by Wordsworth, and I don't think anybody'd be able to tell it. Quite honestly, I I lived in a continuum of literature. I was reading poetry morning, noon and night, and

John Wain7:28

I think it all showed up in my youthful efforts, and this is partly why I didn't publish anything till I was twenty six. Thank God. I was twenty six years old before I sniff print.

Presenter7:35

Thank you.

Presenter7:39

So, you wanted to live in a world of literature. When you graduated, you took a research fellowship. Researching what?

John Wain7:45

My actual subject was something to do with Shelley, and then I didn't get on with that, and I

John Wain7:51

I took a sixteenth century subject, English translations of Ovid, but the fact is I couldn't settle to any of that. I had the usual thing that young men have, that they really don't know what they want to do, except that I knew it's got to be to do with literature. And of course, deep down what I wanted to do was be a writer. And so I bounced from project to project and upset everybody and annoyed everybody. And in the end, I took myself off and took a job at Reading University.

Presenter8:14

Well, in that period of indecision, let's break for your third record.

John Wain8:18

Well

John Wain8:20

Indecision disjointedness.

John Wain8:23

I was very fond of Richard Strauss' The Merry Pranks of Till Eulenspiegel when I was at this time in my life. It was a record I played a great deal. I think I liked it for the impish playfulness and also the sort of

John Wain8:39

Lyricism. It it's rather like what my character was like. I think I was Till Eulen Spiegel.

Presenter9:45

The opening of Richard Strauss's Tilleulen Spiegel, Rudolf Kempe conducting the Dresden State Orchestra.

Presenter9:52

Right. Now you had this research fellowship. You also had a job down the river at Reading. It was at Reading, while you were at Reading, that that first book of poetry was published. And your first novel.

John Wain10:04

Well what was it, and and how long did it take you? Well, it was Hurry On Down, which has just been issued again in a kind of little jubilee edition because it's twenty-five years old.

John Wain10:13

Well, I started out writing on Sundays. I thought, well, I'll do my novel every Sunday morning. And of course, years went by, four years. I was twenty-four when I started it, and I was twenty-eight when I finished it. Reading Hard Done wasn't a very apt title. Well, it certainly wasn't apart from the down bit, I don't know. But it did very well. Yes, it was the first book I wrote. It was taken by the first publisher who saw it, and thank goodness it established me. I could never feel very critical. I mean, I can see faults in that book on every page, the faults of inexperience, but that was the book that opened the door for me. And I'll always be very grateful to it, and to the publisher who brought it out.

Presenter10:23

So pretty hard done.

Presenter10:49

Did it now seem that you could cut adrift from the academic?

John Wain10:52

Mm-hmm.

John Wain10:53

Um

John Wain10:54

I could cut adrift from it as far as making a living from it was concerned, although I I respect academic work. I have always had an amateur's interest in it, and of course I can't compete with the the professional scholars, but I have tried sometimes to contribute to the

John Wain11:11

To the study of classical English literature, you know, so that I never quite cut away from academic life, which is why later on when I became professor of poetry at Oxford, it wasn't a violent re-entry. But no, I went into business as an imaginative writer. I wrote poetry and fiction, which is what I've written ever since. Where did you live? Well, I continued to live in Reading after I left the university, except for a spell when I went to America and took a little flat in New York and lived the life of an ordinary New Yorker for about nine months, eight or nine months, which was very interesting. The countries I've been most involved with, apart from my own, have been America and France. Well, let's break off at this point for your fourth record. Well, if we're talking about America and France, one of the artists I've most admired through my lifetime, though his life only overlapped with mine until I was 25, because he died about then, was Django Reinhardt, the great.

John Wain12:10

What is not French, who's a Belgian gipsy guitarist who was the first European musician to play jazz in a way to rival the great American musicians. I have always loved him and I have got to know many, many people in the French part of my life who remember him and even people who are related to him. And he I my life has touched his a little bit.

John Wain12:32

And I would never last on a desert island without his superb rendering of St. Louis blues.

Presenter13:40

Django Reinhardt.

John Wain13:41

Yeah.

Presenter13:42

Yeah.

John Wain13:42

When did you decide to go?

Presenter13:43

Better.

John Wain13:43

Uh It works.

John Wain13:44

Well, it was after our children started to come, and the tiny little house we were living in in London was just too small, and I had really begun to think that Oxford would be a lovely place to go back to. I have always loved it better than anywhere.

John Wain13:58

And we were lucky enough to find a house and went in nineteen sixty three and we've lived there ever since.

Presenter14:02

Well, there you were, living in Oxford, writing away, doing no harm to anyone, and you found yourself a candidate for the chair of poetry for the university.

John Wain14:10

After many years. I mean, I went to Oxford in uh Yes, it was after I've been back ten years. That's it, ten years. Uh a unique sort of professorship appointed by democratic elections. Yes, it's the only academic post in the world that isn't elected by some sort of f committee.

Presenter14:11

And I went

John Wain14:27

but is actually voted for by the senior members of the university. So to be elected is a very nice compliment because it means that your university says to you

John Wain14:35

We'd like to hear you. You know, it's a beautiful. How long is the HR held for? Five years. And and once only?

John Wain14:42

The the statutes do allow for a re-election for one re-election. I mean, theoretically you could do it for ten years. Matthew Arnold did, for instance. But in modern times, when there's been so much more competition for it and more attention paid to it, it's unthinkable that anyone would actually hold it for ten years. Is it an old endowment? And and what are the duties?

John Wain15:03

Three lectures a year. To the whole university. Yes, three lectures a year, open to anyone in the university and indeed to the public. And judge the Newdigate Prize, which is the undergraduate poetry prize, take part in certain ceremonials and be there and breathe in and out, you know, and and talk to the young poets and so on. It is salaried, of course. It's munificently salaried. I mean, I'm going to retire to Beer Ritz when I finish. It's a thousand a year.

John Wain15:30

Who's held it in the past? Oh, well, uh it's it's had a very good list of people. I mean, strange people like uh Keble, you know, people like that. And Matthew Arnold, of course, uh and Auden, Robert Graves. Uh there'd been a very good in fact

Presenter15:31

Oh well then

John Wain15:47

Obviously, I can't speak of myself, but I would say in the last twenty-five years there hasn't been a dud. They've all been very good people.

Presenter15:54

And there's a sporting element in the election that that the bookmakers take an interest.

John Wain15:58

Yes, uh, you know, people can bet on anything. What were your odds? Oh, I've forgotten exactly how it ran, but uh I was quoted by Lad Brooks at some fairly long odds, but never mind uh anyone who had this shirt on me came home, I suppose.

Presenter15:58

S

Presenter16:01

What were your

Presenter16:11

Well, you're coming up now to the end of your five-year term. You've done a great deal to encourage Oxford poets, young Oxford poets, not necessar

John Wain16:19

Caroline University.

John Wain16:20

Well, there's a moral obligation on anyone in a post like that to see if he can help people not necessarily to be a success, not necessarily to get published and so on, but to improve themselves as poets, if one can.

John Wain16:35

And um I have tried to do my best regarding the members of the university and even people from outside who have

John Wain16:42

sought one's help

John Wain16:43

But as far as Oxford residents are concerned, it's very easy because one needn't keep writing letters, which is what takes time. One can just meet them in a cafe and talk to them.

John Wain16:52

Yeah.

Presenter16:52

Record number five.

John Wain16:54

Well

John Wain16:55

We're speaking of Oxford, and of course a great feature of my Oxford life is the river. Well, the river it's built on two rivers, of course, the Charwood and the Thames. I love them both. And I am a canoeist. My chief leisure activity is to go canoeing.

John Wain17:08

And I'm going to assume that this island is big enough to have a river and maybe a lake, and I'm going to go canoeing on it, and while I'm canoeing I'd like to hear Louis Armstrong singing Up the Lazy River.

Speaker 217:21

Throw away your troubles, dream or dream of me, dream or dream of me After lazy ripple weather robin song

Speaker 217:32

Two bright lights as we stroll along

Speaker 217:37

Blue skies up above.

Speaker 217:40

The one island of the Lazy River.

Speaker 217:44

I happy we will be.

Speaker 217:48

Mama yeah.

Presenter17:50

Lazy River, Louis Armstrong and the All Stars. How many volumes of verse have you published on?

John Wain17:57

Um

John Wain17:58

Four or five, you know, I I off the top of my head, but certainly four or five. I have a new and selected poems coming soon when I'm going to recycle some of my early poems.

Presenter18:08

Now, biography. You have in fact written only one biography, but one could call that A major one. I'm glad.

John Wain18:15

You think so?

John Wain18:17

It took three years, but the only reason it took as little as three years was because I'd been reading about the subject Samuel Johnson for twenty years before that. The three years were just to get it packaged, really. He he's long been a hero. Yes, he's a great hero of mine. He's a he's a moral hero to me. He he's a man who understood how to live and how to face difficulties, and and I've always felt a great instinctive

John Wain18:41

Of well, it sounds too boastful to say an affinity, but he's someone I'd like to be like.

Presenter18:46

Well the book has won a number of prizes and awards.

Presenter18:50

Now you said that with the proceeds you could afford to write a play. It was a play that you had been promising to write for about fourteen years.

John Wain18:57

Well, yes, I I had a bonanza there. I love the theatre, and I don't know whether I am

John Wain19:05

ever going to be a good dramatist, but I I'm a have-a-go sort of person. I mean, if I want to do something, I try and do it.

John Wain19:11

And I wrote a play, and I had it put on by a first rate company, and they acted it something like thirty two times, and it was marvellous. It had some pretty good shellacking from some of the reviewers, but others were quite kind

John Wain19:24

As I say, I don't believe in staying within my range, but it left me with some sense of how to write a play, and since then I have gone on, and I shall go on more.

John Wain19:34

Record number 6.

John Wain19:36

Well, I love jazz.

John Wain19:39

And one of the things I love about jazz musicians is how they give.

John Wain19:44

They have such generosity, they pour it out of themselves. And I think I would have to have at least one record where jazz men really blow up a storm with that tremendous uninhibited inventiveness which leaves you amazed. And I think

John Wain20:00

Uh a record made in nineteen forty five with uh Sidney Beche on soprano saxophone, while Bill Davidson trumpet and Art Hode's piano of uh Dark Town Strutter's Ball.

Presenter21:11

Art Hodie's Blue Note Jazzman playing Dark Town Strutter's Ball. Now, your recent publications, John, you've published your lectures from the chair as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in Professing Poetry.

Presenter21:24

And

Presenter21:25

Your new novel, your first for eight years.

John Wain21:28

Yes, I didn't mean to spend as long as eight years without writing a novel, but now that I've come back to novel writing, it is very, very close to me. I want to tell stories to people. I think that telling a story is a wonderful thing, like singing a song. It's people need it. And for the rest of the time that's left to me, the chief thing I want to do is tell stories, either in the form of novels or maybe plays, which is another way of telling a story. That and write poetry.

Presenter21:57

But the new novel. The Pardoner's Tale, which which I haven't yet finished, an unusual construction, the story of a novelist interspersed with chapters from the novel he's writing.

John Wain22:07

Yes, I wanted to write a book about somebody writing a novel, and I give the whole of the novel that he writes, and I say what happened to him in the months of his life that he wrote the novel. Towards the end, the two stories begin to merge into each other. It was a difficult thing to do technically, but I wanted to I wanted to say something about the nature of imaginative creation. Obviously, the way he sees life through his imaginative lens is going to affect the way he reacts to his experience and the the other way round also. And it's it's a thing I've long turned over in my mind trying to do.

John Wain22:43

I'm trying to shed light on the whole nature of imaginative creation and also on

John Wain22:49

These other emotional questions which occur in the other plot. So I bit off a good big chunk, maybe worth waiting eight years for in my case. Record number seven.

John Wain23:00

Well, I must have a record that reminds me of Wales, because Wales has always been a very important second country to me. There was never a time in my life when I didn't go to Wales a great deal. And my wife is Welsh, and our three boys are very much encouraged to think of themselves as having dual nationality, as it were. So I must hear Welsh people singing. So what about the London Welsh male voice choir singing Sloop John B?

Speaker 223:30

Put up the drumming, put up the drummies, see all the things, see all the things all for the

Presenter23:59

Sloop John B. by the London Welsh Mail Voice Choir. What are you working on now? What's the current over

John Wain24:06

Very much fiction. I want to tell stories to people.

John Wain24:11

And I'm writing another novel which is ballooning out ahead of me and it may turn into a trilogy, but that's just between you and me and the people who happen to be listening.

Presenter24:22

What's your writing discipline can you wick?

John Wain24:25

Oh, I have to work regular hours. I work in the morning.

John Wain24:30

Then I

John Wain24:32

never work in the afternoon uh and then I started work again about

John Wain24:36

Four o'clock and work till about seven. I have two work periods. I never work at night unless I'm desperate finishing a book or something like that. So it's morning and then from tea till dinner.

Presenter24:46

And can you slot in the odd jobs, the the articles and the bits and pieces, into your schedule without too much difficulty?

John Wain24:52

I use my freshest energies for real work, but usually if I start out pretty well on a Monday morning, round about Thursday afternoon I just can't go on, you know, and I and then I I do I do critical jobs and things like that.

John Wain25:06

All right, your last disc. Well, it's got to be a song. Looking back over my records, I see that most of them have involved the human voice, although two of them were instrumental. But I think your voice is a tremendously important thing, and I love songs, and I wish I had the knack of writing great songs. It must be wonderful. It's just given to people at random, it seems to me, that there are great composers who can't write a singable song, and there are great poets who can't write the words for a song. Now, I have a friend called Alastair Clare, who is a brilliant writer on social and political and historical issues. I suppose you'd call him a social scientist. But he has the gift of writing songs, and he writes piercingly beautiful songs, which he goes around and performs. It's a wonderful gift. And one of Alastair Clare's songs that I love most of all is called The Irish Girl.

Speaker 225:58

Once I was walking in the month of May, When the birds were building and the lambs had begun to play When the whole thorn was in blossom White like the bride, No one was walking through the green fields by my side.

Presenter26:29

Alastair Clare's song Irish Girl, sung by Emma Kirkby.

Presenter26:33

If you could take just one disk out of the eight, which would it be?

John Wain26:37

Oh, I suppose it would have to be the Mozart. From the Marriage of Figurative. I think so. I'm assuming the island is big enough to have a a river. Um, oh, yes. I and I I would have to take my canoe, but I'll give you a signed statement. I won't try to use it to escape over the sea.

Presenter26:51

Oh yes.

Presenter26:58

All right, fair enough. For inland waterways only. Yes. And you're allowed to take one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already there, and we don't allow big encyclopedias. Boswell's Life of Johnson, of course. Last 20 years on that. Well, that's no surprise. And thank you, Professor John Wayne, for letting us hear your desert island discs. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 127:29

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