Norman Mailer

Speaker 20:00

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 nine, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

On our desert island this week is the American writer Norman Mailer.

Presenter0:35

Norman, how much does music mean to you?

Presenter0:38

I can't pretend to uh

Presenter0:40

have any expert knowledge in it at all. In fact, I can't even pretend to know much about it. Have you ever played an instrument? Do you sing?

Presenter0:47

Uh I have one of the world's worst singing voices. Um I my children scream when I start to sing. I was married to a woman who was a marvellous singer at one point and uh I was also married to a English girl who couldn't sing at all. One of the things that brought us together was that we could we could argue for hours over who had the worst voice. Uh but but I did play an instrument one time, I played a clarinet when I was a kid. Really?

Speaker 41:07

Uh

Norman Mailer1:07

Elliot.

Presenter1:08

Yeah, I used to play uh Deep Purple and I go to toop toop squawk.

Presenter1:14

Do you find music can sometimes help concentration while you're working?

Presenter1:18

I don't use it. Uh I'm ashamed to say that I live without

Presenter1:22

much music in my life, and I've sometimes felt that I'm keeping it. There's no other explanation for it. It isn't that I have any uh prejudices against music. I have a few trauma in relation to to music. When I was a child in public school, whenever music appreciation started.

Presenter1:35

I couldn't separate the songs, I didn't know which which one was which. And I remember when we s came time for singing I'd be in horror because the teacher would come along and uh say, You're a listener. Don't open your mouth.

Presenter1:46

That was hard. Yeah, I used to hate music at that time. I don't anymore.

Norman Mailer1:47

That was hard.

Presenter1:51

And in fact, when we started picking the records, I picked them without much deliberation and pretty quickly. And then two days later, it occurred to me there was a unifying principle in it. What is it? Well, I've been married a number of times, and each of these not each of these records, I've been married eight times, but these these records reminded me of different women I'd been in love with and what have you.

Norman Mailer2:12

What have you

Presenter2:13

Well now the first one is Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March number one, Land of Hope and Glory. Now how does that come into it? Well I could say that as I say I was married to an English girl once and there was something about her that didn't remind me of Pomp and Circumstance but actually that particular piece of music reminds me more of moments of great pleasure I had in my childhood when I'd see movies like Gunga Din or movies that had anything to do with the British Empire. I used to feel proprietary about the British Empire because my father grew up in South Africa and was a South African subject and then came to America and he was very proud of being English, though it was English at one remove being South African. Of course he was more English than the English in many ways and and he loved Pomp and Circumstance and it it brings back I don't know brings back suits with vests and spats in my childhood and so I love it for that reason.

Presenter4:02

Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March number one, Sir Adrian Bolt and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Now, basic facts, Norman. Born in New Jersey. As a youngster, what did you want to be?

Presenter4:13

An aeronautical engineer. And in fact, you studied aeronaut aeronautical engineering in in Harvard.

Presenter4:19

But you also enrolled for a writing course. Now what was the inspiration for that? It was compulsory for the first I'm a great believer in certain compulsory aspects to education. But in fact, we had a compulsory writing course freshman year. It was compulsory because I didn't do well enough in the entrance exams in English to avoid this compulsory course. About two-thirds of the freshman class had to take it.

Presenter4:40

And toward the end of the year they let us write a little fiction.

Presenter4:44

And I was off to the races. It it was the most exciting experience I had freshman year and was to have for many a year again. I discovered the joy of uh writing. In fact, you won a magazine contest. About a year later.

Presenter4:56

and wrote the inevitable unpublished novel. What was it about? The first novel was called uh No Percentage. And it was a very bad novel about uh I I forget most of it now, it was about a young boy who who uh went hitchhiking or something and rode railroad box cars. It was just a bad book. You were about nineteen at that time. I think I I think I was eighteen when I read it.

Presenter5:17

Did you get your engineering degree?

Presenter5:19

I did, but by then my interest was in writing and so I I took a I take a writing course every year. I took four writing courses at Harvard, English A, English A one, English A three, English A four and A five, something like that. Did they all add up? Was it the same kind of information?

Presenter5:35

No, they were all the same kind of course. Theoretically they got more difficult as they went on and they were you were supposed to be more talented as you went on, but at Harvard they never paid too much attention to that. Well you celebrated your engineering degree by writing another unpublished novel. What was that one about? Well that was called A Transit to Narcissus and it was actually was published in America last year.

Presenter5:52

The manuscript was published and uh a hundred dollars was charged for it. Wow. That must make you feel good. Well, no, I was embarrassed a little because it's a very bad novel.

Norman Mailer5:58

Don't

Presenter6:03

Now all this was was during the war and the day came when you were drafted. The story goes that you drew great consolation by thinking it was going to give you a lot of background for a published novel.

Presenter6:14

Yes, no one could have been more humorless than myself. I, you know, went to the army with the idea I was going to write the great

Presenter6:19

American war novel and in fact I almost wept the day the invasion started. I didn't cry'cause young men were being killed on the beaches. I came near to weeping because I wasn't over there and thereby I was losing a great novel. Where did you serve? Were you making notes?

Norman Mailer6:32

Where do you

Presenter6:38

I used to write letters to my first wife, long detailed letters about patrols we go on and things like that. And for a while they used to be censored, of course. And she'd get the letters full of holes in them, the things that we cut out, names of places and so forth. Then later I had a I found a chaplain who didn't like that and he used to sign our letters without looking at them and so we could seal them and uh so the letters went through uncensored.

Presenter6:59

So in due course you wrote a very long, a very powerful novel called The Naked and the Dead. Was it hard to sell it?

Presenter7:07

No, it was bought by actually it was bought by the year.

Presenter7:09

Second publisher who looked at it and the first had already offered an option, but no promise to publish when I was done. And so I went to another publisher and he said, Fine, I'll take it.

Norman Mailer7:13

Hmm.

Presenter7:18

It was a big success, top of the list, wasn't it? Yes, yes it was. So, as all young writers should, you went to live in Paris for a while.

Presenter7:27

Well, I went and went live in Paris before it came out.

Presenter7:29

And uh I think one reason it was so successful is that I wasn't in New York and so therefore I couldn't get on the radio and television and make a fool of myself.

Presenter7:38

At which point, let's have another record. I think we've got a music hall song and uh.

Presenter7:44

English Music Hall. English Music Hall. And I wondered why I picked it. I I said to myself, How much can you try to butter up the uh British public? But uh it occurred to me there was a reason for it and and that is that my first wife used to have a charming way of singing and she used to sing little parodies of English music hall songs. And so when I came to putting down a list of songs I didn't even know why I said I put down English music hall song. I listened to a few and chose this one.

Norman Mailer8:16

I ain't those chaps what talks about the things what they likes to drink, such as tea and coffee, cow, cow, and milk, why are such things I never think. I'm plain in me habits and I'm plain in me food, and what I say is this

Norman Mailer8:31

But the man what drinks such rubbish with his meals, when I allers give him a miss.

Presenter8:36

Gus Elan.

Presenter8:38

Now, as happened to all, or used to happen to all very successful young writers Hollywood called,

Presenter8:43

I've seen nothing in print about your Hollywood days. Did they put you in writer's row?

Presenter8:49

No, I went out. Uh there there's a way to go out to Hollywood if you want to go out. Uh I've you know, I'd had a good deal of success with the naked and the dead.

Presenter8:58

And the way to do it, looking back on it, is that I I should have gotten the best

Presenter9:02

agent there was in Hollywood and had him call up a couple of studios and say, Mr. Norman Mailer is in town and will consider movie offers for one week. You see at the end of the week nothing had come, you just leave town and forget about it. Uh but I didn't do it that way. I I was nothing if not forthright and forthcoming in those days and so I thought, well, I want to write in Hollywood, I'm going to go out there.

Presenter9:22

And I had a great friend who hadn't earned made a cent in years. His name was Jean Malachi, who had done some French films, and so he went out with me. And we went out with our wives, and there were four of us, and we made up quite a binage out there. And everybody said, you know, they're terribly suspicious out there. They said, why is Manner coming out here looking for work? Why has he got this Frenchman along? So they came to two conclusions. One is that I had nothing left to write about. And two, that the Frenchman was going to do the work. So I was out there for a year and I got no work at all.

Presenter9:48

You never touched a script? Well, I I worked for Sam Goldman for a while. Doing what? Uh working on an original script.

Presenter9:56

And he liked it in the beginning.

Presenter9:58

And then he got to hate it. And looking back on it, he was right. It was never made. It was never made, and it wasn't very good.

Presenter10:03

Had you started your next novel?

Presenter10:06

I've been working on it and having a lot of difficulty with it. I spent three years working on it actually. It was called Barbary Shore. It was a political subject, wasn't it? Yes.

Presenter10:13

Well, then you had a a period in a sort of personal wovenness. You went to live down in the village as a uh as one of the the hip generation. This was a rather an unsettled time for you, was it? I broke up with my first wife and uh

Presenter10:25

After some time

Presenter10:27

was married again. My second wife was a painter.

Presenter10:31

named Adel Morales.

Presenter10:33

And a number of the uh records I I chose come from the fact that uh I became very interested in jazz in this period.

Presenter10:40

And I think if there was any moment in my life when music became terribly important to me,

Presenter10:44

It was with American jazz and the jazz of the fifties. I used to hang out at a place called uh the Five Spot.

Presenter10:50

that was absolutely uh uh famous in small circles in New York in those days. I'm speaking now of the mid fifties and fifty six, fifty seven in there. And we used to uh hear Thelonius Monk there and uh once in a while Miles Davis.

Presenter11:04

What's the great wild Sunny Rollins?

Presenter11:06

And uh

Speaker 411:08

Yeah.

Presenter11:08

Mhm. And Sonny Rollins and and Miles Davis because uh it brings back that period to me. It's a very rich period. It's a period before everything started in America. Well this seems a good point to play one of them. Which one would you like to play? Well let's let's uh play uh Sonny Stitt.

Presenter11:21

He's the simplest of the three and most enjoyable perhaps in certain ways. Plays a wonderfully beautiful lyrical saxophone.

Speaker 411:51

Boo bro.

Presenter11:55

San is dit?

Presenter11:57

Nice work if you can get it.

Presenter11:59

Now, let's have the others that you've chosen from that period. Let's have them all together. Because they do form a unity, don't they?

Norman Mailer12:03

But we do for me.

Presenter12:05

They form a unity, and in the act of saying that they form a unity, it also occurs to me.

Presenter12:10

They not only form a unity, but they cover a long period of my life. They really go across 10 years.

Presenter12:15

Because they literally bridge

Presenter12:18

three of my marriages in in offer because as I said my interest in jazz began during my second marriage and I first became interested in jazz when I heard Sonny Stitch.

Presenter12:27

I met him in Baltimore.

Presenter12:29

and uh he was playing one night and I thought it was absolutely wonderful what it w what he was playing.

Presenter12:33

And he played for hours and I just listened, I was spellbound. It was the first time I'd ever really enjoyed anyone who was a jazz man, you know, listening to him play.

Presenter12:40

Later I began to hear Sonny Rawlins' work.

Presenter12:44

And I remember during the years I was married to Jeannie Campbell, I once took her mother, uh uh Janet Kidd,

Presenter12:51

To here Sonny Rollins at a place called the J.S. Gallery in New York, a huge place.

Presenter12:56

And Janet had absolutely no interest in jazz at all.

Presenter13:00

and I wanted to know why I liked it. And I said, I'm going to take you here Sonny Rollins,'cause he's a genius.

Presenter13:04

And he's far and away the greatest jazz man I think we've got. And so we listened to him that night and she happened to know a lot about Barbados. Much of his music that night was based on Caribbean rhythms. And she was able to make the bridge to that and from there she went on to enjoy what he would do with a standard American pop tune. And it was a wonderful night. I mean I remember it as one of the few nights of my life that was absolutely musical, full of wonderful memories. And so uh Sonny Rollins would be a good example of what he's playing here would be a good example of what we heard that night.

Presenter14:03

Sonny Rollins, the way you look tonight, and watch the The Last of Your Jazz Trilogy.

Presenter14:09

Miles Davis, who had

Presenter14:11

Far away the most lyrical trumpet

Presenter14:14

of anyone I think in in the history of jazz.

Presenter14:17

And uh my fourth wife, Beverly Bentley, was emotionally involved with him for many years before I ever met her.

Presenter14:24

And so our

Presenter14:25

It was an extraordinary experience to recognize that I loved his music so much.

Presenter14:30

that even though I had every reason to be terribly jealous of him and every di I must say every time she was annoyed at me, she'd put on one of his records. I loved his music so much that uh I loved it in spite of the fact that he was a great pain in the neck to me.

Presenter14:42

And and I'd uh hear his music played all the time uh in the house. And and it's marvelous music. Uh you you know, he's another one of the uh jazz greats. What's this number we're going to hear? Round midnight.

Presenter15:26

Miles Davis

Presenter15:27

Round midnight. Now, it was that ten years you were talking about

Presenter15:31

That ten years when you didn't write a novel.

Presenter15:34

No, there never was a period when I went ten years without writing a novel. I think the longest stretch I had really was it took me four years to write The Deer Park. And uh yes, these experiences I've talked about occurred during those years. And then I've that the period I'm talking about in relation to my novels begins with The Deer Park and

Presenter15:54

ends probably with uh

Presenter15:56

Books like An American Dream. Now, An American Dream was something of an experiment. You wrote it the way Dickens did in monthly instalments.

Presenter16:04

For a magazine. That's right, for Esquire.

Presenter16:07

A violent book, Norman. Now you used to be a violent man, that the columnists used to delight in detailing your fisticuffs at parties. Are you through that?

Presenter16:16

Well, you know, I was never in that that much. It it takes very little to build a legend for yourself these days. I mean, I keep thinking of uh eighteenth century London and really how how much money a man had to lose, how many fights he had to get into before he could build a reputation for himself. You know, it was a wonder if a fellow had any brains left by the time he'd built that reputation. In New York, all you have to do is get into three or four fights i in the course of a few years. If you have a name, then everyone, you know, it gets to the point where you'd come through the door at a party and uh the host or the hostess, either one would say, please don't punch me if I say the wrong thing. It was ridiculous. Now, Norman, your great reputation is as a novelist, but in fact, out of your twenty-five or so books, only five or six have been novels.

Speaker 416:46

I'm sure.

Presenter16:55

Yes, but uh novels are hard to write. The others have been journalistic books, some of them, frankly, pot boilers. Is this because sometimes you've been strapped for money and and you get in there and toil away? Excuse me, Robert. I've never written a pot boiler. There's a marvelous statement that's attributed to Picasso.

Norman Mailer16:58

The others are big

Norman Mailer17:05

Right.

Presenter17:11

You know, Picasso was famous for for making little squiggles. A friend would come up and uh ask him for uh the equivalent of a hundred dollars. Picasso would just take a piece of paper and make do a little squiggle on it, sign his name and hand it over.

Norman Mailer17:20

Yeah.

Speaker 417:20

Hmm.

Norman Mailer17:20

Yeah.

Presenter17:22

You know, authority imprinted upon emptiness is money. Someone once said to him, they were talking about one of his works, and they said, Well, it's not really a very good Picasso. And he shook his head and he said, There is no such thing as a bad Picasso. There are some Picasso's that are better than others. There is no such thing as a bad Picasso. No, I've never written a papara. I've written any number of books for money. Yes. But mind of a papa is a book that you write with a certain cynicism. In other words, that you feel that there's nothing of yourself in it and that finally you've just turned a penny. I accept the distinction. But there is that clutch of Young and several ex-Mrs. Mailers. This must be something of a responsibility.

Presenter17:57

Well, it it's a continuing um financial look in the face, yes. Uh but you know, I've been writing books for um money ever since the last book I wrote

Presenter18:07

you know, to my own measure, and for my own pleasure was advertisements for myself.

Presenter18:10

Uh well, it's uh the Presidential Papers was written for money.

Presenter18:14

For $10,000 I remember that I needed in a hurry. An American Dream was certainly written for money.

Presenter18:19

And it seems to me I I've been running for money ever since. My work, such as it is, is it could be said the last two thirds of it has been written for money. It's the way I make my my living.

Norman Mailer18:25

Yeah.

Presenter18:26

A lot of your journalistic work has been political. One of your political books about an anti-Vietnam demonstration, Armies of the Night, won you will pull at a prize. Yes.

Presenter18:36

The demonstration itself won you a few nights in jail.

Presenter18:39

That was unfortunate not really your fault.

Norman Mailer18:39

Yeah.

Presenter18:42

No, it was it was as a matter of fact, I can hardly complain about it. It uh gave me a very good ending to the book.

Presenter18:50

Right, now let's talk about your new book. You were 800 pages into a new novel when you dropped everything to take a a commissioned assignment to write The Executioner's Song.

Presenter19:01

Tell us about the the book's intention.

Presenter19:04

The book started as a book that would be done in a relatively short period of time, and I saw it as an extended biographical essay about Gary Gilmore, much like the book I read about Marilyn Monroe. Now Gary Gilmore needs a little explaining, I think, for you. Well, he was that ex-convict who killed two people in Utah and was sentenced to death, and then said to the authorities in Utah, All right, you've sentenced me to death, now execute me. And when they naturally began to go through the various appeal processes, he said to them, you're silly.

Norman Mailer19:13

No, Gary

Norman Mailer19:15

Well, he was

Presenter19:30

You know, you people are not serious, you're cowards, you're afraid to execute me. And of course, eventually, after many a legal process, he was executed uh some months later.

Presenter19:40

And those are the bare facts. He also was very much in love with a girl named Nicole Barrett. And before it was all over, he and Nicole Barrett had entered a suicide pact and each tried to commit suicide. She perhaps more seriously than he. They both failed. She was committed to a mental hospital. There were bizarre headlines at the time. Gilmore removed from hospital to death row. And there were funny comments by the doctors unwittingly. You know, if we can save Gilmour's life, well, we'll be ready to send him back to death row, and so on. And out of all this, it became a media circus.

Speaker 420:13

Hmm.

Presenter20:14

And so I felt there were any number of novels in it, and I was drawn to it. And the more I began to work on it, the more I realized that there was an extraordinary social panorama implicit in the book. That people from all walks of life, all branches of society, and it's never enough, you know, to write a large social novel with great many people in it. You've got to have a story that will hold it all together. And here I had this incredibly operatic story to tell with a I found a I thought a truly touching and powerful love story at the center of it. You found an immense amount of documentation. You went and interviewed people all over and took transcripts. There were 300 interviews done with well over 150 people, something like that. So this wasn't a quick job at all? No, no, no. It was supposed to take six months and it took two years. What happens next? Are you going back to that novel?

Presenter21:02

Uh I'm going back to my novel about Egypt, yes. About Egypt. Uh well, Egypt in the Twentieth Dynasty, about eleven thirty B C, in in the reign of Ramses the Ninth. You're a man of many parts in your writing, aren't you, Rameses? Bit by bit. Let's have another record.

Norman Mailer21:13

It's not

Presenter21:15

Yes, Lily Marlane sung by Lala Anderson. Why do you choose that?

Presenter21:20

I don't know, I just love that song and uh it brings back the Second World War to me I think and uh it's one of my favorite songs of all time, especially sung in German.

Presenter21:58

Lilly Marlene sung by Lala Anderson.

Presenter22:02

Now you've experimented, I think, with all the media you've written for the theatre.

Presenter22:07

Yes, uh I adapted one of my novels, The Deer Park. And you've directed in the theater? Yes, recently too.

Presenter22:14

You've produced and directed three rather personal movies. Tell us about those.

Presenter22:20

I had an idea.

Presenter22:22

some time ago to uh make films with the means uh of cinema verite and that involved um using cinema verite photographers who are particularly agile. They use handheld movie cameras, usually 16 millimeter, and they don't work off tripods, usually they do documentaries. I thought it would be interesting to take those techniques and bring them over to improvised fictional feature movies. And so I ended up making three that way. What's interesting about it is that since the cameraman doesn't know who's going to speak next, he has to anticipate. A lot of the movie is is truly created by the cameraman and that produced a kind of quick, nervous, rather agile cinema.

Norman Mailer22:56

Yeah.

Presenter23:05

That was marvelously interesting to look at. The only trouble is that you had to have a sound man following what the cameraman was going to do, and the sound man couldn't always anticipate. You needed these people psychologically wed to one another to have it work well. And there weren't nearly as many good soundmen as there were photographers. So we ended up usually with movies that had poor sound. And that's finally what sunk the three movies: the sound would be just about adequate in a good theater with very good acoustics. So the moment you get into a neighborhood movie house, you couldn't hear a word. And people stayed away from my films in droves. They got distribution, all right.

Speaker 423:16

Mm-hmm.

Presenter23:35

They got distributed, but they didn't do well at all. In fact, the last of the movies, Maidstone, was shown in a great many places. It was shown in London, in fact. The London Film Festival in 1970, I think. It was shown in New York at the Whitney Museum. We had huge crowds for that. 7,000 people came to see the movie in two weeks, which was a record for the Whitney. So, emboldened by that, I took some of my own money and opened it in New York. And we then set a record at the theater we opened it at. They did the worst business in the history of that theater. Oh, no.

Presenter24:04

I concluded that there were 7,000 people in New York City who wanted to see my movie and not 7,001.

Presenter24:10

Oh dear, let's draw a veil over that. What's your writing discipline, Norman? Do you have set hours, a set number of works a day? Do you write in long hand? How do you set about it all?

Presenter24:20

I start writing, let's say, about 10 o'clock in the morning.

Presenter24:23

And then I'll work all morning and uh

Presenter24:26

If I'm working on a novel, that's often enough, and I'll stop for the day. On the last novel, however, The Executionist Song.

Presenter24:33

Because I was supposed to do the book in six months and ran out of money and had to borrow money to finish it, and that went on from six months to two years. In other words, I was a year and a half behind schedule, if you will. I found I had to work much more than that. And I was working morning, afternoon, and sometimes morning, afternoon, and night. And seven days a week? Often. I'd work 28, 29, 30 days a month. There's tremendous stretches of work in it. I don't want to work that hard again. It's not altogether agreeable. Well, I'm pretty sure it'll pay off.

Norman Mailer24:47

Do you work?

Norman Mailer24:52

Uh

Norman Mailer24:55

Two.

Speaker 424:56

Uh

Norman Mailer24:56

Yeah.

Speaker 424:58

Yeah.

Presenter25:04

As the French say, esperant.

Presenter25:07

Record number six, I think we've got to. Oh, yes. No, it isn't, it's number seven. It's number seven, it's Imagination by Carmen McRae. What does this do to you? Well, there was a great jazz singer in America years ago named Carol Stevens who uh never became famous. Uh she was great but she never became famous. She was a very delicate woman and she quit singing. She was afraid of the gangsters who were beginning to get into her life. She was very beautiful. And finally she just disappeared and she became a legend in New York'cause she never sang anymore and she lived virtually like a hermit.

Presenter25:36

And at a certain point um I met her and we were very close for a time, and in fact we have a child. And she sang this song, Imagination Better than I've ever heard it sung by anyone else, ever.

Presenter25:47

And there's not even a record of it, there's just a tape.

Presenter25:50

And so when we're talking about there wasn't time to get the tape from America, so I listened to various records of imagination. The closest is Carl McCrae, who has the reputation, in fact, of being one of the great jazz singers.

Presenter26:02

And Carmen's rendition of it is uh reminiscent of another one that I have in my head.

Speaker 426:06

Imagination

Speaker 426:22

It makes

Speaker 426:24

A cloudy day, summer.

Presenter26:35

Carmen McRae Imagination.

Presenter26:37

Your war experiences in the Philippines should make you pretty useful as a castaway, don't you think? You could fend for yourself? I think I could. I might discover I was bored stiff of myself after two days. But uh I don't know.

Presenter26:50

At one time I believe you were the company cook just for a while. After the war. Yes. I always say that'cause uh it piques my pride to have anyone think that I was a cook while the war was going on.

Presenter27:00

Do you know anything about small craft? Can you sail? Just about. I got interested in it about ten years ago. And I'm one of the world's worst sailors. I do terrible things when I get on a sailboat. I've I'd love to be a good sailor. I I respect good sailors immensely, but I'm absolutely abominable at it. I do incredible things. I've gotten to a couple of races and um

Presenter27:16

I make uh yacht clubs happy.

Presenter27:19

They get drunk on Saturday night talking about what I did. They say, Did you hear what he did today?

Norman Mailer27:19

Okay.

Presenter27:24

So you would try to escape.

Presenter27:26

I think I'd uh I I take my chances in a sailor but I'm a terrible sailor, but I take my chances. Right. Your last record. What's that? Well, we're gonna hear the last movement.

Presenter27:35

of Beethoven's Euroika and uh

Presenter27:39

I suppose if if I could write classical music

Presenter27:42

And uh if I could y you know, if I really could do something immense in music, if I were creative in music and had something large in me, th I I suppose I would like to write a symphony on the size of scope of Beethoven's and like perhaps someday I'll be able to do something like that in literature.

Presenter28:51

The closing passage of Beethoven's third symphony, The Heroica, Sir George Schulte conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter28:59

If you could take just one of the discs out of the H you played us, which would it be?

Presenter29:04

Well, I what I would really do is take that tape of imagination that I don't have with me, which is much like Karl McRae's, only, I think, better. Right. And one luxury you're allowed to take?

Presenter29:16

Uh I would take a stick of the very best marijuana I could find, and I would save it for years and hope it didn't get too stale, because I'd know I would have one opportunity to smoke it, and only one. And so I'd wait for that perfect day on the desert island when all the conditions were right.

Presenter29:33

This is a legal talk, mister Mailer. Well, here we are in trouble again.

Presenter29:38

Now one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, and we don't encourage big encyclopedias.

Presenter29:44

I I take a book that I discovered just last week, oddly enough, which is Labyrinths by Borges, the Argentine poet, essayist, and short story writer. B-O-R-G-E-S. B-O-R-G-E-S. Jorge Borgas. I think he's probably the greatest living writer we have in all languages, at least that I've encountered.

Presenter30:08

And although his work is there's very little of his work, it's immensely complex and tremendously compressed.

Presenter30:15

And there's enough in that one work, which is a selection of his best pieces over the years, published I think by New Directions, to um keep my mind interested for many a year.

Presenter30:24

Labyrinth by Jorge Borges.

Presenter30:28

And thank you, Norman Mailer, for letting us hear your desert island discs. Well, Roy, ta-ta. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 230:43

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