Julian Symons

Speaker 40:00

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

Speaker 40:05

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

This week, our castaway is the writer Julian Simmons.

Presenter0:34

Julian, how much does music mean to you?

Presenter0:37

Music in theory means a good deal to me. In practice I have to say that I'm almost tone deaf. Did you never learn an instrument, or start to learn an instrument? Yes, I was

Julian Symons0:46

Yeah.

Presenter0:48

What might be called Put to Learn the Piano by my mother.

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who was intent that one of her sons, at least, should be able to play the piano or the violin or something.

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I learned the piano for seven years.

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Detested it, I'm afraid, throughout.

Presenter1:05

And now it will be difficult for me to find Middle C. This doesn't mean that I'm very happy about being unmusical. And it doesn't mean, I suppose, that I'm totally unmusical. There are certain songs that I like, that I enjoy. They're mostly songs which carry with them a reminiscence for me of some particular occasion, some particular place. Or where do we start? What's your first record?

Presenter1:30

We start with a record called Yes, We Have No Bananas, and

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The reminiscence it carries for me is of my childhood.

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nineteen twenty one

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We moved down to Brighton. My father

Presenter1:45

bought a small hotel in Brighton and ran it.

Presenter1:49

And I recall very clearly when I hear, Yes, we have no bananas, my sister, who was a very pretty girl.

Presenter1:57

who used to sing it my mother standing on the steps of the hotel with an absolutely atrocious little Pekinese dog called Chang in her arms and me, a small child, riding around Brighton on a scooter

Julian Symons2:05

Alms

Presenter2:11

Around Pool Valley, around by the Palace Pier, a scooter that I was very proud of indeed. So yes, we have no bananas carries quite a charge for me. We have no bananas We have no bananas

Julian Symons2:25

Function.

Presenter2:26

Uh

Julian Symons2:27

We've carried calcumbers, freshly faithful plumbers, and runners that run no way. We've got karate

Julian Symons2:36

Gali Kanga Yeah more

Julian Symons2:39

Rong man Uh find it.

Presenter2:40

But yet we have not forgotten.

Julian Symons2:45

Yeah

Presenter2:45

Yeah.

Julian Symons2:45

We have no bananas today.

Presenter2:51

A contemporary recording of Yes We Have No Bananas by the two Gilberts and How Splendid They Are or Were.

Presenter2:57

Now, you're the author of about fifty books, half of them biographies and histories, the other half crime stories.

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How did it all start? You you were brought up in South London and then in Brighton.

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I'm one of a large family?

Presenter3:13

Uh that's right. In Brighton I should say only for a short time for a year or so and then back to London again. Yes. And a large family

Presenter3:22

I was the youngest of this large family. My eldest brother, AJ, became in due course the author of a very fine biography called The Quest for Corvo. A little classic, though. I think so, yes.

Julian Symons3:32

Classic there.

Presenter3:35

And also was the founder of the First Edition Club and the Wine and Food Society. And I, in due course, in the intervals of earning my living, which was a considerable occupation in the early 1930s, became the editor of a verse magazine and wrote poems myself. Now, according to what I've been able to find out, you left school at the age of 14, so you had to do a lot of self-education. What did you do when you left school? In the sense of self-education, all I can say is that I was what I believe is horrifically now called an autodidact. That's to say, yes, I did educate myself. I just educated myself by reading books absolutely at haphazard. No guidance? No guidance of any sort. I read for a while quite a lot of the books in my brother's library because he had collected a library by then. And so the first poets I read seriously, I suppose, were the 1890s poets, Dowson, Lyle, Johnson, Oscar Wilde, so on, simply because A.J. had a very great interest in them. But I soon moved on in other fields and in more modern fields. You began to write verse yourself. And I began to write verse myself, which was published in a paper called The Sunday Referee, which now no longer exists. And it had something called a poet's corner. And in the poet's corner was printed every week the poem of the week, for which one was paid half a guinea. And there were runners-up as well. The runners-up received a propelling pencil, a little wallet, that kind of thing. I got a number of wallets, and I got one or two best poems of the week, half guineas.

Speaker 45:12

That kind of thing.

Julian Symons5:13

Uh

Presenter5:18

Splendid. Something important, then?

Presenter5:21

Let's have your second record.

Presenter5:23

My second record is a poem by WH Auden, The Quarry, and I choose it partly because of the immense admiration I felt and feel for Auden, the influence that he had not only on me but on almost all young poets of the thirties but also because this particular poem, with its sense of betrayal and menace, is very typical of the time. It is, I hasten to add, in my eyes, a very fine poem too.

Speaker 35:56

Oh, what is that sound which so thrills the ear?

Speaker 36:00

Down in the valley, drumming, drumming.

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Only the scarlet soldiers, dear the soldiers coming.

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What is that light I see flashing so clear, over the distance, brightly, brightly?

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To the sun on their weapons, dear, as they step lightly.

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What are they doing with all that gear?

Speaker 36:18

What are they doing this morning, this morning?

Presenter6:20

Only the usual manoeuvres, dear, or perhaps a warning. A poem by WA Jordan, Oh, What is That Sound Which So Thrills the Ear? or The Quarry, and it was read by Punella Scales and Peter Orr.

Presenter6:34

Now

Presenter6:35

You collected your poems together in a little magazine, or some of them.

Presenter6:41

That's right, yes. In early 1937, I started a little magazine called Twentieth Century Verse with the object not only of printing my own poems, though of course that possibility is bound to occur, I think, to the editor of a little magazine if he doesn't see as many of his poems printed elsewhere as he thinks should happen. But I did also have in mind that outside what was then called the Auden circle, that is to say, Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis McNeese, who were distinguished, among other things, by being particularly Oxford poets, there was a wide circle of younger poets who hadn't been to Oxford, hadn't been to a university, and who didn't have a mouthpiece, who didn't really have a platform. Among them were Dylan Thomas, Roy Fuller.

Julian Symons7:33

The random

Presenter7:36

Gavin Youart, those are three of the names that I'm very, very happy to have published. GAVA. There was another magazine doing more or less the same job, I believe rather better financed. Is that true?

Presenter7:48

I don't know that it was Better Finance. The magazine you have in mind was Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse.

Julian Symons7:52

That's right.

Presenter7:53

And when I say I don't know that it was better financed, the little money that one needed to spend to produce a thousand copies of a magazine then is something hardly believable now. I think my magazine cost for a thousand copies something like ten to fifteen pounds. So that you can see it didn't need tremendous financing. Were your poets paid?

Julian Symons8:11

So

Presenter8:16

My poets were paid at first. They weren't paid after they became friends of mine.

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And I'm happy to say that a number of them did become friends. Dillon was paid all the time, partly because he was very hard up.

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but also because he would telephone and say that check you sent me simply hasn't arrived.

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And I could you could you possibly send another? And of course one would send the second check and the first check had arrived.

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What were you doing to earn your living and provide the money to print the magazine?

Presenter8:49

I was a company secretary of a small engineering company. Were you able to sell the magazine?

Presenter8:55

Well, as I say, one printed a thousand copies and sold something like eight hundred, so I certainly didn't make a loss on it. I kept no accounts at all, and I was alarmed at one point when I got an income tax demand. Alarmed, horrified I had no idea that such things would happen.

Presenter9:12

But the tax authorities, I must say, on that occasion were fairly indulgent to me. They accepted my view that I couldn't possibly be making any profit by running a literary magazine.

Presenter9:24

Let's have your next record.

Presenter9:26

The next record is one of Dylan Thomas's poems. It's a very early poem, which I'm unhappy to say that I didn't print.

Presenter9:34

Which is a very sexy piece of work. Dylan was at this time not obsessed by sex, but obsessed by sexual images. He was also obsessed by language. And I think this is a really intoxicating poem. Goodness knows exactly what it means. It's simply full of sexual images. And the explanation of the poem, I suppose, might be the last four words, Man be my metaphor.

Presenter10:03

If I were tickled by the lover's rub That wipes away not crow's foot nor the lock Of sick old manhood on the fallen jaws, Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib Would leave me cold as butter for the flies The sea of scums could drown me as it broke Dead on the sweetheart's toes. Dylan Thomas reading his own poem, If I Were Tickled by the Rub of Love.

Presenter10:35

You had by this time, by the time the war broke out, published your first book of poems, or somebody had published them for you.

Presenter10:43

Uh when you say somebody had published them for me.

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They were published by

Presenter10:48

What must have been, I should think, the strangest publisher of this century?

Presenter10:54

He was a man called Caton, and he ran a press called the Fortune Press.

Presenter11:00

Now Caton's real interest he was a tall, untidy man, who appeared always never to have shaved, and who looked at you in a suspicious manner, rather as though he thought you were out to do him down.

Presenter11:13

Caton's real interest was in the publication of what we should call now very, very soft pornography of a homosexual kind. He published books like Thirteen, A Diary of the Teens, Fourteen, A Diary of the Teens, Boy Soldiers, and so on. But Caton also had a line in publishing poetry.

Presenter11:34

Now he wasn't interested in poetry, but he felt that somehow one of two of these young poets perhaps in the future they might produce something that would really make his fortune.

Presenter11:46

Ah and sir, when I went to him

Presenter11:48

and said, Would you like to publish some of the Twentieth Century Verse Poets? He said, Well, there's no money in poetry. I hope you don't expect me to give you any money.

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I said, well, no, no.

Presenter12:00

He said, Well, I take it you're a man of means. Well, I didn't actually say that I wasn't or that I was. In fact, I certainly wasn't. Anyway, Caton published my first book.

Presenter12:11

He published Roy Fuller's first book, Gavin Hewart's first book. He managed later on to get Dylan Thomas to give him the rights in Thomas's first book for ten pounds, out of which he really must have made some money.

Presenter12:24

And in due course Caton died, and when he died it became known that he was the owner of a large number of properties in Brighton, so that he was a very rich man. He really was a very, very eccentric publisher. He produced the books nicely.

Presenter12:38

Well, let's get on to your fourth record. What's that?

Presenter12:41

My fourth record is a poem by Roy Fuller called The Middle of a War. Roy and I were very close friends then, and indeed are still close friends now.

Presenter12:53

It brings to my mind the very first bombing of London and the bombing of the docks. We were together I think we'd gone to Brockwell Park in South London for a swim and to our astonishment we saw the German planes coming over. This is, I say, this really was the first serious bombing raid, and bombs began to fall. We spent the whole of that evening in a pub called The Fox Under the Hill at the top of Denmark Hill, occasionally looking at each other nervously, shaking our heads and saying, This really is the end of the world as we know it. In a way we weren't entirely wrong.

Julian Symons13:27

Uh in a

Presenter13:30

Because I think the war was the end of the world as people knew it before the war. The world after the war was different. We weren't quite right in our premonition of impending doom. There's a little bit of uh a premonition of impending doom in the poem. And that was written by Roy Fuller at about this time. This was written by Roy Fuller a little later, I think in nineteen forty-two or three, when he had joined up.

Presenter13:53

My photograph already looks historic.

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The promising youthful face The Matalos Coff.

Julian Symons14:00

Holler.

Presenter14:00

Yeah.

Julian Symons14:01

Say This One is Remembered for a Lyric.

Julian Symons14:04

his place and period

Julian Symons14:06

Nothing could be duller.

Julian Symons14:08

Its position is already indicated, the son or brother in the album.

Julian Symons14:14

Pained the expression, and the garments dated.

Julian Symons14:18

His fate so obviously preordain.

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Roy Fuller reading his own poem, The Middle of a War.

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Now you disappeared into the Royal Armoured Corps. Did you do any writing while you were serving?

Presenter14:31

Very little writing. I wrote a few poems. I had my second book of poems published. But I was very distinctly a member of the awkward squad in the army. I was a very bad soldier, an unwilling soldier.

Presenter14:45

My next choice is a song called This Lovely Weekend.

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And it certainly isn't chosen because it's the song that has any classical pretensions, even in its kind, I think, as a popular song.

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In fact, it probably fulfils the opening line of a poem that Fuller wrote at this time, which says, From these old hackneyed melodies, I think probably this lovely weekend might be called a hackneyed melody. At the same time, it carries for me both poignant recollections of snatched weekends while in the army,

Presenter15:22

And also of hearing the song in the company of rather distinguished now painter named Carol Waite, a Royal Academician, who was even more a member of the awkward squad than I was. And there we were, I can see us now, sweeping away outside the Naffy, and inside the Naffy came the strains of That Lovely Weekend. Carol Waite, I'm happy to say, was actually taken away from this humiliating work when it was discovered that he was an artist and he was sent to paint Naked Ladies in the Officer's Mess.

Presenter15:59

There's glory for you. Let's listen to that lovely weekend sung by Anne Shelton. This leather I pain, my heart.

Julian Symons16:08

Problems with you till we meet again.

Julian Symons16:12

Keep smiling, my darling, and someday we'll spend

Julian Symons16:17

A lifetime of sweep

Julian Symons16:19

Has that lovely weekend? Uh

Presenter16:35

That lovely weekend, Anne Shelton with Ambrose and his orchestra, recorded in December 1941.

Presenter16:42

Now, Julian, when you were out of uniform again, you found a job as a professional writer of sorts. A job as an advertising copywriter, yes. You're putting it very politely. Well, it has its creative moments, even a job like that. It does indeed.

Julian Symons16:52

Put it.

Presenter16:57

Now you had written a thriller some years before.

Presenter17:00

I'd written the thriller in the 1930s, rather astonishingly, at the instance, really, of a friend of mine named Riven Todd, who was one of the poets in my twentieth century verse circle. Riven was also a very knowledgeable figure about art.

Presenter17:22

And he was the secretary, or he was some functionary, at the first Surrealist exhibition in England in the late 1930s. It was the first time people in England, or most people in England, had seen a Surrealist painting, and they were very shocking and extraordinary. And Riven said to me, what fun it would be if we wrote a book together about an art movement, if we invented an art movement, if we put all our friends in the book, if we killed off the friend we liked least, and if we made some other friend the murderer. He lived opposite to me at that time in a square in Pimlico, and we used to send little notes across the square to each other with suggestions for bizarre killings of particular friends. I won't name the friends. But in the end he never wrote any of the book. I wrote it, but it really was a joke. I didn't consider it even as having any possibility of being published. I never thought of publication. And I put it away in a drawer.

Julian Symons18:09

I won't

Presenter18:25

Uh then as the years passed I went into the army and got married, and when I emerged from the army I found myself rather hard up.

Presenter18:34

And my wife happened to come across this yellowing manuscript in a drawer one day, read it and said, Well, you know, it's it's quite funny in parts. Why not send it to a publisher? And I did. Was it accepted by the first publisher? It was accepted by Victor Gollangs really by chance, I think. I sent it to probably the only publisher in London who would have appreciated such a zany piece of humour. The plotting of it is so awful, so really terrible, that I refused to let it be republished.

Julian Symons18:48

But

Speaker 418:48

Uh

Julian Symons18:48

Every

Presenter19:09

You were also given, about that time, a book column to write every week. Now that must have helped you towards independence. It did indeed. This came about through George Orwell, who was a friend of mine. And George was writing a column called Life, People and Books for the Manchester Evening News. Then after the success of Animal Farm, he was offered the post of book critic on The Observer and didn't want to go on writing the Manchester Evening News column. And he very kindly managed to persuade them to give me the job. They didn't want to. I'm sure they never heard of me. It was an act of kindness for which I was at the time and have always since been grateful.

Presenter19:53

And that, as you might say, paid the rent. With the advent of the book column, I said to my wife, look, I really hate advertising.

Presenter20:02

I think I'll give it up. And I must say this was a very insouciant way of going about things. When I think now how casually she also said, Well, yes, I mean, if you want to give it up, I should.

Presenter20:14

Why, I can't thank her too much.

Presenter20:16

Now you wrote a number of biographies. You were alternating for a while, thrillers and what we might call serious books, biographies and and books of history. You wrote a biography of your of your brother, AJA, Dickens, Carlyle, Conan Doyle, Poe.

Presenter20:32

and a number of history books about the thirties.

Presenter20:35

is I think I have to take you up.

Presenter20:38

on that remark about thrillers and what we might call serious books, with the implication that no crime story can be a serious book. I'm not saying that all of my crime stories or most of them are serious books, but I do think that crime stories can be good novels. Oh, indeed they can.

Julian Symons20:55

There you go.

Presenter20:58

Right, but this is apart from that, your facts are unacceptionable.

Julian Symons20:58

All right, well this is an official

Presenter21:02

Let's have another record while we're arguing this in more detail. Oh, I don't think we're arguing really. Well, this is the ballad of Mac the Knife. And well, I suppose it means no more to me than that it does seem to me a marvellous song, but it also has that

Presenter21:24

criminal error in which something is concealed that is bound to be valued by any crime writer.

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From a tugboat by the river A cement bags dropping down

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The summons just for the weight.

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Back your Mackeys back in time.

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The Ballad of Mac the Knife, sung by Scott Merrill. Now, your serious murder books. They are not particularly violent. I mean, one or two murders a book is usually enough.

Presenter22:13

Yes, I'm much more interested in the psychology of the criminal than I am truly in setting a puzzle, although I do like to have a puzzle in the book.

Presenter22:26

But neither I, nor indeed most writers now, go in for the old kind of crime story in which there is a map of the grounds as a frontispiece, and on page 44 there's a map of the library where the body is found, and that's marked too. All that, I think, is out and finished, although you might find stories still occasionally.

Julian Symons22:41

Ah

Presenter22:46

That are of that kind. But what is interesting, I think, in the crime story today, in crime stories like those of Patricia Highsmith, say, is that one can say something about society, about human nature, about the nature of violence, even though one may not actually be very violent in the crime story. It's possible to say something of serious social or other interest. I'm making this sound very ponderous. I hasten to say that the crime writer's first duty is to be entertaining. I can see you looking slightly disapproving when.

Julian Symons23:22

I could

Presenter23:26

When I was saying that about serious social rather rather as though it were a social study, that that's not what I mean. And if I conveyed that, I've expressed myself badly.

Julian Symons23:28

Social introduction.

Presenter23:37

You've never had any one character who's run through a number of books. I've never had that, except in my very, very early days as a crime writer when I really didn't know what I wanted to do. Because although this is what readers like,

Presenter23:52

or what a great many readers like. It's highly limiting to you. You have to have your Lord Peter character, or your Inspector Goethe character. He's got to appear, he's got to go through his routine. And this is something that I feel I would like to avoid. Well, I always have avoided it.

Presenter24:11

How recently you've been combining your murder stories with your like for researching Victorian history and backgrounds. Yes, that's right. I've written now three Victorian crime stories. The first of them I wrote simply to see if I could do it, because one is always wanting to push out the frontiers of the crime story a little further, or to do something fresh in it, or at least I am, not to repeat oneself. And so, accordingly, I wrote the first one just to see if I could write a period crime story which I thought was reasonable in language and in setting. And it seemed to be rather successful, so I've now written three. There's a new one just out. There is a new one just out. The Dettling Murders.

Presenter24:56

Out of the whole twenty-five or so crime stories, which are your favorites, which have come off best, which are most sharply characterized?

Presenter25:04

There are three or four which I like much more than the others. One is a book called The Thirty-First of February, which is a very old book, which is set in an advertising agency and which I think probably was at the time almost certainly libelous. There is a book called The Man Who Killed Himself, which is a kind of black comedy, and I think comes off very well. Sometimes one does things and they just don't come off. And of course, one's favourite book, or rather among one's favourite books, must always be the last one.

Presenter25:40

Let's have another record.

Presenter25:42

This record is Betty Hutton singing Murder He Said, of which I'll only say that I enjoyed enormously.

Julian Symons25:51

He says Jackson he says Emma names Marie says Jackson he says she hoot the snoop to me he says Jackson he says is that the language of love

Julian Symons26:05

He says woof woof, he says when he likes my hat, he says

Julian Symons26:10

He says, what the heck is that? He says, woo-hoo! He says, is that the language of love?

Presenter26:19

Murder, he says, sung by Betty Hutton as she sang it in a film called Happy-Go Lucky in 1943. Julian, you devoted a lot of time to the service of your profession. You helped to found the Crime Writers' Association. I was one of the founder members, yes, although the true founder of it was a most extraordinarily prolific writer named John Creasy.

Presenter26:42

who gathered together

Presenter26:44

strangely enough, in the National Liberal Club. A very few crime writers, I think he sent round notices of the formation of an association to about thirty writers, of whom about twelve turned up.

Presenter26:56

And we sat and looked at each other in the National Liberal Club with some suspicion, and John, who was a figure of tremendous efficiency and skill in many ways apart from writing crime stories, really pulled the association through its first three very difficult years. Now it's a flourishing affair.

Julian Symons27:16

Fair.

Presenter27:16

Is that the organization that has a rather macabre ritual initiation?

Julian Symons27:20

That is the

Presenter27:25

And we yes, the Detection Club does have an initiation ceremony in which new members are asked to swear that they will obey the rules of the club. They swear it in a darkened room and they have to place their hand upon Eric the skull, who lights up when their hand is placed upon it and swear that they will obey all the laws of the club, even though most of those laws are actually unwritten. Eric is a departed crime writer, I presume. Perhaps so. We were very baffled when, on one occasion, a lively American came over and said, How can you be sure it's Eric and not Erika? And we can't actually be sure. Nor do we know where Eric came from.

Presenter28:08

You are also, or have been, chairman of the Committee of Management of the Society of Authors, which is a very responsible task. That's right. Yes, I was for a couple of years, which is one's term of office.

Presenter28:20

Now, this desert island situation, how would you manage? Are you a practical man? Could you look after yourself?

Presenter28:26

I'm not sure. I'm certainly not a very practical man, no.

Presenter28:30

But, um I would hope to be able to look after myself in some form or other. You could rig up a shelter and find something to eat.

Presenter28:38

You live by the sea, of course, nowadays. I do live by the sea, yes. Have you taken up fishing? I have not taken up fishing, but I eat fish. And if I were on the desert island, if it were that kind of desert island, I must say I'd rather consider it as being

Presenter28:52

A sybaritic existence. But if it were to be a tough existence, well, I suppose I should have to accustom myself to it. You have no plans for escaping.

Presenter29:02

I have no plans for escaping. No, no. I no. You'll sit it out. I shall sit it out. Listening to record number eight, which is what?

Presenter29:09

Record number eight is Louis MacNeese's Sunlight on the Garden, the tone of which, and especially the last verse of which, represents for me MacNeese's own affirmation of the goodness of life, of mere living even in what I think has been a difficult time. And this is something that I've increasingly come to feel myself.

Presenter29:33

As I grow older.

Presenter29:35

The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold.

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When all is told we cannot beg for pardon.

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Our freedom as freelances advances towards its end.

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The earth compels upon it Sonnets and birds descend.

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And soon, my friend, we shall have no time for dances. Louis Magnice reading his own poem, Sunlight on the Garden. If you could take only one disc out of the age you've chosen, which would it be?

Presenter30:12

I should have to take the Auden, because I'd regard Auden as being the greatest poet of this century.

Presenter30:18

So there really wouldn't be any competition. It would be the Orden poem.

Presenter30:24

And I invited you to choose one luxury that you'd like to have on the island, one object to give you pleasure to be. Yes, I d I did say that my view of this island was that the existence would be sybaritic.

Julian Symons30:30

But yes, I

Presenter30:37

And so what I would choose would be what I call a recliner that is to say, a rather large, not hammock, but something in which to recline, a couch on which to recline. I would I would place it by the sea, and I would watch what I hope would always be a gentle, calm sea in the calm sunlight.

Presenter30:59

Right, and we'll give you a waterproof mattress. I mean, we're very obliging. I think you might have to do that, yes. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already placed under a palm tree for you.

Presenter31:11

My one book since I believe I'm not allowed to take the complete works of Dickens no my one book would have to be a Dickens novel, and after brooding on it and feeling agonised between Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend,

Julian Symons31:15

Yeah.

Presenter31:27

I would choose Bleak House. We might possibly bind our mutual friend in with it. And thank you, Julian Simmons, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 431:47

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