Malcolm Bradbury

Malcolm Bradbury0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty three.

Malcolm Bradbury0:11

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

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On our Desert Island this week is the novelist Malcolm Bradbury.

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Professor Bradbury, have you ever daydreamed about being a Robinson Crusoe?

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No, I haven't. I I teach Robinson Crusoe in my classes and I always present him as a a rather unfortunate figure who is uh stranded uh on a capitalist desert island and uh forced to uh scrape a living from the soil. And I've never been good at that sort of thing myself, so um on the whole I'm happy where I am. Apart from the allegory, if it was real, could you endure it?

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I don't really think I could. I I have a dreadful feeling I'd curl up and die, to be honest. But would a very limited amount of music help? It would. It would indeed. Is music important in your life? Yes, it is, but um I can't say that I have a a a good musical education. I I use music for

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reinforcement and support. But you don't perform. I don't perform and I never have, no.

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Do you have a lot of records at home? Their house resounds with records, but they're mostly not mine. My children are avid users of technology and they listen to a great deal of music. Most of my records are still the records that I had when I was about twenty-five. You keep all the old ones. Oh, I do. Right back to Target. Yes, very much, yes. Did you have any plan in in choosing your aid?

Malcolm Bradbury1:41

Right back to Target.

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Yes, I I I decided that um I would display not that part of my musical listening which has to do with uh

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the records that I ultimately like, that's to say the classical records, but those which have played some part in moments in my life or con or are connected with moments in my life that I

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still want to hold on to, having a dreadfully bad memory and being delighted that there are signal systems like music that help bring things back. I think music that is evocative. What's the first one? I'd like to start with a piece of satire. O one of my favorite musicals or musical operators.

Malcolm Bradbury2:14

And the music challenge is

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was um Candide, a marvellous poet called uh Richard Wilbur, wrote a lot of the the words for the songs in this. Linnea Hellman wrote the libretto and Enner Bernstein wrote the music.

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And um in Candide is a piece of uh of music that should remind everybody that the satirical view of the world is absolutely necessary.

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Which just goes to prove that everything's for the best in this best of all possible worlds, of which if I may say so, Westphalia is the center.

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Look at this view, mountains and towers, three meadows two, bursting with flowers. This is the heart of this best of all possible worlds. Quite the best part of this best of possible worlds.

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This message is the full possible

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Something from Condide, the best of all possible worlds sung by Max Adrian, Barbara Cook and Robert Rounsfield.

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You're a Yorkshireman, aren't you? Yes, I am, yes, yes. I'm proud of it, as all Yorkshiremen are. Of course.

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Your father worked for the railways. As a boy, were you a railway buff? Oh, very much so, yes, yes. There there was a marvellous system called the Privilege Ticket, which allowed uh people who worked for the railways to have all sorts of privileges. Like free tickets. Free tickets to France and uh Germany.

Malcolm Bradbury3:43

Like three

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And so the the great days of uh of the Cook's Continental Timetable where you investigated, you know, in in in those dark times when there were no travel allowances and uh you had to get by on on the sandwiches that you packed before you left home. And um we we we travelled all over the place. My father was a marvellous guide to Europe. Uh he spoke very few languages, um I think, to be honest. Uh

Malcolm Bradbury4:02

Uh

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spoke none except English very loudly. But he did take me everywhere where and I'm very grateful for that. You had the misfortune to have a heart condition which kept you from playing most games. Yes, that's right. Did that turn you into into into a studious lad, throwing you on your own resources? Yes, yes, I must have made me quite obnoxious.

Malcolm Bradbury4:23

Did that turn

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I'm sure it's the reason why I became a writer.

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Which I did very early. I had to retire to the library when everybody else was.

Malcolm Bradbury4:33

Yeah.

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Doing healthy activity.

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So I spent uh much of my days from about twelve to sixteen.

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Avoiding games by writing books. And listening to the radio. And listening to the radio. Particularly comedy programme. Indeed. That's right. You sent in some ideas to the BBC. Yes, there was a marvellous person called Peter Titheridge at BBC Variety who gave me an enormous amount of encouragement. Did you ever sell anything? Well, I believe I did. I can no longer remember very clearly, but I think a line or two in Breakfast with Brayden going back that far. That's right. Were you invited to the studio? Oh, yes, yes. Peter Titheridge was a marvellous support and he was sure I had talent somewhere. So I did come down to look at all the

Malcolm Bradbury4:47

And listening to the radio. Particularly comedy programme. Indeed, that's right.

Malcolm Bradbury4:52

Exactly, that's it.

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If he

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Did you ever

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That's right.

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The programmes that in those days were as fascinating to a would-be writer as pop groups are now to a a would-be musician. That would have been the days of the Aeolian Hall, wouldn't it? It w it was, yes. Who did you meet there? Apart from Brayden, obviously. Yes, Jimmy Edwards and Dick Bentley and the Take It From Here team. They were the great uh

Malcolm Bradbury5:33

Hey.

Malcolm Bradbury5:36

So who did you meet there, apart from Britain?

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Did you write any more material? I switched to Punch. I started writing for Punch. As a youngster? Yes, mm, yes. Um the Punch is always said to be a place where writers have to be, you know, fifty at least before they're allowed to be funny in those pages. That wasn't true in my case. I I I I did write for them very early. Who was the editor then?

Malcolm Bradbury5:52

Yes.

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Um

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Maggie? No, no, it was before Magridge. Bernard Hollywood. Yes.

Malcolm Bradbury6:07

Black

Malcolm Bradbury6:09

Yeah.

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And then, of course, quite soon you went to university and there were more weighty matters on your mind. Yes, yes, yes. Let's have your second record.

Malcolm Bradbury6:16

That you buy.

Presenter6:19

Well, the um uh second is a record that I greatly admire for its bitter texture, its it's almost its nastiness. It's Lottie Lenya, a great heroine of mine from the thirties. I wasn't really around in the thirties, but somehow that thirties intonation lasted for me, and it's Alabama song.

Malcolm Bradbury6:41

Malabo.

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Yeah.

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Uh

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Uh

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We know

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Yeah.

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Must say goodbye We've lost our good old mother

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And must have dollars, oh, you know why.

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Lotte Lena singing the Alabama song from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagoni.

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Right, to University Leicester University, in fact. Were you reading English? Yes, yes. It was in those days still a university college of of of London University. Was it? And there were only seven hundred students, and uh it was uh in fact as small as as the department that I am in now.

Malcolm Bradbury7:21

What's it?

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So it was a very intimate place and um a place where um I found myself able to um think of of myself as a writer since nobody else was doing that job. You spent a lot of time with university journalism? Yes, yes. In fact you started your own paper. Yes, there was a student newspaper called Ripple with the beginnings of which had a great deal to do. And there was also a literary magazine.

Malcolm Bradbury7:42

In fact,

Malcolm Bradbury7:48

Mm.

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Colusiad.

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Again, uh I wrote quite a lot for that. And while there you started to write your first novel. Yes, Eating People is Wrong. And um I um had in it um central character who is um professor of English, forty years old.

Malcolm Bradbury7:57

Yeah.

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And I I thought this was a piece of pure fiction, that is to say, that I could dramatise myself into such a figure in a state of total certainty that I would never become such a figure. In fact, one of the ironies of my life is that I did become a professor of literature in the end.

Malcolm Bradbury8:20

That's pretty sure.

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You nearly became an advertising copywriter. Yes, yes. I had um ambitions in that direction from early years. My father became an advertising man for British Rail.

Malcolm Bradbury8:32

Follow

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And um he thought that uh the world of commerce and practicality was the world for me. And um I on the whole I agreed until I I got a fortune at first and the offer of a research fellowship.

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and went to do an MA at the University of London. You also had a trip to America when you nearly starved. Yes, that's true. Some kind of fellowship or foundation or something that didn't come off. Tell me the story of that. Well I was invited to, or I applied for a fellowship to go and study radio in the United States and Canada. This was in the days when everybody was beginning to talk about whether commercial radio was better than public radio.

Malcolm Bradbury8:53

That is some kind of

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Uh

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And um I wanted to research a project on this topic. I went to um America on um a mysterious airline that flew from Luxembourg and managed to visit seventeen ice flows before.

Malcolm Bradbury9:24

Yeah, especially because it

Malcolm Bradbury9:26

Two of Luxembourg.

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Yes, that fits, doesn't it? I I didn't think of that, but I'm sure you're right. And um I arrived in New York to be told by my host there that the foundation that had given me the scholarship had collapsed.

Malcolm Bradbury9:31

Yeah.

Malcolm Bradbury9:41

Oh no.

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So I went on to Canada where I I'd intended to go first.

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and to the University of Toronto, where they very kindly found me a job mowing lawns round the suburbs of Toronto.

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with a Philippine gardener. I'd just been in Toronto and one of the curiosities is that every time you stare out of a window there is these trucks with the Philippine gardeners and the mowing machines still around. Anyway, I managed to survive. I got back to New York and had ten dollars left I think when suddenly discovered that not only had the research scholarship packed up but so had the airline. So various pieces of fortune that came along and rescued me and I lived from hand to mouth in in New York, which is rather a frightening thing to do if you're nineteen for a couple of weeks until I managed to get a flight out. But it it actually hooked me on America I should tell you.

Malcolm Bradbury10:18

There we are.

Malcolm Bradbury10:31

Yeah.

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Write an MA at London, a PhD at Manchester. And how was the novel going? Slowly, as all my novels do. Uh I I take a very long time to write fiction and um I um managed to finish it in nineteen fifty nine largely because

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The heart condition that you mentioned uh led to a heart operation and I thought at least I'll have one book out before they put me in the morgue. So you finished it in a rush? Yes, I did, yes.

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And fortunately, and thankfully, the heart operation was all right.

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And the following year, 1959, a lot of things happened in quick succession. They did indeed. Yes, yes, the book came out. I got married and I got my first job. I suddenly became respectable in all sorts of ways. I'd lived through, you know, the early part of my life thinking that I wasn't going to last for very long, and suddenly I had to face some sort of perpetuity. Yes. And I settled down a bit. That's a great moment. So let's cut off there and have your third record. Well, it comes exactly from that moment. The title that I chose for my

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Record.

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Novel was Eating People Is Wrong, and that comes from a record by Michael Flanders and Donald Swan.

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at the drop of a hat and the song is called The Reluctant Cannibal.

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Seated one day at the tom-tom.

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I heard a welcome shout from the kitchen.

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Come and get it.

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Roast leg of insurance salesman.

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A chorus of yums ran round the table. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Yum, yum, yum. Except for Junior, who pushed away his shell, got up from his log, and said...

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I don't want any part of it.

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Michael Flanders and Donald Swann.

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Now, that first novel, Malcolm, nineteen fifty nine, Eating People is wrong. You had considerable critical success. In fact, it was compared with Kingsley Amos's Lucky Jim, which was rather hard luck'cause you had started it before he started his book. Yes, yes, I had, although I mean, f fairly compared in the sense that it was a provincial university novel. I think my credibility was slightly greater in that I actually had been in a provincial university as a student, whereas Kingsley Amos, th though he had taught in one, was an Oxford chap. And in those days we always suspected that novels went to Oxford chaps.

Malcolm Bradbury12:52

Yeah.

Presenter12:56

But yeah, I think the essential difference between the two books is that because I've taken so long over it, I see mine as a kind of overview of the 1950s rather than a

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A direct expression of it. I love Lucky Jim. I think it's marvellous. But you would spend, what, eight or nine years on your. Yes. So I'm sort of looking back over the fifties as an episode that's already.

Malcolm Bradbury13:10

Retes.

Malcolm Bradbury13:11

Nine years on your list.

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in process of uh a departure. Now your next book appeared after only, I think, six years, uh, Stepping Westward. Yes, I I had been writing it for a very long time already. I I wrote it in the late fifties, um, side by side with Eating People is Wrong and in the early sixties. And uh it came from the fact that during the f the fifties I did uh spend a great deal of my time

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In the United States it had become a center of my

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interest in a way the center of my freedom, I think. I I found America the place that I was happiest.

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And as I say, it's just been reissued and I confess in the introduction that it represents the moment where I put down my Levis and put on my Levi's and started looking for something other than the rather tight moral and provincial world of Britain and British fiction in the 1950s. And by the time that came out you had moved to what was to prove to be a permanent university post at the new University of East Anglia.

Presenter14:18

It came out just before I went to the University of East Anglia. I taught during the early 60s at the University of Birmingham, where I was a colleague of David Lodges, who remains a very close friend of mine. And we were the two young writers on the faculty. And as you probably know, there is a mysterious English writer called Bodge or Ladbury, who exists in many people's minds. We're so often confused with each other that one of the problems of our life is to secure the belief in the British public that we do have separate identities. We actually do. Right. Now, East Anglia, Professor of American Studies. Is that a course available in other universities?

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Well, I went there when American Studies was just beginning in that particular university. What has it covered? Well, it's interdisciplinary in the sense that it covers um literature, history and then uh politics, um film, drama, institutions, geography, uh but primarily literature and history and we are by now one of the biggest programs uh in the country and indeed I think bigger than almost any any programme in America too.

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Let's have your fourth record. I thought that since America has been a fundamental theme of my life, I ought to try and find some British group who have also been preoccupied with the United States and to find as complicated a form of this as I possibly could. So I chose Super Tramp and here they are in Paris introducing themselves in English to a French audience in order to sing Breakfast in America.

Malcolm Bradbury15:57

Take a look at my door.

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Who should see you be one I got

Malcolm Bradbury16:03

Yeah.

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We never seem to get alive

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Big a drum, a pass of water

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Time to see you on everything

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She the girl then I panel

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I'm hoping it's gonna come true.

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Uh

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But there's not a lot of in the

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Super tramp in Paris with Breakfast in America.

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Now you were beavering away at your next novel, once again six or seven years in the making, and once again, like Eating People is Wrong, a pungent and brilliant comedy of university life.

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In fact, it was to be the novel of nineteen seventy five, The History Man. You had found a place to write it in comfort without distraction.

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Yes, because I was involved in the founding of a new school in a new university, I found my life totally overwhelmed with telephones and committee meetings and so on. And in order to protect a little space for writing, I discovered a venue in Saratoga Springs, New York State, called Yaddo. It's a writer's colony, a writers and artists' colony, where I could hide away from the telephone, from life, and just write fiction, which actually is the greatest pleasure that I I have. How does it work? Are the house rules? Yes, oh yes. You can't talk to anyone between nine and in the morning and six o'clock at night. After that all hell breaks loose, of course. But food is delivered to your studio door in a lunch bail. You know, a little bit of milk and some nice rolls, and you eat them over the typewriter, which is why my my type scripts are so stained.

Malcolm Bradbury17:27

What about the

Malcolm Bradbury17:29

But

Presenter17:40

So you were shut away in there for nine hours? Yes, a long working day, which I like. I do keep, as a writer, fairly serious office hours. And then you say all hell breaks loose after that. Yes, yes. Fine dinner is served. The wine and the bourbon become available. Suddenly people wr writers have this. How many writers at once? When I went there, which which is the winter season, there are about ten.

Speaker 317:50

Then you say all have

Speaker 317:52

Yeah.

Malcolm Bradbury17:52

Uh

Malcolm Bradbury18:01

How many right

Presenter18:06

In the summer they they're about forty. I I find forty rather terrifying. I think writers are best taken in small doses.

Speaker 218:06

No.

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Now you do in fact write and rewrite and rewrite and then rewrite. Yes.

Malcolm Bradbury18:19

Yeah.

Presenter18:20

I am fascinated by rhythms, the uh processes of verbal repetition. My novels have a very strong uh quality of uh of self-commentary. You know, the last chapter tends to be a comment on the first and this sort of thing. Um so they're although they're they're comic and in that sense I hope euphoric, uh they are also very densely worked. Somebody reported that you'd come back from Yaddo with a thousand pages and then proceed to cut them down to eighty.

Malcolm Bradbury18:37

Yeah.

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Yes, I throw away most of what I write actually.

Malcolm Bradbury18:50

And then rewrite it.

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Now The History Man, your your next book, was also a university novel, as I said, and about a trendy lefty, uh a book which did no good at all to the um sociology business.

Presenter19:04

Yes, I wasn't trying to attack sociology as such. What I was after was those extraordinary seasons that occur in our public and our intellectual life where some subject suddenly dominates the centre stage. It becomes more than a subject. It becomes a fashion. Economics has done the same thing in more recent times, as I've tried to display in my latest book. But sociology is, to my mind, a dignified, valuable and serious subject. But it did have a moment when it became, as it were, the mad forefront of the trendy face of university life. It was getting into people's hair, yes. Yes, and that was what I was after.

Malcolm Bradbury19:41

It was getting in people's hair, yeah.

Presenter19:45

The History Man had an enormous success on television. Did you adapt it yourself? No, it was adapted by Christopher Hampton r very brilliantly, I think. And um yeah, I know him, he's a friend, and um it um was done in a fairly intimate uh contact.

Presenter20:00

So that I was terribly pleased with the result. You did make a fleeting hitchcockian appearance. No, no, I I was written in to make a fleeting hitchcock an appearance. Unfortunately, I was off on a British Council lecture tour to China and they wouldn't delay the the filming to let me uh be glimpsed on screen. It's extremely tragic. I what what happens in the novel is that this half-successful novelist uh attempts actually to stop the entire plot of the book by by refusing Howard information about where Annie Canender, the uh victim lady in the novel, actually lives. And uh I did want to have this moment of arrest where the writer is seen

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to be not quite consenting to the development of the story. And uh and and and it wasn't wasn't actually put into the televersion. Let's have your first record. Well, um this is straight out of the history man, or the television version of the history man. I see Howard Kirk, the central character of that um story, as a mixture of two

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literary figures. One is Iagio and the other is Don Giovanni. And uh the director subtly illustrates this in the um television version.

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by uh taking the duet from Don Giovanni, Dacci d'Arim Lamano, and um I would like to hear that.

Speaker 321:21

From your

Malcolm Bradbury21:22

I'm your man.

Malcolm Bradbury21:27

Yeah.

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Uh

Malcolm Bradbury21:28

Yeah.

Malcolm Bradbury21:28

Bell T.

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Yeah.

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God will be here.

Malcolm Bradbury21:39

Uh

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Praise the Lord Nebray.

Malcolm Bradbury21:43

Uh

Speaker 321:43

Uh

Malcolm Bradbury21:43

Uh For

Malcolm Bradbury21:49

Are you done?

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Are you jumping?

Malcolm Bradbury21:56

Ah, you

Speaker 321:57

Yeah.

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Harden time

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A jump young

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Uh

Malcolm Bradbury22:06

Yeah.

Malcolm Bradbury22:07

Yes

Presenter22:21

Give me your hand, my dearest, from the first act of Mozart's Don Giovanni, sung by Eberhard Wachter and Graziellasciutti. Now, in talking, Malcolm, of the long and agonized process of creation for your novels, in between times, in between the novels, you knock out academic books such as the Social Context of Modern English Literature and a recent one which has just come out, the Modern American Novel, at a Speed of Knots. How many academic books have you done?

Presenter22:51

Um I'm not really very sure. I I have written quite a number of academic books. But you wrote those in England?

Malcolm Bradbury22:55

But you read that

Presenter22:56

And doesn't have to go off to seclusion.

Malcolm Bradbury22:56

You just have to go off to do it.

Presenter22:59

No, I find that the teacher and the critic are intimate parties. The teacher and the writer, or the critic and the writer, are derived from a much more schizophrenic relationship. So I do need a very sharp separation between the act of teaching and above all the act of writing criticism, particularly modern criticism. Criticism is influenced by structuralism and linguistics and deconstruction, to use some important and high-sounding words. And the writing of fiction. There is a curious suspicion of the author which exists both in universities in general and in contemporary criticism in particular. And so in order to be one... You mean the author is expendable? Oh yes, yes. There's something called an implied author and an implied reader. And actually to be a real one is almost an embarrassment on a university campus.

Speaker 323:42

Yeah.

Malcolm Bradbury23:43

You mean

Presenter23:54

You and Angus Wilson started a postgraduate writing course at the university, and this has been a great success. Yes, so well tha that that in that in a way was a solution to the problem I've just described. I d I do actually believe that uh universities have a a great responsibility to contemporary literature, and that doesn't simply mean

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studying it and examining it, but I I think paying real attention to what writers are actually doing.

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And attempting to see writing as a serious profession. And so, this is, of course, in serious writing. That is to say, the kind of writer that comes out of it tends to be somebody who is writing fiction with some seriousness. Now, that may sound like a recipe for suicide. In fact, it's not. Quite a number of those writers have been enormously successful, and of the best of young British writers last year, four of them had been associated with that course. Four out of twenty, that's very good.

Malcolm Bradbury24:47

That's very good.

Presenter24:50

How do you split up your year? Can you take off for for Yaddo for for long period? Or order?

Malcolm Bradbury24:55

What are you doing?

Presenter24:57

Now that it's established that I do write for part of the year, that is to say I teach for two terms and write in effect from April to September, I can ritualize my life in such a way that there is a teacher part and a writer part.

Presenter25:11

And the university, which began by accepting that situation rather reluctantly, is probably rather pleased with it in times when we actually need to encourage some members of faculty to do a little less teaching, given the university cuts, the tragic cuts that we've seen over the last few years.

Presenter25:28

Two years ago you also found time to chair the deliberations of the um Booker Prize Committee. Did you find that rewarding?

Presenter25:36

Well, I did. I found it also very punishing. We we we read seventy novels. Um I think we were extraordinarily lucky in that particular year because it was the year in which um

Presenter25:47

Well, certainly two absolutely incredible books, I think, books which are outstanding in any measure.

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appeared in front of us. One was Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children, which won the prize. The other was D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel.

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But also there were a great many more books of great quality and excellence which came in front of us in in that particular year. So it was enormously exciting. Your wife is also at the University of East Anglia. Yes, she's a librarian, yes, and also an adapter of books for radio from Book of Bedtime in Women's Hour and so on. Oh, that's good. A great community of interests. Yes, there are many typewriters in our house.

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Record number six.

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Well, um this is uh again an expression of my American interests. It's from Laurie Anderson's uh extended sequence called United States, and it's the track called O Superman from uh Big Science.

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Oh Superman.

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Oh Jama!

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Oh Mom and Dad.

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I'm a bad guy.

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Laurie Anderson, O Superman

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Now, your new novel, Rates of Exchange, you call it a novel of inflation.

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Yes, I I became fascinated by the obsession with um real money that um dominated the um the late seventies, which is when I started writing it in the early eighties, uh while I was writing it. And um I decided that I wanted to write a book which treated economics as the

Presenter27:40

Well perhaps the the false science of the age in much the way that um I treated sociology uh for the early seventies. But nothing about universities, nothing about the United States, or virtually nothing. No, no, it's said in the imaginary Eastern European country and it it's actually very much concerned with the uh conflicting images.

Malcolm Bradbury27:49

Or virtually no.

Presenter27:58

that seem to me to exist between

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Western and and Eastern Europe. That is to say, people in Western Europe have images of uh Eastern Europe as a place of

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of gloom and dark reality. Um people in Eastern Europe have the reverse image. I was trying to sort out the relationship between those two particular fictions. You explore life in this imaginary country i in great detail, Malcolm, through the eyes of a professor in linguistics.

Presenter28:24

So thorough an exploration, in fact, that it takes him about eighty pages to get from the airport to his hotel.

Presenter28:31

Yes, I noticed that uh one or two of the critics felt that that was a rather slow motion. I i it's it's actually enormously deliberate. It's very entertaining, too. What I'm concerned with in in the book is this man who is uh a linguist whose field is English language as a medium of international communication and who very quickly discovers that first of all that his English, which he thinks will serve him everywhere he goes, won't

Malcolm Bradbury28:38

Okay, so

Presenter28:56

And secondly, that this is a country of very mysterious and strange signs. So he's moving rather slowly and rather passively through this landscape of mysterious signs. I mean we all know that odd world of passage through a modern airport where no signs are actually in any language whatsoever except symbol system. So that the gents is marked by a man in in trousers or if you're in Yugoslavia a man in skirts who's here.

Presenter29:25

And it's it I'm trying to follow him rather carefully through this sequence of confusing signals to show his total disorientation. You've invented a very convincing new language. Well, it took a great deal of trouble. I had some assistance from various well I I run a British Council Summer School in Cambridge. I see, so you went to the linguistics boys and then I got a great many excellent professors of English from foreign universities to sit down and produce a new international language. It's a cross between Esperanto and nothing, I suppose. Do you think it has a future?

Malcolm Bradbury29:41

From whom?

Malcolm Bradbury29:47

Yeah, I I

Presenter30:03

Yes, it has great future, I hope. In fact, the book is to be adapted as a television series. So this means that a great many actors are going to have to sit down in language laboratories and learn slagan in order to keep chatting away in the background while the story takes place. Have you in fact travelled in the Eastern world? Yes, a good deal. Never in any one country for a very long time. And my imaginary country is a compound of five or six different Eastern European countries.

Malcolm Bradbury30:22

Yeah.

Presenter30:32

But there is um a certain

Presenter30:35

Universality about them, just as I think there is a universality about new universities. The new university in the History Man is not any single new university. The imaginary country in my novel is not any single Eastern European country. Malcolm, you're one of our most regarded novelists, but you've only written four novels. I hope you're busy on another. Well, no, I'm I'm not busy on the screenplay or the teleplay of rates of exchange. I am ashamed of the slow pace of my fiction. I intend to speed up. I say this as a reassurance to my publisher, but also to myself. I must write more quickly in the future. Right. Record number seven.

Presenter31:18

Well record record number seven is um I do enjoy records which have a quality of strangeness and fantasy about them, which is partly why I picked Laurie Anderson. The great British fantasist for me at the moment is Kate Bush. And so this is Army Dreamers from Never Forever.

Malcolm Bradbury31:36

Our buddy never even made it to his twenties. Wanna waste our many dreamers.

Malcolm Bradbury31:45

We'll water beast of our meeting.

Malcolm Bradbury31:50

Oh what to be surprised Army Degis, Army Degs, Army Dei Jeez

Presenter32:04

Kate Bush singing Army Dreamers

Presenter32:07

Are you a practical person? Could you look after yourself on a desert island? No, no, I'm totally impractical. I need a guide interpreter.

Malcolm Bradbury32:10

Noted.

Presenter32:15

Like the central character in race of exchange. You don't need an interpreter, you make up your own language. Could you put up some form of shelter, do you think? Um I very much doubt it. I'm dreading this desert island, I have to admit to you. What about food? Can you fish? No, no, I can't do anything. I'm I'm totally indoor.

Malcolm Bradbury32:28

Um

Presenter32:33

sort of person. Um I I hope you can make some kind of special arrangements for me. I'm I'm really not the right resident for this island.

Malcolm Bradbury32:40

Yeah.

Presenter32:41

Pick some fruit, some raw fruit. Oh, yes, yes, that I can do. Could you tie some sticks together and make a ruft?

Malcolm Bradbury32:42

With the

Presenter32:47

I would certainly try. I would want to get away from that island as quickly as I can. And you'll navigate.

Speaker 332:51

Can you navigate?

Presenter32:53

No, no, I can't even navigate.

Presenter32:59

We've got to do something about you. It's no good leaving you there for long. Let's add record number eight.

Malcolm Bradbury33:01

Yeah, it's the open

Presenter33:04

Right, well record number eight is um a record that um may explain how I solve some of the problems you've just been talking about. Um I've just been on Australia and I took with me my son Matthew, who's eighteen, as my minder. And it's he who uh builds the shelters and uh and navigates and so on. You have two sons in fact. I do, yes, yes, the other one's called Dominic.

Malcolm Bradbury33:22

You have two sons, in fact.

Presenter33:26

And um Matthew, amongst other of his activities, has been roading for an a Norwich group called Airbridge. And um I would very much like to have um as part of my eight records a record that reminds me of uh of of him, especially if he's not going to be on the island with me.

Presenter33:45

So uh here is Erbridge playing Words and Pictures. A record you've heard many times at home. Indeed, yes, yes, it rings through the house all the time.

Speaker 334:07

Help me everywhere I

Speaker 334:10

All I want to know is

Presenter34:13

Who writes this world?

Presenter34:17

Airbridge playing Words and Pictures. If you could take only one disc out of the eight you've chosen, which would it be? Well, can I can I cheat slightly and have the whole of Don Giovanni? No, no, you can have one disc, and you can have a third of Don Giovanni.

Presenter34:33

And one luxury to take with you, one object of no practical use at all. So so I I can't have a guide interpreter. No. Um in that case, I I would like a word processor. I I really mean to get to grips with the word processor, and if I'm going to have for as long a time on that island as I probably will, With no shelter and uh no conveniences, I might as well learn the word process. All right, you shall have one. And you're allowed one book. You already have the Bible and Shakespeare as standard equipment. One more book.

Presenter35:02

Well for me it has to be a novel since I think the novel is the greatest of all the literary forms and I originally thought of taking Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy which is the greatest of all novels and the first of all novels but I finally decided that there must be a modern version of this book and what I would like you to give me is a book by the Italian writer Itolo Calvino called If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, which is a compendium of stories, none of them finished, and very preoccupying for a desert island. Right.

Presenter35:37

Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller That's right Right, you shall have it. And thank you, Malcolm Bradbury, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Well, thank you very much for inviting me on to your island. Goodbye, everyone.

Malcolm Bradbury36:16

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