Arthur Hailey

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:30

Our Castaway today is a writer whose books have short titles and exceedingly large sales. Novels like Hotel, Airport, Wheels, The Money Changers have made him one of the world's best-selling authors. In fact, it's estimated that there are at present 120 million of his books in print throughout the world. He is Arthur Haley. Arthur, welcome to your desert island. As a writer, do you think you might find any inspiration on it? I'm sure of it, Michael, because I've often said that I'll work anywhere. I'd work in a coal cellar if I had to. I might not like it much, but I'd go on writing. And apropos desert islands, in a way I've really done this because I live in the Bahamas. My wife and I have our own boat, a cruiser, which we take down to islands or away from everything, the exhumas particularly. We anchor and I sometimes take work with me. But now admittedly I have a lot of luxury along with that on our boat, but it is away from it and I find I work very well in those circumstances. Well you're not allowed to boat on this one. You're maroon, sir. I realise that. So I wonder therefore if any of the music that you choose would would particularly inspire you to write. Any one piece that you've chosen would give you inspiration. I think the piece that comes first to mind is the Brahms Piano Concerto No. two, the third movement, and particularly the cello solo. It's something that has always induced in me a mood of mellowness and sentiment, and uh I can't think of anything better to help one begin writing.

Presenter2:57

Arthur, you were in fact born in England. Was there any sort of literary strain in your family at all?

Presenter3:03

There could have been. My dear mother, who is now dead, only had education until I think the age of eleven. But when I was a boy, she was always making up stories to tell me. When she became grandmother to our children, she'd tell them stories. And I'm convinced that any storytelling ability I have in me came from her. But apart from that, there was no tradition in the family. Did you in fact start writing, though, as a child, when you were at home living in Luton? Oh, yes, at a very early age. And in fact, at age 10, I achieved publication for the first time. I was living in Luton, and I was a very keen swimmer. And I wrote a letter to the Luton News complaining that the local swimming bars weren't open on Sunday. And my letter, to my great joy, was published. It's a very pompous letter, but it appeared in print. Did they open the baths on a Sunday? I'm afraid not. So much for the power of the words, I suppose. Did you in those days, did you predict for yourself that this is what you'd like to be, to be a writer, to earn a living out of writing? No question. I wanted to be from the beginning. I remember I tried to get a job on the local paper, but because circumstances had made it necessary for me to leave school at 14, they didn't consider me. One had to have been to high school. But even then, I wanted to write, and during the war, when I was in the Royal Air Force, I wrote short stories which were published.

Presenter4:29

I went to Canada as an immigrant and the first thing I did was go around to the newspapers trying to get a job. They all said, incidentally, to get a job in a newspaper you had to have newspaper experience. The catch twenty-two was how do you get the experience if you can't get a job? I never found out. Never got the job either. Right. Well, let's now move on to your second choice of a record. What might that be? Well, that is Vera Lynn. I love all of Vera Lynn's songs, but I've chosen I'll Be Seeing You because I'm not sure if she actually sang it during World War II, but I mentioned my time in the RAF. I remember hearing her frequently, and of course it brings back that particular period in my life.

Arthur Hailey5:12

I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places that my heart and mind embraces all day through

Presenter5:35

Arthur, you mentioned the RAF there. In fact, you volunteered, didn't you? Well, let me be honest and said yes, indeed I volunteered, but I joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in the summer of 1939 because I was convinced that war was coming and I didn't want to go in the army. So I did go in the RAF, initially on the ground staff, and then I became a pilot and flew and went overseas. Do you see much action? No. I didn't have a truly adventurous war. It wasn't something one had much choice about, but I did fly airplanes. I flew in the Middle East and the Far East. And there were some dicey moments. But I was no hero. I was just another pilot.

Presenter6:16

In this time too you you started writing again, didn't you? And had something published for the first time. What was that? I began to write short stories. Some were published in um the Royal Air Force Journal and one uh to my great excitement was picked up by an American magazine, uh now defunct. It was called Courier and uh I remember the check was really something special. But at that point I wasn't able to make a living. What was the check? Can you remember?

Presenter6:42

I believe it was $100, which meant a great deal in those days compared to what it does now. You came back to England after the war and you'd got a kind of toehold as a writer, I suppose, no more than that. Why did you decide to emigrate? Why Canada? I'll give you an honest answer to that. I didn't like Winston Churchill being dumped out of office. I'm not ardent about politics, but all my life I've been a political conservative. I believed in the free enterprise capitalist system, even though I didn't have any money. And I had been to Canada to do my flying training as a pilot. I'd like the country and decided that that was a place to go. I guess I had a vague idea of making my fortune, and as it turned out, I more or less managed to. So I went in 1947 and stayed there for 20 years until I moved on with my wife and family briefly to the United States and then to the Bahamas, where we live now. This third choice of music, did that have anything to do or has it become a kind of a memory of that move to Canada? Yes, it did. It's Vorjak's New World Symphony, the going home theme, and I remember that I heard it first in Calgary, first became aware of it when I was there with the RAF. And it's always had a special meaning for me because Canada and the United States did in fact in my life turn out to be the New World.

Arthur Hailey7:43

Are you

Presenter9:02

Arthur, when you got to Canada, it seemed to me that you had all those jobs that James Thurber once boasted that he never did. I mean, you turned your hand to just about everything, didn't you? Did you always at that time want to be a writer? Was that the ambition? I still did, always did. I had the problem, of course, which was common to many people, of needing to make a living. And when I first went to Canada, as I told you about trying to get a job on newspapers and not succeeding. And so I got a job selling real estate. Actually, I did pretty well at it and made some commissions. And all this time, I kept trying to break into writing. And I'd been to a publishing company, McLean Hunter. They had a series of magazines. And after a while, I think they got a bit tired of me dropping in. Anyway, they had a vacancy for an assistant editor on a trade magazine called Bus and Truck Transport. I got the job. After a couple of years, I became editor and an expert, if you will, on buses and trucks. I had five very happy years there. And then, because of the connection with that industry, I had an offer of a rather good job with a truck manufacturing firm, and I took that. And about that time, I'd really given up the idea of doing writing. Did you ever get close to despair at this time? I think I'm right in saying that you split from your first wife. You were divorced and then several times. Yes, I did have an unhappy time. I had got married quite quickly during the war. I was a pilot flying. One didn't know how many times there were. I was an ardent young man and didn't seem to have the live-in arrangements in those days that they have now. Anyway, I did get married, and my first wife and I had three children, three sons. But after the war, we found that we were mentally incompatible. My first wife is a nice woman who doesn't have a mean streak in her, and we're the best of friends, and we're very close. But we did get divorced. You've used the word despair. I don't believe ever in my life that I've despaired, but of course it was a traumatic experience.

Speaker 110:17

Yeah, I think it's a very good question.

Presenter11:01

It's something it takes quite a while to get over. What was the point then where you moved from being an expert on trucks and heavy goods vehicles and started this very rapid rise upward as an international selling novelist? It happened very suddenly. I had by then married my present wife Sheila. We were married in 1951 and I was getting on with the job I had. Sheila and I had actually come to the point of starting a small advertising and public relations business which was going very well. And then all of a sudden my life changed. I had been on a flight, a business flight to Western Canada and coming back I daydreamed a story and I decided to write it for television. It was the play which became Flight Into Danger. I put it in the mail to CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They put it on and then it's like a fairy tale and still seems that way. Everything changed. It was done in Canada, the United States, Britain, Germany. It was sold as a movie. Later it became a book. And almost at once I was swamped with offers of work. And it's not supposed to happen that way, but it did. And it was my wife Sheila who said give up the sure thing, which was our little business which was doing rather well and looks as if it would grow, and take a chance and do what you always wanted to do and become a professional writer. That was 1956, and so I did. And the rest is history.

Presenter12:25

Let's now have your fourth choice of record.

Presenter12:29

This is Dr. Javago and there's no special reason connected with my life in connection with this except that Sheila and I saw that film together one day in San Francisco. It's one of the most beautiful films I think they've ever seen. I have it in my video cassette collection at home and in that film I was haunted by the music of Lara's theme.

Presenter13:24

Lara Steam from Doctor Jivargo.

Presenter13:27

Arthur, how do you come to choose the subject for your books? You mentioned there that uh you had an inspiration in an aeroplane, for one of the first things you ever wrote. Do do things come to you like that, as in a dream or something? I have a lot of ideas floating around, but of course nowadays uh with a book, something that's going to take me three years The choice is fairly important. Some of my books have been based on original notions by myself. I say notions rather than specific ideas because not until I investigate the background do I really know where I'm going. Some have resulted from conversations with the publishers where ideas have leapfrogged. For example, Hotel I think was in part suggested by my American publishers Doubleday. Then Airport was totally my own idea. When I did Wheels, I had the notion of doing a novel about the sales side of the automotive industry, and it was the publishers who said, why sales alone? Why not do the whole thing? And it varies. The most recent book, is it okay if I mention this? Of course. Strong Medicine, which is against the background of the pharmaceutical industry, strangely was

Speaker 114:29

Document

Presenter14:37

Suggested after I had had heart surgery by the publishers. It hadn't occurred to me until that time, and my first reaction was of not much interest. But I did find out about that industry, meet some people for a couple of weeks, and almost at once I became caught up with pharmaceutical business. And in the end, for me, it turned out to be the most fascinating subject I've written about. You wrote this book after you've retired, in fact, and become ill as well, and you had a very serious heart bypass operation. Yes. What effect did this illness have on you? Did it change your perspective of your life? Yes, it did. There were two things which did that, actually. One was when I came out on the far side of World War II and realized that, unlike some of my contemporaries, I was among the survivors. And from then on, life seemed pretty good, in some ways, a bonus. And after the heart surgery, and incidentally, the problem with my heart was caught in diagnosis by a physician, an internist friend, and if he hadn't caught it, I would undoubtedly have had a major heart attack and probably a fatal one. So after that quadruple bypass, when I recovered from it, I began to think, well, this is a bonus too. And however long it lasts, I'm going to make the most of it, which was one of the reasons I went back to work and did another book. One of the reasons I really fill every day and I have a zest for life, and I'm going to have that for as long as it continues.

Presenter16:04

Let's now choose your next record. It's the fifth choice, isn't it? Well, I spoke of Zest a moment ago, and I think there is nothing which gives me more of that than the music of Mozart. Incidentally, I have no musical knowledge. I just know what I like and what has developed uh in my tastes across the years. Right now, the Mozart uh which I play a great deal at home is the soundtrack from Amadeus, that superb mixture of all Mozart's music. But one thing that has uh been consistent in my taste and in my likes across the years have been the Mozart horn concertos. So what I've chosen here is part of the horn concerto number four.

Arthur Hailey17:11

Yeah.

Arthur Hailey17:30

Yeah.

Presenter17:44

Arthur, I suppose that the popular concept of a writer is of a sort of romantic, lonely figure in a garret tapping away nightly at a typewriter. How much is this near the practical fact of your own working system? The lonely is absolutely right. When I do a book, it takes me three years. The first year I do nothing but research, travel, find out about the subject about which I plan to write a story. Then I come back over all my notes and take six months to do the planning of the book. The planning stage, which is like a roadmap for the longest part of all the actual writing which lies ahead. And no matter how long I work, it never becomes easy. I bleed the words out. And incidentally, I never assume that what I'm writing is going to work because the day I become overconfident, which has happened to some writers, I'll take a good hard look in the mirror because that's when you're likely to fall flat on your face. So I live with insecurity, to an extent with loneliness, and it's a long haul. What do you turn out in a day? It used to be 600 finished words a day and I counted them. That was my full day's work. But now I work on a computer because the sheer mechanical drudgery is removed. The computer doesn't really do much to the writing. I said to the IBM salesman not long ago, I've had this thing three and a half years. It hasn't come up with a single original idea. But the mechanical saving is so great that I find that I really can now do a thousand words a day. I hope on the book which I'm currently working on to shave off several months of my normal three years. The trouble is, of course, if you say to somebody who doesn't know about writing, why I did 600 words or 1,000 a day, they say, is that all, don't they? I know. My wife, Sheila, who writes very quickly and has done a book herself, has watched this process and once she was so impatient with the way the slowness I work. She says, why don't you just dash off a first draft and get it done and then go back and correct it? And my answer was, Honey, I can only say that the way I'm doing it seems to be working.

Presenter19:45

You mentioned your wife who wrote a book. The book was called I Married a Bestseller. And in it, she described you in less than glowing terms. I will quote Arthur what she said about you in case you ever forgotten. I should think they're engraved in your mind. She describes you as being temperamental, ruthless, impatient, unreasonable, demanding, pig-headed. Now, that's just for starters. What I'd like to know is, are you like that really, or did being a writer make you that? Oh, yes, but like anything that's lifted out of context, you have omitted some rather nice things she loves. Oh, she said she loved you, yes. Yes, that's just a detail, of course. I'd like to bring that in, though.

Speaker 120:14

Oh shit.

Speaker 320:15

Yeah.

Presenter20:21

There's no question that a writer has to be dedicated and to an extent ruthless. And I think those words that Celia used are to an extent true, and particularly in the early days of my writing, when I was maybe a bit more inflexible than I am now. Yes, yes, you've got to be tough at times. And there are times when I didn't go to some things our children were involved in at school and elsewhere because I had a chapter to finish. Sometimes I've said to my children, who are now grown, that I really wasn't as good of a father as I might have been, but they say, oh, Dad, for goodness sake, stop saying that. And by the way they've turned out, I think I must have done a few things right.

Presenter21:04

Right, let's have your next choice of music, which in fact inspired by your wife again. Yes, it was. It's My Foolish Heart, and this is something of a family joke because it is the music to which I seduced Sheila, and I must admit, a little while before we were married, in the early days of our relationship, we saw the film My Foolish Heart, and we're both quite sentimental about it even now. It has a very special place in our lives, and here it is. The night is like a lie.

Speaker 321:37

Play true.

Speaker 321:40

Beware, my foolish heart.

Speaker 321:45

How wide the ever-constant move.

Speaker 321:51

Take care, my foolish father.

Speaker 321:56

There's a line between love and fascination that's hard to see.

Presenter22:04

Arthur, it seems to me talking to you and reading about you that you've had throughout your life this

Presenter22:11

determination to be what you are now. But you're now at a point in in your career where you can demand whatever you want from publishers. I mean they'll pay you, as you said, a million and and more dollars for a book.

Presenter22:23

Does it get more difficult from that point of view to keep the hunger up, to keep the energy up?

Presenter22:28

I don't think so, because the money isn't something that is important in my life now. It's pleasant to have and comfortable to have. But there is such a great sense of achievement when one has finished a book, and no matter how long I go on doing that, I'm sure I'll continue to possess it. I don't know how much longer I'm going on, but I'll certainly go on as long as I can. Earlier we talked about heart surgery, and since I had that, I don't believe I've had any more energy in my life. I get up early in the mornings, and I fill the day with writing when I'm doing that, and so it's very enjoyable, it's very satisfying for its own sake.

Presenter23:12

I've got a feeling, actually, and I wonder if you feel the same way too, though, that that people in Britain particularly don't actually much care about writers.

Presenter23:19

I mean, they use them, they buy their books, but they don't actually respect them in a sense. Is that something that you're talking about? I don't know about respecting. I have the royalty statements to say that they are indeed interested in writers, and uh if my books are read, that's all I ask. As far as attention is concerned, although when a book comes out uh I do get some attention, I uh appear on T V and radio programmes and so on, between books I disappear from sight because I'm a private person and uh I like uh my home and private life, so I'm not heard from. So whatever people do or don't feel about writers generally doesn't affect me much, but it makes me happy that uh a lot of people out there are reading my books. What about in other countries though? Because you're sold and read in many, many countries behind the Iron Curtain to in Russia perhaps, and you've been there as well. Do they treat r writers different there?

Speaker 123:24

Yeah.

Presenter24:10

Incidentally, I try not to be conceited about many things, but I will admit to conceit about being in 33 languages, something I'm quite proud of. I have been in the Soviet Union, and extraordinarily, they do have literally millions of my books. And because I write about backgrounds which reflect something I believe, the free enterprise capitalist systems, I sometimes wonder if they're honest translations. I've had them read, and apparently they are. And yes, my wife Shira and I did go to the Soviet Union for a month. We didn't expect to have a good time because I am anti-communist, but in the end, we did. And the food was superb, the treatment was wonderful. And the plain fact is, yes, over there they really do venerate writers. It's a tradition that goes back far beyond the present regime into the days of the Tsars and so on. I think they've always had this. In Japan, too, they seem to have a special place for writers. But I'm not dissatisfied either with the British or American attitude to writers. It served me very well. What's your next choice of record? Well, I love all of Tchaikovsky because there are so many melodies in there. But I've chosen, in this case, Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. It has some beautiful passages.

Presenter26:26

Arthur, you left England a long, long time ago left home, in fact, a long, long time ago, and now you live in the Bahamas, and you come back here when you're selling a book, as you are at at present.

Presenter26:36

Do you, as you get older, perhaps feel a greater tug back home? Oh, absolutely. Yes, I do come back when I'm selling a book, but I also come back to England because I love this country. I'm still British because of my Canadian residence. I'm also a Canadian citizen, but I use my British passport frequently. I suppose it's growing old and the sense of being drawn back to one's beginnings. And so much of my life was lived here, and Britain is a good place now. My wife feels this, and we feel this tug. We come at least twice a year, and occasionally a little more. I love coming here. Which will explain then your final choice of record, I think. I chose it for that reason. It's from Edward German's Merry England Words by Basil Hood. It's not, I think, a terribly well-known piece, but I have it at home in my own record library, and I love it. And it says a lot of things better than I could say them myself.

Arthur Hailey27:51

So peaceful England, while I my watch and keeping.

Arthur Hailey28:00

All like men of Willie would be.

Arthur Hailey28:10

We are all asleep.

Arthur Hailey28:14

River wise, open thy slumber smiles.

Arthur Hailey28:24

Why not leave me? I'm awake for you.

Presenter28:36

Arthur Hiller, you know, on your desert island, do you think you'd uh try to escape from it? Oh, yes, because throughout my life I've moved on from one place to another. I've lived in so many countries. Yes, I'm sure I'd try to escape. One record that you could keep of the eight. Suppose there was some great natural disaster and seven were swept away. Which of your records would you keep? Absolutely, the Brahms. Piano Concerto No. Two, because I think the phases of it represent life itself. There is in there beauty throughout. There's liveliness, low points, sadness, gladness. It's all in there, in that Brahms Piano Concerto No. Two. You've got the complete works of Shakespeare on the island, the Bible. What would be the book? I thought a lot about this, and I don't believe there's any single book that I could keep on reading without being bored with it. So I decided I would like a copy of Webster's International Dictionary. I could learn all the words I don't know and perhaps put them together myself in some sort of order. You'd be a devil at Scrabble after that, wouldn't you? And the one luxury item. Well, without any question, this is absurd, of course, on an island, but hot water. I think hot water is the greatest luxury in my life. I'd like two showers a day and one shave, possibly two.

Presenter29:52

Dr. Hilly, thank you very much indeed. My pleasure.

Speaker 130:02

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