Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist and critic who won the Booker Prize for 'Possession', a novel blending academic erudition with creative vision.
On the island
Eight records
Hanna Schwarz, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis
Which is good for me because I come from Yorkshire from the background of the big choirs that really belted out. This joyful music And I wanted the He Shall Feed His Sheep, because my father, who also couldn't sing a note in tune, though he had a beautiful voice, used to sing it while the dishwasher was going...
Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622: II. Adagio
Reginald Kell, Zimbler Sinfonietta
And I wanted this because as a little girl Largely for health measures to cure my asthma, I was encouraged to play the clarinet and was taught by a teacher who. His claim to fame was that he had taught Reginald Kell. And this adager is one of the pieces of music that twisted itself round my insides.
Deller was another thing that hit me. I had never heard of the idea of a counter tenor. And a man at Cambridge put this record on. And there were these wonderful Elizabethan words, and here was this sort of uncanny, haunting sound.
It's Wallace Stevens, the American poet, reading The Idea of Order at Key West, which is a poem about what art does to the world, how art transfigures the world. And again, I heard it through a door.
Philharmonia Chorus, Philharmonia Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini
I like this simply because I I like the noise. I like it because it's an apocalyptic vision of terror and I like it because it's Latin, medieval rhyming Latin. I actually like the sound of the words in this.
When That I Was and a Little Tiny Boy
And she's singing my very favourite Shakespeare song, When That I Wasn't a Little Tiny Boy from Twelfth Night, which was my A level Shakespeare. And she's singing it with bounce, and she comes out of the jazz world that I grew up in.
Das Rheingold: "Goldne Äpfel wachsen in ihrem Garten"Favourite
Kurt Böhme, Vienna Philharmonic, Sir Georg Solti
This one moves me terribly because it's something that's lost and always there.
Liederkreis, Op. 39: Zwielicht
I like this simply because the last line is so sinister.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:08How much effect has winning the Booker Prize had on your life?
Extreme pleasure. I have had hundreds of letters from all sorts of people who have enjoyed the book. And considerable irritation because of being constantly interviewed and the phone never stops going and People offer one goodies... but I feel I'm middle-aged and want to write another book and another book and another book. And it's rather horrid to have nice things appearing to be like persecution.
Presenter asks
8:16Can you remember how you felt when you heard that [your mother] died?
I felt an immense space. I felt a huge amount of sort of brilliantly coloured air coming in through the window, if I'm going to be truthful. And I also felt that she could stop hurting herself. I sort of felt that there was peace in a corner of my mind in which I always felt there was turmoil.
Presenter asks
11:54Why didn't you speak to anybody outside class [at school]?
I had no social graces. I had no capacity to make friends, I think.
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
because in that way I read so terribly fast it would take me quite a long time, and I would have forgotten the beginning of that a bit by the end. And also I could use it to translate Shakespeare into French and it into English, and in this way I would be usefully occupied. A whole new translation of Proust.
The luxury
a large filing cabinet absolutely full of A4 paper narrow feint and black and white felt tip pens
I would rather have the filing cabinet than Botticelli, which says something.
Presenter asks
Did you intend then even then to become a writer?
Yes, though I think if you'd have asked me I wouldn't have said I did. I've never really said this before, but from from being quite little I started thinking, how can I do it? What shall I do?... What I wanted to do was not be famous or achieve things in the world. It it was make something, it was make a work of art, it was do something like Keats' Ode to a Nightingale. I wanted to make something like that.
Presenter asks
17:12Why do you use the words frightened and afraid [about your sister Margaret Drabble coming after you]?
I was frightened there was no room for me, that I wasn't a real person, that there was somebody coming who was the real person, and everybody would see that I hadn't been there.
Presenter asks
29:26What sort of effect did [your son's] death have on your writing, on your work?
Writing does have a large element of being done for pleasure in it, and I lost that completely for a very long time, I think.
“I am a person addicted to solitude. I'm a person who, if I love talking. But if I talk for three days flat without a longish period of solitude, I begin to feel ill.”
“I was the fiftieth generation of women for whom there was still a fairly stark choice between work and marriage.”
“I love words the way I love paint and bright colours. I love Wallace Stevens's singing words the way I love Matisse's bright colours on shining paintings. I think of them as being rather the same as each other. It's a sort of intense sensuous pleasure.”
“No, you don't get over it. And you suffer greatly from people supposing you will, I think. You suffer from people not understanding The pace of grief.”