Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Poet and critic, author of 'The Savage God' and poetry editor of The Observer who promoted Plath, Hughes, Lowell.
On the island
Eight records
for me is the most beautiful piece of music that's ever been written. And Beethoven calls it a holy thanksgiving for recovery from a long illness. And it is about kind of rediscovering the world, I think. It has this extraordinary combination of Earthiness and unearthliness um it seems to me the the basis of all great art.
Piano Sonata No. 21 in B-flat major, D. 960
When he plays, you don't feel he he's just a guy showing h how well he can get through the notes. You feel that he's actually gone into the head of the composer and is thinking the piece out as though almost as though he were the composer, as though while he's playing.
L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, HWV 55: Or let the merry Bells ring round
Michael Ginn, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner
what is extraordinary about this is that he wr he when when he wrote it, he was eighty odd and blind. And speaking of someone who's seventy odd and not blind, this gives me hope that I may not yet be finished.
What I love about that sort of thing is the business of taking the Mickey out of themselves. And that was what the climbing world was good about. You couldn't get away with pretension.
Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492: Sull'aria... che soave zeffiretto
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Irmgard Seefried, Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan
What I love about that and... is I love that feeling of conversation. Um, because it it it th it seems to me that's what all art is about, you know, a a you look at a painting on the wall and you suddenly are in y you're having a kind of... Exchange with it, and it's very, very much... what the business of writing is.
The Hilliard Ensemble & Jan Garbarek
when I first went to America in nineteen fifty three, I was at Princeton and one afternoon I happened to go past this auditorium and I heard this ethereal, incredible music coming out... and I kind of went in and stood at the back while they rehearsed and I got a terrific Taste for this kind of music.
my dear friend Zero Marstel who was really one of the funniest men. ever. And he ha he was one of these guys with a kind of permanently opened hotline to his infancy not to his childhood, but to his infancy.
They Can't Take That Away from Me
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
it was a song that my wife and I used to dance to in our youth a great deal. And since we kept on breaking up all the time, you know, before we actually had a lot of divorces before we finally got married, it saved having them after, you know. It's a kind of good solution.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:48Does the suicide attempt, which seems to have been the watershed between these two sections of your life, now seem like a ghastly aberration, or can you still touch into the desperation?
No, I find it very difficult to get to that. I I don't think the depression went away. I think I was probably depressed for a long time, um, before and after. But it does seem as though it was done by somebody else.
Presenter asks
1:59Do you think looking death in the face made you grow up?
Yeah, I think so was something had to make me grow up. It was it was taking an awful long time. I was I was thirty, I had a child, I had a d I was already s most of the way to a divorce. You'd think at that point you'd start growing up, not me.
Presenter asks
2:27When you first began to be a critic, you went to it because it was a kind of vocation, with a kind of missionary zeal?
Well you've got to remember th I'm an old man, I'm seventy years old, and I'm talking about late forties and so on when literary criticism was thought to be a kind of decent profession... Now of course it's a nightmare. There are hacks who just write whatever comes into their heads and are paid very little for it... And then there are the university people who are only interested in their own activity.
The keepsakes
The book
Sigmund Freud
it's full of these kind of case histories which are like little Russian novels in themselves, aren't they? But what is also wonderful is it's full of thinking. This is a guy who thinks about every bit of information that comes to him. It would be good to have such passionate and stringent intellectual companionship.
The luxury
laptop computer with poker software
I could pass an awful lot of addicted, obsessed. Totally content hours with a um laptop computer with a bit of poker software on it.
Presenter asks
5:31Didn't you begin your Oxford career by handing out broadsheets telling them how deplorable the lit crit there was?
Yeah, that was when I was an undergraduate. I I was obviously a stroppy little swine. Um, not a nice young man, I'm sure.
Presenter asks
18:20What was so revolutionary about the work of [Sylvia] Plath and [Robert] Lowell, and why did the establishment have so much trouble letting it in?
Well, i this was a period when the so-called movement was the the style. Poems written in very plonking i most mostly written in plonking iambic pentameters, rhymed and poems eff effectively like kind of good literary essays... It was much too genteel... And I felt that these people, Lowell and then Sylvia, were were very much writing about that strain.
Presenter asks
24:13When you went to see [Sylvia Plath] for the last time on Christmas Eve 1962, she read you 'Death & Co.' and she begged you to stay?
Well, at that point I realized I'd I I knew where she was, yeah... She wanted me to stay. I think, you know, she wanted help. I ducked out, uh, you know, that um it was... not a passage I'm particularly proud of, but my life was complicated... I also I don't think it would have made a blind bit of difference... because um I think she and Ted were... absolutely eternally linked.
“I think that's exactly what happens with a poem. Until every word is right in place, the poem isn't finished, and you know it.”
“there's more liveliness and energy and appetite in Sylvia Plath writing about death than there is in the collected works of Philip Larkin writing about what a bitch it is to be alive.”
“I've always worked on the supposition that I'm only going to get one shot at this planet, so I want to s not merely see what's on offer, but I kinda want to see what I can do.”