Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist and professor of modern literature, author of novels and technical books on writing and criticism.
On the island
Eight records
Itzhak Perlman and André Previn
It's a a record that my father introduced me to and it exactly reflects His interest in fusion between the jazz tradition and the classical tradition and my own liking for that kind of fusion and its very melodic and poignant kind of music.
This is from Monteverde's Magnificat in Six Voices. It's a version by a Bulgarian youth choir, and I picked it out of a box in a record shop really rather by chance, and was quite thrilled by the quality of the choral singing.
This is a jazz version of a well-known guitar concerto, Rodrigo's Concerto Di Anno RF. This is by Miles Davis, the the trumpeter, arranged and conducted by Gil Evans, who's a a great jazz composer. And I suppose I like this be again because it uh fuses two different kinds of musical traditions in a in a rather powerful and effective way.
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Karl Böhm
Well, record number four is a kind of memory of that particular phase of my life and my collaboration with Malcolm really. This is Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
Record number five really relates to the novel The British Museum is Falling Down. It's uh the Georgian Ira Gershwin number a foggy day. which has a line in it, The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm. And this was the title I wanted to give to this novel.
I like their music very much. I tend to use music a lot as background music, and I think they're very good background music, very good music to relax with a drink over. And I like this track particularly for its very American wit.
Record number seven is by Joni Mitchell. I'm rather addicted to female vocalists in the sort of rock, soul, folk, jazz idioms. And I mean I could very easily have chosen eight records by singers of this kind. So Joni Mitchell in a way represents a whole raft of lady singers who turn me on. But she I think is a very very gifted one.
Nimrod (from Enigma Variations)Favourite
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult
Well, I think I must have something in the great European post-romantic symphonic tradition. Uh and out of many possibilities I I think I would choose Elgar's Enigma variations very much in one's mind at the moment because of the centenary and what else but Nimrod, which I suppose is everybody's favourite movement.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:00Do you look back on your childhood as a happy time?
Well, it was overshadowed to some extent by the war. I was about four and a half when the war started. My father went into the Air Force, and so I was separated from him for most of the war. He was seldom at home. And I was also evacuated … to live in the country because of the Blitz. So that wartime was a time of being wrenched from one's roots and from security of the the whole family unit. But when we went back to London from when I was the age of ten onwards, it was perfectly happy, secure childhood, yes.
Presenter asks
7:42Had you the time and space and inclination at that time [in the army] to write?
Oh yes. I mean, I determined that I if I was condemned to this two years of rather boring servitude, I would at least make use of the time to get on with some work. So in fact I wrote a a prize essay while I was in the army and um most of my first novel, The Picture Goers, while I was in the army.
Presenter asks
10:10Were you going to be able to live as a writer, or did you have to take a job?
Well, I never conceived the possibility of living on my earnings as a novelist. It was very much a part time spare time activity. No, at that point I decided that I would try and have an academic career. It seemed quite a good one with which to combine uh novel writing because of the amount of freedom and um long vacations and so on. So after about a year of trying I got a job at Birmingham University.
The keepsakes
The book
James Joyce
But I think I would take James Joyce's Ulysses, which is the novel I revere most in English fiction and which I've read many times but could well look forward to reading again many more times.
The luxury
a painting: 'Nymph in a Landscape' by Palma Vecchio
I think I'd like to take a rather high class pin up. I mean, a nude by some master of painting. I was at the Venetian exhibition at the Royal Academy recently and there was a picture called Nymph in a Landscape by an artist called Palma Vecchio. I would like that very much, yes.
Presenter asks
10:41Tell me about that first novel, The Picture Goers. What was it about?
Well, it's not a novel I care to reread or that I encourage other people to read now. It seems a very young piece of work to me. It was basically about a young man who is a student at London University and goes to live with a Catholic family in a in a suburb of London not so very different from the one I grew up in. And h he is an agnostic who becomes attracted to Catholicism through his uh contact with his family and his relationship, particularly with a young girl in the family who's just left the convent having abandoned her vocation. And as he becomes more and more religious and in and interested in Catholicism, she becomes more secular. I mean they in a sense have a love relationship, but they pass in opposite directions, as it were.
Presenter asks
17:25Were you brought up as an Orthodox Catholic?
Yes, I was. Um my father is not a Catholic, but my mother, who who uh sadly died a couple of years ago, was a Catholic and I was given a Catholic education and I think it's through the schooling that the Catholicism sort of stuck in me, as it were, because I've remained a Catholic.
Presenter asks
25:12What is structuralism?
Well, it's it's basically a method of analysis which is used by all kinds of subjects in the humanities. It's a way of trying to understand how culture works by uncovering the rules, laws, conventions, constraints that underlie, for instance, language, for instance advertising, uh film, as well as literature and poetry and so on. So it it's if you like trying to write grammars for the various systems by which we communicate with each other in human societies.
“I think I tend to use music as an alternative to my professional life, which is very sort of cerebral and analytical. So my attitude to music is very emotive and instinctual, really. I I use it for relaxation, for emotional luxuriance rather than for intellectual pleasure I suppose.”
“I never conceived the possibility of living on my earnings as a novelist. It was very much a part time spare time activity.”
“I think of it as a rather serious novel. But Malcolm, as I say, was writing comedy, he was writing for Punch, he was writing comic fiction and He encouraged me to try my hand at that sort of thing. We collaborated in a couple of reviews while we were both at Birmingham, satirical reviews, and that was my first experience of writing deliberately to make people laugh, and I found I could do it quite well, and it was rather a revelation to me.”
“I'm not really very good at the outdoor life. I mean, the word camping has a somewhat dire sound to my ears.”