Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
He is a scholar, athlete, and bestselling novelist.
On the island
Eight records
A Fifth of BeethovenFavourite
The first one will remind me that life goes on well, all of them will, really. It's called A Fifth of Beethoven. It's a little bit of a novelty.
Well, since we were speaking of Harvard, I can think of no more suitable record than Tom Lear's send-up of Harvard fight songs.
Summer (from The Four Seasons)
Well, in keeping with uh the notion of a a desert island, I thought I would miss the seasons, and so I I'd I'd like to hear Yitchach Perlman play the Four Seasons. Which one should we hear? Summer.
We have got to a strange record, but keeping in mind that one must uh keep oneself amused all alone on this desert isle, I picked uh Darius Millot's Le Beuf sur which is based on Brazilian folk songs and it's in the meter or the rhythm of five, which is almost impossible to beat.
Well, I have a a sentimental attachment to this song, and I hope narcissism will not be added to my many sins being toted up. But my affection for this song is very peculiar because I wrote it.
Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major, K. 417
Well, I've chosen Mozart's second horn concerto, played by uh Alan Sivill, beautifully.
It's Pablo Casals playing Colnidre in the cello concerto that Bruch wrote. Uh now it's a Jewish prayer. Bruch was not Jewish who wrote the concerto. Casals was certainly not, but I know that Casals knew what he was playing. when he put all the feeling into his performance.
Fill Every Glass / Let Us Take the Road (from The Beggar's Opera)
Well, record number eight, since we've come to the end, I've chosen a what's sort of a double selection. It's one, a toast to you in thanks for inviting me to go to the desert island, and hopefully I can take some of this with me. It's from the beggar's opera, Fill Every Glass, as I hope to do even on the island, and then let us take the road.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:58Was your upbringing [by your rabbi father] very strict and orthodox?
Well, it was strict and unorthodox, if you will, because my father, uh on the one hand, wanting me to to drink deeply of my own cultural heritage, wanted me to be a generally cultured person. So he sent me to a yeshiva, uh a religious school where I learned Hebrew at the same time that I learned English. It was brutal. We started at seven in the morning and finished at at six in the evening, and this was five and a half days a week. But at the same time he wanted me to learn all about world culture, to start Latin at an early age, in addition to the Hebrew and Greek as soon as I could, and he just wanted me to be educated.
Presenter asks
4:53Did you stay on at Harvard to take your doctorate?
Yes, that's one thing I frankly I do regret. I was a little bit too studious. I just I didn't do the traveling that normally one does in America between the AB and the PhD. ... I was a little bit too diligent and went straight on to do a Ph D in comparative literature. What was the hurry, I say to myself now. I mean, I was thrust into the teaching uh profession earlier than I cared to.
Presenter asks
17:08How did you get mixed up on the Yellow Submarine to start with? With the Beatles?
I I really don't know, except that the producer lived in the neighborhood of Yale where I was teaching. ... almost every uh academic has got some side whom. He plays tennis or he's a chess champion or he writes thrillers, etcetera. It's not common in America. So the fact that I wrote the odd song, the odd off Broadway play, Thirty Nine Performances or Not, was known certainly thirty five miles from Yale, which is where mister Al Brodax lived. And so he just came up to see me and, to put it bluntly, I worked cheap. I was, I think, the fortieth writer on the Yellow Submarine.
The keepsakes
The book
Homer
I would save her reading at my leisure The Odyssey again and again because that's one inexhaustible book.
The luxury
I would need a stopwatch because you see that would be the only way I could measure that I was in good enough shape to attempt my swim back to terra firma.
Presenter asks
19:59How did you write Love Story?
Well, it was actually based on a conversation between two students of mine about a third student of mine who, after graduation from college, got married. His wife worked to support him through his graduate degree. And the girl just as he got his degree, the girl contracted a a dread disease and died. That's all I used as far as what I wrote was concerned, these bare facts that a student of mine had at the age of twenty five lost his wife.
Presenter asks
27:01What are the pressures on you from publishers and film companies to write [Oliver's Story] to the same formula?
Well yes, I did feel some pressure to to write Oliver's story and uh if ever the charge of meretricious behavior could stick against me I would say yes, uh I wrote it to measure, I wrote it to order, but I'm not sorry I wrote it because it freed me to write other things and it taught me a little bit more about how to write a novel.
“I never wanted to be a great playwright, but I did want to be a successful playwright.”
“I have agonized my way through forty marathons.”
“I'm frankly relieved to have the moral decision of whether or not to go to Moscow taken from me by the President.”
“I could never write an adventure novel. I could never write a spy novel, I could never write a Hollywood novel. But I hope I can write a human novel and that's what I'm really striving to do”