Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
A writer for radio, TV and film, best known for the novel 'The Life and Loves of a She Devil' and provocative views on women's lives.
On the island
Eight records
Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 (first movement)
Fanny Davies with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Ernest Ansermet
Fanny Davies, who herself was a pupil of Clara Schumann, and it's the first movement of the concerto in A minor for piano, forte and orchestra.
The George Honiard (likely Georges Haurigot arrangement, Ambassadeurs)
Oscar Straus (from the operetta La Ronde)
it seemed to me it was the raw material of the writer's craft. It set up a situation out of which everything was going to develop.
because this will remind me on my desert island of the main preoccupation which I have when I write, I suppose, which is the situation of women having a hard time in relation to their children.
Angels Ever Bright and Fair (from Theodora)
she sang it a long time ago, but again my grandmother used to sing it, and she sounded very like this when she did.
which is always good for a laugh. You might say it made me laugh because what happened to this unfortunate man, but I don't think so.
to remind me on this desert island that perhaps it's not such a bad place to be after all, if only for a rest.
Harold Arlen / E.Y. Harburg (arr. Meco)
part of looking after myself physically would actually be the need for exercise, you see, of a of a kind of concentrated nature. So uh we're going to have a disco version of Over the Rainbow and to wake us up and keep us going.
'Tis the Gift to Be SimpleFavourite
which I think I would play quite often in order to reconcile myself to my lonely lot.
Rockin' My Life AwayFavourite
because it's so sort of cheerful and makes your your foot stomp and cheers you up and it seems a fairly good way to have lived a life.
Because it was sung by my grandmother, who was a musician and who came over from America and lived with us in New Zealand, and she used to play the piano for six hours every day, classical mu classical piano.
this to me has always seemed the most haunting and extraordinary piece of music. It's a kind of sense of destiny, I think, that she brings, and a kind of overall vision of what our existence is.
it's this kind of wonderful American sort of romanticism about the sort of opening up of America.
Antiphon (from Five Mystical Songs)
Guildford Choral Society and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Hilary Davan Wetten
because we have to bring the standard up a bit here, I think.
about that other part of life, which is the not the nostalgic but the song about the things we have lost and the people who have died, who are who remain very much part of us still.
about actually what we were talking about earlier, the terrible emotions women go through. Because the book Worst Fears was written at a time when I read it was probably just about losing my mind
because it's so cheerful and it's so positive and it's so sort of looking at life and deciding it's going to be okay.
In conversation
Presenter asks
6:19What are your memories of New Zealand?
Oh, mountains and rivers and nature and boredom
Presenter asks
7:13Why did you choose to take a degree in economics and psychology?
Uh I seem to remember it was something to do with the time tabling, and the most convenient arrangement for getting to parties or not having to get up in the morning. … No, no, that's being frivolous. Um because I went to a university which had a foundation course and there were a number of subjects … which you had to do beyond the subjects which you thought you ought to do, which would be English literature or Latin, things like that. And I put a pin in and chose these to make up a course and actually found that this was what I really enjoyed. And I did. I found it most extraordinary in easy.
Presenter asks
12:34When did you start writing something that somebody else wanted to publish?
Mid sixties. I wrote a television play … while waiting for my second son to be born, and he was three weeks late. And I had three weeks patch off work when I hadn't expected to be, so I thought I must put this time to good use and wrote a television play because it seemed the only thing I could finish and sent it in and they did it.
The keepsakes
The book
Benjamin Hall Kennedy
Actually I'm going to choose Kennedy's Latin Primer because it's been sitting on my bookshelf for about fifty years when I haven't. Haven't brushed up on my Latin. I loved learning Latin. My mother always said every day you had to be a little further forward in something. It didn't matter what, even if it was only your Latin verbs. So that's what I'll do.
The luxury
what would probably make you happy would be a shot gun. For the purpose of not ending at all. No, no, no, no. Crocodiles, invaders. I don't know what. It would just make you feel feel somehow secure and sort of male fridayation.
Presenter asks
16:18Your novels could all be classed as feminist. You have a rather personal style, short staccato passages, dead paragraphs. Is this something you've worked on, or is it part of being an advertising copywriter?
It's only occurred to me lately that that's what it is. If you do work in this extraordinary business of advertising, uh when words every word costs a lot of money, it has to be placed properly, it has a lot of space around it, 'cause space is cheaper than typeface. And it has to look good, and it makes a point by virtue of the fact that there's space around it. And when you write a novel, it seems to me you must really do the same thing. You place it like poetry upon a page and give it a different value and a different weighting according to the amount of words there are around it.
Presenter asks
17:41Doesn't it worry you that you may be casting aside fifty per cent of your prospective readership by antagonizing males?
No, not at all. I mean, a lot of men would say, I didn't buy this book to be insulted. Then they shouldn't buy it. They don't have to read it. Let them throw it away. … I hope what I write gives perhaps a new perspective on the way things run in general in the world and are actually perfectly interesting for men as well as for women. I find in fact a lot of men do respond to them very well and don't feel persecuted.
Presenter asks
25:28How do you write? Are you a disciplined writer? Do you work set hours every day?
Well, I wish I did, but in fact I don't. I mean, I kind of drive myself into a corner so far as time and money and other people's opinion is concerned, and then I write … as it were, when driven to write, and I meet my deadlines more or less, and I get it done somehow, but I'm never quite sure how.
Presenter asks
0:59You say no one believes you, and you also say that to interviewers you tend to give about sixty per cent true answers, forty per cent fake. Do you promise to be honest today?
Yes, I actually promise to be honest. Actually, it's usually print media I'm so dishonest with. Radio, for some reason, does seem to bring out the the the the truth rather more, if only in the tone of voice.
Presenter asks
0:59You write because you think you know something that others don't. What do you think you know?
I think I know what goes on in other people's heads more than most people do. It can be quite uncomfortable, actually, but you know what they're thinking. I think writers actually, on the whole, tend to have a degree of empathy which not everybody has.
Presenter asks
4:14You have written that as a child you were too aware of the precariousness of life. Why was that?
Well, before I was born there was an earthquake. I sometimes think that might be what it was. And my mother had to leave New Zealand, where I was conceived, and go to England, because everything suddenly fell down. And I think, in a way, this kind of concept has stayed with me, that things can so easily just fall down, and you have to live to be prepared for that.
Presenter asks
9:43What did your parents say to you as a little six-year-old [when they divorced]?
In those days, no, they didn't tell you anything, so I didn't know my parents were divorced. I thought he had to work somewhere in the north, so that was why he wasn't with us. And then then I was told, Oh, he's getting married again, and I thought that was very strange because I thought he was already married.
Presenter asks
14:35As a scholarship girl, your name was on the board every day for free school lunches. Did that affect you at the time?
I didn't mind at all. I just thought it meant I deserved to be there. I was really proud proud of it, you know. And these things did not particularly impinge upon them, or if it did, I didn't notice.
Presenter asks
28:06Why did you decide that religion was important to you?
I think I decided it was important to everybody. I think it's difficult to b live without a sense of life being in some way permanent or not over particularly just because you happen to die.
“I don't think it means very much at all. I use it to change mood. I often write to music, in fact, and I write to rather kind of plaintive female songs most of the time. I like that. And especially if they're very familiar, they don't obtrude on you too much, but they keep a sort of memory of going which you use when you write.”
“if you have a feeling that you share things out in a family, well, somehow the music was hers and it wasn't yours, therefore she did all that, and I, as a little girl, did something else.”
“Oh, mountains and rivers and nature and boredom … I think it was just the sense that children have that you're waiting to grow up. Yes. And that until you grow up, nothing happens, nothing starts, you see.”
“I thought other people were writers. I mean, I thought men were writers. Uh writing plays was something which just it didn't occur to me that women did it because there weren't any. And so I left all that and and and tried to write novels unsuccessfully and then started writing plays and found I could do that.”
“the awful thing was that I did realise then, you see, that though what I was writing wasn't false it certainly wasn't true, because I was abstracting out of all this information what I knew everybody required, so that what was presented in the end was not in accordance with the actual truth of the situation. But being very young I didn't do much about it. I just went on doing what was required.”
“What I want to read is what I write.”
“I think I know what goes on in other people's heads more than most people do. It can be quite uncomfortable, actually, but you know what they're thinking.”
“I don't think anything really makes me feel secure at all. But I don't see why it should.”
“I have no idea any more almost whether I'm real.”
“I've always found it very difficult to live by principle, you know.”