Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer best known for his Rabbit novels, including Rabbit Run, and regarded as one of modern America's most important literary figures.
On the island
Eight records
You're Not the Only Oyster in the Stew
For both of us it was a window into a totally other world than Schillington, all white Schillington. Somewhere uh Larkin talks about uh a giant yes that floats down from the … Playing with Sidney Besche, and I suppose I felt that same giant yes in Fatzweller.
Sing, Sing, SingFavourite
Benny Goodman and His Orchestra
It's really a marvelous, magical passage, a minute or two in the history of jazz.
I fell in love with Doris Day and remain really in love with Doris Day. … she really had a marvelous voice and … It does make the hair on my neck stand up always when I hear it
Fugue No. 1 in C major, BWV 846 (from The Well-Tempered Clavier)
this was my first real experience of being inside music and the sense of the … conversation within that music
The Original Trinidad Steel Band
I never tired of hearing it. It always seemed very magical to me there.
Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467
Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Philharmonia Orchestra
when I'm not writing, I'm happy to listen to Mozart and certainly I'd be extra happy to listen to piano concerto number 21 on my desert island.
It's a great song of farewell, isn't it? Farewell to London, farewell to the Beatles, as it turns out, and mounts in a way that most of this music does to a kind of ecstasy.
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer
The way the music doesn't want to end, it's almost like a life struggling to stay alive. And the way he keeps saying the same thing … It's like a man who can't stop telling you something. And it's so beautiful.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:25What's abnormal about a decent, God-fearing Pennsylvanian boy who grows up to become a famous and prolific writer?
Well, I felt growing up that we were not quite normal, but perhaps it was my mother's writing ambition, which I thought was abnormal. She did have this itch to be a writer, and sure enough, I caught it. I was an only child, and to that extent I missed some of the stimulations that my more prolific family friends had.
Presenter asks
5:28Where did Rabbit, Harry Angstrom, come from?
Well, he was born in the same county, and in a sense, he went to the same schools that I did. He was a year younger than I. The figure of the ex-athlete, the young American who peaks at the age of eighteen and has nowhere to go but downhill was … Very real to me and … I set out out of heaven knows what mingled set of impulses at the age of twenty six to write … a saga of one of these … young men … to whom adult life is an anticlimax.
Presenter asks
6:47Why did you kill [Rabbit] off in nineteen ninety-one?
I thought his time had come. I thought it was very much in the nature of being an ex-athlete. … that he might die young. … of chocolate and hamburgers. … Death was much on my mind. My mother was dying or very ill and of course I'm always aware of my own death in me like a a baby getting bigger every day.
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
The glory of Proust's way of seeing and saying just a permanent inspiration to me and I didn't really become a writer until I'd began to read Proust.
The luxury
I would use it not for shelter, because that would make it a necessity, but I'd use it as a place to repair to.
Presenter asks
13:59How old were you when you first identified that the New Yorker was where your ambitions lay?
I think about the time I fell in love with Doris Day I also fell in love with the New Yorker, maybe a little earlier, come to think of it. We were still in the Shillington House, which we left when I was thirteen. When the New Yorker began to arrive, courtesy of my Aunt Mary of Greenwich, Connecticut … I just liked the look of the magazine. I liked the type and the chastity of the author's name being only at the bottom. And there was a whole lot of c coolness. … and the New Yorker was … to me seemed very cool.
Presenter asks
22:34Your marriage broke down finally after some twenty years or so and four children. You've written that it felt like the worst thing you ever did. Do you think it probably was?
Uh yes, I haven't done anything as as painful … since. … leaving her and the four children. … they were oldish but by no means … adults and … I thought that if now was the moment, if ever, … That there would never be a pain-free … time and … I like to think it's worked out fairly well. … Nevertheless, yeah, it was it was dreadful to have caused so much grief. … And so much loneliness.
“I began to stutter at a fairly early age out of some sense of abnormality. And then I got psoriasis quite early … I think that helped me feel abnormal.”
“It helps me become a … A writer in that I didn't mind … seclusion. I really had to find a profession I thought that would permit a certain amount of seclusion, hiding. A writer can look quite hideous, you know, and as long as'cause you only deal with the mailman, basically.”
“I'm approaching the twilight of my working career and I'm grateful I'm trying to be as d diligent as I can.”
“It's a help if somebody reads it and even more of a help if somebody pays you for it. But it gets to be a habit, you know. It's like a kind of a secretion that you must produce or you begin to feel poisoned.”