Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Biographer and literary critic, known for biographies of Cowper, Melbourne, and Beerbohm; Oxford English professor.
On the island
Eight records
The Stricken Deer
No disc is actually described in the transcript beyond the book title mentioned as his first book. No music discs are present.
The keepsakes
The book
Lord David Cecil
I was going to choose The Journal of John Wesley, which is one of the great books of the world, not specially well known. And it's a book I love. But on the whole, given the circumstances, I think I'd rather have a book that I could take out of a library. So I'll choose a book which I know I shall never get tired of reading. I think it's the greatest prose work in English literature, the Bible in the Authorised Version. So my book would be the Bible.
The luxury
Not recorded.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:08At Oxford you read modern history and took a first. Had you then any ambition to read [write]?
Oh, yes, indeed, I had. My ambitions to write began very much earlier. In fact, I can't remember when they [didn't].
Presenter asks
0:33You were a don at Oxford, at Wadham. Was teaching a vocational thing? Had you any particular ideas in teaching you wanted to put into practice?
Not when I started. Uh I wanted to be a writer, but my father very properly said I ought to have a regular profession and I looked around and I thought if I could manage to get it I would like to be a darn [don], especially of literature. And then when I began it I found I enjoyed teaching very much and I have evolved ideas since. uh which I believe in, though they're not as specially individual. Uh but it wasn't a vocation in that sense that I always felt called to do it.
Presenter asks
1:51You are a grandson of Lord Salisbury, the Victorian Prime Minister. Did his figure still, when you were a child, have a great influence over the family? Did you ever know him?
No, no, I was a year old when he died. I wish I had known him. Yes, it did have an influence. He'd been this very big personality. And he'd had uh the five or six children who'd all been very fond of him and I think had been influenced by him, though they didn't all quite agree with him. But it is true to say, I think, that his particular attitude to life, a mixture of realism and religion, and salted with a good deal of irony and humour, did pervade the atmosphere in which I grew up.
Presenter asks
2:24Have you ever had any political ambitions or so?
None. I knew nothing but politicians all the time I was at charge. I was very fond of them all, and I never wanted to follow them.
Presenter asks
2:33Your biographies, Cooper, Melbourne, Max Birbaum, others, how do you set about a biography like this?
Well, I always think that biography is the portrait painting of literature. … So, uh well I literally do that, I look at pictures of them. But of course it's more important to look at their mind and the best thing of all is something they've said themselves.
Presenter asks
2:56Do you do field work?
Oh, a lot of field work one has to. I read their letters, any diaries, anything anybody who knew them had written about them. And then of course you must have the context, the background. I read a great deal about the period they lived in and to g get the kind of world and atmosphere in which they lived, I go and look at the places they they lived in.
“My first book was after I'd been a don at Oxford for some years. It was a book, A Life of Cooper, the poet, called The Stricken Deer, and that came out, I think, in nineteen twenty eight.”
“his particular attitude to life, a mixture of realism and religion, and salted with a good deal of irony and humour, did pervade the atmosphere in which I grew up.”
“I always think that biography is the portrait painting of literature.”
“I think [D.H. Lawrence] was a genius, and certain things he does splendidly. But otherwise he's a great noisy gasbag to me.”
“I agree with [the person who said] that life's like a game of cards. You're dealt a hand and you must play the hand that you're dealt. And mine was one, I think, which um d did demand a certain uh um cloistered quiet, uh plus a certain amount of social life for it.”