Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
A biographer whose lives of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John, and George Bernard Shaw transformed biographical writing in Britain.
On the island
Eight records
This is the sort of music they would put on in a crisis.
Leopold Stokowski and the London Symphony Orchestra
I whipped myself up into a fine state conducting music like this.
This really represents my mother. My mother is Swedish and I'm therefore half Swedish. And this is the only Swedish composer I know whose music I respond to very much indeed.
Funeral March from Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge
This really represents English music, what I understand by English music and would remind me very much of England. Also a funeral march might not be inappropriate on the island.
String Quartet No. 16 in F, Op. 135Favourite
I feel that music like this on the island might reconcile me to my fate.
This would be my only piano music on the island, I think.
The reason I'd like this is it's the music I never tire of at all, and so it would last me as long as I lasted on the island.
I think it would be extremely appropriate to take this, and also I like it so much because of its vitality and humour facing death.
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, 'Pathétique'
Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer
it's a record that I used to listen to very early on my home in all places in the garage where the records were kept. It moved me tremendously, and it still does.
this was one of my aunt's records that I found in the garage. And I had no idea then why she put all the music in the garage and played nothing, but it was because she had an extremely unhappy uh love affair, and perhaps this record symbolizes that.
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli
really represents, I think, my Scandinavian side, my mother's side, um, and evokes that Scandinavian landscape so well for me.
probably still represents now a hidden part of my life.
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by André Previn
One of my first girlfriends was a ballet dancer, and she used to take me to the ballet, and that's where I saw Neurayev when he first came over dancing with Fontaine and the others, and it was a most wonderful experience.
Dido and Aeneas: Dido's Lament
Kirsten Flagstad recorded this for Bernard Miles, I think, originally, at the Mermaid Theatre in about early 1950s. And everybody said that her voice was quite wrong for Purcell and Dido. But in The Lament, that dark tone voice gives it an extra resonance, I think. I love this.
This is a Sati I came across quite late in life, and I was much taken with his very touching ingenuity and his beautiful humour. I um I really love his music.
String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135Favourite
It's both sad and exhilarating.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:32Was to be a writer your first ambition?
No, not at all really. If anything, I preferred music to writing. Uh it was that in the end, having tried a number of other things, I was good for nothing else but writing.
Presenter asks
2:03What happened when you left [Eton]?
Well, I gave up science. I'd had enough. It was quite obvious that I was no scientist. And I argued against going on to university so well that my father said that I must make some financial use of this tiresome gift of arguing.
Presenter asks
9:56How long did you spend on the [Lytton Strachey] work altogether?
Altogether, um, over six years.
Presenter asks
10:31Did you find yourself being somehow obsessed with [Lytton Strachey's] life? Wasn't there a sense of identification and empathy?
The keepsakes
The book
Hugh Kingsmill
I'd like to take a book called The High Hill of the Muses... which was my introduction to literature, my guide, and still retains this magic for me.
The luxury
There is a sense of great involvement after such a time, but I think that is correct, so long as it doesn't turn into a sentimentality. The right attitude, I think, for any writer, and that's for a novelist or a biographer, is partly involvement and partly detachment. And if you can keep those two in suspension, that is the right balance, I think.
Presenter asks
16:37How long is [the Bernard Shaw biography] going to take you all together?
It will probably take the best part of ten years to complete.
Presenter asks
19:42Could you look after yourself? Could you build some kind of shelter?
Um I couldn't look after myself and I couldn't build some kind of shelter. I think that's probably accurate.
Presenter asks
0:31Michael, your desire for invisibility was so strong for so long it's a minor miracle you wrote this autobiography, isn't it?
Well, some people say it's a um extended act of concealment, self-concealment, uh and that they don't recognize me from it, and other people say it's a way of stopping anybody else writing.
Presenter asks
1:36How difficult was it to write [your autobiography] in comparison with writing biography of others?
I never intended to write it. I thought I might write an essay or something like that after my parents' death. And I started away. And suddenly I found myself going on and on as if it was a book that needed to be written. I then found after the first draft that I had to go back and do a lot of research about myself.
Presenter asks
2:46Why did it take you seventeen years to complete the biography of George Bernard Shaw?
Well, he lived into his mid nineties, and it took me only seventeen years to complete the same course, and I hand it to the reading public in a way that can be read in a month or two, which seems to be a miracle of compression.
Presenter asks
4:03Would you claim some credit that [discussing a subject's private life and sexuality] could be said to have been before and after Holroyd?
I uh was just at the beginning of the spirit of the times very much, and it was part of the sixties, part of the loosening up of things, partly of rewriting the agenda, and I suddenly was in step, perhaps quarter of an hour ahead of uh the time.
Presenter asks
8:49Why did your novel A Dog's Life never see the light of day in this country?
Well, my father considered it too autobiographical, too much revealing the family unhappiness, particularly perhaps his sister, my aunt's unhappiness and a sort of broken love affair. And looking back now, I'm rather thankful to my father. First of all, I see his point of view a little more strongly than I did at the time. And secondly, I don't think it's a very good novel. But... he threatened to take me to court, and so it had to be withdrawn before publication in Britain.
Presenter asks
29:22What right have you to go searching into the kind of personal recesses of the lives of [your subjects]?
I do not believe in writing about the living, because I think we all need our sentimentalities, our lies, our prevarications to get through life, which is extremely difficult. But you pay a compliment to the dead when you say to them, could you contribute more to the living world than we could ask you in your life, now that you can no longer personally be hurt? You pay them a compliment, and I'm in favour of keeping the dead in employment.
“I wrote a book about an unknown writer called Hugh Kingsmill who, since the appearance of my book, has remained unknown.”
“I got what Kingsmill himself would have called, or did call once, more of a retreat than an advance.”
“The right attitude, I think, for any writer, and that's for a novelist or a biographer, is partly involvement and partly detachment. And if you can keep those two in suspension, that is the right balance, I think.”
“I think I would fade away rather quickly.”
“I think I would prefer to fade away on land rather than at sea.”
“I discussed it in my book, and made it as important in the book as it had been, I thought, in his own life, which was quite important.”
“I think gre death is the great enemy and the point of biography is to retrieve people to some extent, at least on the page, from death.”
“between the lines of the text, invisibly, lie the lives of the authors. And if you are able to enrich the text by seeing something of the lives and something of the origin of the work, without reducing it. Then you will gain more from the work. But in the end a work of biography should itself be a work of art, an add a parallel work.”