Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
American novelist and travel writer best known for 'The Great Railway Bazaar'.
On the island
Eight records
start when I was about eight years old … I used to listen to Earl Scruggs in Leicester Flat … playing banjo music.
what if a much of a which of a wind
I associate with being at university … the discovery of poetry
I associate with the sound of the Bazaar … I associate with dust on a hot day.
Regimental Band of Her Majesty's Coldstream Guards
associated with … lying on your back in a grassy park … listening to a band concert.
Cantata No. 170 'Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust'Favourite
I think it's the singer as much as the song that attracts me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:35Have you ever daydreamed about being a Robinson Crusoe?
I've daydreamed about it and I've even had a bash at uh being Robinson Crusoe.
Presenter asks
1:02How much does music mean in your life?
a certain amount … while I enjoy music, I'm a fairly ignorant uh music lover. But I find it's incompatible with most of the things I do.
Presenter asks
1:22What was your plan in choosing your eight records?
nostalgia really … songs that I've heard and happen to like … I don't associate them with anything except a particular period in my life.
Presenter asks
3:41Youngster, what did you want to be?
I wanted to be a doctor actually, or a kind of medical missionary. I saw myself uh going to distant places and doing good.
The keepsakes
The book
an anthology of English poetry from … 1400 to the present, the largest one you could offer
I found myself that I ran out of novels. And you ration yourself with novels, but with poetry you can return to it again and again.
Presenter asks
4:18So you switched to reading English with a view to writing. What happened after Graduation Day?
I thought I was going to be drafted into the army … I decided uh that I would go as far away as possible … I decided on Central Africa … I was in Nyasaland, actually, which later became Malawi. … And then shortly after I arrived they had uh what for them was a revolution … a lot of people were uh deported … the upshot of it was that I was um uh kicked upstairs and I was made headmaster of a school …
Presenter asks
9:56You've been living in London now for what, four years? … Now that you're writing full time, no lectures to worry about, what sort of discipline do you hold yourself to?
I try to write every day and keep at it. … I think sometimes that a that a writer's life is is nothing … a very desk bound occupation. When it's going well … that's a marvelous feeling. If I'm not writing, I I feel very fretful and feel like travelling.
“I've daydreamed about it and I've even had a bash at uh being Robinson Crusoe. There's an island off the coast of Kenya called Lamu. This is very romantic sounding, but it's a terrible place to be if you were uh like me, I think.”
“I wouldn't describe myself as a pacifist now.”
“if you knew where you were going that would take uh most of the fun out of it. I mean the the pleasure of writing is like the pleasure of travel, uh of sort of open-ended travel. You don't quite know where you're going or uh what's going to happen when you get there, but you're going in it in a in a general direction.”
“one of the va uh values of of writing is that there's no competition. It … you have uh no opponent, no enemies, no no no uh competition whatsoever.”