Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A poet, best known for his poetry.
On the island
Eight records
I've chosen Dallas Blues from nineteen twenty nine because I've been playing it for about forty years and never got tired of it. It is a blues and Armstrong plays it in a beautifully warm and relaxed way that he doesn't always achieve on his later more … showmanship size.
I like it not only because it has a curiously haunting tune, but I always have a faint private uh feeling it it's half about the the departure of winter and the coming of spring.
Choir of King's College, Cambridge
Well, I should want something for Sundays, which suggests church music. There's an enormous amount to choose from and I think, oddly enough, church music is a kind of music I like very much in the same way as jazz. I don't know why this should be so, unless agnostics are naturally romantic about religion.
I'm Down in the DumpsFavourite
It's called I'm Down in the Dumps, but a more misleading title I can't imagine. She sounds full of life, and, as she says, vitality and for the first time she's playing with an accompanying group of thirties musicians, Jack Teegon, Frankie Newton. Even Betty Goodman is reputed to have been in the studio.
Well, I would like a record for Christmas. Um that argues I shall play it only once a year, but I shall probably play it more often than that. And it's the St. George's Cansona's beautiful rendering of the Coventry Carol.
Symphony No. 1 in A flat major, Op. 55: III. Adagio
London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult
I'm sure there would be times when I would be homesick for England. I should just want to lie back and think of England. And I can't imagine a better record to do it to than Elgar's Symphony No. 1, and in particular the The Third Movement.
I always thought the words were a little pseudo poetic, but Billy here sings them with such passionate conviction that I think they really become poetry. It also demonstrates a theory of mine that you can't have a great jazz vocal without a great jazz accompaniment.
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Beecham Choral Society, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham
Well, if I have a favourite composer, it would be Handel. And indeed, I could have made up my entire choice from Handel. But I couldn't not have one of his great roaring finales you know, the musical equivalent of sunshine, I think of them as.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:29Are you a gregarious man?
I never think of myself as a gregarious man, but … having thought about your island for a few weeks, I've come to the conclusion I probably am. I should be … very happy there for about twenty four hours, and fairly happy for another another forty eight hours, but after that I suspect I should miss people and society in general.
Presenter asks
3:11Do you play an instrument yourself?
I don't know. I wish I'd been taught forcibly, if necessary, when I was young. The only musical instrument, if you can call it musical, I tri tried to play was the drums. Uh but I never got very far with them.
Presenter asks
5:09Were you brought up in a house with a lot of books to explore?
I suppose I was. Uh my father was not a literary man, but he was a great collector of books, and when I went up to Oxford I found that I had in fact been brought up with many more books than my contemporaries. You know, we had all Lawrence, we had all Hardy, we had all Huxley, we had Somerset Moore, Catherine Mansfield, Forster. And I had somehow absorbed these things, um whereas my friends often were were still uh grappling with them.
The keepsakes
The book
The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
Shaw is such a a sane and light hearted writer, and above all so free from self pity. I think he'd be the ideal companion for a desert island.
The luxury
typewriter and unlimited supply of paper
Well, I might try to write another novel, but if I failed to do that I could always write my life story. in the hope that the white ants would get it before I was rescued.
Presenter asks
10:19Do you write for yourself, or to communicate a feeling to others?
I certainly write to be read. There would be very little point in writing something that no that nobody was going to read, but it's not quite communicating in the sense of writing a letter to The Times, for instance, you try to create something in words that will reproduce in somebody else who's never met you and perhaps isn't even living in the same cultural societies yourself. That somebody else will read and so get the experience that you haven't and that forced you to write the poem. It's a kind of preservation by recreation, if I can put it that way.
Presenter asks
11:44If just one of your poems was to survive, which one would you like it to be?
That really is a most difficult question because one doesn't really think of one's poems as favourites or better or anything like that. I suppose I should choose The Wits and Weddings as being a f fairly full ex expression of one particular theme that I wanted to deal with.
Presenter asks
15:11How did you set about planning [the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse]?
It was quite easy uh for me as a librarian to get and read the collected works of virtually every poet who flourished in this century. … But there came a point when I wanted to read the poets I'd never heard of, and I thought the only way to do that was to … go to a copyright library um for for a few months and prevail on them to let me go down into their stacks and literally handle every book they possessed. And I I managed to do that through the kind offices of the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
“I always thought I should I should be a novelist, and that was what I wanted to be, but um after a couple of novels uh the third one never got finished and I had to fall back on on poems”
“Agnostics are naturally romantic about religion.”
“I think that a poem should be understood at first reading. Line by line. But I don't think it should be exhausted at at first reading.”