Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A poet from the 1930s literary circle including Auden and Isherwood; later professor of English at London University.
On the island
Eight records
Geraint Evans and Ilva Ligabue
When I was an undergraduate, Isaiah Berlin and I used to go to Salzburg... one of the great pieces we heard was Toscanini conducting Falstaff.
String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132Favourite
I wrote a poem called I Think Continually of Those Who Are Truly Great... I think I got this from my passion for late Beethoven.
Philip Langridge, Catherine Pope, London Sinfonietta Chorus, Riccardo Chailly
Auden was a great friend of mine... Stravinsky, I got to know late in his life.
One of the songs he used to sing was I Am a Tree by Douglas Byn.
Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959 (Allegretto)
Our friend and neighbour, Alfred Brendel, whom I think is the greatest living pianist.
Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 19 (Slow movement)
A recording of my wife playing at a promenade concert.
String Quartet in F minor, Op. 20 No. 5 (Adagio)
This is one of my standbys... a kind of quietness and reflectiveness about it.
Götterdämmerung, Final Act (Siegfried's Death)
Wolfgang Windgassen, Vienna Philharmonic, Sir Georg Solti
The final scene of the Götterdämmerung... the most wonderful moment is when he remembers breaking through the flames.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:05Is that how you feel, one of the last survivors of a generation?
Yes, I do. I think. I feel that I'm like something dropped from outer space, coded with messages from outer space, from all my friends who are dead, and all the people I know who are dead.
Presenter asks
8:09Both your parents died when you were quite young. Do you recall being very upset by those deaths?
No, the awful thing is I wasn't. because they were rather liberating their deaths because my mother died at a time when I was at the most horrible and terrible preparatory school, and so when she died I was brought home in order to be a companion to my father. So it was really what it was rather liberating. Then my father died when I was adolescent, and a a very revolting kind of adolescence against the kind of liberalism of my father. And so that in a way was also rather a release. It's rather terrible to say that. And one thing I do spend the end of my life in doing is trying to mourn my father and really trying to appreciate what he was like and thinking how uncharitable my thoughts most of my life have been about my father.
Presenter asks
12:59How did you come to catch his eye [Auden's]?
We knew about each other because both my brothers were at Gresham School Holt with Orden. And it's very funny about things then, manners then, because even if one was an undergraduate, in order to meet another undergraduate at another college you had to be introduced. And so these old Grashamians, who rather patronised me as my elder brother, held before my eyes all through my first year that one day they might introduce me to Auden. But actually I wasn't introduced to Auden until my second year when someone asked both of us to a luncheon party. And after that we got on very well. I used to go and see him. I was two years younger than he, so I was already very much in the position of a disciple. He told me what poets I should like, what poetry was about. He asked me about my personal life.
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
I think I'd take the Proust on the whole because it's a longer read.
The luxury
A painting or sculpture by Matthew Spender
going back to my family again, I think I'd like to take either a painting or piece of sculpture by my son Matthew Spender, so that I can look at that every day and think and if if I'm allowed perhaps I could stick at the back of it a photograph of my daughter Lizzie.
Presenter asks
18:46Why did you and Auden then, on leaving Oxford, go to Berlin?
I think we were reacting against Bloomsbury, which went to Paris. Paris was smart and sophisticated, and they were always talking about it in their sort of rather fluty voices as, you know, they extremely intellectual. And I think we went to Berlin because Berlin was very rough really. We went to Berlin bars and nightclubs. We didn't actually go to these very decadent, expensive places. In fact, if you take a movie like Cabaret, which is about Christopher Isherwood's early story, Sally Bowles, I remarked to Isherwood when I'd seen Cabaret that there wasn't anything in Cabaret that we could have afforded to do when we were living in Berlin, nor could Sally Bowles, whom I knew very well, as a matter of fact, Jean Ross, that girl there. if you associate us with Berlin, you mustn't think of that kind of transvestite, kind of very decadent Berlin. You must think of something rougher, sort of working class young men and boys who were unemployed and were very glad to have friends like us, you see, and just much more like that.
Presenter asks
26:57Was there then after Berlin a moment when you decided to put aside all homosexuality and decided that what you wanted was a wife and a family?
I don't know whether I decided, but I fell in love, really. I don't know, it just happened, I think.
Presenter asks
31:37Cyril Connolly said of you that you were two people. One was an inspired simpleton, a bit of a silly goose, and the other was an ambitious and ruthless intellectual. Do you recognise either of those descriptions?
I I do I recognize the descriptions, of course. He thought I was ruthless uh because anyone who worked seriously he thought of as being ruthless and trying to steal an advantage over him. ... I think it's rather flattering, as a matter of fact. I would replace simple minded or single-minded perhaps for simpleton. But again, it goes back to the Dostoevsky idea of the holy fool, the Alyosha. Well, I wish I was that or had been that.
“I feel that I'm like something dropped from outer space, coded with messages from outer space, from all my friends who are dead, and all the people I know who are dead.”
“I should think I'm what's called a permanent adolescent.”
“I've never known anyone in my life who was so completely sure of himself as Auden was.”
“I think that homosexuality is very clique and it was particularly then, and one had betrayed the side.”
“I hope that I'll just drop dead.”