Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Novelist who won the Booker Prize for Schindler's Ark, later adapted into the film Schindler's List.
On the island
Eight records
Choir of King's College, Cambridge
It reminds me of Australian Christmases, which are totally different from English Christmases. You are sitting with the doors open, waiting for the subtlety to arrive. It's very humid. The beach is down below. You've probably been for a swim.
English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britten
Percy Granger was a very strange boy from Melbourne who was a sort of cultural Dennis Lilly who came to Europe because he felt the Europeans needed him, that music in Europe wasn't taking the right direction. But one thing Percy did was that he contributed enormously to the folk revival in Britain.
Largo from Winter (The Four Seasons)
Itzhak Perlman and the London Philharmonic Orchestra
The um third record is from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, and it's the uh Largo from The Winter Movement performed by Itzhak Perlman and the London Philharmonic.
It's for all my old British friends and all the rather remarkable Australians who have decided to settle here.
Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli
I can remember years ago when we lived in London for a few years, seeing the Royal Ballet's wonderful production of the Enigma variations, and the choreography and the music were an experience which I've never forgotten.
With My Swag All on My Shoulder
I'd like to indulge in a little bit of ancestor worship because I had a grandfather who was a berserk gold seeker. He was supposed to be a farmer, but he kept on going out trying to find reefs.
Blossom Deary, whom I've never met, but I think she has the most remarkably feminine voice. And she's the one whose voice I would most like to take. With me to a desert island.
No Man's Land (The Green Fields of France)
The last record is uh an Australian folk singer, Eric Bogle, who wrote a remarkable song about all the Aussie lads who were killed in World War One or who participated in World War One, it's called No Man's Land.
Oh, the first piece of music is Let Me Weep, Permit Me to Weep, and it's from Handel's Rinaldo, which is one of my favorite operas. Handel was the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day, and and this is a wonderful, ineffable aria.
The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl
I've chosen a song which is an encyclopedia of love, alienation, and then insult and regret. And I've been married forty years or more, so I know about all those. The song begins also with the irresistible line, 'Twas Christmas Evening in the Drunk Tank. And of course, it is an enormously lyrical song by a bloke who can't sing.
Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147: I. ChorusFavourite
Well, this is a Bach Cantata, part of which we had for my elder daughter Margaret's wedding, which was a very joyous occasion because we didn't think either of our daughters would come out of the bars long enough to get married. Judy and I have always loved Bach, so Bach had to be at the wedding.
It's uh my wife, J. Judy's favorite song. Uh Judy is a uh beautiful and forthright older woman and she has an equally forthright sidekick called Jan. And between them Judy is the Capa di Cape of Avalon village. I'm sure they collect protection money from all the businesses in town, and Jan is the concilieri. And this happens to be the favorite song of both of them.
Well, this is a wonderful Australian folk song about shearing. It's called The Lachlan Tigers, and Lachlan Tigers are really top gun shearers from the days when Australia rode on the sheep's back.
The Chieftains with Nanci Griffith
Well, the next piece of music is from the Chieftains and a guest artist, but this is a song called Red Is the Rose, and I practiced, as a folky monkey, I practiced to sing it to my wife, the male version, on her 60th birthday. And at the most earnest pleading of my daughters, I didn't go ahead. So this now in a good voice is for Judy.
Itzhak Perlman & Boston Symphony Orchestra
This is from the great film composer John Williams and the great violinist Itzak Perlman. And the unjust thing about film music is the first time I saw Schindler with my wife and daughter on the morning of the premiere we were the only occupants of an entire theatre in Washington I barely heard the music for the force of what was on screen. But Schindler has one of the most glorious soundtracks of any film.
I thought the movie Waking Ned Divine was a little bit cute, but that it had a magnificent soundtrack, including that old Irish song The Parting Glass. And Judy and I have both chosen it. We're going to have Bach and Mozart and so on if we can afford it. We'll have all that, but also The Parting Glass for The Recessional, because it's a very gracious sentiment from. A comrade who's going home, it's a very gracious sentiment from someone who's just died.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:55What was your first ambition?
I wanted from the start to be uh a writer. I know that because I used to fill little exercise books with stories. Preposterous stories, even more unpublishable than most of the stuff I write now. I can remember that these ambitions were mixed up with sporting ambitions. All Australians have sporting ambitions. So my ambitions were a mixture of rugby league, cricket, and writing.
Presenter asks
6:21How near did you get to ordination [for the priesthood]?
I got quite close, and uh I think both the Church and I myself were lucky that I didn't get closer. But I did spend six years.
Presenter asks
10:57When did you decide that you were going to be a full-time writer or bust? When did you give up teaching?
December sixty five. I'd just married Judith. So there were responsibilities. Indeed, yes. Well, Judy is an enormously supportive woman, and uh She had that same Australian give-it-a-go attitude that that I had, I suppose, and uh Also I must reiterate that our ignorance of the economics of publishing made it made us set ups for trying it on, tr seeing if we could last.
The keepsakes
The book
The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
I think I'd take the collected plays of George Bernard Shaw, because not only are the plays fascinating, the stage directions are fascinating. So I think the wit and wisdom of George Bernard Shaw can go a great distance.
Presenter asks
26:28Where did you come across this story [of Schindler's Ark]?
Well, I was in Los Angeles about to go home to, um Sydney to begin work on a uh documentary with the B B C and uh I went round the corner from the hotel to buy a couple of prescriptive T shirts … and I crossed the road from the T shirt shop and looked in the window of a baggage store, because I'd broken my briefcase. … And the man who owned the shop … began to talk to me About his wartime experience. He knew I was a writer, and he said, I've got a book for you. I was saved, but so was my wife saved from Auswitz by an extraordinary German, big, handsome, Hitlerite dream of a man, called Oskar Schindler. I have many Oscar Schindler documents, he said. … and he took me up to the bank on the corner … And uh he Talked them into running off photocopies of all this material. And it was remarkable material. And at once. I understood that here was a most astounding European character.
Presenter asks
31:44Do you think you'd be all right? An efficient castaway?
I I think I could just about get by.
Presenter asks
1:26At the moment when you won the Booker Prize, what went through your mind?
Well, I felt stung by a cattle prod, but a delightful cattle prod. I was delighted that it happened, except that I'd drunk my publisher's cognac as well as my own. Because I was convinced I had no chance because of the nature of the book.
Presenter asks
3:42To hear their stories must have been incredibly affecting from their mouths, the people who had been there, who had seen it [the Holocaust]?
Yes, and in particular those who'd been children. The former children were the ones in which the pain was closest to the surface. And I'd felt that I was messing with wounds that I was intruding on trauma.
Presenter asks
6:11Were you aware of that [the idea that you had to go abroad to find fame] when you started writing?
Yes, I was, and I was intimidated by it as well. We were raised with the idea that all literature occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, so you had to be in the Northern Hemisphere to produce literature. ... But I had a genuine question as to whether Australians could write.
Presenter asks
7:55You were seven when your father joined the Air Force. Do you remember him going?
Oh, yes, I I do remember the cold night. We see him off at Central Station. ... and I said I'm trying not to cry. Now, I said that because it was the sort of thing I saw in the movies. ... So, you know, sometimes children aren't as distraught as their words would indicate, and sometimes, of course, they're more distraught.
Presenter asks
19:38Did you try to discuss with them [your teachers] your the the subversion of your sexuality, the the emotions that you were going through, or was that a no go area?
That was a bit of a no-go area, but also, to be fair to them, I don't think I could have expressed myself adequately. I. belonged to a system that believed if you prayed enough everything could be negotiated. I felt that I had failed in prayer somehow, and I was overwhelmed by a sense of failure when I left.
Presenter asks
25:36How did you come upon the story of Oscar Schindler?
In October 1980, when I bought a briefcase in a luggage store in Beverly Hills, and because my credit card was held up for about fifty minutes, I got to know the owner, who was a very exuberant fellow called Pauldek Pfefferberg, and he was a Schindler survivor, and he had a Schindler archive at the back, where there were many testimonies and many original documents, including the famous list on which he and his wife were listed.
“I find that a sort of native impetuosity makes me move on to new subjects.”
“I was interested in the way some people get taken up by a demon, by a force which drives them to do extraordinary things, and then it seems to dump them.”
“Travel is uh one of my passions, too. It's a very um expensive passion to have for a writer. but uh fortunately there are enough invitations around that I can travel. uh a fair amount and um it's when you're traveling And particularly when you're travelling and are in a restaurant or a pub, that writing seems easiest. And that the future looks rosy. It's when you get back to the desk. and that blank enormity of the page, it's then that writing seems impossible.”
“Stalin himself said one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic. And Oscar was a lens on every aspect through which he could look, and you could see at a human level every aspect of the Holocaust.”
“writing is an exercise in controlling your fear. Um above all the fear that you're not a writer. And that doubt is always there, but we are addicted to writing. Writing is like dope. It's like alcohol to the alcoholic. You can't do without it.”
“To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You can't escape. Revealing yourself, whatever you write about.”
“if we were not a flawed species we wouldn't be as much fun. I if we didn't die, and if we were not imperfect, and if beauty didn't fade, the novel wouldn't be as interesting. So human imperfection is essential to the novel.”