Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist.
On the island
Eight records
Impromptu in A-flat major, D. 935 No. 2
Well, when I was a small boy, my mother used to play every Sunday evening. It was a sort of ritual. … And the one I've chosen is the Impromptu in a Flat by Schubert, which she played rather meditatively. And I think that this particular record is played in very much the same way.
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
Well, at uh just around the outbreak of war, uh I met Bena Moisevich, and some months after this, when he was bombed out, I, greatly daring, invited him to come and spend a few weeks with me in Cornwall. … And it was a magical time to hear this wonderful music sounding through the house on that grim, cold January month, before he went away again.
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37
Well, while Moisevich was at our house, he learned the Beethoven piano concerto number three for the first time. He was going to play it in Liverpool in the following month, and this is particularly reminiscent to me of the time when he stayed with us. Unfortunately, Moisevich never recorded this. … So who would you like to play to represent him, as it were? Well, nobody surely better than Rubinstein.
Well, living on my desert island, I feel I would really like to hear sometime the sound of human laughter. Uh if only to remind me of my own humanity and uh What better way to hear it than uh to listen to one of our much regretted and great comics, Gerard Hofnung, addressing the Oxford Union and telling them the bricklayer story.
About nineteen fifty, I think, I met a man who'd got a small private recording outfit, and he'd just recorded a group called Los Paraguayos. He gave me a copy of this, and I very much enjoyed it, and I've never really lost my affection for it.
Fourteen or fifteen years ago I heard this song by Jimmy Rogers called Kiss Is Sweeter Than Wine. It's a little sentimental, but it seems to me to sum up quite well a a fairly decent philosophy of life, and it's one that I wouldn't quarrel with.
The Four SeasonsFavourite
Pinchas Zukerman and the English Chamber Orchestra
The whole thing is absolutely marvellous. … If there were one uh record that I had to take to the island, uh this is the one I would certainly take. … Also, of course, it wouldn't be a bad idea if I were marooned on a desert island. I presume it'd be a tropical one. … it would be nice to have a record of the four seasons where there would probably be only one or two.
Well, being on a desert island, if I can't have a Girl Friday, I would like a lady's voice. Rita Strike has a superb voice, and I would like to hear her sing. What in English I think is called the nightingale and the rose.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:32How do you view the idea of a spell on a desert island?
[With] a certain amount of trepidation, because I have never been able to look after myself very well. Uh I've got hands which I use all the time for writing because I write in longhand, but they're not much use I would have thought for building a boat or constructing a house or a shed and I've never cooked much for myself in my life.
Presenter asks
3:00Were you a bookish lad?
Yes. Um I was rather a miserable young man in the sense that I was always ailing and uh this I think uh put one back into oneself more and I was always reading and uh I was a voracious reader, really.
Presenter asks
9:42Did you have periods of discouragement [early in your writing career]?
Oh, yes, certainly, because uh one knew that the first novel didn't make much money, but when the third novel didn't make much money one began to wonder whether one's really going to succeed at all.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
W. Gurney Benham
I think I would take Benham's Book of Quotations... it's better to my mind than the Oxford... I think this would probably be as useful to me as any other book.
The luxury
a large number of exercise books and a large number of barrows
because this would give me some sort of an outlet when I was in distress.
Are any of [your early books] still in print?
They're not in print because I won't allow them to go into print. There are there are certainly one or two publishers who would like to put them out, but uh To my mind they are not uh mature enough and they should stay decently interred.
Presenter asks
17:31Tell me about your writing discipline. Do you work so many hours each day or so many words each day?
Obviously when one a novel is in full flow, you can write for a long periods every day. and my most creative time is from five in the afternoon till about eight. But if you're just beginning a novel and the whole thing is in a sort of state of flux. You can sit down at your desk happily enough, but uh it doesn't necessarily follow that you will do any work.
“I moved [to Cornwall]. My family moved there when I was 17, and I lived there for upwards of 28 years, and I think probably wherever I die, my spiritual bones will rest there.”
“I think there's a a a a very considerable distinction between two types of novelists. Perhaps the better type of novelist, if you may say so, starts with his own personality and works out from that. I, perhaps, the longer staying type of novelist. start much further out, looking for things that perhaps I didn't then totally comprehend or understand.”
“I have, I suppose, a certain instinct for survival, and I imagine that necessity being the mother of invention, I would breed certain schemes.”