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In April 1937,
the BBC broadcast a radio talk

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by one of the leading writers
of the 20th century.

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This is the only surviving record
of the voice of Virginia Woolf.

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Words, English words, are full
of echoes, memories, associations.

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And that is one of the chief
difficulties in writing today.

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50 years later, another great writer
was in the spotlight,

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quizzed about his new novel,
The Satanic Verses.

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What's true about the book is that
it does break a number of taboos

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which, in my view,
are very important to break.

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From Virginia Woolf to
Salman Rushdie, this is the story

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of the 20th century British novel,
as told by the writers themselves.

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Why are you appearing
in this programme? Poverty.

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Many of these recordings
have never been heard since.

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The Count got off his horse,
unfastened his breeches

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and thrust his virile member
into the dead girl.

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I think there's a great deal of
ignorant bumptiousness

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on the part of scientists
these days.

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As a novelist, one is just the pupil
of the great novelists of the past.

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I feared the possibility that the
state was all too ready to start

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taking over our brains and turning
us into good little citizens.

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In this programme, we see some of
the giants who made their name

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in the first half
of the 20th century, many filmed
for television in later life.

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We hear how they captured
the spirit of the age,
whether confronting war and fascism,

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or the frivolity and decadence
of disillusioned youth.

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28, take two and board.

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You think it went all right?
I think it went... I think
it had some nice things in it.

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"Ours is essentially a tragic age",
wrote D H Lawrence,

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describing the decade
after the First World War.

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"The cataclysm has happened.
We are among the ruins."

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The new, terrifying technology
of war hadn't just destroyed
a whole generation of youth,

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but all the values and assumptions
behind the British way of life.

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CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

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Victory of a sort had been won,
but the inter-war years
would prove an age of doubt.

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Doubt about Britain's role in the
world, about its moral righteousness,

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a doubt that would be
most clearly articulated
in the novels of the time.

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Hello, radio terminal. BBC here.

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Are you getting ready
for our broadcast?

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For the generation of writers who'd
made their name before the war,
to be a novelist was to be a man -

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and yes, generally a man -

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of opinion and authority,
as comfortable declaiming
on world affairs as on literature.

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Here are some of
the leaders of opinion,
who speak to you over the air.

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Some people think
that the English poor

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should be helped further

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to colonise the colonies.

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Some, of whom I am one,

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have even dared to dream
that the English might be allowed
to colonise England.

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In 16 years, Russia has struggled

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from medievalism

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to an extreme modernism,

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has demonstrated the possibility

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of an economic life without
the wasting disease of profiteering.

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The first to address the implications
of the new age of doubt

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was the gaggle of intellectuals
that made up the Bloomsbury Group.

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Bloomsbury, in London, is a small
district of residential streets
surrounding the British Museum.

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It was here that the members
of the Bloomsbury Group lived or met.

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Here, according to one of them,
everything was going to be new,
everything was going to be different.

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Among them were Bertrand Russell,
a philosopher of keen anti-war
and anti-imperialist sentiment.

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John Maynard Keynes, who would become
the most influential economist
of the century,

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and the biographer Lytton Strachey,

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devoted to debunking
the heroes of the previous age.

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They remained, in the minds of those
who met them, a formidable bunch.

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They had a manner and they had
a rather breathless way of talking,

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and a very solemn face.
That was the thing I noticed.

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And that was a little alarming,
because when they
shook hands with you,

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they didn't smile,
they just handed the hand.

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I did have the impression that
they were rather superior people,

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but then they were
rather superior people,

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and I don't mind superior people,
I rather like them.

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Even if you didn't know who all
the Bloomsbury people were,

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you could always pick out who was
Bloomsbury and who wasn't by the...

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As if they were on trial.

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They were on trial.
And they knew they were on trial.

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And jolly soon chucked out if
they didn't come up to scratch.

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The first novelist associated
with Bloomsbury was E M Forster.

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He'd written a string of
highly successful comic novels

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before the Great War. Among them,
A Room With A View and Howards End.

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But in 1924,
he published A Passage To India,

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a discreet, but piercing critique
of the British empire.

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Interviewed in Cambridge
decades later,

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he talked about
the book's intentions.

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I am delighted the Passage To India
had...had a success
and that it was influential,

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because I believe the political side
of it is the side
I wanted to express.

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Passage To India tries
to do something quite audacious,

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which I think a lot of novelists in
later years would flinch from doing.

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The first chapter which introduces
human beings into the novel

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starts with three Indian men
talking about the English,

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and how peculiar they are,
and how difficult they are.

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And asking each other whether it's
even possible to be friends
with this strange species of people.

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He moves between male and female
characters, and the interior lives
of male and female characters,

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as quickly and fearlessly as he does
between the British and the Indians.

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And in a way it's simply remarkable
that a novel that saw

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the British Empire in such a light,

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should have been
so readily accepted

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and should have been so popular.

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It seemed a new direction, but
Forster never wrote another novel.

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I'm quite sure I am not a great
novelist,

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because I've only got down onto
paper really three types of people -

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the person I think I am,
the people who irritate me,
and the people I'd like to be.

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When you get to the really great
people, like Tolstoy, you find
they can get hold of all types.

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Generally speaking, I haven't
written as much as I'd like to.
I think that's my one regret.

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Somehow I dried up after
the Passage. I wanted to write,
but didn't want to write novels.

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One of the reasons
why I stopped writing novels,

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is that the social aspect
of the world changed so very much.

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I'd been accustomed to write
about the old, vanished world,

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with its homes and its family life
and its comparative peace.

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All that went.

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It was left to another novelist
to articulate the Bloomsbury vision,

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a woman who would emerge as
one of the most recognisable
personalities of the time.

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In the '20s,

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and subsequent '30s,

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it was the ambition
of every literary young man

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to be invited to one of Virginia
Woolf's Sunday morning soirees.

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These were invariably held...they
were invariably held at her home,

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No. 52 Tavistock Square,
to which I was a frequent visitor,

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for I was distantly related
to the Woolf family,
through some Alsatian cousins.

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LAUGHTER

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Throughout the 1920s,
Virginia Woolf published

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a string of groundbreaking works,
in which she set out to reinvent
the novel to suit this age of doubt.

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Her friends and contemporaries
believed she achieved this, as
they recalled long after her death.

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Virginia Woolf was my idea of
what one means exactly by a genius.

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I've heard somebody else describe
her as a before and an after writer.

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Life is not the same after
as it has been before.

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I know she was a genius.
She's the only genius,

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as far as I know, with perhaps,

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with one exception,
that I have ever

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sat in a room with, been familiar
with, stayed in the house with,
been for a walk with.

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Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925,
is set over the course
of one day in London,

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describing the thoughts
of two unconnected characters -

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a wealthy society hostess
and a suicidal war veteran -
as they pass through the city.

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For Woolf, the novel as a form
couldn't save the world, but it might

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be able to show the true poetry of
the ordinary mind on an ordinary day,

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a technique
known as stream of consciousness.

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She wanted to know about
what was happening in one's life

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and the most commonplace things
seemed to surprise her.

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"What, you mean to say you
really wear sandshoes

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"when you go out for a walk
on the downs? Impossible!"

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Why did you walk down the street?

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Who were you with? What did you see?

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Did you see a cat,
did you see a dog?

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She said to me, "Tell me
what happened today?"

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And I said, "Well, nothing, I've just
come home from school and here I am."

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And she said, "No, no, no, no, that's
no good, start at the beginning.

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"What woke you up?"

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And I thought, and I said,
"Well, it was the sun
coming through the window at school."

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And then she leant forward and
she said, "What sort of sun?

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"Was it a gentle sun
or an angry sun?"

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I love Mrs Dalloway. It does what it
sets out to do fantastically well.

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For me it reads like
a piece of chamber music.

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It's like a string quartet. There's
the same themes running through,

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and different instruments, different
characters, take up these themes
at different times.

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Her point of view shifts constantly.
We're in someone's mind.

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We're suddenly outside their mind,
looking at them from a great height.

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We can see the future,
suddenly we can see the past.

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Her consciousness in the novel is
like this will o' the wisp which can
go absolutely anywhere it wants.

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When Woolf went to Broadcasting House
to speak to the nation,

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she chose to touch on a subject
close to her heart -

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how the English language,
after the Great War, could be freed

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from the burden of the past,
to live again and create new art.

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Words, English words,
are full of echoes, memories,
associations, naturally.

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They've been out and about
on peoples' lips,

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in their houses, in the streets,
in the fields, for so many centuries.

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And that is one of the chief
difficulties in writing today.

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They're stored with other meanings,
with other memories.

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Our business is to see what
we can do with the
old English language as it is.

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How can we combine the old words
in new orders so that they survive

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and so that they create beauty?
So that they tell the truth?

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That is the question.

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Woolf was a serious voice
in what she saw as serious times.

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But for many, the roaring '20s
would prove a decade of hedonism
and decadence,

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as people tried to put
the troubles of the war behind them.

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After all, if the world was doomed,
as many said it was,
you might as well party through it.

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Romantic novelist Barbara Cartland
was the society "it" girl
of '20s London.

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Beautiful, outrageous,
defiantly frivolous.

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In 1923,
she made her authorial debut,

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driven by a quest not
for literary glory, but for money.

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I'd started to write a book.
I laughed, cos my mother thought

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I ought to get a job,
because we had no money after my
father had been killed in 1918.

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And I didn't want to have a job,
because I was dancing all night,

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and I certainly didn't want
to work from nine to six.

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Anyhow, there was no jobs.
Mummy's idea was mad,

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because there were a million men
coming out of the services. There
wasn't work for them, let alone me.

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And so, I thought I'd write a novel.

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In her own way, Cartland
would capture the spirit
of those post-war years,

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recognising the need
for escape and pleasure
inherent in Britain at the time.

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It was a very exciting time,
because men were

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pouring out of the services.
They'd had a terrible time in France.

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I never remember anybody
describing how awful it was,
and they all wanted to get married

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and settle down, so every man
you met fell in love with you
and wanted to propose to you.

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It was frightfully exciting. You
danced because it was the relief the
war was over, it was expression,

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like after an earthquake, you know,
people make love in the ruins,
because it's a sort of relief.

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We all danced. We danced and danced.
We danced at breakfast,
we danced all day.

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And it was frightfully exciting
for me because of the new world
I was exploring, finding out.

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Also, she has arthritis, so we send
her all the things on arthritis,
including the one of how I cured...

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Cartland's literary career
spanned eight decades.

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In all, over 700 romantic novels,
dictated to numerous secretaries.

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It's clear that there's a virgin
in most of your books,

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and I would say that your books
themselves are rather virginal.

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Which leads me to ask you whether
sex was talked about
in realistic terms,

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or not at all,
when you were a girl at home?

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00:15:45,320 --> 00:15:47,080
Oh, no, of course not.

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Nobody ever, in the '20s,
talked about sex.
Anyhow, the word wasn't used.

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You'd talk about
lovemaking, perhaps.

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But even then I didn't know.
I was 19 before I knew how
people had babies

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and I'd had six proposals and got
engaged to a very, very dashing
young man in the lifeguards.

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And you see,
you can't explain to people now,
cos... Even you're much too young!

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If one was a lady, one was treated
in an entirely different way. You
were treated like Grecian China.

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Nobody swore in front of you, nobody
told vulgar stories in front of you,

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everybody treated you as
something rather precious.

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And you were looked after and
cosseted and wooed, which the
wretched girls today don't get.

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Girls, wretched or otherwise,
are creatures to be feared
in the novels of P G Wodehouse.

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He had a run of success with stories
about a toff called Bertie Wooster,

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and his clever butler, Jeeves,

213
00:16:43,680 --> 00:16:46,360
all set in a gloriously
carefree world,

214
00:16:46,360 --> 00:16:50,800
where the worst that can happen is
an unexpected visit from a relative.

215
00:16:53,840 --> 00:16:56,240
That can't be him, can it, Jeeves?

216
00:16:56,240 --> 00:17:00,360
He would be considerably ahead of
his appointed time,
were it Sir Humphrey, sir.

217
00:17:00,360 --> 00:17:06,240
Were people are, you know, Jeeves.
They leap out of bed at some
unearthly hour, like eight or nine,

218
00:17:06,240 --> 00:17:10,200
and then suddenly find I have
all that extra time on my hands
and nothing to do with it.

219
00:17:10,200 --> 00:17:13,400
Well, if it is him, Jeeves,
you'll just have to trot out
one of your lies.

220
00:17:13,400 --> 00:17:16,720
Pardon me, sir, I am not
in the habit of prevaricating.

221
00:17:16,720 --> 00:17:20,680
Oh, whatever it is you choose
to call it when
you don't tell the truth.

222
00:17:22,920 --> 00:17:28,720
Wodehouse and his
eccentric vision was timeless.

223
00:17:28,720 --> 00:17:31,440
He continued writing the Jeeves
and Wooster stories

224
00:17:31,440 --> 00:17:34,160
long after the world
they occupied had disappeared.

225
00:17:38,040 --> 00:17:42,080
It's fairly clear that the world
of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster
really doesn't exist any more.

226
00:17:42,080 --> 00:17:44,000
I'm wondering if it ever did exist?

227
00:17:44,000 --> 00:17:49,840
Oh, I think
unquestionably in...round about...
before the First World War.

228
00:17:49,840 --> 00:17:53,720
I think those characters
that I write about

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00:17:53,720 --> 00:17:57,920
are more or less true to life
at that time.

230
00:17:57,920 --> 00:18:01,400
Say up to 1914, I think.

231
00:18:01,400 --> 00:18:05,920
Certainly I, as a young man,
I used to know them by the score.

232
00:18:05,920 --> 00:18:09,040
But of course,
now I imagine they are all,

233
00:18:09,040 --> 00:18:13,520
more or less...
I always look upon myself as writing
historical novels these days.

234
00:18:15,480 --> 00:18:17,680
One of the things that

235
00:18:17,680 --> 00:18:23,440
critics from time to time note in
your books is an absence of sex, as
one generally understands the term.

236
00:18:23,440 --> 00:18:25,840
Well, I don't...
I know, it's perfectly true.

237
00:18:25,840 --> 00:18:31,360
Of course, when I started writing,
sex was absolutely taboo.
You couldn't even hint at it.

238
00:18:31,360 --> 00:18:34,720
But I suppose
one got set in one's ways.

239
00:18:34,720 --> 00:18:41,520
But the only thing is that I don't
think sex would fit in with my
stuff. My stuff's too light and...

240
00:18:41,520 --> 00:18:46,360
Too serious a subject?
Yes, I think sex wouldn't...
wouldn't work in somehow.

241
00:18:46,360 --> 00:18:48,440
Jeeves. Sir?

242
00:18:48,440 --> 00:18:55,640
That stuff of yours that pulls you
round from unconsciousness to
a vivid awareness of life. Yes, sir?

243
00:18:55,640 --> 00:18:59,280
Do you have another recipe
which reverses the process?

244
00:18:59,280 --> 00:19:03,000
I'm afraid not, sir.

245
00:19:03,000 --> 00:19:11,000
The writing on any given page,
the dialogue is wonderfully,
carefully written,

246
00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:16,200
I think, and even the large passages
of Bertie Wooster narration

247
00:19:16,200 --> 00:19:19,400
are incredibly rich,
linguistically.

248
00:19:19,400 --> 00:19:23,520
It's a very difficult trick to
pull off, this absolute fool,

249
00:19:23,520 --> 00:19:27,080
who's discourse is studded
with bits of half-remembered Latin

250
00:19:27,080 --> 00:19:34,880
and lots and lots of Shakespeare
and always slightly garbled, cliches
and idioms slightly muddled up.

251
00:19:34,880 --> 00:19:37,600
I mean, it's incredibly rich,
I think, textually.

252
00:19:37,600 --> 00:19:41,840
And so the appearance of ease
is just an appearance.

253
00:19:41,840 --> 00:19:45,240
All your books are distinguished
by an enormous complexity of plot.

254
00:19:45,240 --> 00:19:46,880
How do you start about them?

255
00:19:46,880 --> 00:19:50,320
Oh, that's just a matter
of patience. I just sit down,

256
00:19:50,320 --> 00:19:54,800
I put down note after note,
about 400 pages of them,

257
00:19:54,800 --> 00:19:57,520
practically all of them
utterly valueless.

258
00:19:57,520 --> 00:20:02,400
And then eventually one scene
would click onto another scene.

259
00:20:02,400 --> 00:20:06,720
A little bit like
the new crossword puzzle,
you know? You get the clue down

260
00:20:06,720 --> 00:20:12,000
and then you have to get
the one across, and unless the two
fit in, you can't get any further.

261
00:20:12,000 --> 00:20:14,960
You don't believe in letting
your characters take charge?

262
00:20:14,960 --> 00:20:17,080
Oh, heavens no, I'd say not.

263
00:20:17,080 --> 00:20:21,000
I hear some authors say they can
do it. I don't see how they do it.

264
00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:28,840
I have to know exactly where I'm
going before I start a novel. I have
the complete scenario written out.

265
00:20:28,840 --> 00:20:32,240
Did you ever have any ambition
to become a serious writer?

266
00:20:32,240 --> 00:20:37,280
No, oddly enough I never have.
I don't believe I
could become one if I tried.

267
00:20:37,280 --> 00:20:41,280
But I certainly never felt the
inclination to become one at all.

268
00:20:41,280 --> 00:20:44,360
Never written a serious story
in my life, I don't think.

269
00:20:47,840 --> 00:20:54,120
Wodehouse continued writing
the Jeeves novels right through to
his death at the age of 93.

270
00:20:54,120 --> 00:20:57,560
His comic vision
was essentially nostalgic,

271
00:20:57,560 --> 00:21:01,760
but at the end of the 1920s,
one of his keenest disciples would

272
00:21:01,760 --> 00:21:05,760
use that anarchical spirit
in a critique of the age.

273
00:21:09,720 --> 00:21:16,920
Evelyn Waugh,
a young Oxford graduate, was one of
the bright young things of the '20s.

274
00:21:16,920 --> 00:21:21,360
But in a string of satirical novels
published from 1928 onwards,

275
00:21:21,360 --> 00:21:28,360
he parodied the privileged circles
he moved in and mocked
Britain's most sacred institutions.

276
00:21:37,840 --> 00:21:44,400
In this home movie from the time,
Evelyn Waugh, on the left,
and friends, engage in horseplay.

277
00:21:44,400 --> 00:21:48,320
In a scenario not out of keeping
with his written work, Waugh plays

278
00:21:48,320 --> 00:21:52,960
a homosexual Oxford don, making
advances on the Prince of Wales.

279
00:21:59,600 --> 00:22:05,520
Five seconds, stand by two,
superimpose, mix through,
cue on two.

280
00:22:05,520 --> 00:22:10,040
In later life, Waugh was disdainful
of television, but eventually agreed

281
00:22:10,040 --> 00:22:13,600
to appear on Face To Face,
a landmark series, in which

282
00:22:13,600 --> 00:22:19,920
public figures were interviewed with
rapid fire aggression, by legendary
broadcaster John Freeman.

283
00:22:19,920 --> 00:22:24,520
But in Waugh,
Freeman would meet his match.

284
00:22:24,520 --> 00:22:31,320
Are you very sensitive to the
criticisms of others,
unkind reviews of your books?

285
00:22:31,320 --> 00:22:33,080
I don't think so.

286
00:22:33,080 --> 00:22:37,120
I've often wondered,
for instance, at the time
in the middle of the '30s

287
00:22:37,120 --> 00:22:40,760
when you were assailed by,
well by Rose Macaulay
and one or two others,

288
00:22:40,760 --> 00:22:45,720
for being a fascist, because
you reported the Abyssinian War
from the Italian side.

289
00:22:45,720 --> 00:22:48,360
Did that upset you,
or prey on your mind at all?

290
00:22:48,360 --> 00:22:51,280
I wasn't even aware she assailed me.

291
00:22:51,280 --> 00:22:56,480
He was very difficult, he was very
uptight, I think he disliked me,

292
00:22:56,480 --> 00:23:00,360
and whether he did or not,
he was extremely nervous.

293
00:23:00,360 --> 00:23:02,040
I remember

294
00:23:02,040 --> 00:23:07,600
greeting him before, when I met him
before the interview, and I said,

295
00:23:07,600 --> 00:23:09,600
"Good evening, Mr Waugh",

296
00:23:09,600 --> 00:23:14,040
or words to that effect,
and he replied,

297
00:23:14,040 --> 00:23:18,120
"The name, sir,
is Waugh, not Waff."

298
00:23:18,120 --> 00:23:22,800
And since I had addressed
him as Mr Waugh to begin with,
this was clearly

299
00:23:22,800 --> 00:23:28,480
a rehearsed...antagonistic attitude.

300
00:23:28,480 --> 00:23:32,240
Have you ever brooded
on what appears to you to
be unjust or adverse criticism?

301
00:23:32,240 --> 00:23:36,200
No. I'm afraid if someone praises
me, I think, "What an arse",

302
00:23:36,200 --> 00:23:39,080
and if they abuse me,
I think, "What an arse."

303
00:23:39,080 --> 00:23:43,360
And if they say nothing about you
at all and take no notice of you?

304
00:23:43,360 --> 00:23:45,200
That's the best I can hope for.

305
00:23:45,200 --> 00:23:47,120
You like that when it
happens to you? Yes.

306
00:23:47,120 --> 00:23:51,080
Why are you appearing
in this programme? Poverty.

307
00:23:51,080 --> 00:23:54,760
We've both been hired to talk
in this deliriously happy way.

308
00:23:54,760 --> 00:23:57,240
Em, looking at yourself,
because I'm sure you are

309
00:23:57,240 --> 00:24:02,880
a self critical person,
what do you feel is your worst fault?

310
00:24:02,880 --> 00:24:04,440
Irritability.

311
00:24:04,440 --> 00:24:06,760
Are you a snob at all?

312
00:24:06,760 --> 00:24:09,320
I don't think.

313
00:24:09,320 --> 00:24:13,440
Em, irritability with your family,
with strangers?

314
00:24:13,440 --> 00:24:14,960
Absolutely everything.

315
00:24:16,920 --> 00:24:24,640
Considering his extreme irritability,
it's surprising Waugh agreed to do
one more television interview.

316
00:24:24,640 --> 00:24:26,560
Hold it, everybody
in the studio, will you?

317
00:24:26,560 --> 00:24:28,520
Change coming up in the six o'clock.

318
00:24:28,520 --> 00:24:31,600
I'm led to believe that when,
I think it's about 1964,
Evelyn Waugh,

319
00:24:31,600 --> 00:24:35,680
who was then in his early sixties,
was enticed onto Monitor,

320
00:24:35,680 --> 00:24:36,920
the BBC arts programme,

321
00:24:36,920 --> 00:24:39,800
and he insisted that he be
interviewed by a pretty girl.

322
00:24:39,800 --> 00:24:42,560
"I must have a pretty girl."
So they got Elizabeth Jane Howard
to interview him.

323
00:24:42,560 --> 00:24:46,720
And he was quite, ah, you know,
he was quite polite, and she asked
some very good questions.

324
00:24:46,720 --> 00:24:50,680
It's a very good interview.
But I gather, between the takes,
Waugh was tapping off his cigar,

325
00:24:50,680 --> 00:24:52,840
saying, "When is Miss Howard
going to take her clothes off?"

326
00:24:52,840 --> 00:24:58,720
When you were a young writer,
were writers trying to shock...

327
00:24:58,720 --> 00:25:03,120
In the ensuing interview,
Waugh reflected on his early years
in the '20s,

328
00:25:03,120 --> 00:25:07,040
lambasting the innovative style
of writers like Virginia Woolf.

329
00:25:07,040 --> 00:25:10,240
The matter shocked you awfully
whatever you read.

330
00:25:10,240 --> 00:25:14,880
When I began writing,
it was a great period of shock.

331
00:25:14,880 --> 00:25:20,120
But there was a much more sinister
influence, which was to try and
reduce prose style to gibberish.

332
00:25:20,120 --> 00:25:23,560
In my youth, there was
a tremendous blind alley

333
00:25:23,560 --> 00:25:25,760
a whole lot of good writers
went down,

334
00:25:25,760 --> 00:25:29,200
which they tried to give what they
called, em, stream of consciousness,

335
00:25:29,200 --> 00:25:33,840
in which they gave what everyone was
thinking and feeling, apart from
what they were saying or doing.

336
00:25:33,840 --> 00:25:37,640
But when it came to prose,
the English common man knows
what prose is.

337
00:25:37,640 --> 00:25:40,960
He talks it all the time himself,
and he wasn't going to be taken in.

338
00:25:40,960 --> 00:25:46,280
And there were a lot of Americans,
headed by one called Gertrude Stein,
who wrote absolute gibberish.

339
00:25:46,280 --> 00:25:50,320
Then they hired a poor dotty
Irishman called James Joyce.

340
00:25:50,320 --> 00:25:54,920
I say you've never heard about him,
but he was thought to be a great
influence in my youth. Was he? Yes?

341
00:25:54,920 --> 00:25:57,680
And he wrote absolute rot, you know.

342
00:25:57,680 --> 00:26:01,880
He began writing quite well
and you could see him going
mad sentence by sentence.

343
00:26:01,880 --> 00:26:06,520
If you read Ulysses, it's perfectly
sane for a little bit
and then it goes madder and madder,

344
00:26:06,520 --> 00:26:08,840
but that was before
the Americans hired him.

345
00:26:08,840 --> 00:26:13,800
And then they hired him to write
Finnegan's Wake, which is gibberish.

346
00:26:21,080 --> 00:26:25,200
The literary world
of the inter-war years was still
predominantly a boy's world.

347
00:26:28,200 --> 00:26:32,320
But following in the footsteps of
Virginia Woolf, a new generation

348
00:26:32,320 --> 00:26:35,400
of women writers
had been quick to emerge.

349
00:26:35,400 --> 00:26:42,160
Theirs was a style focused less
on plot than on the inner lives
and feelings of their characters.

350
00:26:53,400 --> 00:26:57,560
Female novelists begin testing,
in a new way,

351
00:26:57,560 --> 00:27:03,200
the possibility of creating
a kind of female fictional voice.

352
00:27:03,200 --> 00:27:08,160
So perhaps, ironically,
this is a period in which,

353
00:27:08,160 --> 00:27:15,560
whilst fiction is at
its most experimental,
it's also kind of divided,

354
00:27:15,560 --> 00:27:22,000
more than it has been
in the past, by the gender
of the novelist concerned.

355
00:27:23,800 --> 00:27:30,520
The Irish born Elizabeth Bowen
came to London to mix
with the Bloomsbury Group.

356
00:27:30,520 --> 00:27:34,160
She went on to publish a string of
electrifying novels, in which she

357
00:27:34,160 --> 00:27:40,440
reveals the ongoing emotional drama
behind the apparent mundanity
of everyday life.

358
00:27:42,600 --> 00:27:46,040
Well, we'd better take
the train, hadn't we?

359
00:27:46,040 --> 00:27:48,440
We can give the buns to some child.

360
00:27:48,440 --> 00:27:50,520
And where shall we find some child?

361
00:27:50,520 --> 00:27:52,440
Oh, on the way home.

362
00:27:52,440 --> 00:27:54,600
You'll take the train when we go?

363
00:28:10,960 --> 00:28:16,040
Bowen's masterpiece, The Death Of
The Heart, tells of a 16-year-old
orphan girl,

364
00:28:16,040 --> 00:28:18,880
bitterly learning
the cruel realities of life.

365
00:28:20,400 --> 00:28:23,360
My favourite scene
in Death Of The Heart, you know,

366
00:28:23,360 --> 00:28:27,800
one's own heart dies a little,
you know, when she notices,

367
00:28:27,800 --> 00:28:31,040
the heroine notices,
the young girl,

368
00:28:31,040 --> 00:28:36,040
that the person she loves
is holding the hand of
the other girl in the cinema.

369
00:28:36,040 --> 00:28:40,120
It's a very simple scene,
in a way, but that betrayal

370
00:28:40,120 --> 00:28:45,080
is just so intense that you
can't believe that it's happening,
you're completely with her.

371
00:28:45,080 --> 00:28:50,360
And she's looking at this hand
and she can't understand why
it's in the hand of her boyfriend.

372
00:28:50,360 --> 00:28:53,680
And that's just wonderful.

373
00:28:57,840 --> 00:29:03,200
In later life,
Bowen was interviewed about The
Death Of The Heart, by V S Naipaul.

374
00:29:04,720 --> 00:29:09,280
The Death Of The Heart is perhaps
the best known
of Elizabeth Bowen's novels,

375
00:29:09,280 --> 00:29:13,880
but Miss Bowen refers to
it specifically as a pre-war novel.

376
00:29:13,880 --> 00:29:17,360
And I would like to ask her
what a pre-war novel is.

377
00:29:17,360 --> 00:29:22,480
A novel, I think, which reflects
the time in which it was written,

378
00:29:22,480 --> 00:29:28,520
and in this case, the pre-war time,
with its high tension,

379
00:29:28,520 --> 00:29:34,760
its increasing anxieties
and this great stress against...

380
00:29:34,760 --> 00:29:41,280
great stress on individual
existence. People were so conscious
of themselves, and of each other

381
00:29:41,280 --> 00:29:44,440
and of their personal relationships,

382
00:29:44,440 --> 00:29:50,000
because they thought
that everything
of that time might soon end.

383
00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:54,880
Do you think that there's
any more room for experimentation
in the novel?

384
00:29:54,880 --> 00:29:58,280
Well, I think every novelist
experiments all the time.

385
00:29:58,280 --> 00:30:04,320
I can't believe that anyone has ever
written the same book, or the
same kind of a book over again.

386
00:30:04,320 --> 00:30:11,440
And the fascination of the novel,
to me, is that it is a perpetual
experiment which moves forward.

387
00:30:11,440 --> 00:30:14,440
She refused to be fully happy
until you and I had met again.

388
00:30:14,440 --> 00:30:17,240
And since we have met
and she has seen

389
00:30:17,240 --> 00:30:19,800
that God knows how that I love you,

390
00:30:19,800 --> 00:30:22,440
her love of me has become

391
00:30:22,440 --> 00:30:25,280
a love of her own pain.

392
00:30:25,280 --> 00:30:27,320
Her mother watches her watching,

393
00:30:27,320 --> 00:30:30,400
and misses nothing. I cannot live
with them both.

394
00:30:30,400 --> 00:30:35,800
We'll just need to live with it
somewhere else. I will not live with
a woman who lives with her own pain.

395
00:30:35,800 --> 00:30:38,840
Now how would you set
about finding your character?

396
00:30:38,840 --> 00:30:44,320
Because I think of characters,
I think of the situation
first so often.

397
00:30:44,320 --> 00:30:48,640
Some incidents are extreme ones,
somebody throwing
someone else over a cliff.

398
00:30:48,640 --> 00:30:53,440
And I think, "Who is the person
who went over the cliff,
and why was the other one angry?"

399
00:30:53,440 --> 00:31:00,280
And you think you'll bring the
characters in, however, because you
think, "Who are the kind of people

400
00:31:00,280 --> 00:31:07,480
to whom this incident, or action,
or catastrophe would be most likely
to happen, and why did it happen?"

401
00:31:07,480 --> 00:31:12,120
And the character shapes itself
around? And the character
shapes itself around.

402
00:31:14,840 --> 00:31:21,760
In a male-dominated world,
it was easy for women writers
to be overlooked.

403
00:31:21,760 --> 00:31:24,880
Take Jean Rhys.

404
00:31:24,880 --> 00:31:30,400
After a childhood
in British Dominica, she published
a string of brilliant novels,

405
00:31:30,400 --> 00:31:35,240
capturing the lonely demimonde life
of a colonial exile in London.

406
00:31:36,760 --> 00:31:42,320
She had such an effect on me when I
first read Voyage In The Dark, and
it just touched such a chord in me.

407
00:31:42,320 --> 00:31:44,040
I felt as if...

408
00:31:44,040 --> 00:31:47,120
I understood
everything about this character,

409
00:31:47,120 --> 00:31:49,800
and that it was a wonderful way
to tell a story,

410
00:31:49,800 --> 00:31:54,400
right from the inside of someone,
rather than
what's physically happening to them.

411
00:31:54,400 --> 00:31:59,440
The story that she tells
is all driven by Anna's...

412
00:31:59,440 --> 00:32:01,880
the sort of essence
of Anna's character.

413
00:32:04,040 --> 00:32:07,320
But Rhys was underappreciated
at the time.

414
00:32:07,320 --> 00:32:11,360
She disappeared from public view
for many years, before returning

415
00:32:11,360 --> 00:32:18,240
with her triumphant swan song,
the Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966.

416
00:32:18,240 --> 00:32:24,040
While many had thought her dead,
she'd been living all along
in a small bungalow in Devon.

417
00:32:25,680 --> 00:32:29,800
Captured on camera in a brief
interview shortly before her death,

418
00:32:29,800 --> 00:32:33,200
she questioned whether novelists
can ever be truly happy.

419
00:32:35,880 --> 00:32:40,720
Has writing always been partly
getting things off your mind?

420
00:32:40,720 --> 00:32:44,360
Yes, very much so.

421
00:32:44,360 --> 00:32:49,760
When I was excited about life,
I didn't want to write at all,

422
00:32:49,760 --> 00:32:53,960
and when I was happy,
I had no wish to write.

423
00:32:53,960 --> 00:32:57,840
I've never written
about being happy, never,

424
00:32:57,840 --> 00:33:03,440
I didn't want to. Besides, I don't
think you can describe being happy.

425
00:33:03,440 --> 00:33:07,320
So what do you settle for if
you can't describe being happy?

426
00:33:11,360 --> 00:33:16,920
Well, I suppose I've never had
a long period of being happy.

427
00:33:16,920 --> 00:33:19,080
Do you think anybody has?

428
00:33:20,920 --> 00:33:24,440
But then, altogether, I think...

429
00:33:24,440 --> 00:33:28,800
well, I think if I had to choose,
I'd rather be happy than write.

430
00:33:30,320 --> 00:33:33,800
If I had my life all over
again and could choose.

431
00:33:51,240 --> 00:33:57,280
The Great Depression of
the early '30s sent Britain's
economy spiralling into decline.

432
00:33:59,160 --> 00:34:04,920
Unemployment soared,
and the plight of the nation's poor
became more apparent than ever.

433
00:34:08,040 --> 00:34:15,520
Every walk of life was affected,
and even those unused to worrying
about money struggled to get by.

434
00:34:24,040 --> 00:34:31,440
For the poet Robert Graves, the
solution was to write a bestseller,
and he did so in I, Claudius.

435
00:34:33,400 --> 00:34:38,800
Oh, come on, tell
the queen of heaven what
her lord and master wants.

436
00:34:38,800 --> 00:34:43,400
This sensational account of intrigue
and decadence in imperial Rome

437
00:34:43,400 --> 00:34:48,760
still had the power to shock
when adapted by the BBC
over 40 years later.

438
00:34:50,320 --> 00:34:54,040
I, Claudius is the work
Graves is best remembered for.

439
00:34:54,040 --> 00:34:58,400
But he never made any bones
about his literary motivation.

440
00:34:58,400 --> 00:35:03,360
I wrote I, Claudius because I'd been
let down on a land deal

441
00:35:03,360 --> 00:35:05,480
and I had to find £4,000,

442
00:35:05,480 --> 00:35:07,960
and I'd mortgaged my house.

443
00:35:07,960 --> 00:35:13,680
And, ah, I'd made a note
some, a couple of years before,

444
00:35:13,680 --> 00:35:17,480
that there was something very wrong
with the Claudius story and that the

445
00:35:17,480 --> 00:35:19,560
historians weren't telling the
truth

446
00:35:19,560 --> 00:35:23,840
and, that it might be a good thing
to write if I ever needed the money.

447
00:35:23,840 --> 00:35:29,480
And I did need the money, so I wrote
it and I made £8,000 in six months,

448
00:35:29,480 --> 00:35:31,600
and that saved my house.

449
00:35:31,600 --> 00:35:34,160
The noble, Gaius Caligula,
to see the emperor.

450
00:35:34,160 --> 00:35:36,000
What do you want,
can't you see that I'm busy?

451
00:35:36,000 --> 00:35:39,440
Graves used the smokescreen of
history to pack in a degree of

452
00:35:39,440 --> 00:35:43,920
sex most novelists couldn't get
away with, and the public loved it.

453
00:35:43,920 --> 00:35:46,120
Took me a year to find it.

454
00:35:46,120 --> 00:35:53,280
When I heard about I said, "That is
for my great uncle Tiberius."

455
00:35:53,280 --> 00:35:55,880
Happy anniversary.

456
00:35:55,880 --> 00:35:57,600
Oh, that's nothing,

457
00:35:57,600 --> 00:36:00,400
wait till you see the others.

458
00:36:00,400 --> 00:36:02,520
It cost quite a lot.

459
00:36:02,520 --> 00:36:06,640
Robert Graves was something of an
unconventional libertine himself,

460
00:36:06,640 --> 00:36:10,640
never shying away from the
taboo topics of the time.

461
00:36:10,640 --> 00:36:13,480
I knew you'd like it.

462
00:36:13,480 --> 00:36:17,120
In fact, I'd like to
borrow it myself sometime,

463
00:36:17,120 --> 00:36:19,600
I mean when you're not using it.

464
00:36:23,240 --> 00:36:26,040
In an interview with Malcolm
Muggeridge,

465
00:36:26,040 --> 00:36:30,560
Graves talked candidly about his
sexual explorations at school.

466
00:36:30,560 --> 00:36:35,240
Do you think the fact that you
went through a homosexual phase

467
00:36:35,240 --> 00:36:38,240
at Charterhouse influenced
you much?

468
00:36:38,240 --> 00:36:42,120
It wasn't a homosexual
phase, it was no more than...

469
00:36:42,120 --> 00:36:46,240
Listen, you've got to distinguish
between homosexuality

470
00:36:46,240 --> 00:36:49,920
of one sort, and homosexuality in
which the boy is playing the woman.

471
00:36:49,920 --> 00:36:52,240
Robert, I
quite understand that distinction.

472
00:36:52,240 --> 00:36:55,840
The only thing I wonder is whether,
not having been to a school of that

473
00:36:55,840 --> 00:37:00,200
kind myself, whether the fact that
you go through this phase,

474
00:37:00,200 --> 00:37:02,640
I mean looking back on it, whether

475
00:37:02,640 --> 00:37:08,480
you think the influence of it
is bad, or good, or large, or small?

476
00:37:08,480 --> 00:37:10,880
Oh, everything is interesting,
isn't it, so to speak?

477
00:37:10,880 --> 00:37:12,480
Yes. It, em...

478
00:37:12,480 --> 00:37:15,000
I mean you don't look back
on it as something that was

479
00:37:15,000 --> 00:37:16,680
blighting or anything like that?

480
00:37:16,680 --> 00:37:19,480
No, no, I'm not a faggot myself.

481
00:37:19,480 --> 00:37:23,360
No, I know you're not. Thank you.

482
00:37:23,360 --> 00:37:26,280
I give you a full credit for that.

483
00:37:30,160 --> 00:37:32,640
He's pulled the sword out of the
stone.

484
00:37:32,640 --> 00:37:36,440
Now we have a worthy king to rule
over Britain. Hurrah!

485
00:37:37,880 --> 00:37:41,760
After I, Claudius,
historical fiction was all the rage.

486
00:37:41,760 --> 00:37:45,520
One school teacher was inspired by
his experiences in the classroom,

487
00:37:45,520 --> 00:37:49,280
to write a radical reinterpretation
of the legend of King Arthur.

488
00:37:52,920 --> 00:37:57,400
TH White's The Sword In The Stone,
which deals with the education of

489
00:37:57,400 --> 00:38:01,680
the young Arthur,
would prove a runaway success.

490
00:38:01,680 --> 00:38:05,640
It was a winning formula,
that appealed to children

491
00:38:05,640 --> 00:38:07,080
as well as adults.

492
00:38:07,080 --> 00:38:09,880
I'll try and see if it's a trick.

493
00:38:12,920 --> 00:38:15,360
Well, I think children are about
ten times more intelligent

494
00:38:15,360 --> 00:38:18,800
than grown ups. They're more alive,
they're more perceptive, they're

495
00:38:18,800 --> 00:38:20,880
doing more, they're more vigorous
and more vivid,

496
00:38:20,880 --> 00:38:23,080
and more able to
distinguish between right and wrong.

497
00:38:23,080 --> 00:38:26,840
And if I am childish,
I am very glad I am.

498
00:38:30,480 --> 00:38:35,280
White capitalised on his triumph
with not one, but three sequels.

499
00:38:35,280 --> 00:38:39,400
Not only did he never have to teach
again, but the BBC tracked him down

500
00:38:39,400 --> 00:38:42,320
leading a life of luxury
on the Channel Islands.

501
00:38:44,000 --> 00:38:47,720
Do you like making money? Do you
enjoy it? Is it important to you?

502
00:38:47,720 --> 00:38:50,120
No, not a bit. Ah, no.

503
00:38:50,120 --> 00:38:52,720
Do you make a lot of money?

504
00:38:52,720 --> 00:38:56,360
No. Ah, I make a great deal,
and then hand it all over

505
00:38:56,360 --> 00:38:58,080
to the Farewell State.

506
00:38:58,080 --> 00:39:02,920
Ah, but even if I was a millionaire,
I should go on living as I do.

507
00:39:02,920 --> 00:39:05,400
You are you.
You live very sumptuously, though.

508
00:39:05,400 --> 00:39:07,000
I do not,

509
00:39:07,000 --> 00:39:09,120
I do my own cooking and everything.

510
00:39:09,120 --> 00:39:12,800
You've got a whacking big swimming
pool, and a temple to Hadrian.

511
00:39:14,600 --> 00:39:17,840
The swimming pool is
to swim in, and the

512
00:39:17,840 --> 00:39:20,720
temple to Hadrian is because I think
Hadrian was a very fine fellow.

513
00:39:20,720 --> 00:39:24,600
But it is not in order to be
rich and have one, it's because

514
00:39:24,600 --> 00:39:29,120
I can just afford to do it, by
scraping up what little is left

515
00:39:29,120 --> 00:39:31,560
to me by you people in the smoke.

516
00:39:40,240 --> 00:39:43,320
For those novelists who couldn't find
a way to support their writing at

517
00:39:43,320 --> 00:39:47,560
home, one extreme solution
was simply to emigrate.

518
00:39:47,560 --> 00:39:49,760
The British economy might be weak,

519
00:39:49,760 --> 00:39:52,520
but the pound still went
a long way abroad.

520
00:39:54,320 --> 00:39:59,400
My name is
Christopher Isherwood. I'm a writer.

521
00:39:59,400 --> 00:40:02,880
I live in Santa Monica, California,

522
00:40:02,880 --> 00:40:05,880
but 40 years ago,
I used to live in Berlin.

523
00:40:15,600 --> 00:40:17,520
At the beginning of the 1930s,

524
00:40:17,520 --> 00:40:20,680
Berlin was the most
exciting city in the world.

525
00:40:25,560 --> 00:40:29,000
It was leading innovation in art and
architecture, and Weimer Germany's

526
00:40:29,000 --> 00:40:32,640
embattled economy meant an Englishman
could live cheaply and well.

527
00:40:43,400 --> 00:40:45,720
But for Isherwood,
it was the decadence and

528
00:40:45,720 --> 00:40:49,280
sexual licentiousness of Berlin's
nightlife that proved most alluring.

529
00:40:55,560 --> 00:40:59,960
In his books Mr Norris Changes
Trains, and Goodbye To Berlin,

530
00:40:59,960 --> 00:41:02,920
he brought his experiences
vividly alive.

531
00:41:04,560 --> 00:41:08,720
Ah, there was of course my
dear old landlady

532
00:41:08,720 --> 00:41:12,080
who always called me
"Herr Issyvoo".

533
00:41:12,080 --> 00:41:15,840
I appeared as a character
in the book, under my own name.

534
00:41:15,840 --> 00:41:20,400
And, there was a working class
family that I lived with

535
00:41:20,400 --> 00:41:23,200
for a while, in the Berlin slums,

536
00:41:23,200 --> 00:41:26,880
and there was a very wealthy Jewish
family,

537
00:41:26,880 --> 00:41:29,480
who owned a department store.

538
00:41:29,480 --> 00:41:35,200
And then there was, um, a girl,
whom I called Sally Bowles.

539
00:41:37,960 --> 00:41:42,320
Sally Bowles, a British nightclub
singer, would be immortalised

540
00:41:42,320 --> 00:41:46,760
by Liza Minnelli in Cabaret,
a musical based on Isherwood's works.

541
00:41:51,040 --> 00:41:54,120
"As she dialled the number,
I noticed that her fingernails

542
00:41:54,120 --> 00:41:57,840
"were painted emerald green, a
colour unfortunately chosen,

543
00:41:57,840 --> 00:42:01,760
"for it called attention to her
hands, which were much stained

544
00:42:01,760 --> 00:42:05,360
"by cigarette smoking,
and as dirty as a little girl's."

545
00:42:05,360 --> 00:42:08,640
Now I don't remember that
Sally actually had dirty hands.

546
00:42:08,640 --> 00:42:11,280
They were stained
certainly by cigarette smoking,

547
00:42:11,280 --> 00:42:12,440
like everybody's are.

548
00:42:12,440 --> 00:42:15,920
But you see already one comes away,
one starts to work on

549
00:42:15,920 --> 00:42:18,080
certain details and exaggerate
them.

550
00:42:18,080 --> 00:42:21,960
"Her face was long and thin,
powdered dead white,

551
00:42:21,960 --> 00:42:24,720
"and she had very large,
brown eyes,

552
00:42:24,720 --> 00:42:28,240
"which should have been darker,
to match her hair and the pencil

553
00:42:28,240 --> 00:42:29,920
"she used for her eyebrows."

554
00:42:29,920 --> 00:42:34,040
I suppose that's, roughly speaking,
true.

555
00:42:34,040 --> 00:42:36,520
The style seems quite
understated and low key.

556
00:42:36,520 --> 00:42:38,800
It's not really heavily worked up.

557
00:42:38,800 --> 00:42:41,120
I mean it couldn't be
further removed from

558
00:42:41,120 --> 00:42:42,720
Joyce's Ulysses, let's say.

559
00:42:42,720 --> 00:42:45,400
But then you'll get this
incredibly sharp

560
00:42:45,400 --> 00:42:47,760
observation,
or this kind of phrase.

561
00:42:47,760 --> 00:42:50,640
You know, he's talking very
fondly about how glamorous

562
00:42:50,640 --> 00:42:54,160
Sally Bowles is, and this one day
he says she looks really awful.

563
00:42:54,160 --> 00:42:56,480
"Her eyes looked
like they'd been boiled."

564
00:42:56,480 --> 00:43:01,120
And it seems that that is just so
devastating, much more devastating

565
00:43:01,120 --> 00:43:03,920
that some kind of
moral judgement would be.

566
00:43:03,920 --> 00:43:06,520
CHANTING

567
00:43:10,840 --> 00:43:14,440
Along with the nightclubs and
decadent parties, Isherwood's stories

568
00:43:14,440 --> 00:43:19,720
witness the ever growing grasp on
the city by Hitler's Nazi thugs.

569
00:43:21,240 --> 00:43:25,600
But Isherwood avoids moralising.
He describes himself as a mere

570
00:43:25,600 --> 00:43:30,040
camera, reporting, but not
passing judgement on all he sees.

571
00:43:32,040 --> 00:43:36,240
The Christopher Isherwood, the "Herr
Issyvoo" in the book, is just an

572
00:43:36,240 --> 00:43:41,280
observer, a kind of scanning device,
who's there among the characters.

573
00:43:41,280 --> 00:43:45,240
And, now I'm writing it,
trying to write exactly what I

574
00:43:45,240 --> 00:43:49,280
saw and why I went, and what
I wanted out of the whole thing.

575
00:43:49,280 --> 00:43:51,960
If I'd insisted on that,
the Berlin stories would have

576
00:43:51,960 --> 00:43:53,360
been much less entertaining,

577
00:43:53,360 --> 00:43:56,200
because I wouldn't have been
describing all these people,

578
00:43:56,200 --> 00:43:59,480
which is what the Berlin stories
are about. They're not about me.

579
00:43:59,480 --> 00:44:01,920
CHANTING

580
00:44:07,800 --> 00:44:12,360
In January 1933,
Hitler became Chancellor,

581
00:44:12,360 --> 00:44:17,480
unleashing a wave of widespread
brutality and Jewish persecution.

582
00:44:25,360 --> 00:44:29,960
Isherwood left Berlin for good, under
no doubt about Germany's fate

583
00:44:29,960 --> 00:44:32,960
and the implications
for the rest of Europe.

584
00:44:40,880 --> 00:44:44,720
The rise of fascism intensified
the feeling of doom

585
00:44:44,720 --> 00:44:47,160
prevalent in 30s Britain.

586
00:44:47,160 --> 00:44:51,120
But for some, it was our ever
growing dependency on technology

587
00:44:51,120 --> 00:44:52,840
that was most to be feared.

588
00:44:58,800 --> 00:45:02,360
The key question was whether
human liberty and individuality

589
00:45:02,360 --> 00:45:07,080
would be able to survive
the merciless march of science.

590
00:45:10,720 --> 00:45:14,680
Aldous Huxley had enjoyed
some success in the 1920s,

591
00:45:14,680 --> 00:45:18,640
with satirical novels in a style
not dissimilar to Evelyn Waugh.

592
00:45:18,640 --> 00:45:21,880
But in 1932 he published
Brave New World,

593
00:45:21,880 --> 00:45:26,560
a dystopian vision of a
Britain where pharmaceutical drugs

594
00:45:26,560 --> 00:45:30,840
and a social ranking system modelled
on the factory production line

595
00:45:30,840 --> 00:45:33,120
are used to control human behaviour.

596
00:45:39,440 --> 00:45:44,440
Over the years, many aspects of
Brave New World seemed to come true,

597
00:45:44,440 --> 00:45:47,920
and Huxley assumed the role of
prophet for the modern age.

598
00:45:51,480 --> 00:45:54,080
Well, this, em, Brave New World,

599
00:45:54,080 --> 00:45:58,840
I suppose you can describe as a
picture of society in which

600
00:45:58,840 --> 00:46:03,120
the urge to order
was carried to extreme limits.

601
00:46:03,120 --> 00:46:10,080
I mean, here an attempt was made
to iron out human differences, to

602
00:46:10,080 --> 00:46:14,920
create a kind of standardised human
product, by means of manipulation of

603
00:46:14,920 --> 00:46:19,840
the mind, by pharmacological and
psychological methods,

604
00:46:19,840 --> 00:46:23,080
which I think are
perfectly feasible.

605
00:46:23,080 --> 00:46:26,240
I think we can, if we want to,

606
00:46:26,240 --> 00:46:31,520
create this kind of uniform
making society.

607
00:46:31,520 --> 00:46:34,320
In Brave New World
everything is happy,

608
00:46:34,320 --> 00:46:40,440
but so much that we might value as
human has to be expelled,

609
00:46:40,440 --> 00:46:43,720
in order to create happiness.

610
00:46:43,720 --> 00:46:46,720
Freedom, literature,

611
00:46:46,720 --> 00:46:51,760
all forms, all forms of
unhappiness,

612
00:46:51,760 --> 00:46:56,480
discontent, anything uncomfortable.

613
00:46:56,480 --> 00:47:01,440
So we become, as human beings, in
the pursuit of happiness,

614
00:47:01,440 --> 00:47:03,680
something much less than human.

615
00:47:03,680 --> 00:47:06,880
Now I think when the
technological and applied scientific

616
00:47:06,880 --> 00:47:10,680
means are developed,
they just tend to be used.

617
00:47:10,680 --> 00:47:12,320
I mean hence

618
00:47:12,320 --> 00:47:17,760
this sense which
many people have, this sense that

619
00:47:17,760 --> 00:47:22,160
man is being subjected to his
own inventions, that he is now

620
00:47:22,160 --> 00:47:24,720
the victim of his own technology,

621
00:47:24,720 --> 00:47:27,000
and the victim of his own
applied science,

622
00:47:27,000 --> 00:47:28,840
instead of being in control of it.

623
00:47:28,840 --> 00:47:33,040
How could he be in control of it?
Well, I think this is perhaps one

624
00:47:33,040 --> 00:47:38,120
of the major problems of our time,
and we have to start thinking about

625
00:47:38,120 --> 00:47:40,280
this problem very seriously,

626
00:47:40,280 --> 00:47:45,240
and seeing how we can re-establish
control over our own invention.

627
00:47:54,360 --> 00:47:59,480
Huxley's work would, in its turn,
inform another great dystopian novel,

628
00:47:59,480 --> 00:48:03,200
one adapted by the BBC
shortly after publication.

629
00:48:06,560 --> 00:48:13,320
'This, in 1984, is London,
chief city of Airstrip One,

630
00:48:13,320 --> 00:48:15,800
'a province of the
state of Oceania.'

631
00:48:18,640 --> 00:48:21,640
Throughout the 1930s,
George Orwell published

632
00:48:21,640 --> 00:48:25,240
books highlighting the inequality
at the heart of modern Britain.

633
00:48:28,600 --> 00:48:30,840
Down And Out In Paris And London,

634
00:48:30,840 --> 00:48:34,880
and The Road To Wigan Pier,
revealed the extremity of the

635
00:48:34,880 --> 00:48:39,960
rich/poor divide, and the plight
of the nation's underprivileged.

636
00:48:39,960 --> 00:48:45,240
But it was only in the novel 1984,
published at the end of his life,

637
00:48:45,240 --> 00:48:48,320
that he allowed his fears full reign.

638
00:48:49,440 --> 00:48:53,200
'You might say there are two
possible dystopias in literature.

639
00:48:53,200 --> 00:48:57,720
'There's Brave New World,
which is a kind of false utopia.

640
00:48:57,720 --> 00:49:00,400
'And then of course there's
1984 by George Orwell,'

641
00:49:00,400 --> 00:49:07,440
where, you know, the future is
is a boot in a human face, forever,

642
00:49:07,440 --> 00:49:11,120
which is another dystopia
we recognise,

643
00:49:11,120 --> 00:49:16,080
where human beings are
dragooned into the assertion of

644
00:49:16,080 --> 00:49:21,440
their happiness in a world which
is actually brutalised

645
00:49:21,440 --> 00:49:24,800
and bereft, not just of
spiritual consolation,

646
00:49:24,800 --> 00:49:28,480
but actually
of any of the good things in life.

647
00:49:28,480 --> 00:49:30,880
'The thought police
are joining you.'

648
00:49:39,240 --> 00:49:44,440
1984 has the virtue of intense
readability and it's actually

649
00:49:44,440 --> 00:49:49,280
very sort of muscularly written,

650
00:49:49,280 --> 00:49:52,280
and does have prescience.

651
00:49:52,280 --> 00:49:57,120
It gives a description of something
that wasn't quite clear at the time,

652
00:49:57,120 --> 00:50:01,560
which was really the Russian
tyranny, the Soviet tyranny,

653
00:50:01,560 --> 00:50:06,400
and indeed, you know,
accurate and tremendously realistic.

654
00:50:09,240 --> 00:50:12,160
For a time, Orwell worked at the BBC,

655
00:50:12,160 --> 00:50:17,320
and he based certain details of
1984 on his experiences there,

656
00:50:17,320 --> 00:50:19,880
including the dreaded Room 101,

657
00:50:19,880 --> 00:50:24,440
where it is said he had to
attend bureaucratic meetings.

658
00:50:24,440 --> 00:50:29,480
Hang me, shoot me, no, not,
not Room 101!

659
00:50:29,480 --> 00:50:31,000
Room 101.

660
00:50:36,760 --> 00:50:38,880
If we don't get anything at all from
them...

661
00:50:38,880 --> 00:50:41,760
Morning, Bob. Morning, Jeff.
Hello, Margaret. Hello.

662
00:50:41,760 --> 00:50:45,240
Despite Orwell spending over two
years broadcasting to the world,

663
00:50:45,240 --> 00:50:49,800
the BBC did not preserve a
single second of his voice.

664
00:50:52,160 --> 00:50:54,320
Big Brother would be proud.

665
00:51:03,240 --> 00:51:04,760
By the end of the 1930s,

666
00:51:04,760 --> 00:51:08,920
the mood was right for the
emergence of a new literary genre,

667
00:51:08,920 --> 00:51:14,480
one rooted in paranoia and pessimism,
in betrayal and despair.

668
00:51:18,360 --> 00:51:23,000
A world of night-time border
crossings and hidden identities,

669
00:51:23,000 --> 00:51:27,760
a world that became known simply
as Greeneland.

670
00:51:34,000 --> 00:51:37,480
Graham Greene was the son of a
headmaster in Hertfordshire,

671
00:51:37,480 --> 00:51:39,280
a fairly humdrum background.

672
00:51:39,280 --> 00:51:43,000
But in the string of thrillers
he published in the 30s,

673
00:51:43,000 --> 00:51:47,240
he evolved the unique literary
style that made him famous.

674
00:51:53,000 --> 00:51:54,920
It was in keeping with his fiction

675
00:51:54,920 --> 00:51:57,920
that when the BBC made a
documentary about Greene,

676
00:51:57,920 --> 00:52:00,040
he refused to have his face filmed,

677
00:52:00,040 --> 00:52:04,520
but allowed a television crew to join
him on a night train across Europe.

678
00:52:07,400 --> 00:52:09,840
Why is it you decided not
to be filmed?

679
00:52:09,840 --> 00:52:13,120
I'd be afraid
of playing a part on the screen.

680
00:52:13,120 --> 00:52:15,600
Playing the part of whom?
I'm not quite sure.

681
00:52:15,600 --> 00:52:18,640
Playing the part of a writer,
part of a Catholic, I don't know.

682
00:52:18,640 --> 00:52:22,320
But I think there would
be a little bit of a part there,

683
00:52:22,320 --> 00:52:26,320
and I would cease to be a writer,
and I would become a comedian.

684
00:52:31,000 --> 00:52:33,840
These Bulgarian
sausages are terrible.

685
00:52:33,840 --> 00:52:35,360
I feel sick.

686
00:52:38,440 --> 00:52:42,440
Boredom has always been
my besetting sickness,

687
00:52:42,440 --> 00:52:45,280
as in kind of a manic depressive.

688
00:52:45,280 --> 00:52:49,840
There's a sense,
in myself that the ice is thin and

689
00:52:49,840 --> 00:52:53,680
I shouldn't stay in one place
too long, or the ice will break.

690
00:53:02,280 --> 00:53:05,800
In 1938,
Greene published Brighton Rock.

691
00:53:05,800 --> 00:53:08,840
The story is an investigation
of good and evil,

692
00:53:08,840 --> 00:53:12,640
through the figure of a
psychotic gangster called Pinkie.

693
00:53:19,160 --> 00:53:23,040
Brighton Rock I really intended,
when I began writing it,

694
00:53:23,040 --> 00:53:24,640
to be a detective story.

695
00:53:24,640 --> 00:53:28,800
Then the character Pinkie took hold,

696
00:53:28,800 --> 00:53:34,080
and I realised that I was not going
to write a detective story at all.

697
00:53:35,600 --> 00:53:40,960
All that remains of a detective
story is the original murder.

698
00:53:40,960 --> 00:53:43,440
Was Pinkie meant to be all bad?

699
00:53:43,440 --> 00:53:48,240
I wanted to make people believe
that he was a sufficiently evil

700
00:53:48,240 --> 00:53:51,760
person, almost to
justify the notion of hell.

701
00:53:53,280 --> 00:53:56,960
I wanted to introduce a
doubt of his future,

702
00:53:56,960 --> 00:54:01,640
a doubt
whether even a man like that

703
00:54:01,640 --> 00:54:05,160
could possibly merit
eternal punishment.

704
00:54:09,960 --> 00:54:11,920
The way that Brighton Rock winds up

705
00:54:11,920 --> 00:54:15,040
and winds up into a chase narrative

706
00:54:15,040 --> 00:54:17,680
and one of those paradoxical,
theological questions,

707
00:54:17,680 --> 00:54:22,000
that Greene liked so much,
it's irresistible, isn't it?

708
00:54:22,000 --> 00:54:24,320
It's got a fairground quality.

709
00:54:24,320 --> 00:54:27,640
It just explains to the
budding novelist,

710
00:54:27,640 --> 00:54:30,200
how to put together a narrative.

711
00:54:33,320 --> 00:54:37,240
Despite refusing to be seen in
vision, Greene himself adapted

712
00:54:37,240 --> 00:54:41,080
scenes from the novel for
the BBC documentary,

713
00:54:41,080 --> 00:54:44,480
with a young James Bolam
playing Pinkie.

714
00:54:44,480 --> 00:54:46,800
I was always against murder,

715
00:54:46,800 --> 00:54:48,840
and I don't care who knows it.

716
00:54:48,840 --> 00:54:52,480
Listen to him,
he's what they call a philosopher.

717
00:54:52,480 --> 00:54:54,040
Well, we ought to lay off.

718
00:54:54,040 --> 00:54:55,880
Sour and milky.

719
00:54:55,880 --> 00:54:59,600
Ah, they won't get us for Hale.
It's over and done with.

720
00:54:59,600 --> 00:55:02,120
You forget that
girl in the tea shop.

721
00:55:02,120 --> 00:55:04,360
Well, if she grassed she
could hang the lot of us.

722
00:55:04,360 --> 00:55:07,000
I'm taking care of the girl.

723
00:55:07,000 --> 00:55:11,000
She won't talk.
You're marrying her, aren't you?

724
00:55:11,000 --> 00:55:13,440
Who told you I was marrying her?

725
00:55:13,440 --> 00:55:15,560
Spicer.

726
00:55:15,560 --> 00:55:17,920
Well, I only said it
would make her safe.

727
00:55:17,920 --> 00:55:20,800
I mean, well a wife can't
give evidence, can she?

728
00:55:20,800 --> 00:55:22,880
That cheap polony.

729
00:55:22,880 --> 00:55:26,200
You don't have to be
so solemn about it.

730
00:55:26,200 --> 00:55:28,800
LAUGHTER

731
00:55:37,240 --> 00:55:40,440
It's almost impossible to think
of Brighton, for me,

732
00:55:40,440 --> 00:55:42,760
without thinking of Greene's novel.

733
00:55:42,760 --> 00:55:49,760
And somehow he zones in on the
peculiar mix of sort of affluence

734
00:55:49,760 --> 00:55:54,720
and tawdriness, of this
English seaside town,

735
00:55:54,720 --> 00:55:59,320
and makes it
the backdrop for a story about,

736
00:55:59,320 --> 00:56:05,680
you know, men's and women's souls
and whether they lose them or not.

737
00:56:05,680 --> 00:56:08,160
I mean it's an extraordinary
kind of thing,

738
00:56:08,160 --> 00:56:12,120
that mixture of the parochial
and the universal that he does.

739
00:56:16,960 --> 00:56:19,440
For all his fascination with
the darker side of life,

740
00:56:19,440 --> 00:56:20,840
Greene remained resolutely

741
00:56:20,840 --> 00:56:24,920
uninterested in what was, by then,
the defining issue of the time.

742
00:56:25,920 --> 00:56:29,360
It's interesting to me that you
haven't written, as far as I know,

743
00:56:29,360 --> 00:56:33,320
at length, anywhere,
about Nazi Germany.

744
00:56:33,720 --> 00:56:38,760
'I kept away. I disliked the thing
too profoundly.

745
00:56:38,760 --> 00:56:41,640
'And we were getting too tired of
Hitler in those years,

746
00:56:41,640 --> 00:56:44,080
'even though one
didn't understand German,

747
00:56:44,080 --> 00:56:47,240
'listening to the sound
of that ranting voice.

748
00:56:47,240 --> 00:56:50,240
'He was a
boring subject to me, Hitler.

749
00:56:50,240 --> 00:56:54,480
'He was a bore who was going to
destroy my world, as it were.'

750
00:56:58,960 --> 00:57:01,440
SIRENS

751
00:57:02,680 --> 00:57:08,640
Greene was right. In September 1939,
Britain declared war on Nazi Germany

752
00:57:08,640 --> 00:57:14,880
and the world he and his generation
had known was soon swept away.

753
00:57:37,880 --> 00:57:40,560
For a free Open University booklet,

754
00:57:40,560 --> 00:57:43,680
featuring some of our best loved
writers,

755
00:57:43,680 --> 00:57:49,320
or to explore the connections between
authors, call...

756
00:57:49,320 --> 00:57:55,880
or go to the website and follow the
links to the Open University.

757
00:58:07,520 --> 00:58:10,320
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758
00:58:10,320 --> 00:58:13,480
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