In April 1937, the BBC broadcast a radio talk
by one of the leading writers of the 20th century.
This is the only surviving record of the voice of Virginia Woolf.
Words, English words, are full of echoes, memories, associations.
And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing today.
50 years later, another great writer was in the spotlight,
quizzed about his new novel, The Satanic Verses.
What's true about the book is that it does break a number of taboos
which, in my view, are very important to break.
From Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie, this is the story
of the 20th century British novel, as told by the writers themselves.
Why are you appearing in this programme? Poverty.
Many of these recordings have never been heard since.
The Count got off his horse, unfastened his breeches
and thrust his virile member into the dead girl.
I think there's a great deal of ignorant bumptiousness
on the part of scientists these days.
As a novelist, one is just the pupil of the great novelists of the past.
I feared the possibility that the state was all too ready to start
taking over our brains and turning us into good little citizens.
In this programme, we see some of the giants who made their name
in the first half of the 20th century, many filmed for television in later life.
We hear how they captured the spirit of the age, whether confronting war and fascism,
or the frivolity and decadence of disillusioned youth.
28, take two and board.
You think it went all right? I think it went... I think it had some nice things in it.
"Ours is essentially a tragic age", wrote D H Lawrence,
describing the decade after the First World War.
"The cataclysm has happened. We are among the ruins."
The new, terrifying technology of war hadn't just destroyed a whole generation of youth,
but all the values and assumptions behind the British way of life.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Victory of a sort had been won, but the inter-war years would prove an age of doubt.
Doubt about Britain's role in the world, about its moral righteousness,
a doubt that would be most clearly articulated in the novels of the time.
Hello, radio terminal. BBC here.
Are you getting ready for our broadcast?
For the generation of writers who'd made their name before the war, to be a novelist was to be a man -
and yes, generally a man -
of opinion and authority, as comfortable declaiming on world affairs as on literature.
Here are some of the leaders of opinion, who speak to you over the air.
Some people think that the English poor
should be helped further
to colonise the colonies.
Some, of whom I am one,
have even dared to dream that the English might be allowed to colonise England.
In 16 years, Russia has struggled
from medievalism
to an extreme modernism,
has demonstrated the possibility
of an economic life without the wasting disease of profiteering.
The first to address the implications of the new age of doubt
was the gaggle of intellectuals that made up the Bloomsbury Group.
Bloomsbury, in London, is a small district of residential streets surrounding the British Museum.
It was here that the members of the Bloomsbury Group lived or met.
Here, according to one of them, everything was going to be new, everything was going to be different.
Among them were Bertrand Russell, a philosopher of keen anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiment.
John Maynard Keynes, who would become the most influential economist of the century,
and the biographer Lytton Strachey,
devoted to debunking the heroes of the previous age.
They remained, in the minds of those who met them, a formidable bunch.
They had a manner and they had a rather breathless way of talking,
and a very solemn face. That was the thing I noticed.
And that was a little alarming, because when they shook hands with you,
they didn't smile, they just handed the hand.
I did have the impression that they were rather superior people,
but then they were rather superior people,
and I don't mind superior people, I rather like them.
Even if you didn't know who all the Bloomsbury people were,
you could always pick out who was Bloomsbury and who wasn't by the...
As if they were on trial.
They were on trial. And they knew they were on trial.
And jolly soon chucked out if they didn't come up to scratch.
The first novelist associated with Bloomsbury was E M Forster.
He'd written a string of highly successful comic novels
before the Great War. Among them, A Room With A View and Howards End.
But in 1924, he published A Passage To India,
a discreet, but piercing critique of the British empire.
Interviewed in Cambridge decades later,
he talked about the book's intentions.
I am delighted the Passage To India had...had a success and that it was influential,
because I believe the political side of it is the side I wanted to express.
Passage To India tries to do something quite audacious,
which I think a lot of novelists in later years would flinch from doing.
The first chapter which introduces human beings into the novel
starts with three Indian men talking about the English,
and how peculiar they are, and how difficult they are.
And asking each other whether it's even possible to be friends with this strange species of people.
He moves between male and female characters, and the interior lives of male and female characters,
as quickly and fearlessly as he does between the British and the Indians.
And in a way it's simply remarkable that a novel that saw
the British Empire in such a light,
should have been so readily accepted
and should have been so popular.
It seemed a new direction, but Forster never wrote another novel.
I'm quite sure I am not a great novelist,
because I've only got down onto paper really three types of people -
the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.
When you get to the really great people, like Tolstoy, you find they can get hold of all types.
Generally speaking, I haven't written as much as I'd like to. I think that's my one regret.
Somehow I dried up after the Passage. I wanted to write, but didn't want to write novels.
One of the reasons why I stopped writing novels,
is that the social aspect of the world changed so very much.
I'd been accustomed to write about the old, vanished world,
with its homes and its family life and its comparative peace.
All that went.
It was left to another novelist to articulate the Bloomsbury vision,
a woman who would emerge as one of the most recognisable personalities of the time.
In the '20s,
and subsequent '30s,
it was the ambition of every literary young man
to be invited to one of Virginia Woolf's Sunday morning soirees.
These were invariably held...they were invariably held at her home,
No. 52 Tavistock Square, to which I was a frequent visitor,
for I was distantly related to the Woolf family, through some Alsatian cousins.
LAUGHTER
Throughout the 1920s, Virginia Woolf published
a string of groundbreaking works, in which she set out to reinvent the novel to suit this age of doubt.
Her friends and contemporaries believed she achieved this, as they recalled long after her death.
Virginia Woolf was my idea of what one means exactly by a genius.
I've heard somebody else describe her as a before and an after writer.
Life is not the same after as it has been before.
I know she was a genius. She's the only genius,
as far as I know, with perhaps,
with one exception, that I have ever
sat in a room with, been familiar with, stayed in the house with, been for a walk with.
Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, is set over the course of one day in London,
describing the thoughts of two unconnected characters -
a wealthy society hostess and a suicidal war veteran - as they pass through the city.
For Woolf, the novel as a form couldn't save the world, but it might
be able to show the true poetry of the ordinary mind on an ordinary day,
a technique known as stream of consciousness.
She wanted to know about what was happening in one's life
and the most commonplace things seemed to surprise her.
"What, you mean to say you really wear sandshoes
"when you go out for a walk on the downs? Impossible!"
Why did you walk down the street?
Who were you with? What did you see?
Did you see a cat, did you see a dog?
She said to me, "Tell me what happened today?"
And I said, "Well, nothing, I've just come home from school and here I am."
And she said, "No, no, no, no, that's no good, start at the beginning.
"What woke you up?"
And I thought, and I said, "Well, it was the sun coming through the window at school."
And then she leant forward and she said, "What sort of sun?
"Was it a gentle sun or an angry sun?"
I love Mrs Dalloway. It does what it sets out to do fantastically well.
For me it reads like a piece of chamber music.
It's like a string quartet. There's the same themes running through,
and different instruments, different characters, take up these themes at different times.
Her point of view shifts constantly. We're in someone's mind.
We're suddenly outside their mind, looking at them from a great height.
We can see the future, suddenly we can see the past.
Her consciousness in the novel is like this will o' the wisp which can go absolutely anywhere it wants.
When Woolf went to Broadcasting House to speak to the nation,
she chose to touch on a subject close to her heart -
how the English language, after the Great War, could be freed
from the burden of the past, to live again and create new art.
Words, English words, are full of echoes, memories, associations, naturally.
They've been out and about on peoples' lips,
in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.
And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing today.
They're stored with other meanings, with other memories.
Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is.
How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive
and so that they create beauty? So that they tell the truth?
That is the question.
Woolf was a serious voice in what she saw as serious times.
But for many, the roaring '20s would prove a decade of hedonism and decadence,
as people tried to put the troubles of the war behind them.
After all, if the world was doomed, as many said it was, you might as well party through it.
Romantic novelist Barbara Cartland was the society "it" girl of '20s London.
Beautiful, outrageous, defiantly frivolous.
In 1923, she made her authorial debut,
driven by a quest not for literary glory, but for money.
I'd started to write a book. I laughed, cos my mother thought
I ought to get a job, because we had no money after my father had been killed in 1918.
And I didn't want to have a job, because I was dancing all night,
and I certainly didn't want to work from nine to six.
Anyhow, there was no jobs. Mummy's idea was mad,
because there were a million men coming out of the services. There wasn't work for them, let alone me.
And so, I thought I'd write a novel.
In her own way, Cartland would capture the spirit of those post-war years,
recognising the need for escape and pleasure inherent in Britain at the time.
It was a very exciting time, because men were
pouring out of the services. They'd had a terrible time in France.
I never remember anybody describing how awful it was, and they all wanted to get married
and settle down, so every man you met fell in love with you and wanted to propose to you.
It was frightfully exciting. You danced because it was the relief the war was over, it was expression,
like after an earthquake, you know, people make love in the ruins, because it's a sort of relief.
We all danced. We danced and danced. We danced at breakfast, we danced all day.
And it was frightfully exciting for me because of the new world I was exploring, finding out.
Also, she has arthritis, so we send her all the things on arthritis, including the one of how I cured...
Cartland's literary career spanned eight decades.
In all, over 700 romantic novels, dictated to numerous secretaries.
It's clear that there's a virgin in most of your books,
and I would say that your books themselves are rather virginal.
Which leads me to ask you whether sex was talked about in realistic terms,
or not at all, when you were a girl at home?
Oh, no, of course not.
Nobody ever, in the '20s, talked about sex. Anyhow, the word wasn't used.
You'd talk about lovemaking, perhaps.
But even then I didn't know. I was 19 before I knew how people had babies
and I'd had six proposals and got engaged to a very, very dashing young man in the lifeguards.
And you see, you can't explain to people now, cos... Even you're much too young!
If one was a lady, one was treated in an entirely different way. You were treated like Grecian China.
Nobody swore in front of you, nobody told vulgar stories in front of you,
everybody treated you as something rather precious.
And you were looked after and cosseted and wooed, which the wretched girls today don't get.
Girls, wretched or otherwise, are creatures to be feared in the novels of P G Wodehouse.
He had a run of success with stories about a toff called Bertie Wooster,
and his clever butler, Jeeves,
all set in a gloriously carefree world,
where the worst that can happen is an unexpected visit from a relative.
That can't be him, can it, Jeeves?
He would be considerably ahead of his appointed time, were it Sir Humphrey, sir.
Were people are, you know, Jeeves. They leap out of bed at some unearthly hour, like eight or nine,
and then suddenly find I have all that extra time on my hands and nothing to do with it.
Well, if it is him, Jeeves, you'll just have to trot out one of your lies.
Pardon me, sir, I am not in the habit of prevaricating.
Oh, whatever it is you choose to call it when you don't tell the truth.
Wodehouse and his eccentric vision was timeless.
He continued writing the Jeeves and Wooster stories
long after the world they occupied had disappeared.
It's fairly clear that the world of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster really doesn't exist any more.
I'm wondering if it ever did exist?
Oh, I think unquestionably in...round about... before the First World War.
I think those characters that I write about
are more or less true to life at that time.
Say up to 1914, I think.
Certainly I, as a young man, I used to know them by the score.
But of course, now I imagine they are all,
more or less... I always look upon myself as writing historical novels these days.
One of the things that
critics from time to time note in your books is an absence of sex, as one generally understands the term.
Well, I don't... I know, it's perfectly true.
Of course, when I started writing, sex was absolutely taboo. You couldn't even hint at it.
But I suppose one got set in one's ways.
But the only thing is that I don't think sex would fit in with my stuff. My stuff's too light and...
Too serious a subject? Yes, I think sex wouldn't... wouldn't work in somehow.
Jeeves. Sir?
That stuff of yours that pulls you round from unconsciousness to a vivid awareness of life. Yes, sir?
Do you have another recipe which reverses the process?
I'm afraid not, sir.
The writing on any given page, the dialogue is wonderfully, carefully written,
I think, and even the large passages of Bertie Wooster narration
are incredibly rich, linguistically.
It's a very difficult trick to pull off, this absolute fool,
who's discourse is studded with bits of half-remembered Latin
and lots and lots of Shakespeare and always slightly garbled, cliches and idioms slightly muddled up.
I mean, it's incredibly rich, I think, textually.
And so the appearance of ease is just an appearance.
All your books are distinguished by an enormous complexity of plot.
How do you start about them?
Oh, that's just a matter of patience. I just sit down,
I put down note after note, about 400 pages of them,
practically all of them utterly valueless.
And then eventually one scene would click onto another scene.
A little bit like the new crossword puzzle, you know? You get the clue down
and then you have to get the one across, and unless the two fit in, you can't get any further.
You don't believe in letting your characters take charge?
Oh, heavens no, I'd say not.
I hear some authors say they can do it. I don't see how they do it.
I have to know exactly where I'm going before I start a novel. I have the complete scenario written out.
Did you ever have any ambition to become a serious writer?
No, oddly enough I never have. I don't believe I could become one if I tried.
But I certainly never felt the inclination to become one at all.
Never written a serious story in my life, I don't think.
Wodehouse continued writing the Jeeves novels right through to his death at the age of 93.
His comic vision was essentially nostalgic,
but at the end of the 1920s, one of his keenest disciples would
use that anarchical spirit in a critique of the age.
Evelyn Waugh, a young Oxford graduate, was one of the bright young things of the '20s.
But in a string of satirical novels published from 1928 onwards,
he parodied the privileged circles he moved in and mocked Britain's most sacred institutions.
In this home movie from the time, Evelyn Waugh, on the left, and friends, engage in horseplay.
In a scenario not out of keeping with his written work, Waugh plays
a homosexual Oxford don, making advances on the Prince of Wales.
Five seconds, stand by two, superimpose, mix through, cue on two.
In later life, Waugh was disdainful of television, but eventually agreed
to appear on Face To Face, a landmark series, in which
public figures were interviewed with rapid fire aggression, by legendary broadcaster John Freeman.
But in Waugh, Freeman would meet his match.
Are you very sensitive to the criticisms of others, unkind reviews of your books?
I don't think so.
I've often wondered, for instance, at the time in the middle of the '30s
when you were assailed by, well by Rose Macaulay and one or two others,
for being a fascist, because you reported the Abyssinian War from the Italian side.
Did that upset you, or prey on your mind at all?
I wasn't even aware she assailed me.
He was very difficult, he was very uptight, I think he disliked me,
and whether he did or not, he was extremely nervous.
I remember
greeting him before, when I met him before the interview, and I said,
"Good evening, Mr Waugh",
or words to that effect, and he replied,
"The name, sir, is Waugh, not Waff."
And since I had addressed him as Mr Waugh to begin with, this was clearly
a rehearsed...antagonistic attitude.
Have you ever brooded on what appears to you to be unjust or adverse criticism?
No. I'm afraid if someone praises me, I think, "What an arse",
and if they abuse me, I think, "What an arse."
And if they say nothing about you at all and take no notice of you?
That's the best I can hope for.
You like that when it happens to you? Yes.
Why are you appearing in this programme? Poverty.
We've both been hired to talk in this deliriously happy way.
Em, looking at yourself, because I'm sure you are
a self critical person, what do you feel is your worst fault?
Irritability.
Are you a snob at all?
I don't think.
Em, irritability with your family, with strangers?
Absolutely everything.
Considering his extreme irritability, it's surprising Waugh agreed to do one more television interview.
Hold it, everybody in the studio, will you?
Change coming up in the six o'clock.
I'm led to believe that when, I think it's about 1964, Evelyn Waugh,
who was then in his early sixties, was enticed onto Monitor,
the BBC arts programme,
and he insisted that he be interviewed by a pretty girl.
"I must have a pretty girl." So they got Elizabeth Jane Howard to interview him.
And he was quite, ah, you know, he was quite polite, and she asked some very good questions.
It's a very good interview. But I gather, between the takes, Waugh was tapping off his cigar,
saying, "When is Miss Howard going to take her clothes off?"
When you were a young writer, were writers trying to shock...
In the ensuing interview, Waugh reflected on his early years in the '20s,
lambasting the innovative style of writers like Virginia Woolf.
The matter shocked you awfully whatever you read.
When I began writing, it was a great period of shock.
But there was a much more sinister influence, which was to try and reduce prose style to gibberish.
In my youth, there was a tremendous blind alley
a whole lot of good writers went down,
which they tried to give what they called, em, stream of consciousness,
in which they gave what everyone was thinking and feeling, apart from what they were saying or doing.
But when it came to prose, the English common man knows what prose is.
He talks it all the time himself, and he wasn't going to be taken in.
And there were a lot of Americans, headed by one called Gertrude Stein, who wrote absolute gibberish.
Then they hired a poor dotty Irishman called James Joyce.
I say you've never heard about him, but he was thought to be a great influence in my youth. Was he? Yes?
And he wrote absolute rot, you know.
He began writing quite well and you could see him going mad sentence by sentence.
If you read Ulysses, it's perfectly sane for a little bit and then it goes madder and madder,
but that was before the Americans hired him.
And then they hired him to write Finnegan's Wake, which is gibberish.
The literary world of the inter-war years was still predominantly a boy's world.
But following in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, a new generation
of women writers had been quick to emerge.
Theirs was a style focused less on plot than on the inner lives and feelings of their characters.
Female novelists begin testing, in a new way,
the possibility of creating a kind of female fictional voice.
So perhaps, ironically, this is a period in which,
whilst fiction is at its most experimental, it's also kind of divided,
more than it has been in the past, by the gender of the novelist concerned.
The Irish born Elizabeth Bowen came to London to mix with the Bloomsbury Group.
She went on to publish a string of electrifying novels, in which she
reveals the ongoing emotional drama behind the apparent mundanity of everyday life.
Well, we'd better take the train, hadn't we?
We can give the buns to some child.
And where shall we find some child?
Oh, on the way home.
You'll take the train when we go?
Bowen's masterpiece, The Death Of The Heart, tells of a 16-year-old orphan girl,
bitterly learning the cruel realities of life.
My favourite scene in Death Of The Heart, you know,
one's own heart dies a little, you know, when she notices,
the heroine notices, the young girl,
that the person she loves is holding the hand of the other girl in the cinema.
It's a very simple scene, in a way, but that betrayal
is just so intense that you can't believe that it's happening, you're completely with her.
And she's looking at this hand and she can't understand why it's in the hand of her boyfriend.
And that's just wonderful.
In later life, Bowen was interviewed about The Death Of The Heart, by V S Naipaul.
The Death Of The Heart is perhaps the best known of Elizabeth Bowen's novels,
but Miss Bowen refers to it specifically as a pre-war novel.
And I would like to ask her what a pre-war novel is.
A novel, I think, which reflects the time in which it was written,
and in this case, the pre-war time, with its high tension,
its increasing anxieties and this great stress against...
great stress on individual existence. People were so conscious of themselves, and of each other
and of their personal relationships,
because they thought that everything of that time might soon end.
Do you think that there's any more room for experimentation in the novel?
Well, I think every novelist experiments all the time.
I can't believe that anyone has ever written the same book, or the same kind of a book over again.
And the fascination of the novel, to me, is that it is a perpetual experiment which moves forward.
She refused to be fully happy until you and I had met again.
And since we have met and she has seen
that God knows how that I love you,
her love of me has become
a love of her own pain.
Her mother watches her watching,
and misses nothing. I cannot live with them both.
We'll just need to live with it somewhere else. I will not live with a woman who lives with her own pain.
Now how would you set about finding your character?
Because I think of characters, I think of the situation first so often.
Some incidents are extreme ones, somebody throwing someone else over a cliff.
And I think, "Who is the person who went over the cliff, and why was the other one angry?"
And you think you'll bring the characters in, however, because you think, "Who are the kind of people
to whom this incident, or action, or catastrophe would be most likely to happen, and why did it happen?"
And the character shapes itself around? And the character shapes itself around.
In a male-dominated world, it was easy for women writers to be overlooked.
Take Jean Rhys.
After a childhood in British Dominica, she published a string of brilliant novels,
capturing the lonely demimonde life of a colonial exile in London.
She had such an effect on me when I first read Voyage In The Dark, and it just touched such a chord in me.
I felt as if...
I understood everything about this character,
and that it was a wonderful way to tell a story,
right from the inside of someone, rather than what's physically happening to them.
The story that she tells is all driven by Anna's...
the sort of essence of Anna's character.
But Rhys was underappreciated at the time.
She disappeared from public view for many years, before returning
with her triumphant swan song, the Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966.
While many had thought her dead, she'd been living all along in a small bungalow in Devon.
Captured on camera in a brief interview shortly before her death,
she questioned whether novelists can ever be truly happy.
Has writing always been partly getting things off your mind?
Yes, very much so.
When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all,
and when I was happy, I had no wish to write.
I've never written about being happy, never,
I didn't want to. Besides, I don't think you can describe being happy.
So what do you settle for if you can't describe being happy?
Well, I suppose I've never had a long period of being happy.
Do you think anybody has?
But then, altogether, I think...
well, I think if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.
If I had my life all over again and could choose.
The Great Depression of the early '30s sent Britain's economy spiralling into decline.
Unemployment soared, and the plight of the nation's poor became more apparent than ever.
Every walk of life was affected, and even those unused to worrying about money struggled to get by.
For the poet Robert Graves, the solution was to write a bestseller, and he did so in I, Claudius.
Oh, come on, tell the queen of heaven what her lord and master wants.
This sensational account of intrigue and decadence in imperial Rome
still had the power to shock when adapted by the BBC over 40 years later.
I, Claudius is the work Graves is best remembered for.
But he never made any bones about his literary motivation.
I wrote I, Claudius because I'd been let down on a land deal
and I had to find £4,000,
and I'd mortgaged my house.
And, ah, I'd made a note some, a couple of years before,
that there was something very wrong with the Claudius story and that the
historians weren't telling the truth
and, that it might be a good thing to write if I ever needed the money.
And I did need the money, so I wrote it and I made £8,000 in six months,
and that saved my house.
The noble, Gaius Caligula, to see the emperor.
What do you want, can't you see that I'm busy?
Graves used the smokescreen of history to pack in a degree of
sex most novelists couldn't get away with, and the public loved it.
Took me a year to find it.
When I heard about I said, "That is for my great uncle Tiberius."
Happy anniversary.
Oh, that's nothing,
wait till you see the others.
It cost quite a lot.
Robert Graves was something of an unconventional libertine himself,
never shying away from the taboo topics of the time.
I knew you'd like it.
In fact, I'd like to borrow it myself sometime,
I mean when you're not using it.
In an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge,
Graves talked candidly about his sexual explorations at school.
Do you think the fact that you went through a homosexual phase
at Charterhouse influenced you much?
It wasn't a homosexual phase, it was no more than...
Listen, you've got to distinguish between homosexuality
of one sort, and homosexuality in which the boy is playing the woman.
Robert, I quite understand that distinction.
The only thing I wonder is whether, not having been to a school of that
kind myself, whether the fact that you go through this phase,
I mean looking back on it, whether
you think the influence of it is bad, or good, or large, or small?
Oh, everything is interesting, isn't it, so to speak?
Yes. It, em...
I mean you don't look back on it as something that was
blighting or anything like that?
No, no, I'm not a faggot myself.
No, I know you're not. Thank you.
I give you a full credit for that.
He's pulled the sword out of the stone.
Now we have a worthy king to rule over Britain. Hurrah!
After I, Claudius, historical fiction was all the rage.
One school teacher was inspired by his experiences in the classroom,
to write a radical reinterpretation of the legend of King Arthur.
TH White's The Sword In The Stone, which deals with the education of
the young Arthur, would prove a runaway success.
It was a winning formula, that appealed to children
as well as adults.
I'll try and see if it's a trick.
Well, I think children are about ten times more intelligent
than grown ups. They're more alive, they're more perceptive, they're
doing more, they're more vigorous and more vivid,
and more able to distinguish between right and wrong.
And if I am childish, I am very glad I am.
White capitalised on his triumph with not one, but three sequels.
Not only did he never have to teach again, but the BBC tracked him down
leading a life of luxury on the Channel Islands.
Do you like making money? Do you enjoy it? Is it important to you?
No, not a bit. Ah, no.
Do you make a lot of money?
No. Ah, I make a great deal, and then hand it all over
to the Farewell State.
Ah, but even if I was a millionaire, I should go on living as I do.
You are you. You live very sumptuously, though.
I do not,
I do my own cooking and everything.
You've got a whacking big swimming pool, and a temple to Hadrian.
The swimming pool is to swim in, and the
temple to Hadrian is because I think Hadrian was a very fine fellow.
But it is not in order to be rich and have one, it's because
I can just afford to do it, by scraping up what little is left
to me by you people in the smoke.
For those novelists who couldn't find a way to support their writing at
home, one extreme solution was simply to emigrate.
The British economy might be weak,
but the pound still went a long way abroad.
My name is Christopher Isherwood. I'm a writer.
I live in Santa Monica, California,
but 40 years ago, I used to live in Berlin.
At the beginning of the 1930s,
Berlin was the most exciting city in the world.
It was leading innovation in art and architecture, and Weimer Germany's
embattled economy meant an Englishman could live cheaply and well.
But for Isherwood, it was the decadence and
sexual licentiousness of Berlin's nightlife that proved most alluring.
In his books Mr Norris Changes Trains, and Goodbye To Berlin,
he brought his experiences vividly alive.
Ah, there was of course my dear old landlady
who always called me "Herr Issyvoo".
I appeared as a character in the book, under my own name.
And, there was a working class family that I lived with
for a while, in the Berlin slums,
and there was a very wealthy Jewish family,
who owned a department store.
And then there was, um, a girl, whom I called Sally Bowles.
Sally Bowles, a British nightclub singer, would be immortalised
by Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, a musical based on Isherwood's works.
"As she dialled the number, I noticed that her fingernails
"were painted emerald green, a colour unfortunately chosen,
"for it called attention to her hands, which were much stained
"by cigarette smoking, and as dirty as a little girl's."
Now I don't remember that Sally actually had dirty hands.
They were stained certainly by cigarette smoking,
like everybody's are.
But you see already one comes away, one starts to work on
certain details and exaggerate them.
"Her face was long and thin, powdered dead white,
"and she had very large, brown eyes,
"which should have been darker, to match her hair and the pencil
"she used for her eyebrows."
I suppose that's, roughly speaking, true.
The style seems quite understated and low key.
It's not really heavily worked up.
I mean it couldn't be further removed from
Joyce's Ulysses, let's say.
But then you'll get this incredibly sharp
observation, or this kind of phrase.
You know, he's talking very fondly about how glamorous
Sally Bowles is, and this one day he says she looks really awful.
"Her eyes looked like they'd been boiled."
And it seems that that is just so devastating, much more devastating
that some kind of moral judgement would be.
CHANTING
Along with the nightclubs and decadent parties, Isherwood's stories
witness the ever growing grasp on the city by Hitler's Nazi thugs.
But Isherwood avoids moralising. He describes himself as a mere
camera, reporting, but not passing judgement on all he sees.
The Christopher Isherwood, the "Herr Issyvoo" in the book, is just an
observer, a kind of scanning device, who's there among the characters.
And, now I'm writing it, trying to write exactly what I
saw and why I went, and what I wanted out of the whole thing.
If I'd insisted on that, the Berlin stories would have
been much less entertaining,
because I wouldn't have been describing all these people,
which is what the Berlin stories are about. They're not about me.
CHANTING
In January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor,
unleashing a wave of widespread brutality and Jewish persecution.
Isherwood left Berlin for good, under no doubt about Germany's fate
and the implications for the rest of Europe.
The rise of fascism intensified the feeling of doom
prevalent in 30s Britain.
But for some, it was our ever growing dependency on technology
that was most to be feared.
The key question was whether human liberty and individuality
would be able to survive the merciless march of science.
Aldous Huxley had enjoyed some success in the 1920s,
with satirical novels in a style not dissimilar to Evelyn Waugh.
But in 1932 he published Brave New World,
a dystopian vision of a Britain where pharmaceutical drugs
and a social ranking system modelled on the factory production line
are used to control human behaviour.
Over the years, many aspects of Brave New World seemed to come true,
and Huxley assumed the role of prophet for the modern age.
Well, this, em, Brave New World,
I suppose you can describe as a picture of society in which
the urge to order was carried to extreme limits.
I mean, here an attempt was made to iron out human differences, to
create a kind of standardised human product, by means of manipulation of
the mind, by pharmacological and psychological methods,
which I think are perfectly feasible.
I think we can, if we want to,
create this kind of uniform making society.
In Brave New World everything is happy,
but so much that we might value as human has to be expelled,
in order to create happiness.
Freedom, literature,
all forms, all forms of unhappiness,
discontent, anything uncomfortable.
So we become, as human beings, in the pursuit of happiness,
something much less than human.
Now I think when the technological and applied scientific
means are developed, they just tend to be used.
I mean hence
this sense which many people have, this sense that
man is being subjected to his own inventions, that he is now
the victim of his own technology,
and the victim of his own applied science,
instead of being in control of it.
How could he be in control of it? Well, I think this is perhaps one
of the major problems of our time, and we have to start thinking about
this problem very seriously,
and seeing how we can re-establish control over our own invention.
Huxley's work would, in its turn, inform another great dystopian novel,
one adapted by the BBC shortly after publication.
'This, in 1984, is London, chief city of Airstrip One,
'a province of the state of Oceania.'
Throughout the 1930s, George Orwell published
books highlighting the inequality at the heart of modern Britain.
Down And Out In Paris And London,
and The Road To Wigan Pier, revealed the extremity of the
rich/poor divide, and the plight of the nation's underprivileged.
But it was only in the novel 1984, published at the end of his life,
that he allowed his fears full reign.
'You might say there are two possible dystopias in literature.
'There's Brave New World, which is a kind of false utopia.
'And then of course there's 1984 by George Orwell,'
where, you know, the future is is a boot in a human face, forever,
which is another dystopia we recognise,
where human beings are dragooned into the assertion of
their happiness in a world which is actually brutalised
and bereft, not just of spiritual consolation,
but actually of any of the good things in life.
'The thought police are joining you.'
1984 has the virtue of intense readability and it's actually
very sort of muscularly written,
and does have prescience.
It gives a description of something that wasn't quite clear at the time,
which was really the Russian tyranny, the Soviet tyranny,
and indeed, you know, accurate and tremendously realistic.
For a time, Orwell worked at the BBC,
and he based certain details of 1984 on his experiences there,
including the dreaded Room 101,
where it is said he had to attend bureaucratic meetings.
Hang me, shoot me, no, not, not Room 101!
Room 101.
If we don't get anything at all from them...
Morning, Bob. Morning, Jeff. Hello, Margaret. Hello.
Despite Orwell spending over two years broadcasting to the world,
the BBC did not preserve a single second of his voice.
Big Brother would be proud.
By the end of the 1930s,
the mood was right for the emergence of a new literary genre,
one rooted in paranoia and pessimism, in betrayal and despair.
A world of night-time border crossings and hidden identities,
a world that became known simply as Greeneland.
Graham Greene was the son of a headmaster in Hertfordshire,
a fairly humdrum background.
But in the string of thrillers he published in the 30s,
he evolved the unique literary style that made him famous.
It was in keeping with his fiction
that when the BBC made a documentary about Greene,
he refused to have his face filmed,
but allowed a television crew to join him on a night train across Europe.
Why is it you decided not to be filmed?
I'd be afraid of playing a part on the screen.
Playing the part of whom? I'm not quite sure.
Playing the part of a writer, part of a Catholic, I don't know.
But I think there would be a little bit of a part there,
and I would cease to be a writer, and I would become a comedian.
These Bulgarian sausages are terrible.
I feel sick.
Boredom has always been my besetting sickness,
as in kind of a manic depressive.
There's a sense, in myself that the ice is thin and
I shouldn't stay in one place too long, or the ice will break.
In 1938, Greene published Brighton Rock.
The story is an investigation of good and evil,
through the figure of a psychotic gangster called Pinkie.
Brighton Rock I really intended, when I began writing it,
to be a detective story.
Then the character Pinkie took hold,
and I realised that I was not going to write a detective story at all.
All that remains of a detective story is the original murder.
Was Pinkie meant to be all bad?
I wanted to make people believe that he was a sufficiently evil
person, almost to justify the notion of hell.
I wanted to introduce a doubt of his future,
a doubt whether even a man like that
could possibly merit eternal punishment.
The way that Brighton Rock winds up
and winds up into a chase narrative
and one of those paradoxical, theological questions,
that Greene liked so much, it's irresistible, isn't it?
It's got a fairground quality.
It just explains to the budding novelist,
how to put together a narrative.
Despite refusing to be seen in vision, Greene himself adapted
scenes from the novel for the BBC documentary,
with a young James Bolam playing Pinkie.
I was always against murder,
and I don't care who knows it.
Listen to him, he's what they call a philosopher.
Well, we ought to lay off.
Sour and milky.
Ah, they won't get us for Hale. It's over and done with.
You forget that girl in the tea shop.
Well, if she grassed she could hang the lot of us.
I'm taking care of the girl.
She won't talk. You're marrying her, aren't you?
Who told you I was marrying her?
Spicer.
Well, I only said it would make her safe.
I mean, well a wife can't give evidence, can she?
That cheap polony.
You don't have to be so solemn about it.
LAUGHTER
It's almost impossible to think of Brighton, for me,
without thinking of Greene's novel.
And somehow he zones in on the peculiar mix of sort of affluence
and tawdriness, of this English seaside town,
and makes it the backdrop for a story about,
you know, men's and women's souls and whether they lose them or not.
I mean it's an extraordinary kind of thing,
that mixture of the parochial and the universal that he does.
For all his fascination with the darker side of life,
Greene remained resolutely
uninterested in what was, by then, the defining issue of the time.
It's interesting to me that you haven't written, as far as I know,
at length, anywhere, about Nazi Germany.
'I kept away. I disliked the thing too profoundly.
'And we were getting too tired of Hitler in those years,
'even though one didn't understand German,
'listening to the sound of that ranting voice.
'He was a boring subject to me, Hitler.
'He was a bore who was going to destroy my world, as it were.'
SIRENS
Greene was right. In September 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany
and the world he and his generation had known was soon swept away.
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