Proms Plus Literary - Responses to War
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2014
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Booker prize winning novelist Pat Barker, author of the Regeneration Trilogy on the subject of the First World War, and the poet Owen Sheers discuss writers', musicians' and painters' responses to war including the work of Keith Douglas, UA Fanthorpe, David Jones, Alun Lewis and the paintings of CW Nevinson. The reader is Samuel West. This programme was recorded in front of an audience at the Royal College of Music as part of the BBC Proms. To find out further information about the events which are free to attended go to bbc.co.uk/proms
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Hello, the great literary critic Paul Fussell, who fought in World War II, once wrote |
| 0:36.9 | The Real War |
| 0:38.2 | will never get into the books. Can we really describe war in literature or depict it in paintings? |
| 0:45.1 | Well, it's a hard task, but if anyone can do it, then it's certainly my two guests tonight. |
| 0:50.6 | Pat Barker is one of Britain's finest novelists. She won the Booker Prize for the Ghost Road, |
| 0:55.3 | which was the third part of her regeneration trilogy set in World War I. |
| 1:00.1 | And Owen Shears writes about war in prose and in poetry. |
| 1:04.1 | He's the winner of multiple awards, |
| 1:05.7 | and his brilliant long poem, Pink Mist, |
| 1:08.1 | about the Afghanistan War, was dramatized for radio. Tonight, we're going to ask how |
| 1:13.2 | writers and artists respond to war, and our discussion will be illustrated with readings |
| 1:18.7 | performed for us by the actor Samuel West. Now, Pat, that is a provocative quote from Paul Fussell |
| 1:25.2 | there. Would you agree that real war can never get into the books? |
| 1:29.1 | Oh yes, I agree absolutely. One of the things about war, which everybody who's gone through it personally |
| 1:34.5 | remembers very clearly, is that it's 99% boredom and 1% terror. Well, if you write a book, |
| 1:42.3 | which is 99% boredom and 1% terror, you're not going to have |
| 1:45.7 | many readers. And I often feel that the real anti-war book would be one that really captured the |
| 1:53.7 | terrible, bone-acheing boredom of a wet Sunday in barracks. That would put young men off doing it. |
| 2:02.7 | There is, of course, a book famously called All Choirs in the Western Front, but I suppose that's ironic. |
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