William Boyd, writer

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:46My castaway this week is the writer William Boyd. He's the award-winning author of 18 novels, five short story collections and numerous screenplays, which have made him one of Britain's most successful writers. He's made the genre of whole-life novels pretty much his own, writing four of these cradle-to-grave narratives, including Any Human Heart, which became a BAFTA-winning television series. Perhaps he was always destined to become a writer. Growing up in the 1960s, between the family home in West Africa, where his father worked as a doctor, and his Scottish boarding school, he developed what he's called the curious eye of the permanent visitor.

1:23His critically acclaimed breakthrough, A Good Man in Africa, drew on the world of his childhood, in Ghana and Nigeria. His books combine broad historical sweeps with the intricacies of everyday life and interrogate what he calls the vast indifference of the universe. The role of luck, good and bad, also intrigues him, particularly how his characters deal with the folks in the road that go on to determine their destiny. He says, We are all walking on thin ice. It can crack at any time. I think if you do realise that, you go through life with a totally different point of view. It can be empowering.

1:58You have to relish the present. Do things now. William Boyd, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. Very happy to be here. So, William, you have been described as hard to classify as a writer because you have written so many different types of novels, a wide range of styles. How do you describe yourself, when people ask? Well, I call myself a serious comic novelist. I do see the world through a comic lens. It can be a dark lens, darkly comic, or it can be absurdly comic. I don't see life as a tragedy. I see it as absurd, something to laugh at. And you often spend years researching before you actually put pen to paper.

2:38And then when you do that, you write your first draft in longhand. What kind of resources do you turn to when you're first thinking about a new novel? Well, I get the idea and then I start researching it. and usually that involves buying Matt's books, much to my wife's irritation, because we have a serious book storage problem. Yes, I mean, all sorts of things are helpful. I wrote this novel, a whole life novel called Sweet Caress, which is a story of a woman's life, in fact, from the point of view of a woman photographer through the 1920s into the 1970s. And a friend of mine was standing at a bus stop in Southwark and he noticed a scrap of paper on the ground.

3:18He picked it up. It was a photograph of a young woman in the 1920s wearing a bathing suit and standing in a pond somewhere. And he sent it to me because he knew I was collecting anonymous photographs. And I used that as a frontispiece of sweet caress. And I said, this random woman who was found near a bus stop is my character. So each book that you write generates what sounds like a mini library of its own, as you mentioned, much to your wife's displeasure. So tell me how extensive is this? how many have you got and how many does each book create? Well, I think I must have about 10 ,000 books in our house and some of them are in boxes because the books I buy for the individual novels in a way cease to be interesting once a novel is written.

4:05But you can't just chuck books on a skip, you know. You have to look after them and cherish them. But I'm not going to read the history of Turnpike Roads in north of England in the 19th century again. but it was very useful at the time to cherry pick a few facts out of. You begin your novels with the ending in mind. Why do you write like that? I think the reason is simply fear of writer's block in a way or else fear of abandoning a novel. A lot of writers start novels and they're not going well and they just stop them and put them in a drawer and wait to see if they can kickstart them again but I've never abandoned a novel because of this method I have And then I can write with confidence, not particularly quickly, but I know where I'm going and I have no excuse not to write, more importantly.

4:52If I'm in the middle of chapter 11 and not feeling great that day, I've got no excuse. I have to buckle down and keep going. It's a doggy business. You need a lot of stamina to write. You can see the last page on the horizon. You've got to get yourself there. Yeah, and sometimes I actually write the last paragraph before I start on page one because I know exactly the kind of tone I want to hit at the end, the right kind of catharsis I want the reader to experience. So let's get started. Your first choice, what's it going to be? It's by Stephen Sondheim, and this is from Sunday in the Park with George, which is an extraordinary piece of work, unique in musical theatre, I think.

5:29A Sura painting coming to life in front of your eyes. and this is a song called Sunday and it's one of these songs that I think almost makes you not cry but brings tears to your eye. There's something about the sequence of notes that has that effect. Towards the verticals of trees forever

6:03A dream of life and past of the bright

6:15Sunday from Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, performed by Mandy Patinkin and the original Broadway cast. William Boyd, you were born in 1952 in Ghana, West Africa, which back then was a British colony known as the Gold Coast. Your father, Sandy, was a doctor who specialised in tropical medicine and he worked at one of the country's universities in Accra, the capital. He was Scottish from Fife, as was your mother, Evelyn. How did they find life as expats? It was a rather idyllic life, to be honest, because you had a big house. You had lots of servants, of course, in those days.

6:52You had a cook, gardener. And the great thing about British colonies in West Africa is they were totally integrated. There was absolutely no racial tension at all. We lived in a rather nice house on the edge of what's called Orchard Bush, which is sort of savannah. And I just wandered around and played games. I had friends and get on my bike and go cycling off somewhere. No mobile phones. And my mother would say, make sure you're home by one, darling, you know. And then as I got older and as we moved from Ghana to Nigeria and I became a teenager, I could walk through the center of Ibadan, a huge city in western Nigeria.

7:31at midnight. Can you imagine how exotic that was? They get the odd shout at me, you know, white boy or something like that, but completely unafraid and everybody really friendly. In fact, when I look back on it now, I realise how extraordinary that experience was. And tell me a little bit more about your dad. Were the two of you close? Yes, we were close. He died very young. He died when he was 58. And I had been away at boarding school for at least 10 years before he died. And so we didn't see that much of each other, but we got on very well. But he was a classic East Coast Scot in a way. And he always encouraged me to don't get married until you're 30, always get a proper job, a decent pension, always save one sixth of your income, advice I completely ignored.

8:20But my great regret is that He never saw my success as a writer because he was highly dubious that I would ever make it in such a ridiculous profession. But I would love to have proved him wrong, but it wasn't to be. As you mentioned, William, you moved from Ghana to Ibadan in Nigeria, where your father worked at a much bigger university and your mother became a French teacher there. Tell me about her. What was she like? Well, she lived to a ripe old age, my mum. She died at the age of 92. And she was a devoted mother and devoted wife. But because she was working in the university and me and my sisters, as it were, left home, she thought, what am I going to do?

9:03and so she did a degree in French and English and then she ended up as a teacher of French in Nigerian schools which she found incredibly satisfying. But when my father died and we left Nigeria, she went to teach in a school in Switzerland which was like a whole different chapter of her life and she sort of changed. She seems like one of your characters. She became more sophisticated and European But then in Switzerland, you have to retire at 62 if you're a woman. So she came back to Scotland. And then started another chapter. Exactly. She became sort of extramural student at St. Andrews University, going to courses and writing essays.

9:45So she wrote? She wrote novels, which I've read, which are incredibly sentimental and with absolute 100 % guaranteed happy endings. So there's no sort of irony or darkness in her work, but they never got published. But maybe I get my artistic side from her because she grew up in a very interesting family. Her father was the editor of the Scottish Sunday Express and two of her sisters became artists and my cousins are artists and architects. So on the Smith side is where you find the art. on the Boyd side, they're all serious professional Scots, you know, with proper jobs, with a good pension. It's time for disc number two, William.

10:33What have you chosen? It's Femi Kuti, who I think is a wonderful artist, but I saw his dad play Fela Kuti. He came up to Abaddon to do a concert. This must have been the very late 60s, early 70s. And Fela Kuti came to town, but he was four hours late for his concert and there was a riot was about to break out and then he came on stage with this enormous band that he had and he said I'm going to play till dawn relax so it was one of the great concerts of my life and it's interesting to see how the torch has been passed on to his son Femi the title is sorry sorry and it's actually goes on to say sorry for Nigeria sorry for Africa That's the plaint, if you like, of the songs he's singing, but it's got such fantastic rhythm and energies to it that you kind of forget in a way that he's making a political point.

11:56Sorry, sorry, Femi Kuti. William Boyd, you spent the school holidays with your family in Scotland. How did you juggle your two lives? In later life, you've talked about being deracinated, uprooted. Did you consider Ghana your home? obviously it wasn't my country and we were strangers if you like visitors to it so I wasn't at home there but I knew how Ghana worked I knew how these African cities worked much better than I knew how Edinburgh worked or how Aberdeen worked so I always felt more at home in Africa than I did in the UK and I remember once I must have come back on leave before the school holidays ended and I walked past a school in St Andrews full of kids my age who were playing in the playground and of course they couldn't understand what I was doing not at school so I got shouts and yells and I felt alien funnily enough because I was still living on my kind of African time and African persona and I suddenly felt strange and a bit unwelcome actually and then maybe because you've always felt you're on the outside looking in, maybe that's a good position for a novelist to adopt, you know.

13:11So I think it may have helped me scrutinise the world in a slightly different way as well. And what about your parents? Did they find it difficult fitting into Scotland in the way they once had? Yes, I remember once I was out in Edinburgh with my father. In Africa, he was a very significant figure and revered by his patients. And I remember him buying a newspaper and fumbling with his change because he wasn't familiar with British coinage. And I suddenly saw him as a kind of ordinary man instead of this godlike figure who's curing people in Africa. The family moved to Nigeria from Ghana in 1964.

13:48But of course, in 1967, the Nigerian Civil War, the Biafran War began. At what point did you realise what was happening? I think I realised it was going on when our next door neighbours dug a slit trench at the bottom of their garden, because there was a Fear that the tiny little Biafran Air Force, which only consisted of three light planes, was going to bomb Nigerian federal cities didn't happen, in fact. But you couldn't escape the war. So I would get on a bus in Ibadan and there'd be 20 soldiers there with Kalashnikovs and FN rifles. And one great event which really did shape and change my thinking was I was learning to drive.

14:29And we used to drive on deserted roads at the edge of the campus with my father teaching me. And we were driving home and he took a shortcut. And we passed a roadblock, a very flimsy roadblock. And my father spotted it screeched to a halt. But out of the bushes came six or seven drunk soldiers with their AK-47s shouting and screaming at us because they thought we were trying to avoid the roadblock. They ordered us out of the car, guns pointing at us. And that moment I thought this could all go horribly wrong because they were out of control. There was no officer. We were alone on a road in the bush.

15:05My father, to his great credit, said, call that a roadblock, you useless bunch of soldiers. And he upbraided them and they started to laugh and the whole thing was diffused. But I've never forgotten that moment of knife edge, uh-oh, this could all end very, very badly. It's affected my work and it's affected the way I look at conflict and the way I understand wars. Because even though I was never in any great danger, I did live in a country that was tearing itself apart in a civil war. And saw and had friends in the Biafran army and heard their stories. And I realized that real war is nothing like the movies.

15:47And I actually wrote a novel a few years later when I was at university, which was called Against the Day, which was a very experimental war novel, which was trying to somehow transmute my experiences in Nigeria into a work of fiction. Never got published, quite rightly, but I did pillage it for another novel I wrote about a war in Africa called An Ice Cream War, my second novel. but it's the First World War in Africa. But everything that's crazy and surreal and out of control in my novel came from my thinking and my experiences in Nigeria at the end of the 60s. So it was a life-changing moment or an art-changing moment for me.

16:30And Africa continued to inspire your work. I'm thinking of your first published novel, A Good Man in Africa. Yes, I'd written two short stories featuring this rather overweight, drunken English diplomat in a country that resembles Nigeria, which I called Kinjanja. And by then I had published quite a few short stories in magazines. I had them broadcast on the BBC and I sent the collection off to Hamish Hamilton publishers. And two of the stories featured this drunken diplomat called Morgan Leafy. And I said, as a PS, by the way, I've written a novel about this man. Had you? I hadn't, no. I was lying.

17:11And my eventual editor wrote back saying, well, we'd rather publish the novel before we publish the short stories. It was a great day for me, but I told this white lie. And so I told another white lie saying the manuscript's in an appalling state. I need to retype it. And I wrote A Good Man in Africa in a kind of white heat of dynamism in about six or seven weeks. Thank you, Morgan Leafy. William, it's time to go to the music. Your third choice. What are we going to hear next and why are you taking it along to the island? A Way Down the River, sung by Alison Krauss. This is a song that sort of represents the Scottish side of my life experiences, even though it's sung by a bluegrass singer from America.

17:53But it's a song that's based on a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. and it has a kind of folky Scottish feel to it. Baby, dry your eyes

18:11There's no need to cry

18:18Cos I'll see you again It might be a while before you understand I'm just away Alison Krauss, A Way Down the River William Boyd, you were nine, I think, when your parents sent you to boarding school in Scotland. Looking back, how do you think that shaped you? It's funny, I think in a good way it made me very independent and I think it makes you very self-reliant. but there's no doubt that growing up in a society that only has one sex it can turn sour and there were examples of what I would call fascism pure and simple in in the house I was in we were terrorized but as you got older by older boys you know they'd steal your stuff they'd break up your desk they'd bully you so when your house master went back to his flat it became Lord of the Flies in a way, you know, and so you had to struggle to survive.

19:24But if you were a strapping lad and good at games, you had a better chance than our weaker brethren. And where did you fit? I was good at games, thank goodness. You took your A-levels and after that in 1970, you had started thinking about becoming an artist. So how did your parents react to that idea? You described their kind of different temperaments. Yes, well, I said to my father, I'm thinking I'd quite like to go to art school, you know, explosion, dream on. There was no way he was going to let me do that. And I'm slightly ashamed to say I didn't rebel. I just switched from fine art to literature.

20:01and I'm sure I saw a movie with some actor sitting as a typewriter and typing away and then standing up and mixing himself a cocktail and stepping onto his balcony and looked at the hurrying crowds and thinking, this is the life for me. I didn't know how, but that was the plan. And he sort of tolerated that. But as a safety net, I had this parallel career of being an academic and he'd worked in universities all his life and he could sort of understand that I could get a job, become a university lecturer, get a pension. It was just a safety net. I had no intention of following that career path.

20:41So you didn't intend to actually go there, but how did you feel? How did you feel about him vetoing your plan to paint? Well, he died shortly after that, and so I had sort of managed to prove that I was not a totally worthless, useless artist dreamer by going to Oxford to do a doctorate. And I'd got a good degree at Glasgow University where I'd been in Scotland. So he lived long enough to see me embark on that career. But I had published a couple of short stories, which he rather disdainfully agreed to read. But it was... Did he like them once he read them? He never said he liked them or not. I mean, I remember he was not a man to express much emotion or give overt encouragement.

21:27But he could see, I think, or he sensed that I was paying lip service to the idea of an academic career, but he never saw the outcome of it, so it was never an issue. When you were 18, you went to the University of Nice to study, which was a formative period for you. What did you get up to while you were there? I learned to speak French, I got a diploma, and it was massively transformative, not only because I was 18, 19, but because I was living on my own in a room in an old lady's flat. So I had to find my feet. And more to the point, I realised that my education had turned me into somebody I didn't particularly like.

22:09In what way? Well, I was unreflecting. I think it's true of all boys who left school in those days. You were unreflectingly right-wing, classist, sexist. And so going to Europe at the age of 18 and having friends who were young men and women like me, a lot of Scandinavians, Germans, I suddenly realized that even though I was super independent, I was super unsophisticated. And so I started to turn myself into a European and became very left wing almost immediately and looked at the world with new eyes. And so it was a it was a crucial period in my personal development. But also that's when I seriously started writing, writing little vignettes and sketches.

22:56So Nice was the turning point for me. I think we better have some more music, William Boyd. What have you got for us next? Well, this is symbolic of my francophilia. It's a classic French song. It's almost a cliché, in a way, called Que reste-t-il de nos amours by Charles Trenet. And the ingredients of it, fleurs fanées, faded flowers, vieux clochet, old church bells, sort of summon up a kind of idyllic version of French rural village life. And actually, I live that life to a certain extent. We have a house, an old farmhouse in France, So it really reminds me of the French side of my life.

24:04Carreste Thiel de nos amours. Charles Trenet. William Boyd, in 1971, you started an English and philosophy degree at the University of Glasgow, and this was where you began to write in earnest. How confident were you that you had what it took to become a novelist? Well, I wasn't confident, to be fair, but the first year English literature course at Glass University ran a short story competition. About 600 people entered it and I won. I think I got a£10 book token. But it was a fantastic, if you like, vindication of my dreams that I could write something. It's all about me and Nice, actually, the story I wrote.

24:45And so I was able to say to myself, maybe I'm not kidding myself. Maybe I can do this. And I started writing a novel all about me in Nice, got that out of my system. I did a lot of student journalism. I appointed myself theatre critic and film critic of the university newspaper. I wrote a play, I wrote short stories, really just flexing those muscles. So William, you said that at that point your work was autobiographical and you said you had to get it out of your system. Tell me a little bit more about that then because, you know, I mean the saying goes, write what you know. Isn't that where writers are supposed to start?

25:23They're supposed to start. It's kind of received wisdom. But I would actually say write about something you don't know. Use your imagination because you'll run out of material pretty quickly, as I did. In a way, all writers need to get the autobiographical first novel out of their system because it's a natural thing to do because you think you're the most fascinating person on the planet and the world needs to find out about you. But once you've realised that's not true, then try making things up is my advice. Many of your novels explore how luck and forks in the road go on to affect our lives.

25:56Why do you find chance and happenstance such fertile territory? Well, I think it's because of my experiences and because I don't have a religious faith, you know, and I studied philosophy at the university. And so you sort of think, well, what are the guiding principles of the universe or the human condition? and I think things that happened to me like that moment at the roadblock in Nigeria or my father's early death and my wife's mother's early death. And they were quite close together I think. They were a month apart so we lost half our parents very quickly showed me that the universe is a kind of random unsparing place.

26:38So I came up with this idea that everybody has their share of good luck and their share of bad luck And with most people, the two piles that accrue in their life sort of match up. But don't expect the road to be straight and narrow and clear. It's going to be very winding and bumpy from time to time. But if you know what makes you happy, just hang on to that. Well, let's focus on the good luck. I think chance played a big part in how you met your wife, Susan. Yes, I was in my horrible flat. term was about to begin. Susan was in the university library revising and we both independently, spontaneously thought to hell with this.

27:23I'm going to go to the theatre. So we went to the Citizen's Theatre independently to see a production of The Crucible, a jolly play, Arthur Miller. And I had spotted Susan on the campus, but she had no idea who I was, of course. She had a boyfriend. But luckily, there was a mutual friend in the audience. And in the interval, this mutual friend introduced us. It was a coincidence of us coming together at that play that night that started something that's still going strong 50-odd years later. So it was a remarkable stroke of good luck. It's the best bit of luck I've ever had in my life. It's time for your next piece of music, William Boyd.