MILES KINGTON INTERVIEWS
3.Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe performed by Bob Peck
Miles Kington played himself
KINGTON Robinson Crusoe, you are probably the most famous castaway in history. Nobody has spent such a long time as you in isolation.
CRUSOE Except, perhaps, the man in the Iron Mask. . .
KINGTON Well, I meant without human contact.
CRUSOE I had Man Friday.
KINGTON You are still the most famous castaway in history, even though in one sense you didn't exist.
CRUSOE In what sense is that?
KINGTON Well, to the extent that although Daniel Defoe wrote down your story, it was the story of Alexander Selkirk, who really had been cast away on a desert island, and who had a story to tell.
CRUSOE My story.
KINGTON Yes, true, but he used your name. . .
CRUSOE If it is names that worry you, why not interview Alexander Selkirk?
KINGTON Because nobody has heard of him. He is not famous, so nobody would want to listen to his story. But Robinson Crusoe… you have had not only books written about you, but films and musicals, and you are the recurring subject of pantomimes.
CRUSOE I always thought that was very odd. Pantomimes depend on lots of characters criss-crossing the stage, getting in each other's way. But in all my years on the island I never tripped over anyone, never heard anyone shouting for Abanazar or that dratted boy Aladdin…
KINGTON Well, it is very unusual for a pantomime to be based on anyone who really existed. When you think of Peter Pan, Puss in Boots, Old Mother Goose - was there ever a panto hero who really lived?
CRUSOE Dick Whittington. Robin Hood…
KINGTON If they really existed…
CRUSOE It strikes me that you have a lot of problems with existence. I wouldn't worry so much about what exists and what doesn't exist, if I were you. Just relax, enjoy yourself. Ask me some questions…
KINGTON Did you talk to yourself a lot?
CRUSOE I'm sorry?
KINGTON In all the years you were on the island you never heard another human voice until Friday came along. You must have been afraid to lose the power of speech. Did you talk to yourself a lot?
CRUSOE No, never. I talked to everything else, though. When people use the expression "talking to yourself" they don't mean that. You never talk to yourself, as such. There is nothing you can tell yourself that you don't know already. What you can do is either talk to the animals and rocks and trees as if they were people just as people do when living alone who talk to their cats and dogs – ‘Would you like to have another dog biscuit, little fellow?’ - that's the way it starts, and it goes on from there, at least it did in my case, until I actually found myself conversing with the birds in the trees about some quite abstruse philosophical problems, such as Does God exist? And if he does, is he you or me? Yes there were some quite surprised birds on the island… There was one parrot who did have the knack picking up words, and the first expression he ever learnt from me was, ‘Well, it all depends…’ I must have said that to him so often, when discussing abstract matters… It shows you what kind of wishy-washy discussions I had with my birds… ‘It all depends…’ Still, I had all the time in the world… Funny thing was, I had quite a strong Yorkshire accent when I arrived on the island and I passed it on to the parrot… ‘Ey oop, it all depends,’ he'd say. And: ‘Ah reckon so, lad.’ I'm sorry - even now, I have the habit of going on endlessly. I was never interrupted for ten or twenty years, you see, so your sentences do go on a bit….
KINGTON Yes, they….
CRUSOE Mark you, I have met many people who were never on a desert island who have got the habit of prattling on and on - one meets them at dinner parties…
KINGTON You go to dinner parties?
CRUSOE When I first returned and was made famous by Mr. Defoe, I was invited to many dinners, yes.
KINGTON Did you enjoy them?
CRUSOE No
KINGTON Why not?
CRUSOE By that time I preferred eating alone.
KINGTON Without company?
CRUSOE The company was immaterial. It was my table manners that were the trouble. You see, if you have eaten alone for many years, you develop solitary habits, such as lounging, and scratching, and belching, and farting, and groaning, even singing, so that when you are suddenly trussed up in Sunday clothes and forced to make polite conversation to a lady who wants only to know how on earth you managed to amuse yourself on your barren island- well, all you want to do is get back to your island and let off a good belch.
KINGTON When you returned, what were the most difficult things to adjust to? Apart from dinner parties?
CRUSOE Good God, dinner parties were the easiest. The smell, for a start…
KINGTON Smell? Smell of what?
CRUSOE Everything. You have no idea what a symphony of smells there is in a city street - rubbish, paint, food, cooking, varnish, slops, perfumed ladies - I tell you, on my return to London it was my nose that was most buffeted, not my ears or eyes. And people smelt! Heavens, how they smelt!
KINGTON Of what?
CRUSOE Of there natural body smells, part one, and of their attempts to disguise 'em, part two. My nose had been quite sharpened by life on the island. I could scent the bushes in flower, the direction of the wind, even some of the animals. I could tell you if there was salt in the air or not. I could tell you if the skins I had left to dry were near ready, or the stew of goat near eating. It had become an instrument of use, like an animal's, and when my nose told me something, it was something that meant something - a warning or a weather pointer…
…But walking down Oxford Street, I would be hit in the face by a powdery perfume, strong enough to burn the nostrils, and I would whirl round to see what strange beast was coming behind me, and find only some lady in all her finery, anointed in so many oils and essences that she was like a walking garden. Faugh! I would cry, and fan my nose to get the stink of cosmetic crassness out of my nostrils. Yes, many a fair lady I have offended in Oxford Street, I can tell you. Now, to them it was unnatural not to smell so. They did not wash, and would have smelled most animal-like if left unattended, so they sprayed and painted themselves with false smells. It is often said that the French make excellent sauces to disguise the rankness of their meat.. The same is true of our ladies…
KINGTON Nowadays we wash very well, but put on as many smells as they did.
CRUSOE A waste of effort, if I may say. But the one thing I had grown accustomed to on the island was my own smell. It was the one smell which had passed so deep into my unconscious that I could no longer smell it. However, the people of London could smell it, and very strongly. Faugh! they would cry, as I entered the room, even the most polite.
KINGTON While you were simultaneously exclaiming at their heavy and rich smells I suppose?
CRUSOE Being choked, more like. I could hardly breathe in society when I returned from my island.
KINGTON Did you find the society or humans difficult, generally?
CRUSOE Yes. But I had done so before my shipwreck.
KINGTON You were not a sociable man?
CRUSOE No more or less than another. But I believe that most of us find difficulty in establishing bonds with our fellow men.
KINGTON In relating to them, you mean?
CRUSOE What does that mean?
KINGTON It means. . . establishing bonds with your fellow men.
CRUSOE As I said. Every day we are surrounded by thousands of other people. To very few of them do we even speak. We pass them in the street, we brush past them in doorways, we ignore them, we do not even see them. Most of humanity is of the supremest unimportance to us. We can pass from one end of Oxford Street to the other, through hundreds of other of our fellow humans, and not have the faintest memory of any of them at the end of it. Now, I on the contrary, when first returned, was intensely conscious of them. I wanted to greet them all as fellow travellers, as fellow guests on earth.
KINGTON And did you?
CRUSOE Of course not I would have been locked up as a lunatic. But I used to stare into their faces and wonder at the difference of them all. When you are on a deserted island, you miss humanity as a block. You forget how different from each other we all are.
KINGTON So having missed humanity as a block, you found it difficult to be reunited with them one by one?
CRUSOE You might say so. By the by, did you know that we all smell quite differently?
KINGTON Emit distinctive odours, you mean?
CRUSOE Yes. Apart from the artificial ones, I mean. When first I returned, my nose was so keen I could tell the identity of a man who entered the room behind me. It gradually fell away, however, and within a year or two I had lost all sense of smell, and I had to rely on sight like everyone else. But there - we use our eyes every day, all the time, so they are skilled at recognition. Our poor noses are left unemployed except for admiring flowers and cooking, and for supporting spectacles. It is a poor comedown for a once proud organ.
KINGTON What blessings of civilisation did you most welcome on your return?
CRUSOE Blessings of civilisation? (HE LAUGHS) Well, let me think. Mmmmmm...
KINGTON Tea, coffee? Sugar? Milk?
CRUSOE I had lost the taste for all those and never regained them. Strong drink was another matter - I found it easy to force a little rum down my throat, and it was as if I had never been away.
KINGTON When you returned, it must have been a delight to be able to have light at any hour of day or night.
CRUSOE Yes, were it not that I had also made myself candles on the island.
KINGTON Yes, I had forgotten…
CRUSOE You must not fall into the trap of thinking that I was rescued from a state of savagery. What I had on the island was a civilisation of sorts. Better in some ways than the one I had left behind.
KINGTON In what way?
CRUSOE Everyone on my island was fed and clothed. There was no crime, no bloodshed, except what man had brought. There was no... no desire for what one had not got. The animals lacked for nothing, and I did not lack for animals. What I had rescued from the ship served me well for many years, and when it was exhausted I devised new substitutes. When I tried to conjure up the Europe I had left behind, in my mind's eyes, it was no bigger than a ship. All I ever wanted could be contained in a ship. I had forgotten all things bigger than a ship.
KINGTON There are not many things bigger than a ship.
CRUSOE Houses, Castles. Palaces. Churches…
KINGTON I know you are a religious man. Did you miss churches?
CRUSOE It is curious the way you say, ‘You are a religious man’, as if there were any other kind.
KINGTON There are, today.
CRUSOE Ah, today! Yes, nowadays one wears religion as if it were a fashion, and most people go about most unfashionably dressed, as if a matter of belief were what one dressed up in at Christmas and wedding time. But I did not leave God and the Bible behind when I entered upon my island.
KINGTON You left churches behind.
CRUSOE And did not miss them once. Back in London, I took myself once or twice to the church of the neighbourhood to join in worship of the Almighty, but I have to confess I did not feel the presence of the Almighty there, as I did on the hillside of my little island. God does not need a church. Perhaps we do not either.
KINGTON How well do you think most of us would fare on a desert island? Half as well as you?
CRUSOE That all depends, as my parrot used to say. If you were a seaman, and used to shifting for yourself, and accustomed to hard knocks and cold and unreasonable hours, than you would have a good chance. If you were a gentleman, I would fear for you. But I note one thing. Whenever I talk to people about my experiences, they always fall to speculating on their own likelihood of survival, and I have noticed one strange thing: that the higher one goes up the social ladder, the higher expectations one had of the island. A gentleman assumes that the island of his casting away would be fertile, full of palm trees, blessed with fruit, seldom rainy, and almost pouring a cornucopia of fodder into their lap. The average man of the people, however, fears the worst; he sees a desert island as truly desert - rock, rain and nothing to eat. What a difference is made by social status and privilege, even in philosophy and speculation!
KINGTON Philosophy?
CRUSOE Those upon whom fortune has smiled make the most cheerful philosophers. A man who had been ravaged by war, destitution and disease is inclined not to believe that all is for the best in this world. Yet it is the same world. Only the temperament of the philosopher varies.
KINGTON You are accustomed to philosophical speculation?
CRUSOE On my island, I had more time for thought than most people. I reflected much on the nature of things, and how the animal kingdom had… evolved.
KINGTON You don't mean - been created?
CRUSOE There were certain things I conceived on the island which were not thought of later until after my death, by Mr. Darwin.
KINGTON It might have changed the whole course of human thought if you had anounced the theory of evolution a hundred years earlier.
CRUSOE A moment's thought will show that you are quite wrong. If I had come back from my island proclaiming evolution, or relativity, or radio waves, I would gave been totally ignored. There is nothing as strong as an idea whose time has come, but there is nothing so absurd and weak as an idea which has come upon the scene too early. I do not believe that ideas are for all time and all place. I believe that ideas are very much of their own time and place - ideas, after all, are only human notions, and therefore change as human society changes. Shall I give you an example?
KINGTON Yes, please.
CRUSOE The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe have always provoked this rather curious criticism, namely, that my exploits have tended to glorify capitalism.
KINGTON How so?
CRUSOE Oh, come! Do not pretend ignorance! It is always said by left wing critics that on my island I took over the means of production, put all power centrally in my hands, took totalitarian decisions, enslaved the animal occupants, and so on… The fact that I could sell none of this for profit - indeed, that there was no hint of money on the island - has not worried these fellows, who further point to the arrival of Friday and his working for me, as - you know, don't you?
KINGTON I think it has been construed as colonialism.
CRUSOE At the very least! To listen to some commentators, you would think I was a one-man South Africa, a slave trade in one person… I seem to have lost track of the chain of ideas…
KINGTON You were talking of ideas, and of how they belonged to one time.
CRUSOE Ah, yes. Now, because I came upon the world at a time when money and business, and economics and all that, were governing the way people thought, I was therefore construed as a capitalistic exemplar. I am not sure if that is the right term, but I think you can see what I am struggling to say.
KINGTON Yes.
CRUSOE But if the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe were to be published now, if I were to be a modern hero, what think you people would say?
KINGTON Well, I…
CRUSOE Exactly the same book, mind. Nothing added.
KINGTON They might see you as a back-to-nature figure, perhaps even a parody of the romantic impulse...a bit of a hippy...
CRUSOE No, no, quite wrong. They would call me an ecological disaster.
KINGTON You think so?
CRUSOE Undoubtedly. Ecology is the idea of your time, as economics used to be, and I would be judged in those terms. And ecologically I might well be called a disaster. I used the resources of the island, hunting and eating them without thought of preserving the ecological balance. I chopped down trees without replanting. I fished the rivers and shot down birds without any thought of how this would effect the - what is it called? - The food chain. I did not manage my resources very well, except in my own terms. I was totally incorrect, politically. If my island was a planet, I would have been condemned for using up the resources of the planet without giving a thought for posterity. The fact that one man living alone on an island is not liable to have any posterity would not have occurred to them, or impressed them even if it had. My book would be banned from schools and little children would be taught that I was an Attila the Hun of small-holdings. And if anyone dared to remember me in pantomime form, Greenpeace would be there in force to picket the theatre and condemn Robinson Crusoe as if I had chopped down a rainforest or poured oil into the Pacific Ocean.
KINGTON But nobody said this of you at the time?
CRUSOE Heavens, no. I was seen as a hero, a man who could carry on Western civilisation and technology single-handed, someone for all castaways, prisoners, explorers and hermits to look up to. A hundred years later, and I could have made a Lakeland poet twice as remarkable as Mr. Wordsworth, or at least twice as resourceful.
KINGTON And so you melted gradually back into society? Became one of the crowd again?
CRUSOE Perish the thought! For a moment it was possible. I encountered a young lady in London… I had not seen a lady, young or old, for many a year... my head was turned... But if I had ever had the knack of making myself attractive to a lady, I had lost it, or more probably lost the desire to do so, and it was not to be. I retired to the country. Not to a comfortable pile, or homely cottage, but to a remote part of England which reminded me most of my lost island. There I built a small house with my own hands and lived in it, hunting and growing things as heretofore.
KINGTON You mean - you reverted to your island pattern of existence back here in Britain?
CRUSOE Of course. That is when I had been at my happiest, though I did not know it then.
KINGTON And where you happy there?
CRUSOE Of course. It was as good as living on my island, and better in that in the unlikely event of my wanting human company - and it is surprising how the desire for it fades when it is readily available - I did not have far to go. Nor, of course, was I driven by the urge to escape or the fear of missing a passing ship.
KINGTON May we know where in Britain you lived this remote life?
CRUSOE You may not. I have seen what happened to the Lake District. I have seen the Wordsworth Coffee Bars, the Lakeland Grills and the Host of Dancing Daffodils Tea Rooms. God forfend that they should find my retreat and make it into a Robinson Crusoe Visitor Centre or a Man Friday Race Relations Study Centre.
KINGTON Robinson Crusoe, thank you for talking to me.
CRUSOE And thank you for not asking me what music I would have taken to my island.
ENDS
Producer Anne-Marie Cole
Radio 4