This month, literary legend CK Stead turns 85 and releases his first novel in five years, The Necessary Angel.
CK Stead Photo: Credit Francesco Guidicini
He talks to Jesse Mulligan about his favourite music (which definitely doesn't include Frank Sinatra) and how he once put his early poetry to test on the school soccer field.
Stead, who is 'CK' on his books and 'Karl' to friends and family, started going by his initials as a young man.
The most famous poets at the time were TS Eliot, WH Auden and WB Yeats.
"They weren't Willie and Winston and Tom."
The Necessary Angel is set in Paris, a city in which Stead loves 'being a tourist' – eating, walking around, listening to the language and sitting in cafes.
Stead says he didn't really have the time to get into writing novels until he left full-time university teaching at 53.
When he needs inspiration, Charles Dickens is his go-to.
"The writing itself is so exciting … If you're a writer yourself and you suddenly feel your own writing is going slack and you're kind of losing momentum and you spend a bit of time reading Dickens, it gives you such a kick along … And it's also very funny. You can almost hear the author laughing at his own jokes as he makes them."
A while ago Stead's daughter Charlotte Grimshaw put him onto the "very, very funny writer" Martin Amis.
"Amis in a way is a bit like Dickens in that you read the novels partly for the characters but partly for the verbal aspect."
Amis' 1984 novel Money: A Suicide Note is his pick.
"Money is about an appalling person, a real slob … He drinks too much and he eats too much."
When Stead was at school in the late 1940s, he was a fan of the poet Rupert Brooke, but nobody encouraged creative writing and poetry was seen as a bit weird and not very manly, he says.
"If you did it, it was almost like a private vice."
Stead used the soccer field to put his early poetic efforts to the test.
"I played centre-forward so sometimes the game would all be happening at the other end of the field and I'd be waiting for it to come my way. I'd suddenly spring on myself the memory of the poem that I wrote – and if it didn't seem to stand up in those circumstances I'd know straightaway it was not a success. It was a way of testing its reality, I suppose … If I'd been at war it could have been tested under gunfire."
Along with his wife Kay, Stead is a self-confessed 'Wagner freak' and has made several international trips to see the German composer's "mad and unreal" Ring Cycle – a four-part opera held over five nights (including one night off to recover).
One of his favourite songs ever is Kurt Weill's 'Autumn Leaves' (aka 'September Song'), but definitely not Frank Sinatra's version.
"He's so often not on the note. It's appalling, I would say … It's as though he doesn't know where the middle of the note is …. As a singer, he was always awful and he got worse."
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