LIST.CO.UK/FESTIVAL EDINBURGH WORLD WRITERS CONFERENCE FESTIVAL BOOKS
A lthough the Book Festival started in 1983, the 1962 Edinburgh World Writers Conference is part of the festival’s story. There’s a lot of myth going around about who said what and soundbites are used that may well have been taken out of context. We have been working very closely with John Calder and Jim Haynes, who organised the original event, to make sure that we represented it properly. What was important about 1962 was that it gave us a snapshot of what writers were for and to explore the reason for i ction. I think it’s important to ask that now: why is i ction important for helping us make sense of the world in 2012?
Obviously, 1962 was a different time, a post-war era with genuine austerity. Edinburgh was a buttoned-up city which did not embrace culture very easily and along came these writers who shocked everybody. Now, in a globalised information age, it’s a very different context yet it seems to me that the questions they asked then are just as relevant now: for example, what should the relationship be between stories and the political world we live in? That’s still relevant and I want to see how writers are both similar and different from 50 years ago.
CHIKA UNIGWE ON JAMES BALDWIN My i rst encounter with Baldwin was as a young girl reading whatever book I laid my hands on. I read Just Above My Head greedily, soaking up words that I only partially understood but which thrilled me with their beauty. Serendipity drove Notes of a Native Son into my hands after I moved to Europe and began, for the i rst time, to view myself consciously as a ‘black person’ in a way I never had reason to in Nigeria. Reading it shook my dungeon. I felt less alone in my loneliness, but it also empowered me by articulating my own experiences and frustrations as a minority in a relatively small Flemish town. Baldwin is a phenomenal writer. He writes with such eloquence and grace, such love and incisive intelligence that I always emerge from reading him certain that I’ve been touched by the hand of a benevolent god.
EWAN MORRISON ON ALEXANDER TROCCHI We are all cosmopolitan scum now. History is cruel in who it edits out of its archives. Scottish-born writer Alexander Trocchi was, for over 30 years, one such individual. He was an existentialist and avant-gardist in Paris, a close friend and champion of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in New York; a co-conspirator with Guy Debord and creator of inl ammatory agit-prop Situationist texts. But nonetheless he was excluded from all of the histories of Scottish writing until a decade ago. This was not because he was also a sometime pimp, junkie and writer of pornography, but because of a single verbal i ght he had in 1962, with Hugh MacDiarmid, at the Writers Conference in Edinburgh. Trocchi accused MacDiarmid of ‘old fashioned quaintnesses’; MacDiarmid called Trocchi ‘cosmopolitan scum’.
Over time, history has a tendency to turn on its victors, and as we are about to recreate that conference this year, we have to ask who was really victorious. MacDiarmid’s aesthetic and political project of a communist revolution based in national identity and Scottish language died with the fall of communism in 1990; while when we look at globalised consumerist world of libertarian, hallucinogenic, pornographic, postmodern society of the spectacle, we have to conclude that we are living in Trocchi’s world. For better or worse, we are all cosmopolitan scum now. the permissive,
today –
ALI SMITH ON EDWIN MORGAN I remember seeing Edwin Morgan on stage in one of
the smaller tents at the Edinburgh International Book Festival about ten years ago. He was, as usual, slim, and self-effacing, and when he read his poems it was like that tent i lled with energy. It was a pure kind of joy.
lifeblood I saw him many times; this one was, typically, an experience like nothing else, where sell essness, intelligence and something loving and alive moved like a through form and revitalised everything it came near. I think that’s what his work, in all its forms, does and did; it is always an act of generosity of vision, inclusive revelation. He celebrated intelligence, wit, playfulness, the voices of all things, beings, languages, planets, possibilities. In a world where writers are increasingly meant to be celebrities, he went beyond self and he let the work not just have space but make space. He knew the power of the local and he dei ed parochialities. He was an open force of imagination right at the heart of Scottish writing, going round quietly crossing the borders and opening the doors. What a legacy.
KAPKA KASSABOVA ON MURIEL SPARK They are my own secret rules but they arise from deep conviction. They cannot be formulated, they are as sincere and indescribable as are the primary colours,’ says Lucy, the narrator of Muriel Spark’s story ‘The Fortune Teller’. Lucy may as well be explaining – in Spark’s characteristically seductive tone – her creator’s approach to writing. Judging from records of the 1962 World Writers’ Conference, Muriel Spark was one of those writers who didn’t make shockingly operatic statements about their own sexuality, commitment, nationality, and overall genius. She didn’t need to. All the shocking stuff went into her books, which is what matters if you’re a true artist. She put her best self into her writing, and left the rest to the rest. This is why Spark could convincingly object to Lawrence Durrell’s view that literature should change people: ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that for a novelist to try and change anybody, for anyone to try and change anybody, is horrible.’ Change happens through insight – her speciality; not through the coercion of grand statements.
Have you read her Complete Short Stories? At 600 pages, the book is too short; that’s how unrelentingly good she is. And always uncomfortable. As John Lanchester says in his introduction to The Driver’s Seat, ‘It doesn’t tell us a single thing that we want to hear’. But we can’t stop turning the pages because we know that Spark is the custodian of a great dark truth. Read her and be changed.
JANNE TELLER ON ALDOUS HUXLEY The greatness of Aldous Huxley could lie alone in his endless imagination, his wisdom, insight and highly original talent of storytelling. But to my mind, his courage to go wherever all of these took him is the true key to his genius, and the reason why we’ll keep on reading him generation after generation.
Inviting us into seemingly strange illusory worlds, he showed us not just what tomorrow might be, but how today is: the today of those past times in which his books were written, the today of today, and also, I’m convinced, the today of tomorrow. Never shying away from the truths he might uncover, by placing his invented characters often in extreme situations, his literature uncovers who we are in all our mundane daily situations. Imagining the unimaginable was the particular mark of Aldous Huxley’s artistic gift. His gift to us readers is to opening our eyes to how real the unimaginable is. For me as a novel writer, Aldous Huxley has taught me not only that in literature all is possible, but also that all is necessary.
THE BOOKS OF62
A CLOCKWORK
ORANGE
With its inventive ‘nadsat’ argot,
Anthony Burgess
unleashed
Alex and his ultra-violent
droogs onto an unsuspecting
world.
SOMETHING WICKED THIS
WAY COMES
A scary carnival
comes to town in the late Ray
Bradbury’s
fantasy chiller whose title
comes from a line in Macbeth.
THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK
Dubbed one of
Doris Lessing’s books of ‘inner
space i ction’,
this tale tackles
motherhood,
war and
psychological breakdown.
ONE FLEW OVER THE
CUCKOO’S
NEST
Ken Kesey’s critique of
institutionalised care came about from his
time working as an orderly
at a Californian mental health
facility.
PALE FIRE Vladimir
Nabokov’s novel
and one of his most widely
discussed works
is presented as a 999-line poem
written by the i ctional John
Shade.
■ Full details of events in the Edinburgh World Writers Conference can be found at list.co.uk/festival 16–23 Aug 2012 THE LIST 27