Festival Moment

OVERHEARD: Henning Mankell has been asked if he wrote with a biro, a computer – or what? Such was the delight of the audience that this famous question had finally been asked at Hay the great man was able to avoid answering it.

NEWS Paul Theroux and Sir Vidia Naipaul met today, for the first time since Theroux published ‘Sir Vidia’s Shadow.’ No one punched anyone and there was general disappointment. Daniel Mordzinski, the GREAT Argentine photographer, takes the picture.

FESTIVAL MOMENT Daniel is taking a picture of a certain Welsh writer. Dainel’s method is – well, he’s captured the soul of Garbriel Garcia Marquez on film: how long is yours going to take?

The shoot ends with a trick involving a yellow watering can. Daniel needs someone to hold it. He grabs the nearest passer-by, brushing aside the protests of this person’s companions. (Daniel speaks Spanish and French, and possibly other languages, but not English.)

The passer-by is on his way to an event, and startled – but he is game. He takes his jacket off.

“Who are you?” he asks the writer, shaking hands.

“Er, I’m a – famous writer! Who are you?”

“Hahaha!” (The passer-by is still almost game, but the seconds are long now, and the confusion deepening.)

Daniel produces the watering can and suddenly the passer-by is off.

“No -”

“No!”

“No,” the entourage agree. “No props.”

If only I had explained that Daniel just wanted him to hold the can, that everything was fine, that he would not have been in the shot with it – …

But alas I could not speak.

“C’etait qui?” Daniel demands, dismayed.

“Il s’appelle Davide Milliband…”

Sunspots

Sunday: Grey skies, streaming flags and huge crowds shivering in a marauding wind. Paul Nurse (cellular Biologist, Nobel Prize, President of the Royal Society) pauses in his lecture on Darwin and Milton, as the giant pavilion strains and shakes, to express the hope that ‘no one up there’ objects to what he is saying.

As a ‘skeptical agnostic’ he presumably means he hopes the riggers have done their work well, but the audience’s laughter is slightly nervous. The lecture is a comparison of Darwin’s theory and Milton’s great poem. They meet in creativity, Nurse says, in the use they make of what has gone before (evolution had been proposed before Charles’ masterpiece, not least by his grandfather Erasmus – other examples date back to ancient Greece) and in the conceptual leaps which produce the works themselves.

Nurse reads Milton’s reading of Genesis, with delightful up-shots. For example, Milton visited Galileo in 1638, when the astronomer was under house arrest in Florence. He had discovered sun spots in 1616, which was a problem for contemporary accounts of a Genesis-based universe, in which everything ‘above’ the moon was perfect. Sunspots meant change – and how might perfection change? Milton has his Satan jump across the sun in his journey. The sun spots are his footprints…

First impressions…

And we’re in! I love the Newport-Abergavenny train but it was packed – Joanna Trollope stood, manfully, in her festival finery, while lounging football fans chased their beer with cider.

Nipped home, freshened, jumped into  the car with Alexander and Mum, banished the dog (Apollo would outshine the stars and we can’t have that) and here we are.

The best thing about the festival as far as the authors are concerned – apart from meeting anyone kind enough to show an interest or buy a book, of course – is the Green Room.

So we slide in, armed guards indulging us (can they be here for Rob Lowe?) and there, gossiping away, are half our heroes and one or two of our villains commingled. Adam Nicolson, most exquisite of exquisite writers, says hello. My mother blushes and retreats – she has been a fan of his since I can remember.

Norma Percy, Britain’s greatest television producer, shows me where to plug in this laptop. I am humiliatingly star-struck. She is the producer’s producer – the masters of the universe, who habitually can’t, won’t or don’t talk straight to us, talk to her.

She will be addressing the question “Can Television Make History?” tomorrow, Sunday, at 5.30pm. If you possibly can, do go. She will be showing clips from some of her films (‘multi-award-winning’ rather undersells them), including ‘The Death of Yugoslavia’, ‘The Second Russian Revolution’ and ‘Endgame in Ireland’.

Norma is nervous about tomorrow: much happier asking the questions than being interviewed. Her husband was nervous too, earlier, she says: the geneticist Steve Jones gave the Maddox Lecture.

“The jokes went down well,” she says.

An American writer has just informed his mobile phone that he is “At a book festival in England.”

Close, but -

Behind me David Shukman, the BBC’s environment editor (you have certainly seen him balancing on a melting icecaps) is giving some English students a talk on breaking into journalism. “I was a very poor English student,” he begins. It’s an honourable tradition…

We cruise the festival’s main quadrangle.

“What a lovely crowd – Readers!” Mum exclaims, joyfully, and dives into the bookshop, emerging an hour and one cigar-break later with a bag of treasure.

Pete Hurley of Permberton’s says he has managed to obtain a dozen copies of ‘Truant’, the book I will be talking about on Monday, though it is, technically, out of print. We agree to charge a ferocious amount for these collector’s items.

Slight Hitches, Eventual Triumph

Dr Rowan Williams – scholar, gentleman and Archbishop of Canterbury – is, as you might expect, much too polite to give any outward sign of what must be desperate disappointment. We can only strive to follow his example.

As the twilight died intimation and confirmation of disaster arrived simultaneously, in the form of a phone call from our heroic advance party – led, you will remember, by Historian, Life Artist, Blogprobationer and Free Thinker Jody Trick. I took his call on the Stansted Express.

“So we’re in Hay,” he began, slightly harried.

“Great! How was the Archbishop?”

“I’ve booked a campsite but I don’t actually know where it is and it’s really dark – what?”

“Ok – how was Rowan Williams?”

“Ow.”

“Are you ok, Jody?”

“Cow!”

“You’re in The Cow?”

“Town! We’re in the middle of town and it’s dark. The thing is I think the campsite’s about four miles – we’ve just arrived -…”

“Are you seeing Rowan Williams?”

“No, we missed Rowan. We were late leaving – “

“Oh, right.”

“It might be a bit late for the festival now, do you think? What would you advise?”

 

One might have ill-advised at this point, along the lines of “Find the Archbishop immediately – he’s probably hiding somewhere but he’s easy to spot – winkle him out…” but thankfully Young Alex intervened and it was agreed that a taxi should be taken to the campsite. I apologise for raising hopes, and especially to the Archbishop.

 

The good news is the advance party survived the night and promise to redeem themselves. I survived some very exciting turbulence over the Alps, and a ticket bloodbath at Paddington, and a diversion via Bristol, and am finally ON SITE. Things can only get better. Fingers crossed.

Festival-going

Toothbrush, pen, laptop, cheap Italian tobacco, passport, party invites, pants… Thank goodness I’m not camping. One of my subcontracted blogspies, Jody Trick, is. He rang around midnight Italian time to say he was on his way to Asda to get a tent. “Bit last minute,” he admitted, which made me feel comparatively relaxed. As I write Jody is listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury on Shakespeare. He has his own subcontracted blogspy, Alex, who was four years old last time I met him. I will relay both their reactions in full.

I share your frustration, dear reader. The festival has started and your correspondent is only just about to set out for it, on a journey across four countries. The residency does not officially start until Monday but I intend, transport permitting, to be reporting from the scene tomorrow, Saturday. Until then, then.

Travel well – we’ve got thunder and lightning in Verona. The aspect of the element is most like the work we have in hand, most bloody, fiery and most terrible, as Shakespeare put it. And to think he never flew Ryanair –  there’s genius for you. There will be a prize for the most convoluted journey to Hay – send ‘em in… H

Studying the form…

Slightly dazed having just been to Cambridge and back (to fair Verona, where we lay our scene, most of the time, until Hay) with a class of Italian teenagers to watch ‘Journey’s End’. Half of us were in tears by the end and the students were entranced throughout – which is serious praise. “Prof, this was beautiful,” said one, one who had hitherto never sat still for ten minutes, or silent for five. The play is at the Arts Theatre, and the production is on tour – go, go if you possibly can.

It is another gorgeous morning in Verona (the class shivered around what I considered a balmy Cambridge) and I have been going through the line up for Hay. How would you feel about Colin Thubron, Don Paterson on Shakespeare, Patrick Barkham on butterflies, Eric Hobsbawn, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Richard Cohen on the cultural history of the sun, Germaine Greer on the psalms, Leo Mckinstry on the Hawker Hurricane, Jim al Khalil on the golden age of Arab science, Roy Foster on Yeats and Mariella Frostrup trying to maintain her legendary poise in the face of Rob Lowe – ? 

Or shall we concentrate on zombies, story-telling and Catalan rock fusion? I will try for the lot.  

Recent reading includes a sneak preview of Niall Griffiths’ new novel, Shining Star, which is looks like the book I and his fans across the world have been waiting for. I can promise a Hay interview with him, as he has promised me a pint. He recently signed of an email with ‘must get on – 21st century Britain won’t excoriate itself..’ And he means it, and he’s abundantly equipped to do it, and by this extract, he’s hit it. You heard it here first.

Also recently dispatched Justin Cartwright’s excellent ‘Other People’s Money’. One character is a playwright, ‘Cornwall’s second greatest theatre impresario’, who laments the decline of arts funding, blown away, he says, by the ‘spiv bankers’ of London and Frankfurt. He survives by sponsorship from a pie and pasty company. “Do you think Johnny Gielgud had to preface his performances with ‘thanks to Fray Bentos, our generous sponsors?’ 

In these disjointed times, the surviving arts organisations and those who fight for them are to be praised and prized. And so it gives me great pleasure to introduce, gentle reader, our own sponsor, Literature Wales. A recent marriage between the Welsh Writers’ Centre at Ty Newydd, and Academi, the literature promotion agency of Wales, has produced this beautiful body.

Among other things, Literature Wales brings us the Wales Book of the Year (one day, one day…) the National Poet of Wales (the Great Gillian!) Writers on Tour funding, writing courses at Ty Newydd, Translators’ House Wales, the Bay Lit and Ty Newydd Festivals, Young People’s Writing Squads, mentoring, bursaries, information and advice, and independent manuscript assessment. 

In sum, if you have a pen and paper and seek a reader, Literature Wales is in your corner. And of course, as I now realise, you can blog! Many thanks to the kind welcomes I have received from this community – and a particular greeting to our readers in the Ukraine. 

Coming soon, more details on the Hay line up, perhaps an update from tomorrow’s wine walk (it really is a tough business, living in the Veneto) and, of course, the unexpected. 

H x

Love at first blog

Ever since I can remember I always wanted to be a…blogger?

Imagine Ray Liotta saying it in a parallel-world version of Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” in which Ray’s character wants to be a blogger for the respect, the money, thrills, luxury, guns, drugs, heists, women and perhaps the intellectual challenge. A world in which gangsters hunch solitary over their keyboards, writing about cats and knitting. It’s not that loopy. One of the most successful – the only successful – blogger I know, if success means making a living at it, does indeed blog about knitting. She was an early adopter, it seems.

For myself, I could see how hi-jacking a truck full of money at an airport could make you rich – but blogging? Someone once said that you should never do for free that which you depend upon for your livelihood. As a writer I therefore turned my back on blogging, and joyfully. I know the argument that you need to move with the times, and that technology is the times, and that those of us who are slow to produce tablet-friendly texts with audio and video and add-ons and apps will be left behind in the Luddite dust. But my soul screamed at the prospect. Half the point of this miraculous craft is that a good writer can take a chewed pencil and some scrap paper, stare at a mark on the wall and produce something which enriches lives, which speaks to other souls, which outlasts steel and stone. Read Virginia Woolf’s story ‘A Mark On The Wall’ for proof.

So what changed?

Reader, I got a job. A dream of a job! The offer came from Literature Wales, formerly known as Academi, a beautiful institution run by wizards who love books and don’t seem to mind working with writers, even fag-breathed, yellow-toothed, flap-soled, booze-loving, freebie-hunting scoundrels like myself, wasteoids would sooner lie in bed with a book and call themselves artists than undertake anything resembling respectable employment. Indeed, these Literature Wales saints even seem to enjoy it. And the job is – Hay. The Hay Blooming Festival No Less.   

Let me sing to you of Hay. (I come from just down the road, over the pass, down the valley and up the hill, so I know whereof I speak.) (I mean blog.) Hay is about as much fun as you can have in the writing game. Thanks to an apparently scattered man in a linen jacket who never seems in any kind of hurry, but who nevertheless produces the world’s best literary festival, one Peter Florence, more of whom anon, an invitation to Hay is the professional equivalent of Charlie ripping into his chocolate bar and finding Wonka’s golden ticket. Remember, Charlie didn’t actually get paid, so this is even better than that, because in return for appearing on stage you get a crate of Cava. I have the skeletons of about five of those at home. If it all goes belly-up, planetwise, I intend to knock them into a raft. 

The first time I went to the festival, as a reader rather than a writer, I saw John Mortimer, novelist, lawyer, creator of Rumpole, wit and lover of life and fair women. He told a friend of mine he reckoned it took him about fifteen minutes to talk away his face, which was not classically handsome. I loved the atmosphere and I wanted in and further in. The Gods took note, smiled and sent me for the next four years of festivals as a radio producer. I could tell you many indiscreet tales from behind the scenes, and in due course I might – tales of outrageous parties crashed, of US Presidents slow-handclapped, of rivers swum naked, of impossibly gorgeous French actresses bluffed, of network radio programmes broadcast through washing lines, of critics told to stuff themselves in rather stronger terms, of break-dancing historians, of the powerful made foolish and the foolish enthroned, of illicit sex, black sheep and the one about the improvisational Welsh rapper who promised he would not drink before going on stage and ended up miming the passage of a curry through his lower tracts, live on Radio 3. 

And then my first book came out, followed by a second and third, and like the annual miracle of the swallows’ return, golden invite followed golden invite. And this year, as blogger in residence, it is my great pleasure and huge privilege to extend that ticket to you. We are going to have a time of it together, you and I. We will attend many of the best of the best events, and we will be asking very direct questions. We will relax in the green room, and watch the rulers of the world put in their proper place by the chroniclers of the age. We will see who really runs Britain, and we may well get to measure them on the dancefloor. We may well join fellow writers in practicing the art of living disgracefully, gracefully. We will peek and pry and overhear. We will be onstage and back stage. I absolutely cannot wait. Do join me, I implore you. Here’s to the hills and the green-gold times! We’re bound for Hay on Wye…       

Horatio Clare 2011

Horatio Clare will be Literature Wales’ blogger in residence at Hay Festival 2011

Horatio Clare - copyright Random House, Caroline Flinders

Writer and journalist Horatio Clare will spend a week at this year’s Hay Festival (www.hayfestival.com) as Literature Wales‘ (www.literaturewales.org) blogger-in residence. You will be able to read about his experience in this exclusive blog, from late May 2011 onwards.

Horatio Clare is the author of Running for the Hills,  Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope, and A Single Swallow. This year he will publish his first novel, Clip’s Truth. Horatio’s books have been nominated for many prizes; he won a Somerset Maugham Award, and his journalism, which appears in national newspapers and magazines, won a Foreign Press Award in 2010. He regularly teaches writing and literature, both in schools and for the Arvon Foundation.