Monday, August 13, 2012

How the Edinburgh writers' conference changed the world of literature


With the conference about to be revived, Stuart Kelly recalls its lively origins in 1962 when the idea of a book festival was radical

John Calder
John Calder, the radical publisher who suggested that Edinburgh could host a writers’ conference. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Fifty years ago, the cultural entrepreneur and radical publisher John Calder hit on an idea that would change the world of literature altogether. Having successfully toured some of the new French writers he was publishing – Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras – he suggested to George Lascelles, the 7th Earl of Harewood and director of the Edinburgh festival, that the city might host a writers' conference, a bookish supplement to the atonal music and challenging theatre Harewood was then introducing to Edinburgh audiences.
Nowadays, book festivals are an international phenomenon and it can seem as if every second village in the country has one. In 1962 it was an innovation. It is fitting that Nick Barley, the current director of the Edinburgh international book festival, has programmed a "reinvention" of the event for this year's festival.
The Edinburgh writers' conference has been slightly superseded in the cultural imagination. The following year, Calder held the notorious dramatists' conference, where, as he recollects in his memoirs, a young woman called Anna Kesselaar "appeared at the end of the organ gallery that ran behind the platform where the conferencees sat. She was hanging on to a BBC lighting trolley and was wheeled around the gallery by a BBC technician, naked, but within the law, as she was not moving, but being moved".
The Daily Express was outraged, not least because Harewood, who was attending, was the Queen's cousin. Duncan Macrae, the actor, lamented that "if these people wanted to cause a sensation they would have been better advised to have gone to the Rangers-Celtic football match and thrown bottles at the referee. I did not appreciate the scene."
In 1965, Allen Ginsberg staged his "International Poetry Incarnation" in the Albert Hall in London, which was immortalised in Peter Whitehead's documentary Wholly Communion, and which became an iconic image for the new "Beat" tendency in literature and performance. In many ways the Edinburgh international writers' conference paved the way for Ginsberg's celebration; and in its own way was even more controversial than the "shock strip" (Sunday Mirror) in 1963.
The five-day event was scheduled for the 20th to the 24th of August, and Calder assembled a staggeringly eclectic line of speakers: established novelists and poets, new voices, prominent critics.
Like every festival director, he suffered from last-minute cancellations (Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell) and the purse-lipped scepticism of the establishment. But firmly on-side was the Scotsman's then arts and features writer, Magnus Magnusson, who summarised the opening with typical eloquence: "Everything went wrong. Crowds were still milling outside the hall long after the advertised starting time. Microphones sulked. The speech of welcome, on tape, didn't materialise. Promised stars failed to turn up. And yet, despite all this – or even because of it – the first international writers' conference to be held at the Edinburgh festival got off to a splendid start."
Full story at The Guardian

No comments: