Our world is awash with stories,” said Philip Pullman, discussing fiction at last week’s Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival — a statement resoundingly confirmed by this brilliant eight-day celebration of all that’s best in our phenomenally varied literary culture.
A festival that started with John Mortimer, Alan Hollinghurst and Kazuo Ishiguro (plus Ned Sherrin on comic quotations) was rounded off the following Sunday by Zadie Smith, David Mitchell and P D James: writers at the top of their powers, providing revealing, entertaining insights into how writing and reading affects their lives. In between, 250 writers came to the city, and more than 25,000 visitors flocked to hear them.
Passionate debates covered subjects such as the arts (“As you cannot access someone else’s feelings,” argued John Carey, “it is impossible to evaluate some else’s experience of art”); the influence of the 1960s (“I managed to miss it,” said Ferdinand Mount. “I was so square, I was cubic”); the British constitution (“I thought you were going to stop talking?” said Peter Hitchens to Denis MacShane MP); and the human brain (“You’re nothing but a pack of neurons,” said Rose to us all).
Sometimes, festival goers appeared to be in on the story themselves, as when Mark Warby QC revealed on stage to George Galloway MP that Galloway’s opponents in his libel action had just won the right to appeal. David Mitchell, reading from his work in progress, was editing bits as he went along. On the day one of our largest supermarkets announced its results, subliminal advertising came up in Steven Rose and Guy Claxton’s discussion of the brain. “Don’t you know that ‘The world will shop at Tesco!’ is being beamed into this event,” Claxton suggested cheerfully. (For chairman Colin Blakemore, “supra-liminal advertising was quite worrying enough”.)
There was an intriguingly confessional aspect to some interviews. Although Proust has influenced him profoundly, said Ishiguro, he has yet to finish him: “I started when I was 19, and let’s just say I’m still reading it.” Hollinghurst, asked from the floor about the influence of Foucault on his work, was similarly frank: “I’m afraid I’ve never read him.” What he did reveal was a thwarted desire to be an architect; the country house in his Man Booker-winning novel is drawn on Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire.
Addressing a heritage under greater threat was Dan Cruickshank: “Looting is the great problem in northern Iraq, but objects can be found there that are worth a year’s wages.” Iraq’s recent political history was brilliantly scrutinised by Jon Lee Anderson; and African politics were powerfully considered by a panel including Aminatta Forna and Christina Lamb.
“We tend to think of celebrities as a modern phenomenon,” said Paula Byrne, challenging this notion as she revealed how newspapers tracked every minute of the actress and writer Mary Robinson’s thrilling 18th-century life. G P Taylor, the author of Shadowmancer, revealed a downside of modern celebrity that Robinson didn’t face: finding intimate items of his clothing up for sale on eBay: “But they were boxer shorts (signed), and I never wear them, so they can’t have been mine. And they went for £240.”
Sometimes, eminent specialists revealed how new developments in their own field had taken them by surprise. “When I was first informed that hippopotamuses’ closest living relatives were whales,” revealed Richard Dawkins, “I flatly refused to believe it.” And sometimes there was a pleasing sense of touching history: questioned about Ernest Bevin, John Julius Norwich boomed: “Oh, we all adored Ernie. He looked like a chunk of unhewn rock, and he fell in love with my mother (Lady Diana Cooper). I was 15 at the time, and I used to sit round the piano singing songs with him.”
The past was under scrutiny by Andrew Roberts and Richard Holmes, Diarmaid MacCulloch and David Starkey. The biographers, too, were looking at their subjects’ place in history. “It would be 50 years, Matisse reckoned, before the public would respond to his work,” said Hilary Spurling; Tony Blair, said Peter Stothard in his TLS lecture, “writes more of his speeches, and cares more about them, than any politician since Churchill”.
Discussing language, Jasper Fforde read Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” backwards (“You see, it sounds exactly the same”), and, that evening, actresses including Charlotte Rampling read poems with stunning force — the right way round. At the festival banquet Melvyn Bragg paid tribute to the Oxford writers who have contributed most to our mother tongue.
“This is a very great age for children’s literature,” said the Archibishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, discussing the subject with his wife Jane; and parents of the many excited children at the festival would no doubt agree. Only a fraction of the festival’s pleasures can be mentioned here, in what was an elatingly powerful display of the written word — for all ages.
[© Times, 24/04/05]
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