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This is the season when literary festivals start to happen all over the UK. From the highlands of Scotland to the South London lowlands of Deptford, there are book festivals for every taste and tribe. Festivals devoted to crime fiction, women writers, LGBTQ writers and young novelists. Even old Marxists are having their own summer festival. I’m thinking of starting a literary festival for neglected and bitter writers like me who don’t get invited to literary festivals.
I ask myself: why should I care? But I do. I spend long nights of self-torment scrolling through the lists of people appearing at various festivals and shouting at my laptop screen: who the fuck is he? What has she written? Why is Bono there and not me? For heaven’s sake, who invited Minnie Driver?!
I failed to get invited to the two biggies of the festival season — the Hay festival and the Cheltenham Literature festival. For writers, appearing at Hay or the Cheltenham Festival is a social must; it’s like skiing in Gstaad or schmoozing at Davos. You’re a nobody if you’re not invited. Friends ask if I’m doing any of the book festivals this year. They know that I’m not, they just want to tell me they’ve been invited. Writers love literary festivals. For starters you don’t have to write, you can get pissed and party and not feel guilty that you’re not in your dark study trying to finish that damn novel. You can go out and play.
But the real prize is this: you get a chance to sit in a large room, a tent or a field full of people and just talk about yourself — your life, your work, your new book — in front of people who have actually paid money to hear you talk about yourself! And these same people who paid to hear you talk about yourself, will pay for a copy of your new book!
These in-conversations with celebrated writers promise to be “thought-provoking” and “insightful” about literature and the great social issues of the day. But it’s usually just bland chit-chat, PR puffery. The reality of these conversations is that some shameless, sycophantic interviewer — often a friend — asks safe and bland questions in front of an audience of adoring literary groupies. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with adoring literary groupies — as long as it’s you being adored.
But it’s curious how intelligent, cultured and sophisticated people, in the presence of a literary star – a Zadie Smith or a Salman Rushdie — transform before your very eyes into drooling, adoring fan-boy types. People will suck up just any old nonsense from a big name: I remember at one in-conversation event hearing Gore Vidal blame America for starting the Cold War and the audience of Gore groupies just sat there in adoring silence. I got to my feet and suggested to His Highness that maybe Joseph Stalin might have had something to do with the origins of the Cold War — and was told by the audience to sit down and shut up.
If you actually look at the number of events devoted to literature at a so-called literary festival there are very few. For every literary writer on the bill you’ll find a dozen celebrity actors, pop singers, cooks, journalists and TV personalities who have a new book that needs to be promoted.
The great fear of every literary festival is a fear of not being fun. So there are usually a smattering of men on stilts wandering aimlessly around as kids line up to have their faces painted. And there are “fun” events for all the family. At Hay there was an event called “Theraplay” — which is a way of “playing with your child which builds and enhances attachment, self-esteem and trust in each other.” That’s fun?
Actually, a truly literary festival shouldn’t be fun. Writing isn’t fun. Reading isn’t fun. I didn’t spend the best years of my youth reading Kafka, Proust, Dostoevsky, Bellow and Roth for fun. Hell no, I wanted to be complex, dark, moody and depressed. But well-read. And the truth is writers aren’t fun — they’re miserable egotists and that’s why we write.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2023 World edition.
