A harvest of literary talent
For one weekend every year a sleepy village in Wales is transformed as the Hay-On-Wye literary festival descends, as Holly Williams discovered.
The Hay Festival might not seem to have much in common with your classic summer festival – there’s no danger here of anyone dressed as a fairy offering you drugs, the toilets are a civilized affair and the focus is on general books rather than raucous rock. But arriving on the Saturday morning, there is one thing already in common – mud. Well, this is Wales after all, and returning to my soggy homeland, I’d expect nothing less.
When Bill Clinton visited the festival a few years ago, he declared it ‘the Woodstock of the mind’, and while this has become its most over-used tagline, the name holds some truth. The festival, which started in 1988, has grown massively and now includes a truly diverse and inspiring line-up, taking in politicians and poets, artists and actors, comedians and columnists, and even the odd raucous rock band, suggesting that it has as more to offer than initially meets the eye. While the first event I went to was mostly populated by oldies in anoraks, happily clutching their free Guardian Reviews (the paper sponsors the whole event, a fact it would be impossible to remain oblivious to) the Hay Festival has much to offer the intrepid student. I say intrepid, because it is a bit of trek from York – or anywhere really – to Hay-on-Wye, a market town on the Welsh border. But although this might be a bit of an effort, with the chance of free tickets for students and a line-up that really does rival your average musical festival (PJ Harvey, Zadie Smith, Jimmy Carr, Beth Orton, Al Gore and Seamus Heaney to name but a few) it seems a shame there aren’t more young faces about.
Their conversation was lively, and Saunders came across as that rare breed, the self-deprecating American: his response to Smith eulogising his style was to suggest that “the style thing was a gradual embracing of my own defects”. He continually – and with great humor - played down his own intelligence, and saw his personal style as the product of failing to be able to write like anyone he admired. Saunders impulse is “primarily comedic”, yet he also explored the growing need, coming with age, to be less cynical, to get away from the “automatic, dysfunctional ‘life sucks’ attitude of American fiction.” But being positive about life without being gushy ain’t easy, and he left us pondering the question “How do you stay funny, stay taught, while wanting to get in some of the luminosity of life?”
With the afternoon turning out a bit sunnier, we headed into the town of Hay-on-Wye itself, a town dedicated to books. Despite appearing small enough to explore in an afternoon, there are over 30 bookshops, making it a browser’s paradise and great for getting hold of course books on the cheap. The town was heaving, and alive with buskers and street-theatre, on what is surely the only week of the year any of the bookshops can make a profit. The town is over-looked by the castle, and up there too is the heart-warming Honesty Bookshop – basically bookshelves, a couple of tin money boxes and a bit of faith in human nature.
Our stimulating first day continued back at the festival site (a field) with Germaine Greer. Having reservations about her, and her apparent courting of controversial topics (all that stuff about beautiful little boys seemed somewhat suspicious…) I was pleasantly surprised. Giving her annual poetry master class, she explored the idea that “poetry is a masculine invention” through a detailed analysis of John Donne’s 19th Elegy. From the very beginning she acknowledged our likely reaction to this “knee-jerk subject” , and was keen to make clear that she wasn’t slagging off men. Instead she looked at the way the poem represented the confrontational sexual relationships between men and women. An excellent speaker, she took a rigorous but entertaining approach and the hour was like just a really, really good university lecture - although she still managed to elicit the odd shockwave; the woman sitting next me gasped at the pertinent observation that “an erect prick has no conscience”.
Perhaps these literary types have a bit of a pre-occupation with erections. Andrew Davies, screenwriter for all those nice BBC dramas (the legendary Pride and Prejudice, the addictive Bleak House and the beautiful, er, Line of Beauty), was asked about the same topic by interviewer Peter Florence: “Is it true that in Pride and Prejudice you included the direction ‘Darcy looks at Elizabeth and gets a hard-on?’” Davies answered with a resounding “Yes”.
Stressing the importance of sex in adaptations, Davies suggested that for something to work on screen, you have to get the sex on the spine of the story. “Writers are scared of sex, and kid themselves it’s not centrally important which it always is. Until you get to my age when wine is much more important.” Jovial throughout, Davies never took himself too seriously, even singing the soundtrack to a scene from Line of Beauty when the technical equipment failed. Sadly, the same could not be said for interviewer Peter Florence, whose convoluted and often pretentious questions were a confusion to the audience and guests alike. Florence established the festival 18 years ago, with the winnings from a poker game, and is to be thanked for doing so. However, as the only speaker I saw that was on the annoying side of intellectual, he should really let someone else interview, and just silently bask in the glory of having set the whole thing up.
If the festival sounds all a bit cerebral, then a welcome change can be found in Gifford’s Circus. Just outside of the town, its new show, Joplin! takes place in proper big top and includes horses, hula-hooping and classic clowning, keeping true to its 1930’s, village green, circus aesthetic. With its inspiration being the “all out performance style and full-tilt rock&roll life of Janis Joplin” the show featured Cossack dancers in Jimi Hendrix outfits, an opera singing horse rider and the most impressive acrobatics I’ve ever seen (two people juggling their own children with their feet), the show constantly took your breath away, or slapped a great big smile on your face. And there was plenty of cause to smile after the show was over, as we were invited to join the circus folk for an after-party in the sawdust of the circus ring. With established ska band The Trojans providing some funky live sounds, we enjoyed the unique opportunity to skank with Will Self in a big top (well, next to him anyway!) and it was late night before we wended our way home through the windy back lanes.
The next night also provided entertainment, in the poetry gala on site where 8 poets had 8 minutes each to read some of their work. While the gala boasted big names, in Seamus Heaney and Margaret Atwood, it was actually the new - and distressingly young and beautiful - faces whose work made the most impact. Tishani Doshi’s poetry of dislocation tackled both personal crisis and issues of culture and gender, while Owen Shears work seemed appropriate, with the first poem dealing with sheep castration! The evening ended with the marvelous Hugo Williams, twinkly in tweed and jeans, providing properly funny, very intelligent, laugh-out-loud poetry.
Both Atwood and Heaney proved more interesting within their own session however, and Atwood’s deliciously dry reading from her new darkly comic “short fiction” collection, the aptly named The Tent, prompted me to head to the on-site bookshop immediately after the session. Heaney discussed his latest work, District and Circle, with an ex-pupil, the teasing Welsh Laureate Gwyneth Lewis. A calm and incredibly modest man, for someone who’s already won the Nobel Prize for literature, Heaney spoke of the “sweet electricity of gratitude and fulfillment” that comes with completing a poem.
With the new addition of a cinema tent this year, the festival is going hi-tech, and this proved especially useful in Ronald Harwood’s talk. Playwright and screenwriter, Harwood is best known for his literary adaptations for Polanski films (The Pianist, Oliver Twist) and we gained unique insight into their working relationship, as Polanski made an appearance himself, via live satellite link from Paris. They were clearly a close collaborative team and the slightly odd Polanski described their relationship as being like a pair of tango dancers: “it’s a question of, as they say, “good vibes!’” These two intensive creative forces also share a Jewish connection (“we tell a lot of Jewish jokes while working”) and the holocaust is clearly a pre-occupation for them both, with Harwood’s conviction that you cannot “remind the world enough of the holocaust”, even if we don’t want to be reminded. For Polanski, of course, the subject is an intensely personal one. He described how the scene in The Pianist where the protagonist is pulled out of the crowd heading for the concentration camp and told, when escaping, “don’t run – walk” by a helping solider was directly based on his own war-time experience in Krakow. Yet, again, the conversation was thoroughly enjoyable to listen to, and the two men engaged in a bit of banter, and were full of anecdotes. Harwood described his struggle with adapting the pianist: “I said, ‘Roman, I don’t know where to begin’. He said, ‘Look, it’s called the Pianist. Start with him playing the piano.’”
My Hay Festival experience came to end, after several more inspiring speakers, with the electronic, imaginative noodlings of Wales’ own Super Furry Animals. The restrained nature of the audience, who mostly stayed in their seats, meant that strolling to the front of the crowd was easily done and there was plenty of room for a good boogie – although I did seem to be standing next to the only two people left in the world for whom head banging is still the preferred dance move. The ‘Furries didn’t disappoint, and dancing was done to some classic hits, including ‘Juxtaposed with U’ and the anthemic ‘The Man Don’t Give a Fuck’. Always sure to provide a good show, Gruff and co were dressed in shiny blue satin boiler suits and projected a little video montage of the Hay Festival, as well as a live feed of them careering around the site in a little truck, which eventually drove into a van and away.
As they waved goodbye to us, via video, I knew I had to wave goodbye to Hay as well, and get back to my course reading and essays and all you’re expected to get on with during reading week. Still, I don’t think anything could be more inspiring, or so successfully get me thinking and reading and writing. And I’m certainly planning to brave the mud again next year.
