Cheltenham Festivals blog archives

4 months
3 weeks ago

It’s the last day of the Festival. For me, these nine days have been a whirl of literary, philosophical and historical debate. People occasionally popped up in the Writers’ Room offering shots of whisky to an eager crowd. I chatted to strangers and made new friends. I spotted celebrities and didn’t have the courage to go and say hello. I bought books by great writers and wondered when I’ll get time to read them all. And I wandered around the streets of Cheltenham on sunny autumn days, marvelling at the stark and sudden division of posh and poor.

A week ago I was immersed in William Dalrymple’s hour-long narrative on marginalised lives in India. The writer sat on the stage, a master storyteller, filling his glass of red wine as soon as it was a quarter emptied, and spun tales to a hushed and hypnotised main hall; we were as charmed as rattlesnakes. I walked out with the taste of the stories still in my mouth, and had odd dreams that night involving skull collectors and blind men singing in divine voices. Despite being intelligent, rational grown-ups, most people still find it easy to suspend disbelief and surrender to a world of a tale, whether true or not. We go on journeys through books, films and TV programmes, and sometimes even forget we are not actively taking part in them. I thought about this as I listened to and laughed with David Mitchell and Robert Webb as if they were old friends. The illusion of knowing actors or writers personally persists because though reading their books or watching their work on the screen, we feel as if we’ve been there with them, that we were part of their world, that they’ve spoken to us personally.

A highlight for me was the day programmed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I learned about new African writers, their books on top of my reading pile. Adichie herself was a charming speaker, and she talked about her identity in a way that confirmed my idea of similarities in the mentality of the third and second (i.e. Balkan and Eurasian) worlds. When she moved to the US Adichie was confronted by a number of labels: she was seen as ‘black’ and ‘African’, though they were categories in which she’d never placed herself before. So far, she had simply been Chimamanda, nationally a Nigerian. When I came to the UK from Bosnia, I was surprised to find I was seen as an ‘Eastern European’ or a ‘Slav’. I had always seen myself as just me, a girl from Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. ‘Identity is not something you come up with by yourself,’ said Adichie. ‘It’s something other people stick onto you.’

Identity was also tackled on Alice Roberts’ day, though in a slightly different context, when she and Stephen Oppenheimer discussed the basics of human evolution and migration in a fascinating presentation on humanity’s exit out of Africa and its subsequent dispersion across the globe. It felt heartening to find that we all stem from the same root — literally, through our DNA — and that our divisions are but an illusion.

Yesterday, I got passionate about the subject of organ donation and presumed consent (I am for it). I’d never considered our impulse to feel possessive of our bodies, even after we are dead. This thing we go about in is so fragile at the best of times that one never knows who will need to donate or be donated to, in their lifetime. I walked out of the event thinking that ethics and debate are a luxury for those of us who are healthy.

Finally, it was A L Kennedy who tackled what we were all here for in the first place: words. Her one-woman theatre show gives words to us all; words that heal us, liberate us and make us escape from our (possibly dreary) lives. ‘Words’ is an elegant weaving of comedy and pathos, and Kennedy cleverly avoids the show’s poignancy ever being saddled with sentimentality. Instead she empowers the audience to own their words and wear them as jewels, but more than anything to know their power. A subtle political message is woven through when Kennedy invites us to consider the absurd phrase ‘A Repetitive Administration of Legitimate Force’; it’s a phrase that at an innocent glance appears to have something to do with filing papers in an office, but that on better consideration actually means torture until death. It was a phrase — and method — that was used by US anti-terrorist squads throughout the Bush regime, and that, as news surface over this weekend, was also present in the vocabulary of Tony Blair’s government. Kennedy is right: words have immense power, in ordinary life and in politics. But she also points out their beauty. Words are a tool for expressing love and they nurture the imagination. Her show underlined, for me, what book festivals are all about: people who love words, coming together. So enjoy the Festival’s last day and come back next year to celebrate more words.

Vesna Maric is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Vesna Maric, Kapka Kassabova and Sathnam Sanghera in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Vesna’s latest book is Bluebird published by Granta Books.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Sunday 18 October 2009.

4 months
3 weeks ago

Mad, Bad and Sad

Madness was in the air today — in a nice, literary way. Two talks were inspired by psychological disturbance, and the poets Don Paterson and Owen Sheers promised me to try and ‘naturally exude mental illness’ at their reading to fit in with my topic. They didn’t. They exuded pitch-perfect poetry, which is why the Poetry Café was full. And why I regretfully zoom past them and skip to the nineteenth century.

This is where we find the classic mad woman in the attic — Mrs Rochester, described by her husband as ‘intemperate and unchaste’. The three writers and psychiatrists in the ‘Madness: a fiction?’ discussion led by Vivienne Parry agreed that the nineteenth century wasn’t a good place to be considered insane. Even Jane Eyre hears voices in her head, but that was seen as normal. Which immediately leads to the question of what is sane and insane, normal and abnormal. The psycho-literary plot thickens when you read the ‘prequel’ to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea — a magnificently imagined colonial answer to the Victorian puzzle of Mrs Rochester. It’s fitting that the author, Jean Rhys, was herself a magnificent fruitcake.

Next on the couch was The Woman in White, perhaps the first Victorian novel to raise awareness of mental illness and the effects of institutionalisation — namely that if you weren’t already barking when you went in, you were when you came out. One panellist suggested that simply being a Victorian female could be a liability. Hysteria, a female affliction in Freudian terms, comes from the Greek word for womb. And did you know, Vivienne Parry said, that the vibrator was invented in the 1880s as a cure for ‘blocked wombs’?

But we digress. Lisa Apiganensi, author of the superb study of mental illness through history, Mad, Bad and Sad, redressed the gender balance by reminding us of the rich English literary history of male lunatics. For every Ophelia, there is a Hamlet.

And then, at the mild end of the madness spectrum, there is Madame Bovary who simply suffers from extreme dissatisfaction, coupled with extreme fantasising. It’s a bittersweet cocktail of romanticism and realism, and the condition has become known as Bovarism. Emma Bovary’s disturbances are psychosomatic — just like Flaubert’s nervous breakdowns. While he wrote the scene of Emma’s suicide with arsenic, culminating with black bile coming out of her mouth, he became violently ill. When he declared ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’, he wasn’t exaggerating. The French Romantic poet Rimbaud called this a ‘systematic derangement of the senses’ and believed it compulsory for artists. But then he died young — a good career move.

Not so with the English Romantic poet John Clare. He lived long, went mad, wrote stunning poetry, and was forgotten. His derangement wasn’t systematic — it was genuine. It started with the ‘English malady’ known as melancholia, and ended with extravagant delusions. He believed he was Shakespeare and Byron — at the same time. When he sent his last poems to a publisher, he was told that only cookery books were being published these days. All this I learned from the gripping talk by John Clare’s biographer Jonathan Bate and novelist Adam Foulds who has imagined the poet’s last years in his A Quickening Maze.

They have brought to life a great Romantic soul who, in his darkest hour, dreamt of going to a place somewhere…

‘Untroubling and untroubled where I lie. The grass below — above the vaulted sky.’

And in all these words — the poet’s, the novelist’s, the biographer’s — we have the exact antithesis of mad, bad and sad. We have sanity, humanity, and hope. In other words, we have books.

Kapka Kassabova is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Kapka Kassabova, Vesna Maric and Sathnam Sanghera in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Kapka’s latest book is Street Without a Name published by Portobello Books.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Saturday 17 October 2009.

4 months
3 weeks ago

I’ve admired Elizabeth Jane Howard, the author, one-time director of the Cheltenham Literature Festival, and former wife of the late Kingsley Amis, ever since I heard her opining, on Radio 4, on my favourite subject: the agony of writing. And sure enough, it wasn’t long into her talk on Thursday that she returned to the theme. ‘Writing is difficult for me,’ she remarked, sitting perched on a mobility scooter. ‘I’m very slow, I don’t write easily, and I envy people who love writing. I feel awful when I don’t write but then I feel pretty awful when I do write. It’s like trying to punch a whole into a tin of condensed milk.’

Of course, finding something difficult doesn’t mean that you don’t want to do it, and Howard, now in her eighties, has always been incredibly driven. A famous beauty, she married young and, after a series of affairs, left her first husband and daughter to become a writer in 1947. ‘I moved to a flat in Bayswater. I was selfishly determined to be a writer at any cost. I always wanted to write. I remember writing my first story at the age of seven. It was the story of the nativity written from the view of the innkeeper. My grandmother summoned the servants on a Sunday afternoon and read the story to them. I remember feeling terribly embarrassed.’ Given this intensity of ambition, her success must have been very pleasing? ‘Well, I had quiet success, I was not a bestseller or winner of prizes. But it felt good to be able to carry on.’

She was being modest: the sell-out crowd was proof that she has done more than just ‘carry on’ writing. She has now penned 12 novels and a frank memoir entitled Slipstream. Though her productivity did fall while she was married to Kingsley Amis. ‘It was hard to write at all when we were married, what with the three stepkids and other commitments. I remember saying to him in advance that I couldn’t iron shirts, which was a complete lie, but at least I didn’t have to do that. But being a step mother is time-consuming, and then stepchildren started having girlfriends and boyfriends which meant making dinner for 12 people at times. But Kingsley was very funny to be with, which was great. Also, I had a writing block for a long time.’

A block that is clearly no longer a problem. Howard spoke at length about, Love All, her latest novel, dismissing the sniping of a reviewer who remarked that the title made it sound like ‘the biography of a lesbian tennis player’. ‘Some people were rather rude about the title. But I like it! The book is about the consequences of the absence of love on various levels… sexual, intellectual and so on, and the damage it does. Love is the single most important thing people can have.’

Did her mother, Kit, a composer’s daughter, who gave up her career as a dancer in the Ballet Rambert for marriage to Howard’s father, an inspiration for the book?. ‘Well, I don’t think she cared for me much. She loved her sons. It took me a long time to get out on the other side of that. I think she had a very sad life, giving up work for marriage. I think she always regretted that, but she was a victim of her times.’ It’s a theme Howard will be returning to in her next novel, which will explore the tension between careers and homelife in three generations of women. ‘People imagine it has changed more than it has.’

Sathnam Sanghera is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Sathnam Sanghera, Kapka Kassabova and Vesna Maric in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Sathnam’s latest book is The Boy with the Topknot published by Penguin.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Friday 16 October 2009.