There are no festivals like literary festivals, book festivals, writer’s festivals. Not for me, anyhow. The music festivals I have attended you could pretty much tie into a bundle with twine and shelve, only to review should you need a general idea of what young people look like today. Music festivals are heavily scattered with depressingly cool young men, thin and longhaired, tanned and overwhelmingly pleasant – however much you are determined for them not to be. The girls are equally as young, citrussy, femininely eccentric, on the whole damn fine to look at if teetering on the grubby. One of the few encouraging aspects of this is that you can squint at them all for a short time and pretend that the eighties never happened. But the joy of rolling about in a field at various stages of inebriation with “cool people” is perhaps a topic for another time. I just thought it useful to draw the (lack-of) parallels between one particular genre of festival and another.
I have frequented the Guardian Hay Festival for some years now. One of the increasing advantages of living on the lobed estuary banks of Newport is that you can get there in a little over an hour. I have found it a fantastic opportunity to see writers that you would not otherwise get to see – John Updike, Norman Mailer, David Hare etc. but also have enjoyed the chance to be among other writers and readers. Or so I tell myself on the way up there, and so I keep telling myself on the way back from there. What you actually get in Hay, now the most significant book festival in the world, is a convergence of the white middle-classes who swarm upon a very white very middle class village that is split up between rowdy farmers and professionally retired bookshop owners. Now the rowdy farmers, who seem to make themselves heard around the pubs of the town after dark, I can happily deal with – living all these years in Newport has taught me some very handy lessons about the drinking classes. It is the white middle-classes that I find are the troublemakers, the slowly creeping well-spoken armies of the bourgeoisie. Anyone who has been to somewhere like the Hay festival has seen them. They are normally flannel-jacketed, high-nosed, something tucked under their arm like a copy of the New Statesman or a wine catalogue. They are fervently left wing but also are more than happy in conversation to allow their lack of black friends to be supplemented by their support for free trade coffee. These people scoff at you if you ask if there is anyone sitting in that empty chair, these people have no time to listen only to speak, they have dreary horribly empty lives that they are convinced are interesting and worthy. (Actually, accept for the income bracket, very similar characteristics to my own).
Being someone who swears uncontrollably whenever out of sight of a church, someone who drinks glutinously whenever threatened with a crowded public space, whose foibles have made him so grossly opinionated and forthright with them, I cannot help but feel my own distaste at the clientele of Hay is partly of my own tragic making. Nobody else seems to complain about it. And I cannot sit here and honestly say that I do not feel absolutely displaced when I am there. For here are people I can discuss things with, people I can share love and disdain and butt heads with. And that is what being educated is all about, surely, rather than just sitting on a tube train for twenty percent of your waking day as reward for impressing your employer more than anyone else with your collection of exam certificates.
But still, whenever I am actually at Hay I find myself coming back to the question of myself – I have nothing in common with these people. I am not middle class, my jowls are not dragged toward the floor with the weight of my academic achievements, I don’t drink tea and I don’t go walking in the Highlands every summer. I don’t have a daughter studying in Paris, I am not on a Trustees Board with Carole Ann Duffy, I am quite unlikely to make my own bread or ever write to the Guardian to correct a reviewer on his spelling of a place name in an Anthony Beevor book. But there I find myself, snarling and grubby, softly effusive, but ultimately extremely happy to be there.
I suppose it is quite easy to analyse me and conclude that I long to be a part of a societal group that I neither have the intellect, concentration or real will power ever to emulate. And this could be correct. But it could only be correct for those few days of the year. The world of the literati has always fascinated me, astute minds brandishing ideas meeting with likewise intellects, groups of highly talented writers infusing each other as much with ego as respect. The Beats, Bloomsbury lot, The Inklings – I have dreamed at certain points of my life of being part of a strong and dynamic group such as this. But these groups are rarely friendly atmospheres, really, (how could they possibly be competitive, intellectual, copulating and friends all at the same time?), and it seems more likely that Vonnegut was more comfortable than Kerouac, Dorothy Sayers more creative than Charles Williams, and the disintegration of the Bloomsbury Group is that of legend.
No. I actually believe nowadays that I am to be one of those lonely painters that lives in a box of paints and am in no need of some overpowering Gaugin to tell me I need to arch my wrist more in order to capture the light. For someone as young as I am, I have written with a serious artistic intent for many years, and I have gotten by without any of that. So perhaps it riles me, perhaps it amuses me, when sat in the on-site bar this year two charming young girls that I encountered refused to believe I was a writer – refused even more to believe I was performing at the festival fringe. They did not think I was articulate enough to be a writer, my tongue was too coarse and my humour was unambiguously direct. My humour and my tongue I can put down to some good hard living in as many ways as my upbringing would allow, my inarticulacy I could happily put down to the six pints of Stowfords Press, but their idea of what a writer would look like and act like was something that lay not in me but in some strange high-nosed, flannel-jacketed ideal. I have gathered my heroes from the sentences they have constructed, but there is something about Hay that has become more of the middle-class ideal than the hard-working man of letters.