Insatiable quest for knowledge
Henrietta Bredin on how we have succumbed to a craze for self-improvement
During the month of March you could, if you wished. attend a talk on any of the following: 'Wagner's Das Rheingold', 'Plants of the Himalayas', 'Austria and the Legacy of National Socialism', 'Crossing Antarctica by the Longest Route', The Peppered Moth Controversy', 'Mining in the Former USSR' or 'Vuillard's Intimate Interiors'. You could pop into the National Theatre in London to hear Alan Ayckbourn reveal some tricks of the play-maker's craft or head for the Grosvenor Museum in Chester, where Elisabeth Parry will be describing her last view of the Yangtze Kiang before the flooding of the great gorges.
The entire nation seems to be caught up in a positively Victorian passion for selfimprovement by public lecture. There seems to be no end to people's appetite for acquiring new knowledge, or at any rate witnessing other people display theirs. It's all of a piece with the ever-burgeoning book-group phenomenon. Admittedly, on that front, things have calmed down a little since the heady days of super-specialism (the group that read only the novels of Henry James), of competitive cooking (the group where the hostess spent the entire day sweating over a hot oven in order to be able to offer her co-readers a helping of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's macaroni pie, so lovingly described in The Leopard), or of themed travel (the group that went to Paris to appreciate fully the art of flaning as propounded by Julian Barnes in Metro/and). However, the urge to meet up with friends to discuss a book that everyone has read remains strong. Jim Naughtie's monthly Radio Four slot, Book Club, is clearly in no danger of running out of candidates eager to go on air and share their thoughts on what they have been reading.
And the book-group habit naturally leads on to the stronger stuff — literary festivals. From Peter Florence's annual big-hitting two-week extravaganza at Hayon-Wye to Mary and Johnny James's Aldeburgh Bookshop weekends of talks and writers' workshops, the popularity of these events is astonishing. Is it simply the allure of the live event? The appeal of seeing and hearing writers, scientists, architects in the flesh?
There certainly is a feeling of getting closer to these people, of perhaps having the chance to ask a question and engage in a dialogue, to however limited an extent. Some of the more successful events are when the advertised guest is engaged in conversation by an intelligent and sympathetic interviewer. John Walsh talking to Carrie Fisher in one of the Hay Festival's offshoot series in London of talks by screenwriters seemed simultaneously stricken and captivated by her frightening combination of ricochet wit and raw vulnerability. This is a woman with no edges. She is open to, and immediately affected by, absolutely everything that comes her way.
Kicking off her shoes so that she could curl up in the corner of her chair, putting them on again the wrong way round, making self-deprecating grimaces, pushing her glasses on to the top of her head, getting them hooked up in her microphone, bursting with intelligence, shrewd and canny as hell but with a lifetime of falling headlong into a stream of shattering mistakes anyway, you felt that the audience were at one with Walsh, not sure whether to be fascinated or appalled by the can of worms that she opened up to general view with such seeming abandon. This was certainly an example of that feeling of getting closer to a person and her work. If you hear Ian McEwan reading an extract from a work in progress, you feel privileged to have been granted a sneak preview, and, as writers and publishers know, that makes you more likely to go out and buy the book when it appears. Theatres and opera and dance companies know this. too. I used to co-present a series of opera talks for the Sotheby's Institute and recruited a range of singers, conductors, directors and designers to help introduce operas that were coming up in the repertory of ENO, the Royal Opera or Glyndebourne (sadly nothing from further afield for a resolutely London-based audience). You could sense a frisson of pleasure as people felt that they were being given a private look behind the scenes. Their experience of performances was greatly enriched by the fact that they were in possession of (sometimes surprising) information from the people who were directly involved in them. Gwynne Howell described the surge of adrenaline and increased powers of concentration he derives from the sheer physical demands of singing. Conductor and repetiteur Paul Wynne Griffiths illustrated exactly how many layers of meaning and interpretation are packed into every bar of musical performance by getting everyone to learn and sing the first two lines from a chorus in Verdi's Attila. These sorts of insights are uniquely and often unpredictably illuminating.
So who is attending all these talks and lectures? It depends on a number of factors — time of day, cost, pulling-power of the speakers. Grey power is definitely in the ascendant for lunchtime lectures, many of them free of charge, particularly those introducing big exhibitions at the National Gallery, the Royal Academy or the Tate. But the audience members for the screenwriters' talks at the British Library this winter were predominantly in the 35-40 age-group; a lot of men sporting small, carefully shaped beards and ruthlessly rectangular glasses, and women with ergonomically moulded footwear and short, surprised-looking haircuts. The Daily Telegraph's series of lectures at the Royal Geographical Society are rather grand and formal, extremely well attended and highly professionally presented — no chance of upside-down slides here.
I wonder whether people who went to university are attempting to relive some of that experience and those who didn't are attempting to make up for the lack of it. That may be the case for courses of lectures such as those run by Sotheby's on 'English Furniture' or the 'History of the Art Market' (first term: 'From the Grand Tour to Napoleonic Looting'). Then there is the urge to be able to hold your own among people who seem to be annoyingly knowledgable; that could well propel you towards a French regional wine course run by Berry Bros and Rudd. Or maybe it's the realisation that going to the gym gets you out of the house but is agonisingly boring and can easily result in painful, inconvenient injury, whereas exercising the grey matter is stimulating, safe and a great deal more amusing.
Mixing holidays with self-improvement has long been a popular option — art tours to Florence and Venice, trips down the Rhine with lectures on board and guided visits to castles and palaces en route. With increasing interest, these are getting more and more specialised. You can undertake an in-depth study of the battlefields and their context on a Crimean War excursion, or follow in Wellington's footsteps on his Peninsula campaigns. Martin Randall, probably the leading UK specialist in this area, makes a point of gaining access for small groups to houses and private art collections that they wouldn't otherwise be able to see, and takes people to music festivals, concert series or operas with expert introductions to everything they'll be hearing, In April there's a Johann Sebastian Bach-fest, nine concerts in seven days, with an itinerary that dots about between Miihlhausen, Weimar and Leipzig. There are special gastronomic tours, botanical and ornithological trips, visits to archaeological excavations, a bewildering range of options.
But I see I have a free evening next week. Why not come and join me? either be learning about 'Hydrogen — Tomorrow's Fuel' or pondering the 'Management of International Migration'.
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