Edinburgh Festival
Aspects of the Novelist
By SIMON RAVEN
HE International Writers' Conference in Edinburgh was billed to undertake five ses- sions of public discussion in a vast mausoleum called the McEwan Hall. Four of the sessions had to do with the contemporary novel, one (the second) with 'Scottish Writing Today': even during the latter the hall was never less than half
full, while on each of the other three afternoons I was there tickets for 5s. and upward were sold for almost every seat other than those behind the massive columns which propped the place up. Incredible as it may seem, several thousand
people were prepared to pay hard cash to look and listen, the majority of them making it plain, by courteous attention and generous applause, that they thought they were getting their money's worth.
And so they were. For in a perverse and hideous way the assembled writers (mostly novelists, but with a handful of poets and assorted commentators) succeeded in filling the role of theatrical entertainers. This success was not immediately obvious; it was the slow and cumulative effect of emerging contrasts—of honesty contrasted with glibness, modesty with vanity, the laconic with the prolix, petty squabbles with statements of high dignity. Thus Angus Wilson led off on the first day with a witty,
squeaky little speech about corruption: the
traditional theme of the novel, he said, could be summed up as the seduction of the innocent milkmaid by the city slicker (or urban intellec- tual) down for the weekend. Mary McCarthy followed up, between grunts, with some equally palatable generalisations (`the Italian novel seems to me to have become a branch of the Italian film'), and by now it seemed as if the stage were set for an afternoon of academic virtuosity. Not
a bit of it. Hal Porter from Australia, looking like a discredited ex-officer of the RAOC, com-
plained that all this was too clever by half, he
couldn't understand a word of it, he never troubled his head with such matters, etc. etc. This
contemptible speech had its ovation—and rightly
so, in a sense, because it did issue a challenge. Very well then: we were to have some tilting between the intellectuals and the philistines. But once again, not a bit of it. Porter's gauntlet lay ignored while a po-faced Dutchman announced, a propos of nothing at all, that he was homo- sexual, and Dame Rebecca West confessed that she would not have been at all sorry if all critics currently writing had been strangled at birth. But by this time the form was plain: instead of coherent debate, there were to be isolated and inconsequential attitudes, which, however, would readily lend themselves to the piquant and in- structive process of contrast which I mentioned above.
Only on the second day (Scottish Writing) was there a more or less constant theme; and since this seemed to be Scottish Nationalism (intro- duced, with a kind of crazed pungency, by Hugh MacDiarmid) the less said the better. On the third day we rose again to the random diffusion of attitudes: invited to talk about Commitment, Izhar Smilansky (Israel) wanted to give us all a life sentence in a kibbutz to teach us simplicity, Khushwa,nt Singh (India) was violently applauded for his pretty reading of a long quotation, the po-faced Dutchman reminded us he was homo- sexual, I myself mentioned money the only time the word was heard during the entire con- ference (then Rosamund Lehmann followed, marmoreal and magnificent, speaking up gallantly for the after-life, and Dame Rebecca West said she was tired of the conference and wanted to go home. There was nothing I know of to stop her, but she was still there the next day, which was devoted to Censorship. We all disapproved of this, for the highest reasons, of course, though Norman Mailer conceded that an over-sophisti- cated literature might damage a country's military potential and Stephen Spender, the veteran Con- ferer, pointed out that books could do harm as well as good. Muriel Spark, all gaiety and good- ness, maintained that no Catholic took the Index seriously and the po-faced Dutchman spoke at length about nudity (did it give offence?), and another Dutchman just spoke at length. What no one had the brass neck to say, until a self-confessed pornographer came up from the audience to shame us all, was that sex was (a) fun, and (b) funny, so let's all stop being mealy-mouthed--this, I should have thought, with particular reference to M. Maurice Giro- dias, who had prosily preceded him. Colin MacInnes made sense about indirect forms of censorship, notably that exercised by puritanical printers, but by that time I had a splitting head- ache and wanted to go home, which, unlike Dame Rebecca, I promptly did.
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