literature

in Sebald’s shadow

November 23, 2010

After Chatwin, a book that in some ways could not be more different – Will Self’s new Walking to Hollywood, which I’m also reviewing.  Compared to Chatwin’s self-consciously lean prose, Self is baroque, fecund and profuse – in fact, rather like that, always using three adjectives when one could do.  But both share a common interest in travel writing as essentially fictive.

Walking to Hollywood is heady stuff and the book has some brilliant flashes of genius as well as of over-indulgence.  One shadow looms large over it – that of WG Sebald, the German writer who lived for many years in England and died in 2001.

Reading it, I was reminded that earlier this year I went to hear Self give an intriguing lecture on Sebald – whom with the intimacy of a familiar he called Max;  he also pronounced his name to rhyme with ‘pay-cult’ (rather than ‘see-bald’), thereby elevating him to the pantheon of those writers like Borges whose name can only be pronounced properly by initiates … …

in Sebald’s shadowRead More »

Walking with ghosts

October 13, 2010

 

Reading Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful letters recently – see my review for the Independent – I came across a detail that brought me up short:  that Chatwin, while a mature student  at Edinburgh, used to go to Glen, the country house of the Tennant family near Innerleithen. He writes to the deeply eccentric recluse Stephen Tennant about it. 

So what?  Well I went there myself a great deal as a teenager, as the son of the household, Henry Tennant, was my closest friend.  It was a special place for me, about the only place I knew in Scotland, with its crazy Victorian Gothic castle and romantic glen leading up to a loch and trout stream where we used, ineffectually, to fish.

.

So the discovery that Chatwin used to go there as well had a special resonance.  Not least because the place has been in my thoughts as its then owner, Colin Tennant (Lord Glenconner), another eccentric member of the family, has just died – see Phillip Hoare’s obituary.  As a teenage boy, I found him a frightening but fascinating mixture of playboy charm and occasional irrascability;  he was a nightmare to partner at tennis.

It was not a happy time for Chatwin – he found academic archaeology stultifying, as I often do – and he left a cold Edinburgh flat prematurely, with little money left.  Glen was clearly a place of refuge for him; as it was for me.

Why do we like to think of our heroes as having trodden the same ground as we have?  Do they leave some footfall that we can pick up?  Walking with ghosts is something I increasingly find I do on my travels.

I sometimes go back to Glen as I know the current chatelaine, Tessa Tennant;  and the next time I do, I will be thinking of Chatwin as I walk up to the loch and the glen.

Reflections on Festivals

January 27, 2011

We are coming to the end of another bumper season of literary festivals.  From Hay to Edinburgh to Saffron Walden, it sometimes seems that every town and city in the land is getting out the French regional white wine to welcome writers.

At Cheltenham recently, where I was giving a session on travel writing, they told me that overall this year they had sold more than 100, 000 tickets before the festival had even begun – a staggering amount, and far more than they have in the past.

When VS Naipaul gave a talk there a few years ago, just after winning the Nobel Prize, he suggested that the growing success of such events is not accidental;  it is because the appetite for such highbrow literary debate is no longer being fed by the BBC.   And the Beeb could do well to pay more attention to the phenomenon.  There is talk of cutting Newsnight Review on BBC2, the last remnant of The Late Show enterprise that once lit up the channel.  Given that it only runs once a week, and after 11.00 at that, this hardly seems a sacrifice that is necessary to make.  And nor is the egregious Culture Show any substitute  – a much more lightweight magazine format, without the same sort of sustained debate that could make Newsnight Review – or indeed a literary festival – such fun.

…

Reflections on FestivalsRead More »

Scroll to Top