May 272010
The venerable Hay Literary Festival kicked off today, drawing the great and good of the planet’s literati to the sylvan banks of the River Wye. Along with de rigueur writerly star power, the setting is gorgeous and the prices, despite our credit-crunchy times, remain reasonable. If you’re a literary groupie, what’s not to like?
Despite these temptations, I’ve not been the least bit moved to sling a sack of signable books into the Vauxhall and drive several pleasant hours from London to join the well-heeled throng. Why? In a word, I think Hay is boring. And worse: Hay may be the ne plus ultra of high-class literary love-ins, but it also encapsulates much that is wrong with the world of writing and publishing at the moment.
Whenever I consider Hay and all that it contains (I’ve attended twice in recent years), my mind inevitably free-associates its way to my music collection. The ever mysterious ‘they’ say that most of us will, at some point, find that our musical tastes have lodged firmly in whatever era most closely attends our youth or young adulthood. I am no exception to this rule: a shuffle through my iTunes library would reveal a disproportionate number of offerings from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
And yet, in that collection, along with the entire output of The Sundays and Matthew Sweet, can be found Andrew Bird, CSS, Ozomatli and any number of other artists most definitely not of ‘my’ era, or even necessarily widely known. Now, I’m no John Peel: when it comes to music I don’t have a particular nose for the edgy, the now. But it takes relatively little effort for me, in my mainstream-ish mode, to find current, often unusual stuff, some of which I actually like.
You’re not likely to find the literary equivalent of CSS presenting to the chardonnay-sipping crowds at Hay (now that would sell me a ticket: I’d pay to see Lovefoxx read the phone book, let alone sing.) Competent, prolific, even elegant writers…absolutely. The raw, the edgy, the downright odd? Not likely.
The problem with events like Hay is that they define, for many, the ultimate idea of a literary experience while doing very little to expose their audiences to writers or work that aren’t already attached to big-league agents and/or publishers. True, there are a few sessions with worthy/patronising labels like ‘work by local writers’ and ‘work by older writers’. But these are generally off the Hay radar, meaning nowhere near prime time. By and large, Hay is like a warm bath on a rainy night. It may soothe your sensibilities, but it won’t challenge them.
Perhaps the most insidious effect of Hay is that, for a couple of weeks each spring, a bygone bubble world pops to life on the banks of the Wye, in which adoring, literature-loving crowds a-slosh with money revel in a micro-society free of recycled histories and celebrity biogs. But in our heart of hearts, we know that world is long dead. When Hay decides to take its audiences out of their bubble and towards the future, who knows what else might follow?
