Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Edinburgh Book Festival: The war of the words


Ewan McGregor in Young Adam from 2003.Ewan McGregor in Young Adam from 2003.

IT MAY have been the jugs of whisky, heroin fixes, or massive egos, but a conference 50 years ago on the future of Scottish literature turned into one big ding-dong, and became the prototype of the modern book festival, reports Stuart Kelly

On 21 August, 1962, in Edinburgh’s McEwan Hall, two men appeared in front of an audience to decide the future of Scottish literature. It was the second day of the first International Writers’ Conference, and most of the great and good of Scottish letters were in attendance: Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Robin Jenkins and, presiding over them all, Hugh MacDiarmid.
Then just turned 70, MacDiarmid was credited with engineering the “Scottish Renaissance” of the 1930s. He had been expelled from the Communist party for nationalism and the Nationalist party for communism, living up to his own dictum to “aye be whaur extremes meet”. He had heard the name Alexander Trocchi before, and even met him briefly in Milnes bar, the haunt of the literati; but he had not read him.
Whether in a spirit of overgenerosity, or in the hope of precipitating the proverbial stair-heid rammy, the water jugs had been filled with whisky. As the speakers took their place, Trocchi was taking his first injection of heroin of the day. Their debate that day inflected Scottish literary discussion for a generation. Indeed, in ways which are as interesting as they are depressing, the debate about Scottish literature has barely moved a jot since: individual vs collective, nationalism vs internationalism, triumphantly local vs constrictingly parochial, shock-horror over drugs, double shock-horror over sex and drugs. This year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival will be commemorating the 50th anniversary of that conference. I hope they realise what they might be letting themselves in for.
Trocchi was 37 at the time, and his two most famous novels, Cain’s Book and Young Adam, had been published in the United States, but no publisher had dared to release them in Britain. The son of a Scottish mother and Italian father, Trocchi was not well known: even in 1996, the literary magazine Chapman could decry his marginal status – before his “existentialist” novels reached a wider audience with the 2003 release of a film version of Young Adam starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton. Edwin Morgan had been his tutor at the University of Glasgow, and remembered his “devilish”, satyrlike looks, and that he did not get the degree he was capable of since he had overdosed on Benzedrine before his finals (before lighting out to start a pig farm, and then head for Paris). Trocchi was there with the publisher John Calder, who had organised the event, the prototype and precursor for the modern book festival, and who intended to publish him (he was true to his word, though the book was immediately banned). Trocchi latterly succumbed to heroin addiction to the extent he would pimp his wife, and could only make a living writing pornography for the notorious and brilliant publisher Maurice Girodias, who swung between the high art of Nabokov’s Lolita and the cheapest of smut. Trocchi died in 1984, with a few voices – notably the poet Edward Dorn, who thought him comparable with Dostoyevsky – keeping alive his reputation. But Trocchi’s tinge of sulphur lingered as well. At a literary conference in the Lake District in 2004 another participant visibly blanched when I mentioned his name.
Read the complete article here.

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