The day began with an early morning interview with Judith Thurman, the distinguished biographer of Isak Dinesen and Colette, and writer for the New Yorker on fashion and books. We begin by talking about Michelle Obama and fashion. Judith speaks of Michelle's achievement: like Jackie Kennedy, and unlike Princess Diana, she has understood the need to "mount the pedestal, hold your pose, and create a persona," to fulfil the role of "old-fashioned consort" to the holder of office. Judith thinks that Michelle has been able to speak to different elements of America, including the majority of the population which keeps to a core of puritan, old-fashioned values.
Michelle's is a "robust glamour," though, with none of her feisty, opinionated intelligence reined in, and sexy too—a "wholesome marital sexuality," as Judith puts it. All this explains her consistently high approval ratings (80 per cent) throughout the year, independent of the vicissitudes of her husband's political life.
I ask Judith whether the eight years she spent on her biography of Colette were a labour of love, to which she replies "definitely not a labour of love, but a labour of literature". Clearly there is a selfless aspect to biography, she contends, in one's quest to understand every last detail and strain to another person's life; but this is also a project about one's self in which, as perhaps in the practice of Buddhism, one encounters "objections, impasses, antipathies and idealizations" of one's own along the way.
Some aspects of Colette's life (1873 - 1954) are plainly disagreeable to Judith: her occasional cruelty, and acute selfishness, and her far from courageous attitude in the second world war (in which she was successful in playing the system during the occupation to ensure her and her husband's daily survival, but in which she wrote for anti-semitic publications and would, Judith contended, have thrown her lot in with whichever side had won).
We conclude with a conversation about Judith's career at the New Yorker, a career in part captured in her recent volume of essays Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, the Spanish version of which has just been published in Colombia. Judith speaks of the intensity and vibrancy of life at the publication, and of her devotion to writing, and writing well.
Next in the morning, an enjoyable talk between Joanna Coles, editor of Marie Claire, and Peter Florence, about the recent documentary film about life at the magazine, Running in Heels; the publication's ethical commitment, both to good causes and to promoting fashion for real women with real bodies; the future of print journalism; and dealing with celebrities with all their particular neuroses. It drew one into this largely unfamiliar world of a monthly women's magazine which sells over a million copies.
I then rush over to the Santa Clara Hotel for an interview with Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the pre-eminent 36-year old Colombian novelist whose novel The Informers was short-listed for the Independent foreign fiction prize in 2009.
It was a wide-ranging conversation, in which Vásquez spoke eloquently about the "deep desire to understand"—human experience, history, memory—which underlies his writing, which extends to two novels, a collection of short stories, volumes of literary essays on a wealth of authors and inspirations (amongst others, he cites Tolstoy, Orwell, Camus, Vargas Llosa, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Conrad) and weekly articles in the Colombian and international press.
We talk about politics, in which—like Vargas Llosa, whom Vásquez much admires—the writer plays an active role. Vásquez has no "compulsion to be in politics", but argues that "obsessive readers of novels", like the author, "have a privileged view of society" which necessarily translates into informed political observation and action. He is "radically opposed to violence", above all, and to the "cult of a messianic single figure" which characterises much of Latin America's past and more recent political experience. He eschews ideological extremes, pointing to the respective horrors of Chile's period of dictatorship and Cuba's persecution of homosexuals and critical intellectuals, and argues for more politically mature democracies in the region which arrive at imperfect compromises.
Vásquez lives in Barcelona, a distance from his native Colombia which was self-imposed at the outset of his writing career. In the early mornings, he writes fiction, "about things that are not there", enclosed in his study with his earplugs in place. In the afternoons he returns to the real world, to his translations, his literary work, his articles and his family. Asked about his experience at the Hay Festival, he replies that he loves talking about literature and discussing books ("not all authors do") and that his contact with real readers is a welcome change from the permanent dialogue with the "platonic, chimeric reader" with which he interacts during the writing of his novels.
At the end of the interview, we meander together, past García Márquez's house, to the Teatro Heredia for Simon Schama's lecture on "Obama and History". Schama, dressed in a bright red shirt and jeans, cut a characteristically flamboyant figure on stage, as he delivered from memory a lecture full of effect on Obama's rhetoric and its place in American political tradition, interlaced with reflections on the ups-and-downs of the presidential campaign, the president's mixed political fortunes in the past year and the State of the Union speech earlier in the week.
Occasionally, Schama would sit on the floor at the front of the stage, as if delivering a Shakespearian soliloquy or a telling operatic aria; at other times, he would walk backwards, or throw his water bottle in the air to catch it again. The content may at times have been brilliant, a kind of précis of The American Future: A History, but the delivery did seem distracting, almost as if it were a parody of the television persona that Schama has cultivated.
Lunch and an interview with the Americas editor of the Economist, Michael Reid, followed, the journalist's measured tones, light touch and sanguine demeanour a striking contrast as we discussed his 2007 book, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America's Soul.
A core thesis of Reid's, echoed in Vargas Llosa's lecture the day before, is that Latin America is at a political crossroads between the "mass democracies here to stay", in which a "constitutionalist, democratic tradition" has taken root, independent of the political orientation of the party in power, and other countries in the region currently caught up in a kind of populist dictatorship. Reid argues passionately and with evidence for the potential of liberal capitalist democracy, allied with adequate social policy, to take root in the continent to the (continuing) benefit of the poor and the economic growth of the region.
In the afternoon, Helena Kennedy gives a compellingly and thoughtful lecture on democracy in the 21st century, speaking on democracy in peril, the decline of political parties, the disconnect between professional politicians and an increasingly disenfranchised public, the failures of the British political system, the rise of cabinet government and the need to find new ways to invigorate life into our democracies—themes she continued to elaborate in a lecture yesterday in Bogotá at Los Andes University. A capacity crowd seemed to hang on every word.
And then, as a golden sun began to fleck the tops of the houses in Cartagena, one sensed that the end of the festival was nigh, heralding in turn the advent of a rather nostalgic melancholy in your Prospect blogger, faced with the prospect of return to his cotidian life in Bogotá. Nonetheless, there was time for three more events: Michael Reid's discussion of his book alongside investigative reporter Jon Lee Anderson, who has recently returned from the favelas of Brazil and from Haiti, and the editor of Colombia's main weekly political magazine, Semana; a joyous encounter between ten authors in the the theatre in which each spoke about their favourite book (amongst others, Vásquez: A Perfect Day for Banana Fish, J.D. Salinger; Schama: The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth; Hector Abad Faciolince, The Leopard by Lampedusa, and Hiob, Job, also by Joseph Roth; amongst the highlights); and then a moving encounter with one of Colombia's most celebrated vallenato musicians, Leandro Diaz, a blind, Homer-like octagenarian, surrounded by his loving family and group of musicians, talking about his love of nature, and of God, and responding to the marvel expressed by his interviewer, Daniel Samper Pizano, at the vivid description in his music and lyrics of Colombia's ineffably beautiful nature which he had never seen.
The music which was performed captured, in all its beauty, spirit and simplicity, the whole welter of human emotions that had been explored and experienced by the participants throughout the festival over four days; and as a full yellow moon rose to illuminate the old, now almost empty streets of the colonial city, and the dark sea beyond, it was time to get to the airport and to return to Bogotá.
Last days at the Hay Festival, Cartagena
February 04, 2010
