Dartington: Day 2

Beautiful sunny day - though I woke up feeling the effects of too much wine and partying the night before.  There were lots of interesting people at dinner - Howard Marks, the drug courier who has come out of jail to write crime thrillers (Sympathy for the Devil); comedian Harry Hill, who was quite unlike his TV persona.  I sat next to him but was too diffident to strike up a conversation. What do you say to someone famous for their wit?
Food writers Joscelyn Dimbleby and Elizabeth Luard were very good company - Elizabeth could remember dancing with Mick Jagger at parties in the sixties (check out her memoirs!).  Fiona Sampson, editor of the Poetry Review was there briefly, and Blake Morrison - who is as nice as his books suggest he might be.  He was sitting with Ted Hughes wife Carol.
So, a very enjoyable dinner.  Being shy is a distinct disadvantage though - I’ve never been good at this networking malarkey and have absolutely no small talk.  But I do like people and enjoy listening to interesting conversations.

We ate our breakfasts on the lawn after the fire alarm went off and the building was evacuated, but it turned out to be only someone burning the toast.  After my Christchurch litfest event was prevented by an earthquake, I did wonder whether my Dartington appearance would be thwarted by the Hall burning down - probably giving rise to the legend of the Mansfield Curse!!

In the end the talk seemed to go smoothly - all beautifully choreographed by staff and a very good chairperson.  Though nervous I was soon feeling better in front of a friendly, welcoming audience - I even sold some books afterwards.

The only downside was having to get into the car and drive 350 miles home afterwards - a gruelling 8 hour motorway epic on a hot sunny day we would have loved to spend on the lawn at Dartington.  I shall just have to write another book and get invited back!

Dartington Hall: the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture

The bliss of Dartington Hall and the Ways with Words literature Festival!  The Hall is one of the most beautiful buildings in the south west of England - grey stone walls crammed with history.  Add in the delight of many of your favourite authors, green lawns to lie on with the sunlight filtering through the cherry trees, a glass of wine in hand and Waterstones’ book tent just across the grass, and  - as a way of spending the afternoon - it takes a bit of beating.

I first came to Dartington 20 years ago to talk about Christina Rossetti, so it is wonderful to be here again to celebrate their 20th anniversary as a literature festival.   The bedroom I’ve been allocated is like a royal suite - one of the heritage rooms with antique furniture and medieval graffitti.  The bed was so big I needed a step-ladder to get into it!  Sadly, I couldn’t take a photo of the wall drawings because the white wall just reflected back the flash.  A ship has been carved into the wall, probably by soldiers billeted here at the end of the 14th century.

           
Once we’d unpacked and recovered from the 7 hour drive, we went to the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture in the Great Hall, given this year by Blake Morrison.   He was brilliant on Hughes’s poetry and his life, making illuminating connections between the two informed by  interviews he had had with the poet.

I hadn’t known that Ted Hughes had given up his study of English Literature because, after struggling for hours on an essay,  he dreamt that a fox came into his bed, burnt and injured.  The fox put his paw (a human hand in the dream) on a white page and left a bloodprint on the paper.  ‘Stop this,’ he said to Hughes, ‘You are destroying us.’  After that, Hughes transferred to Archaeology and Anthropology believing that the structures of critical thought taught by the university system ruined creativity.   The fox became the equivalent of a ‘spirit guide’ and it occurs three more times in his poetry - the marvellous Thought Fox, and the ‘fox for sale’ poem in the Birthday Letters.   Later Hughes told Blake Morrison that for a poet  ‘Prose is a killer’.

Apparently Hughes felt that the real fall in human history had come with the loss of animal innocence - and that our egotism, introspection and self-consciousness separate us from our creativity and prevent us being whole.   He often quoted the phrase ‘Every man must skin his own skunk’, and he believed that every poet must be true to their own experience - getting to grips with what was real.  Poets who could do that became healers.

Later he apparently acknowledged that much harm had come from his decision not to write about his own tragic experiences  - the deaths of  Sylvia Plath and then Assia Wevill and her daughter by Hughes.  Not dealing with grief and its consequences, he said, creates a canker inside that eats away at your creative self - it ‘takes a piece of yourself away, like an amputation’.

More from Dartington tomorrow.

Ways with Words

Not much time for blogging at the moment.  I'm madly packing suitcases, arranging the house so that someone else can collect the mail and water the plants, and preparing a talk for the Ways with Words festival at Dartington  Hall on Thursday morning.   It's a long drive, so I leave tomorrow, returning for a few hours on Friday to collect the suitcases before catching a plane for Italy.   It's frantic, but also very exciting.

Rather nervous about Dartington.  It's a lovely festival in the most beautiful surroundings,  but the hall is usually packed with an audience passionate about literature and expecting the best from their authors.  It's one thing performing on the page, quite another on the stage!  My talk is going to focus on Katherine Mansfield and her relationship with DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda when they lived in Cornwall - not that far from Dartington.  Fingers crossed!

No Tuesday Poem from me this week, but please go to www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com web site to have a look at what others are posting.