Damian Grant has been co-chairman of the Cambridge Seminar for many years. Here, in celebration of the 30th Cambridge Seminar, Damian concocts an imaginary scenario where eminent past speakers return for one very unique (albeit logistically impossible) literary event.
Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Textermination works on the wonderful idea of a conference attended by characters from fiction, who appear alongside their representations on the stage, in film and on television. One might likewise conceive of the 30 episodes of the Cambridge seminar as occurring simultaneously, in some generous lateral time, where some hundreds of visiting speakers would address and enter into dialogue with an audience of over a thousand, drawn from the four imagined corners of the earth.
A large welcoming party is taking place on a revolving stage with bits of Peterhouse, Clare, Trinity and Downing colleges. The awkwardness of first introductions in unfamiliar accents is tempered by a more relaxed (and much noisier) farewell party occurring at the same time. Here, for one exhilarating and exhausting week, novelists, dramatists and poets (both distinguished and emerging); publishers, translators and journalists; academics and actors; philologists and philosophers; meet and mingle. They argue, agree with, and misunderstand each other while swapping anecdotes, books, and addresses. It is not just an A-list, but an A to Z list: from Peter Ackroyd to Benjamin Zephaniah, from Ali Smith to Zadie.
Various chairmen (Malcolm Bradbury and Chris Bigsby among them) will be vying with each other in civility and good humour; while successive heads of literature from the British Council will be conspiring how to load and bless the event, with an admirable mixture of diplomacy and opportunism. The event organisers are somehow squeezed into the seminar office, organizing everything from cash flow to coach times, menus to missing persons.
The events swim together. William Golding recalls how as a boy he swallowed a splinter from Nelson’s Victory; was it this that sent him to the ends of the Earth? John Fowles dispenses wisdom and beneficence in equal measure; Pericles’s ‘I do not ask for reverence, but love’ might be his text. Angus Wilson recalls the early days of the UEA creative writing course. W. G. Sebald ruminates; Muriel Spark scintillates. With 50 years of rich reflection behind him, Wilson Harris pauses to think. The room pauses with him. Despite his fear of water, Seamus Heaney consents to be transported in a punt (with his wife and daughter) by the present writer, who is trying not to look too much like Charon making for the other side. Alan Bennett anecdotalises with gleeful glumness. Frank Kermode is being magisterial and knighted. Christopher Ricks enthuses eclectically over Bob Dylan and Samuel Beckett.
Martin Amis takes a dog for a walk in a short story. Ian McEwan and Graham Swift confect their fictions for us; as do Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, and Timothy Mo. Louis de Bernières tunes Corelli’s mandolin, Jim Crace spends 40 days in the desert, Barry Unsworth travels from a Renaissance palace to Liverpool, Howard Jacobson from Judea to Manchester. Julian Barnes talks it over with us, urbanely; Jonathan Coe carves up Thatcher’s Britain; Michel Faber etches his crimson petal on the memory. Ben Okri is here in his Booker year. Caryl Phillips is here too, sailing in the ghost of the Empire Windrush. Another ghost, Ken Saro-Wiwa, reads from his ‘novel in rotten English,’ ; a comic masterpiece from Nigeria to set beside .
Doris Lessing takes us to Persia, Rhodesia, the ‘60s and the interstellar paces with equal confidence. Angel Carter rewrites our imaginations for us; Penelope Lively repents of writing for children ('Their minds are unknowable to us,' she says). A. S. Byatt is there, possessed by her calling; Fay Weldon terrorizes the fainthearted; while Michelle Roberts and Hilary Mantel and Bernice Rubens make an appearance as the three necromantic sisters. We hear the challenging Scottish voices of A. L. Kennedy and Janice Galloway. There are women intellectuals too: Gillian Beer arguing with the past; Hermione Lee in Woolf’s web; Gayatri Spivak at her most spontaneous. Not that the categories are exclusive: Marina Warner performs in both roles, as does (in two others) novelist and poet Helen Dunmore, and the multiple selves that are Jackie Kay.
The telescoping creates some curious effects. Salman Rushdie is here with and without his bodyguards. George Steiner lectures simultaneously on reading, writing, music, science, Antigone, Shakespeare, Kafka, Heidegger, language and silence. Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd appear both single and as a couple, regarding each other - just for a moment - interrogatively; as do Rose Tremain and Richard Holmes. We see Terry Eagleton turning from a fiery Marxist to an adoptive Irishman before our very eyes; David Lodge changing places with himself, by turns novelist, critic, theoretician, playwright and TV adapter. Meanwhile, Malcolm Bradbury’s novels from three decades seem to interact, as a kind of meta-hyper-intertext, with the preoccupations and personalities of the seminar itself.
The poets are present, like some ambulant anthology, and having a great time. Too many to name, unfortunately; although one can’t fail to spot Tony Harrison, who sets up a stall (a bit like Autolycus) to sell his books; the indefatigable D. J. Enright; and Andrew Motion, the self-deprecating laureate; we even catch sight of the receding figure of Stephen Spender. We can hear Edwin Morgan’s Edinburgh, Tom Paulin’s Belfast, Simon Armitage’s Huddersfield; as well as the expansive Craig Raine and the encyclopaedic Peter Porter, both talking late into the night.
It’s difficult not to notice the dramatists. David Edgar does the prologue; Arnold Wesker turns a barstool into a little world. David Hare puts in an appearance after Charlotte Keatley performs her father, and Mark Ravenhill takes us shopping. Michael Frayn leads us (metaphorically) back stage; Harold Pinter holds the audience with a spellbinding six-pack from his plays. And isn’t that Arthur Miller, over here for a new production?
The atmosphere hums with anticipation, excitement; tension and laughter. There are questions (some below the belt: ‘When will your novel be remaindered?’) and answers (some inspiring: ‘There is only one way to start. Start!’). It is hot; the air trembles in the still afternoon. There is even the suggestion of a mirage. But none of this is fiction; it is as real as the stone gryphon that stands in heraldic attendance outside Downing College’s Howard Building. These things have all happened at the Cambridge Seminar over the years. It has been – and still is - a unique experience, as has been testified by many of those who have taken part.
Further reading:
The United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities.
A registered charity: 209131 (England and Wales) SC037733 (Scotland)
Our privacy and copyright statements.
Our commitment to freedom of information. Double-click for pop-up dictionary.
Open the original version of this page.
Usablenet Assistive is a UsableNet product. Usablenet Assistive Main Page.