To name
just a few, there's the Words In The Park Festival in London and the Hay
Festival in Hay-on-Wye alongside the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Then there's Latitude in Suffolk, the Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall and
Voewood in Norfolk sandwiched somewhere between Theakstons Old Peculier Crime
Writing Festival in Harrogate and even smaller get-togethers like the Stoke
Newington Literary Festival in London.
But the
maxim is, if the London Modernist Literary Event is anything to go by: do
things for yourself. Today, the reclusiveness and mystery of a writer like JD
Salinger no longer makes good business sense. Today a writer must get out there
and hawk his wares in person, and in doing so, become empowered and get his
voice heard when the mainstream ignores it. He must, he has realised just in time,
turn entrepreneurial.
And so to
a windswept Saturday afternoon in Marylebone and the convening of underground
talent under the banner of the London Modernist Literary Event, a recent
literary sit-down that showcased the current work of nine scribes who have
cannily identified their own demographic and who now possess growing
readerships. And all achieved without the help of mainstream publishing houses.
Terry
Rawlings, Stuart Deabill, John Hellier, Mark Baxter, Ian Snowball, Paul 'Smiler'
Anderson, Simon Wells, Jason Brummell and main man of the afternoon and
original member of The Jam, Rick Buckler, all understand the power of
marketing.
Writers
such as these are busy documenting themselves in print. Things, it seems, are
getting festive. Perhaps it's the creeping sense that in this age of tech and
sound bite we all fail to comprehensively communicate with one another, so
better to stick to tried and tested methods. Or perhaps the reason for such
orchestrated rallies of a literary bent can be better explained and put into
context by Milan Kundera's interpretation of graphomania.
But even
the mainstream is at, the ranks of well-loved British authors never busier and
all too aware of the festival circuit and their readers, those voracious
vultures of culture known as the consumer public. And you thought it was only
the rock world that bothered with mass sit-downs and attentive listening.
Things
have changed in the world of publishing and the literary festival is now
perhaps the only means by which the industry at large can bridge the
ever-widening gap between the writer and his reading public.
The
scribes at the sold out Cockpit Theatre, through their own not inconsiderable
efforts, have fictionalised and documented the very British subculture of
modernism while simultaneously breathing life into the working class (or
social) novel, that popular literary form of the recent past. After all, where
would we be without the unflinching gaze of Sillitoe, Collins or MacInnes in
novels like Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, London Belongs To Me and
Absolute Beginners or in Room At The Top, The People Of The Abyss or Great
Expectations?
If
literary critic FR Leavis's understanding of literature was that it helps renew
one's emotional life and assists in the learning of a new awareness, then it is
in the work of marginalised literary voices that a universal morality, borne of
forgotten ideals, can often be found.
Mainstream
publishers, in perhaps championing less salty chroniclers of the word, are
overlooking the autodidactic offerings of men on the ground. Penny-wise and
pound-foolish business sense one could call it in so much as business is
instead being conducted by the writers themselves, all of whom are enjoying an
emboldened cultural health. The mainstream might in turn level the criticism
that what they document is esoterica, yet esoterica can be social history, and
a type as bona fide as this has proved lucrative. Just ask Paul Weller.
The
organisation and cohesive intent of the writers gathered at the Cockpit spoke
not of thwarted desire, but rather of literary ambition undiminished despite
the odds stacked against them. These are modern writers who found the need to
market themselves and banded together to do so because, after all, time waits
for no one.
Photo
by @JasonAHolmes
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