Where's Drif?

It's surprising, but the Festival has never had anything remotely to do with the prosaic trade of successfully selling secondhand books. That's been a rare observation down the years in Hay-on-Wye, although it was true when Roy Strong and the mayoral entourage blocked the Bullring traffic on the eve of first Festival, and it's true now. It's become wholly against the interests of Hay to imagine that publishing for national consumption (a highly capitalized process), and secondhand bookselling to an international market for the benefit of a local economy (an extremely poor faux-relation), can exist as two parts of one idea. Very simply, old books and new books are such distant cousins, so many times removed, they can only be mistaken as belonging to the same species.

The mantra of the best of the old booksellers in Chicago, John Chandler, was that new books and old books are as like as apples and oranges, and John was never liberal with the tripe and onions. Although he never visited Hay, John would have clearly seen the Festival for what it isn't, and not what it is. The Festival isn't a local resource, to be rolled out to the cheers of otherwise cash-strapped hicks with nothing better to do than follow the Sky line for a couple of weeks in the year, and then to retire like a gaggle of cidered-up peasantry in yonder meadow, a lost troupe from Miss Julie, pouring away the profits through long and lazy summer nights.

Ours can be a lonely and largely sober job, and the business carries on like coal-mining, out of media scrutiny for most of the time. In consequence, breaking canapés with Booker Prize short-listers, sometimes even winners, is an unusual hobby for the rump of our tribe. Secondhand booksellers don't habitually lionize literati; as a group, we sensibly leave the business of selling new books and newly-signed new books to the professionals in the field. I suspect those among us who can't avoid the lure of organizing public signing sessions are genetically similar, if not identical to the Literace, a species delineated by Drif in a once moderately famous and now mostly forgotten guide to secondhand bookshops in the British Isles. "To rhyme with Liberace", he said, these people have shops which "are extremely showy, very flash and unnecessarily expensive." Drif sometimes gleefully sliced through a lot of pretension with bracing candour.

Perhaps we should discourage the practice of oiling the market for instant collectables by legally requiring publishers to put critically honest blurb on dustwrappers; it would certainly have the effect of cutting down on all the self-congratulatory parties. A periodic dose of cold custard in the eye for the successful few might even temper the proliferation of the large mass of published but forgotten authors, whose works are arranged by the ton in shops which make you wonder if Poundstretcher has acquired Borders. Not only would my plan be artistically useful, it would also be a downright ecologically sensible. Is Drif available, does anyone know?

Hitchens for a Fight

We're lucky in Hay. The frequent late-night carousing and cursing on just about any of our streets might not be intellectually polemical in origin, possibly not to cultured taste, but it's free and unticketed. I'll concede that the anticipation of an infrequent brawl doesn't indicate a sane outlook, but there are some things which appear to have less sense. One of those is queuing to provoke Christopher Hitchens into swearing at you under canvas, in earshot of hordes of his acolytes. That sounds to me like an almost indescribably baroque perversion, like paying to be whipped by the squire while his chums from the Hellfire Club (modern incarnation, immoveable feast) and assorted media sponsors lay bare your wheals to a wider public. Some people will do almost anything for money, and some people, often unaccountably, will do almost anything to give it away.

Banking on Oscar

Because its own interests are inimical to the generation and maintenance of local reputations, and in response to a slowly developing realization about which side their bread is most thickly buttered, this year the Hay Festival organizers have allowed a monolithic financial institution to give us a short turn as a literary critic. Rising to the creative challenge, Barclays has presented a new juxtaposition of ideas: Oscar Wilde, runs the reminder, knew that the soul is the repository of real riches, while the bank's own mundane expertise is available to help you "enjoy your wealth". I didn't know there's a substantial connexion between a loveably roguish writer and the notion of profitably managing my global financial strategies in the age of deregulation, but Barclays Wealth have made it for me. Their offering of a whole-of-life dialectic for the New Millennium is going to have a profound effect on the way I think.

Instinctively feeling their way around unfamiliar subject matter, perhaps Barclays' ad-people were themselves subliminally affected by Wilde's subtle talents for self-promotion, or maybe they were merely pumped up by the thought of his Astrakhan trimmings. Whichever it was, their programme advertisement has made me voraciously keen to have them shovel all my spare scratch into an exciting foreign venture, but they'll have to forgive me for a couple of days while I traipse off to the the railway station to look for my handbag.

Hay Festival 2008

A growing breed of naysayers and critics are now reminding us that the Festival used to engender cuddly relationships, not only in the spiritually nutritious communion of reader and writer, but also between the event itself and the town it had chosen to live in. It was intimate in both mystical and mechanical senses. Now, we have a rather sophisticated festival of publishing, and not what might be taken for a festival of literature, or literary festival, as it was once described. I think there's a difference between the last two, but it's probably easier to understand Diane Keaton telling Woody Allen in Love and Death, that she's scared, but not frightened of dying. Or is it the other way round?

Anyway, the mysticism between producer and consumer is purportedly still present in Hay, but it feels like a different kind, almost characterized by decree and not consent. The mechanics of the event are unrecognizable from the past: before, it was like the Monaco Grand Prix, a track partly in town, with the locals almost as close to the action as the spectators and stewards; now, it's along the sterner lines of the Shanghai International Circuit, built on larger piles of corporate money, but with at least one obvious difference: instead of being raised on reclaimed swampland, the Festival is beginning to look like a refugee village thrown up before the reclamation project was finished. Given that the present site has a lease stretching close to infinity, there will always be the danger of an abrupt return to soggy nature, unless the event can be rescheduled to a safer slot, maybe the middle of February. It's also sad that the racing allusions aren't entirely accidental. If anyone has paddled away from Hay-on-Wye this year still believing the two 'ideas' of publishing and literature to be closely related components in the exercise, they should remember that the 2008 Festival brochure awarded "top writer" status to.....Jeremy Clarkson. Whoever compiled these programme notes seems to have an attenuated idea about what makes a genuine literatus; either that, or they have real advertizing balls and a lack of familiarity with other authors, because that's what's needed to put such glossy hokum before the public without fear of physical reprisal.