The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
Wallace Stevens,
"The Pleasures of Merely Circulating"

JUNE 2005, The New Writing Worlds Symposium held at the University of East Anglia in Norwich


On the eve of my departure for the New Writing Worlds Symposium at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, I received an email from a good friend who had been a guest of the University some years before. "Beware," he cautioned, "you are entering a concrete prison from which you may never emerge." When I arrived the next day, I saw what had provoked his facetious warning. The heft and layout of the university buildings resembled a vast correctional facility, a complex of massive, louring, Bauhausian blocks scattered helter skelter that had one promptly devising plans for escape. Its architect, Sir Denys Lasdun, had clearly transformed his Modernist dream of a communal living and working space into a scowling futurist nightmare straight out of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, constructing (in the Russian novelist's words) "an impenetrable curtain that was about to cut me off from this whole beautiful world." I was reminded of Prince Charles's mordant comment on Lasdun's Royal National Theatre: "a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting."
But first impressions, even of Brutalist architecture, are notoriously unreliable. When the initial shock had worn off, I noticed that many of the petrified slabs that seemed to curtail one's sense of movement and latitude had begun to yield to the caressing ministrations of climbing ivy, the grim lapidosus gradually turning a rich, warm green as if nature abhored a Lasdun and time could be counted on to succeed where man had failed. Had Malcolm Bradbury, founder of the creative writing department at East Anglia, written The History Man today, with its description of "the local new university, a still expanding dream in white concrete, glass, and architectural free form," the edges of his satire might have softened with vegetal supplements and germinating borders. Adding to my changing impression was the campus itself, spreading beyond the penal structure of stony confinement in Wordsworthian swards of rolling lawn and gentle slope and victory- signed with innumerable rabbits' ears. Indeed, I had never seen so many rabbits in my life, the consequence, I was told, of a biological experiment run amock. This laboratory miscarriage, I fancied, had changed a solemn professoriate into a warren of gamboling dons given their freedom at last. I suddenly felt as if I had stepped out of Le Corbusier's "machine for living" into Watership Down.
And then there was "The Broad", an icy, duck-dotted lake quarried out to the south of the campus where one could stroll and take the evening air after a strenuous day in the conference room and too many valedictory pints at the Union Bar. But I was not unduly surprised to learn that a number of carousing students had had their university careers cut short in its waters, tragic events which accentuated the paradox of university life and made me think as well in the course of my late walks of that sodality of writers whose trajectories had ended in disaster. Hopefully, some of those assembled at the round table would manage to circumvent such derelictions.
During the time I spent shuttling between my lodgings at Nelson Court and the conference sessions in the Council Chamber, I was unable to shake this sense of contradiction, this feeling of internment mixed with intimations of deliverance. In this respect, the venue furnished a perfect if anomalous setting for the Symposium itself. On the one hand, there were the wide-ranging discussions on almost every aspect of literary endeavour, the occasional exhilerating insights of the conferees, and the intellectual saunter into realms, if not always of gold, of literary veridian; and on the other, the intermittenly oppressive repetition of self-evident themes, the obvious infatuation of some of the participants with the circumscribed self rather than the voluminous world, and the constraints of a politically-correct and determined evasion of plain veracity and candour.
This dialectic of scope and bondage, of spontaneity and interdiction, rhyming the surrounding topography of oasis cum penitentiary, was both startling and predictableù startling because intellectual vision and inspiration are always arousing, and predictable because in any group of people, however erudite and accomplished, there is inevitably a hint of the lowest common denominator at work. The interplay of angel and cloud is ineluctable. Thus, at the first night poetry reading, English poet George Szirtes will respect the conventions of performance in delivering a series of beautifully crafted poems, some witty and flamboyant, others darkly meditative, but studiously avoiding those issues which a multicultural audience might find contentious or offensive. Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, on the other hand, will seek to politicise the event by reading a long, problematic piece featuring his grandfather's rooted fist and the incursion of conscienceless bulldozers, indifferent to the fact that certain members of the audience might have a very different point of view from his and find themselves tempted to respond on a level alien to the proceedings. Szirtes was civil and impeccably courteous, aware of the gradients at work in symposia of this nature; Barghouti was consumed by an agenda and subject to his prejudices, reading propaganda rather than poetry.
Similarly, another of the conferees, Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua, no doubt taking a page out of John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, will launch an impassioned address on the necessity for a reawakened moral fervour behind all literary commitment, dismissing the blandishments of theory, the frivolity of merely technical experimentation, and the fashionable preoccupation with the trivial and the mundane. The impact of his contestation might be controversial but it remains keenly illuminating and demands to be grappled with. In another session, Lancashire poet and well-known translator from the German, David Constantine, taking a page out of practically everyone else's book, will argue for the particular virtue of literary language as truth-speak, dispelling the occlusions of corrupt description, political euphemism and hidden agendas. But in demonstrating how meretricious language suppresses what should be obvious, he will cite a cluster of illustrations of a distinctly anti-American slant which undercut the purport of his message, forgetting that the choice of examples is no less important than the choice of words. While stressing that literary language should cast an intense light on the shadowy assumptions that words will often hide, his examples of disingenuous formulation serve to conceal a strong political bias, if not a deep-seated prejudice, associated with current academic thought and jargonùthe ideological reflection of Bradbury's "pious modernismus and concrete mass." In between these two extremes of vigorous clarity and moral occultation comes a varying muniment of ivy and concrete, of cultivated discourse and rigid fustianùstandard fare, I suppose, for all such belletristic colloquies.


* * *

Early one morning, as I went outside with my cigarette and coffee to think about the day's planned events, I noticed a gondola balloon sailing by overhead and was put immediately in mind of Yeats's ringing phrase, "Another emblem there!" Here was a great bag of hot air that aptly symbolized every literary conference I have ever attended. At the same time, without the fuel and medium of gaseous exhalations, the panorama of landscape unfolding beneath the observation basket would not have been available. The East Anglia Symposium was, for me, precisely that high-wafting bladder, a combination of flatus and elevation, of vapour and loftiness. And I realized that despite my own contribution of dubious ventilations, I had also profited from the altitude afforded by the opportunity to speak and listen, to reflect upon subjects pertaining to my vocation, to agree and disagree, and to meet a number of extraordinary individuals who helped me broaden my views on the practice of literature.
My friend was only part right. The prison was also a greenhouse, and among the literary wardens intent on preserving ideological order, there were more than enough gardeners to keep one believing in pastoral.