All their yesterdays
In one of the festival's advertised highlights, writes Anita Sethi, Penelope Lively and John McGahern have just taken us on a journey through their recreations of childhood, how they "fished out shards of the past" and discovered "how treacherous a place is memory", at once alluring and dangerous.
John McGahern found escape from childhood in fiction; "words were a physical presence", he says, and he delighted in the "joy of pushing words around" until scenes started to emerge which unfolded further into novels. He has written movingly about his relationships with his parents, though paradoxically his father put an "embargo on the past", seeing life as a continually living presence without reference to what's come before. But his account refuses to assign blame to his parents, believing that as a writer "an ounce of sympathy is worth a tonne of judgment".
Penelope Lively created a fictionalised account of her own past: growing up in Egypt, she was always "an odd solitary child"; without either school or siblings for company, she had instead a "DIY education". "Did moving from Egypt to a south-coast boarding school in England damage you?" one audience member asks. It damages any child, says Lively, to be removed from their familiar environment on the cusp of adolescence. "I also couldn't believe how cold it was", she laughs, "But when I was 18 or 19, I began to feel at home, and I still do now".
They both speak of the differences between fiction and memoir, how fiction must be wrenched away from life until it takes on its own rules. "The god of life is accident", says Gahern, "but there's no place for accident in fiction".
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There are as many artists as writers at this year's Festival, and the past few days have seen explorations of George Stubbs' paintings of horses, Michelangelo's bewildering but exhilarating figures; and I am just off to hear Hilary Spurling resurrect the passionate, tormented character of Matisse, who sought to escape from the chaos of his private and professional life in the harmony and peace of his art.