The Edinburgh Writers Conference 1962: An explosive conference recalled 50 years on

HERE’S Mary McCarthy describing the 1962 Edinburgh International Writers Conference in a letter to Hannah Arendt: “People jumping up to confess they were homosexuals; a registered heroin addict leading the young Scottish opposition to the literary tyranny of the Communist Hugh MacDiarmid.… And all this before an audience of over 2,000 people a day, mostly, I suppose, Scottish Presbyterians.… I must confess I enjoyed it enormously.”

And now, 50 year later, here are the two main organisers of that culturally climactic gathering, on the stage along with Angela Bartie and Eleanor Bell, who have just written a book about it. As Bartie pointed out: “How many literary conferences are remembered 50 years later?”

Veteran publisher John Calder and Traverse Theatre co-founder Jim Haynes had no doubt that the 1962 event they made happen lived up to its ambitions of, in the title of Friday’s event “Putting a Bomb under Scottish Literature”. What emerged from an excellent curtain-raiser to the five sessions at Charlotte Square intended to mirror the discussions at the McEwan Hall 50 years ago, was just how much has changed since.

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In 1962, as Calder emphasised, censorship was the routine on both stage and page. Homosexuality was still illegal, and people didn’t talk about sex in public. He had even to persuade Edinburgh International Festival director Lord Harewood that they would be prepared to pay good money to hear writers talking. In the letters pages of this and other newspapers, public opinion seemed to be in favour of spending money on drains instead.

A series of brilliant stunts to create controversy helped to build an audience for writers such as Trocchi (then almost unknown) and William Burroughs (ditto). “In the discussions,” said Calder, “people began to respond to different points of view and writers started to play to the audience, fighting each other to get more applause. Writers became actors for the first time – and enjoyed it.”

The main difference between the 1962 conference and the literary festivals it helped spawn, added Haynes, was that now the format is more about writers promoting their own books than about debating ideas about literature and society. “That’s what made it exciting. It’s not that I have anything against promoting books, but the discussion of ideas was what made it unique, and there are still not many places in the world where you can do that.”

As if anticipating that challenge, John Burnside then appeared in an event that didn’t plug any books other than ones by his countercultural hero David Gilbert, an American anti-capitalist serving a life sentence for his part in an armed robbery in 1981 in which two policemen and a security guard died.

Burnside will be writing about the Weather Underground in fiction rather than in fact, he claimed, “because fiction is better at asking questions and the better vehicle to talk about ideas”. Somewhere in the next three days, perhaps the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference might get around to chewing over that one.

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