Stoke Newington Literary Festival 2012 – A London Obsession

Craig Taylor will at speaking at A London Obsession at Clissold House on 3 June

From the 1st to the 3rd of June, from the High Street all the way up Church Street to Clissold Park, the axis of Stoke Newington will be chattering with events for the third year of the Literary Festival. Set up to celebrate the area’s “radical thinking and literary heritage,’” founder and director Liz Vater explains that the imminent Olympics and the lingering chaos of the Hackney riots “warranted some lively debate. ”

This year’s London-centric programme is a homage to the capital at a time when there is as much to lament as there is to praise in our city of Olympically-awful public transport and ‘uproarious’ celebrations.

Alongside delectably radical events such as the Literary Cabaret and Dr Frankenstein’s Travelling Freak Show, the Literary Festival presents refreshingly local inset mappings; tackling the swoop of the city as a whole, and zooming in on our East London neighbourhoods.

China Miéville, Iain Sinclair, Laura Oldfield Ford and Ken Worpole will debate The Olympic Legacy, there will be a screening of Tony Grisoni’s tribute to Kingsland, and local writers including Stoke Newington poets and contributors from the Hackney Anthology Acquired for Development By, will all have a platform to showcase their work. I spoke to authors Mark Mason and Craig Taylor about their books, Walk the Lines and Londoners, to get to grips with this year’s London Obsession.

For Walk the Lines, Mason walked the London Underground over ground, compulsively driven on by the lure of “wanting to explore the mystery of London’s appeal,” in the belief that, “walking is the only way to really discover a city.” Taylor’s work was similarly exhaustive, interviewing Londoners over a period of five years until he had around one million words and fourteen notebooks of transcripts and stories with which to make his book.

I can see the reasoning behind the festival’s decision to bring these authors together under the title of a London Obsession, but Taylor is reluctant to define it as such, “If it was an obsession, you’d have to classify it as a very fulfilling one.”

He is wise to avoid the negative connotations; the etymology of the word ‘obsession’ is an ‘action of besieging’ and later the ‘hostile action of an evil spirit’, implying that to succumb to an obsession with our city is to give into an attack, to be held hostage by a malevolent force.

Mason brushes it off lightly with a warning that while “projects like these are safe ways of getting rid of the intensity inside you. You have to be careful, it’s only a short step from walking the Tube to becoming a full-blown trainspotter.”

What these authors reveal most tellingly, is the difficulty of having a relationship with our city. The legacy of writers like Jean Rhys, who could walk from elation to desperation in the space of a network of narrow streets, suggests that any intimacy with such a sprawling beast will always be fraught with ambiguity.

Mason notes the different endorphins which come from walking, “after 20 miles you feel euphoric, at 30 miles the effect starts to wear off, and at 40, you feel drained and very low.”

Too much of the city can be a dangerous thing. When asked about what motivated him to write Londoners Taylor explains, as though he is all too aware of the challenge involved, “I wanted to know how people succeeded and found a way to live in a place like London.”

I feel certain that each and every Londoner is currently struggling with their own internal debate about the impending Olympics, and every heat wave brings equal measures of joy and torment. In one hot week last year a mass of disenchanted residents took to the streets and rioted as though they were railing against the vicious city.

London isn’t always our friend and conspirator, and too often spurns and rejects us. Built by us and sustained by us, it insistently remains a force in its own right. Taylor admits that: “Writing the book confirmed my suspicion that London is an infinitely complex place and that there’s failure built in to any book about it. No writer can capture it. London always wins. Writing about London is an act of humility. The best you can possibly do, even if you spend five years and speak to 200 people, is capture a brief glimpse, a quick snapshot.”

When Virginia Woolf wrote about London in her essay ‘A Street Haunting’, she described how in wandering ‘the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime.’ Both Mason and Taylor are in tune with this London of imaginative possibilities.

Mason quotes an overheard phone-call in Watford, a Businessman saying: ‘We’ve been proactive – have you explained that to Gail?’ he doesn’t suggest what we might infer, but there is a story proffered there. A key part of Walk the Lines is the lives we glimpse through snatches of conversations, those chance phrases, amongst the local trivia, which build to an epic vision of the city. For Taylor these fabricated lifetimes are what make his book more than the sum of the pages printed.

Virginia Woolf muses that from overheard conversations it was possible to ‘penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.’ Something of this occurs when we read both Mason and Taylor’s books; a sense of a collective of Londoners, an entire city offered to us where tube journeys typically leave it disconnected and estranged.

When I ask Taylor for a highlight from his book, he replies: “Different stories come back to me at different times. I was walking across the river this morning and I thought of the Wiccan priestess letting remnants of her spells fall into the moving water.” It is as though through recording this oral history, these hundreds of collected stories have become his own memories, a part of the fabric of his London. It’s easy to forget that sometimes, in a city as big as this.

Mark Mason and Craig Taylor will be at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival for A London Obsession on Sunday 3rd June at 1pm in Clissold House.

The Stoke Newington Literary Festival runs 1 – 3 June.