Edinburgh International Writers' Conference, 1962
The five-day conference (20–24 August 1962, McEwan Hall) organized by John Calder and Sonia Orwell within the Edinburgh International Festival; Mailer's first major literary appearance abroad, where he met Henry Miller and William Burroughs and clashed with Mary McCarthy and Lawrence Durrell over the future of the novel.
The Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference was held 20–24 August 1962 at the McEwan Hall in Edinburgh as a five-day plenary segment of the Edinburgh International Festival. It was organized by the publisher John Calder and the editor Sonia Orwell — Calder secured the major American and Continental novelists; Orwell handled the British and Commonwealth list — and drew some seventy writers from twenty countries to McEwan Hall sessions on the novel, the writer in society, and censorship. The session topics across the five days were: The Novel Today; Scottish Writing Today; Is Commitment Necessary?; Censorship Today; and The Novel and the Future.
Mailer attended the full five days. He co-chaired the final session, The Novel and the Future (24 August), with Mary McCarthy and Lawrence Durrell — and clashed with both McCarthy and Durrell over the novel’s prospects; with William Burroughs over the cut-up method; and contributed memorable remarks on Das Kapital and the bourgeois realist tradition. The conference produced his first in-person meetings with Henry Miller and William Burroughs, both of whom were also platform participants.
The court stenographer’s mimeographed Transcript of Proceedings of the 20–24 August International Writers’ Conference: “The Novel Today” (138 pp.) is the only contemporary record of the proceedings, replete with humorous transcription errors. Mailer’s contributions to the transcript constitute Lennon Works entry 62.24. In 2012 — fifty years later — Andrew Hook’s edited limited edition The Novel Today: Edinburgh International Festival 1962 (Edinburgh: Kennedy & Boyd) reprinted the proceedings in a properly typeset form. The conference is referred back to across the Mailer corpus at 65.1, 65.13, 81.21, 92.12, 96.7, 13.2 (pp. 312–15).
The conference’s reverberations continued: the 1963 Edinburgh Drama Conference, and the controversies surrounding both events, are sometimes seen as a precursor to the 1960s expanded festival culture.
Related pages
- 1962 | Conference Remarks (Edinburgh International Writers' Conference) | Henry Miller | William S. Burroughs | Mary McCarthy
- Defenders of "Naked Lunch" Compare Burroughs to Authors of Classics (65.1) | The Boston Trial of Naked Lunch (65.13) | Norman Mailer: A Double Life (13.2)