Conference Remarks (Edinburgh International Writers' Conference)
Mailer's contributions to the Edinburgh International Writers' Conference, 20-24 August 1962, preserved in the court stenographer's mimeographed 138-page transcript of the proceedings: 'The Novel Today.' Mailer co-chairs the final day's session, 'The Novel and the Future,' clashes with Mary McCarthy and Lawrence Durrell, and contributes memorable remarks on Das Kapital. The transcript carries the conference's significance into the official record. In 2012 Andrew Hook edited a limited-edition reprint, The Novel Today: Edinburgh International Festival 1962 (Edinburgh: Kennedy & Boyd).
Conference Remarks. In Transcript of Proceedings of the 20–24 August International Writers’ Conference: “The Novel Today,” Edinburgh, 138 pp.
The Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference was held 20–24 August 1962 at the McEwan Hall, organized by John Calder and Sonia Orwell as part of the Edinburgh International Festival; some seventy writers from twenty countries attended. The five-day program ran The Novel Today, Scottish Writing Today, Is Commitment Necessary?, Censorship Today, and The Novel and the Future.
The court stenographer’s mimeographed transcript (replete with egregious, humorous, errors) is a fascinating document. Mailer speaks several times, and co-chairs the final day’s session, “The Novel and the Future.” The transcript details Mailer’s interaction with Mary McCarthy, Lawrence Durrell, William Burroughs, and his comments on Das Kapital.
In 2012, a limited edition of the proceedings, titled The Novel Today: Edinburgh International Festival 1962, edited by Andrew Hook, was published by the Edinburgh publisher Kennedy & Boyd.
The Edinburgh conference is one of the two principal mid-1962 events for Mailer’s literary life — the other being the Patterson–Liston fight in September. It produces Mailer’s first in-person meetings with Henry Miller and William Burroughs (per the published Days, p. 13).
Related pages
- 1962 | Edinburgh International Writers' Conference, 1962 | 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) | Conference remarks and court testimony on Burroughs's *Naked Lunch* (81.21) | "Comments" (in Girls Lean Back Everywhere) (92.12) | Comment on William Burroughs (96.7) | Norman Mailer: A Double Life (13.2)