There’s been a few appearances by writers of late, and WitSunday was not the least of them. Unfortunately I only made it at the end of the day, to see Alain de Botton and Edmund White. (I’ve also got notes on Messrs Mahy and Knox last week, so keep reading, it’s a long ‘un.)

I enjoyed Alain again (having seen him last year at the festival) but not as much as the first time. I rather agreed with Maggie Rainey-Smith, who sent in a review of his appearance in a packed hall in Wellington (his ‘show’ in Auckland was a record 1,100 odd). Maggie:

… what struck me most about the evening, was the amazing turnout to hear this guy – when the Book Council has regular ‘Meet the Author’ events – and I must say, perhaps sometimes more worthy contenders for a crowd. Hey, but this guy is ‘popular’ and he was/is extremely articulate, interesting and sometimes funny – but bordering on glib and covering so much ground, (he is not an architect – I suspect some architects might find his potted history of architecture 101 a bit over-reaching) with lots of pictures from the laptop to the screen – on it went.

I felt tired and uninspired, but it improved near the end, got a bit more interesting. But what was the point? In the end, I didn’t think his topic was worthy of almost an hour’s talking ... and ultimately, I guess he was just there to promote his book – and why not? But it seems to me that people ‘on the circuit’ as Alain currently is, somehow lose an innocence, and authenticity in the process – it becomes a performance. Of course, it might be that I lack innocence, am getting old and cynical and want something more than there is to offer from such a high-profile writer and speaker.

Yes, I have to say I agreed with Maggie. Alain hardly seemed to stop to draw breath, and I found myself wondering how many times he’d said and done all it all. There are really only a few solid ideas in the premise that architecture can make you happy, and he seemed to be really stretching those. However, still an endearing and relaxing chap, with his cute, self-deprecating stutter and charming exposées of his own bad habits. I’d find it very hard not to like him. He probably just needs a week in Fiji. But don’t we all.

Edmund White. Again, a magnificent addition to any dinner party, but what with Peter Wells’ rather queasily obsequious and sibilant interview, which was combined with a curious, white-knuckled gripping of the arms of his chair between questions, I could hardly take in what the Patriarch of gay literature had to say. I expect poor Peter, usually so smoothly professional, was horribly starstruck, and who’s to blame him?

I remember scribbling down a line from Peter: ‘Your books are not so much explicit, as specific,’ which I thought was very well observed. I must admit to only having read one book of Edmund’s, prompted by one of my gay flatmates in London years ago – A Boy’s Own Story – which is an extraordinarily affecting book about… well, being human really. I was struck by this book enough to be hell-bent on seeing him in the flesh years later, and I remember thinking at the time that he wrote about sex very well indeed – the above phrase did it fine justice.

Anyway, I’ve lost my notes, and I didn’t write many to start with, so entranced was I by the sight of Mr Wells’ giggling. The stories Edmund told about trying to get various French people to give out their memoirs when he was writing his biographies of Proust and Genet were fascinating; I could’ve listened to that for hours, but I did feel (thanks to Peter) that without Edmund giving a brief (token?) moment to saying how he treasures the fan mail he gets from his women readers I would have felt like I did in a New York nightclub last year: the only chick in the place – and dear me, I wasn’t Kylie. Oh well. Whatever – Edmund White is a brilliant writer, as is Peter Wells, and I’m going to read more of both of them one day. When I’m not struggling with a ten-book stack of review books.

Later in the week I saw Elizabeth Knox and Margaret Mahy at a NZ Book Council event chaired very well by Kate de Goldi, at the lovely new hall at Epsom Girls Grammer. Don’t try and get there from Titirangi at 6.30 on a wet Thursday, that’s all. But I did eventually, and I was glad. These two have a mutual fan club going which sparked each other off deliciously – they are obviously two of a kind in many ways. Margaret is more down to earth, but then she’s older, and with Elizabeth what you see is not exactly what you get – she’s much more approachable than one would assume from the formidable intellect in her writing. But they’re sisters under the cranium, with those amazing brains.

I was late (see above) and Margaret was just starting a story about how her imagination had been kick-started. (I think Elizabeth had already been talking about the elaborate games she used to play with her sisters). Margaret was about 7 or 8 I think and off to a fancy dress party. Her mother suggested she go as a witch as all the other girls would be dressed as fairies. Margaret overheard her mother say to her father ‘She’s got the right sort of face for a witch’. (‘Because of my big chin, of course,’ she endearingly cackled, stroking it.) Young Margaret was briefly taken aback but then after a night of fun scaring other children and then having to endure a few days of teasing at school, she saw how it might be used to her advantage. She decided to become a witch, and told the children that she had a poisonous bite. Then the movie Jungle Book came out and she immediately saw the potential inherent in being brought up by wild animals in the jungle – she began to insist that she had been, and pretended to be able to talk to animals; she drank from puddles and ate leaves with growly noises. Then someone gave her one with a caterpillar in it and she saw things had gone far enough.

Kate de Goldi had a great time drawing the two of them out. She has a passion, she says, for watching for leitmotif in writers and had a few ideas on what each of these two seem to dwell on. The common thread in Elizabeth’s books is the question of what is normal? She has, she says, ongoing existential angst (Vintners Luck), and is also preoccupied with issues of addiction (Daylight, Billie’s Kiss, Dreamhunter) and ‘the artist’s responsibility to society’ (Dreamhunter again). Margaret’s constant intellectual probe is what it is to be human, what the world is all about, and she’s consumed by the beauty of the process of writing something: where a story goes ‘from one inner silence to another and is absorbed into that part of the intelligence that is called imagination’. Quite nice, that, innit? I was going to ask how they each felt about their various books being turned into movies, thus kicking inner silence effectively into touch, but didn’t get a chance.

They both vibrate with passion when mention is made of the project they’ve been involved with over the course of the last year (Are Angels OK?, see book cover, above) – they’ve learned a lot about the magic and mysteries of quantum physics. And they’re both quite keen on querying the existence, or otherwise, of god. Or God. Margaret, who was brought up ‘er, Anglican, I think’, is very interested in what other peoples’ views are on the subject, but on the whole thinks that pinning a religious label on certain mysteries can be ‘rather limiting’. Elizabeth is in constant turmoil – she is prone to ‘visions’ which she calmly puts down to migraines, but respects and uses them nonetheless and sometimes feels they are important enough to write down … it’s how The Vintner’s Luck came about. A recent reading of Gilead by Marilynne Robinson left her convinced the book was an argument for the existence of God, but left her husband, publisher Fergus Barrowman, convinced of the opposite. Comment, anyone?

After a final discussion of how each writer decides on the hero of their books, Kate very charmingly declared that the writers themselves were the heroes – by ‘inhabiting dangerous places, and persisting’. I’ll drink to that. This was a great evening with two of our best and most world-famous writers. And then home to bed, slowly, in the rain.