The Shanghai Grip

By Fionnuala McHugh

“Can anyone explain the Shanghai Grip?” asked a plaintive female on Sunday evening, a few hours after the first M Festival in Nanteuil-en-Vallée had reached its successful conclusion. She was seated in one of the charming Charente homes in which the weekend’s global visitors had billeted themselves. The men in the group who’d attended Anne Sebba and Paul French’s afternoon talk on Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, rushed to oblige in chorus: “It made a match feel like a cigar!”

Still, as someone pointed out, Sebba had made it clear that the correct terminology for the practice is Baltimore Grip. Or Shanghai Squeeze. Or China Clinch. Sebba has a crystalline voice that can purify pornography; and Paul French has wonderfully suggestive tones that hint at double entendre where none is intended. We learned, for instance, that Wallis didn’t linger in 1920s Hong Kong because it couldn’t provide cocktails.

Meanwhile, Sir Alan Hollinghurst and Tash Aw explored the literary language of gay sex and the subsequent responses by their parents in, respectively, England and Malaysia. In both cases, silence was considered the best response although, in an earlier talk, a heartfelt Tash Aw also spoke of his father’s support when he faced extreme online hostility.

Other literary pairings included opera critic Ken Smith with Philip Eisenbeiss, who has written a biography of opera impresario Domenico Barbaja. When the enthusiastic Eisenbeiss made entertaining diversions down the byways of 19th-century Italian history, Smith could nudge him back on to the musical path. (It also turned out that Barbaja, who couldn’t read music and thought orchestral tune-ups were composers’ new works, wasn’t all that interested in opera anyway.)

Fuchsia Dunlop’s succulent talk on the tastes, textures and ideal grapple-factor of Chinese cuisine was moderated by Hamish Pollitt, former chef at M on the Bund. You could hear the smacking of audience lips at the first on-screen image – a bowl of pock-marked grandmother’s tofu.

Food, as with any M event, was a strong festival theme (although, alas, tax expert Philip Marcovici’s memorably-titled event, Don’t Eat the Rich!, was cancelled). Tash Aw recalled M arriving with meals at his chilly Shanghai door, when he was M’s first writer-in-residence. By contrast, Paul French revealed that the Duchess of Windsor-to-be thought the British in Hong Kong boil-boil-boiled their dishes into a brown sludge.

Even Amy Tan referred to her nourishing role in a talk on her latest book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles. Tan, whose bright blue highlights gleamed in her dark hair so that she resembled one of her own lovely avian sketches, described how the fledglings of Sausalito pecked at her window in their eagerness to be fed. Later that evening she said she had indeed seen the Hitchcock film and it had terrified her; but the session was a calm meditation on the benefits of quietly observing the natural world.

This was encouraging to hear because global tension was, inevitably, also a theme. Like a warning from the grim past, Anne Sebba turned her attention to a barely-known group of unlikely musicians. Her talk on the women’s orchestra of Auschwitz was a masterclass, not in voyeuristic horror but measured compassion. But it is the present that disturbs Victor Mallet: he spoke, in both English and French, about the rise of the Far Right in France.

He also moderated Helen Scales’ powerful talk about her book What the Wild Sea Can Be. As her name suggests, Scales is balanced between optimism and pessimism. She is, mostly, hopeful; but her audience heard how the ocean is changing and how the future holds a threat for all humanity.

A tiny flavour of this shift was heralded by the cancellation of two French writers: neither Prix Goncourt winner Marie NDiaye nor Simone Gélin could make it to Nanteuil because of the fires consuming the landscape around Bordeaux, two hours’ away. Later, the departures of authors and visitors by train, plane and road would be a complicated matter. (M had said from the beginning of this project that she was not – NOT – going to be everyone’s travel agent. But you’d never have guessed that as she briskly deciphered alternative transport flow-charts – scribbled in green ink across scraps of paper – in the grounds of the Abbaye on Sunday night.)

In any case, M’s mother Ange had successfully petitioned Heaven for Nanteuil’s cooler weather. The air seemed buoyant. Even the paper bags in which the Sunday lunchtime samosas and spring rolls were wrapped bore the words Lucky China… and it felt like that. Many people clasped each other in (actual) China clinches, renewing old friendships across the miles and decades.

On successive evenings in the 13th-century local church of Saint Jean-Baptiste, sublime music from guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre (courtesy of Andrea Fessler) and the Lumia Quartet rose to the newly-restored roof. The past, it turns out, can be renewed.

At the end, M announced that the next festival would be in 2028; and so Nanteuil-en-Vallée (pop 1,354) has now taken its place alongside Shanghai and Beijing’s literary festivals. With practice and determination, even the smallest endeavour can grow unexpectedly bigger. That, after all, is the lesson of the Shanghai Grip.