24,00 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A The Spectator and Observer Book of the Year The NB column in the Times Literary Supplement, signed at the foot by J.C., occupied the back page of the paper for thirteen years. For a decade before that, it was in the middle pages. That's roughly 60,000 words a year for twenty-three years. The purpose of the initials was not to disguise the author, but to offer complete freedom to the persona. J.C. was irreverent and whimsical. The column punctured pomposity, hypocrisy and cant in the literary world – as one correspondent put it: 'skewering contemporary absurdities, whether those resulting from identity politics or from academic jargon'. Readers came to expect reports from the Basement Labyrinth, where all executive decisions are made, and where annual literary prizes were judged and administered. These included the Most Unoriginal Title Prize – for a new book bearing a title that had been used by several other authors (eg, The Kindness of Strangers); the Incomprehensibility Prize, for impenetrable academic writing; the Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal, and the All Must Have Prizes Prize, for authors who have never won anything. Readers of NB by J.C. will find an off-beat guide to our cultural times. The book begins in 2001 and proceeds to 2020. The substantial Introduction offers a history of the TLS itself from birth through the precarious stages of its adaptation and survival.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
7
to
Maren Meinhardt
and
Peter Stothard
9
I make haste to agree once more with Mr Eliot that for the normal critic, the purpose of literature is to amuse. If that word feels too light, then substitute another: entertain … Entertainment is a tremendous as well as a delightful thing, and there are plenty of writers, God knows, who do not succeed at it.
– Mark Van Doren, The Happy Critic
*
I am ashamed of my century
for being so entertaining
but I have to smile
– Frank O’Hara, ‘Naphtha’
Contents
NB BY J.C.
Introduction
The Literary Supplement of The Times came into being on January 17, 1902, a few days before the first anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria. It was conceived as a convenience, a bearer of excess baggage from the overloaded Times – ‘a makeshift’. The idea was to find a place for the increasing numbers of book reviews, with their accompanying column-length advertisements, now clogging up the pages of the newspaper. With a busy parliamentary session in prospect, the management wished to keep space free for debates about the conduct of the war in South Africa and related matters, such as the construction of the original concentration camps – an innovation of which The Times disapproved. Casting back in 1930, the editor of the TLS Bruce Richmond found it ‘almost a shock to look at the first number with its hesitating announcement that “During the ensuing session of Parliament” a supplement dealing with books will be published’ – during that session but not beyond. It is easy to assume now that continuation was certain from the start but, in fact, the Lit Supp, child of 1902, hadn’t a licence to survive into 1903.
When the parliamentary session closed, it was expected that the makeshift would close with it. Thanks to the manager of The Times, Charles Moberly Bell, however, the Supplement was discreetly steered into a second year. In his letter of 1930 to Mrs Moberly Bell, Richmond remembered how it staggered past the final week of parliament, ‘when your husband … immersed in graver troubles, seemed to have forgotten to stop it’.
Only seemed to have. During those busy days, Bell was present in the editorial office with another member of the management, ‘coasting round and round the room jingling his keys and discussing high matters’, while Richmond busied himself with the new books. ‘Without any apparent 14interruption of his talk [he said] in a sort of stage whisper as he passed me – “If I were you, I shouldn’t remind anybody”.’ So, Richmond concluded, ‘I reminded nobody – and here the thing is to this day.’
Richmond guided the thing through one world war, on to the brink of another, navigating two further premonitions of closure, before stepping down in 1938. Having spent thirty-six years in the chair, he is the longest-serving editor of the TLS, possibly the most enduring in British weekly journalism – neither Robert Rintoul, founder of the Spectator and its editor between 1828 and 1858, nor Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman (1930–1960), outdo him. The first of these threats, in 1914, was followed by another eight years later. The proprietor of The Times by then was Lord Northcliffe, crudely characterized by some as the Rupert Murdoch of his day. ‘Send for Richmond’, Northcliffe instructed one of his lieutenants in telegraphese on March 27, 1922. ‘Tell him Lit Supp deprives Times 20,000 readers. Literary side of Times very weak since Supp started.’ He threatened to do away with the Literary Supplement, not because it was failing but thriving. ‘Shall merge Supplement in Times beginning with Friday week’s number.’
How close Northcliffe came to killing off the Supplement was recorded in an article by one of Richmond’s editorial assistants, Harold Child (TLS, January 18, 1952):
The number of March 30 was almost ready for press when a sudden order came from Lord Northcliffe: the next number but two was to be the last, and this death-sentence was to be published …. Into the leading article on the front page a ‘box’ was introduced, announcing in italic type that No. 1056 (April 13, 1922) would be the last number of the Literary Supplement …. But once more the journal was to owe its continued existence to something like an oversight. The order had not penetrated into every department concerned. In one quarter there was some 15doubt about its validity. Twenty minutes before the paper went to press, the box was removed from the front page and the number of April 13 showed no sign of its narrow escape. That summer Lord Northcliffe became too ill to take an active part in his business. In August he died.
In common with two long-serving editors of a more modern era, William Shawn of the New Yorker and Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books, Richmond rarely, if ever, wrote anything for publication himself. His talent was to enable the writing of others: to take a good piece and make it better. In a fond tribute published in the TLS in 1961, T. S. Eliot recalled that Richmond ‘did not hesitate to object or delete, and I had always to admit that he was right’. Like other victims of the blue pencil through the ages, Eliot might have felt on occasion that those deletions were wounding, if not plain wrong. But, again like those others, once obliged to see his work from a different viewpoint, he was inclined to come round.
Virginia Woolf on the whole shared Eliot’s esteem for the exacting editor, though at times she flinched at the pencil’s sharpness. Her first review was turned down. The book was Catherine de’ Medici by Edith Sichel. Richmond told the twenty-two-year-old hopeful that his preferred style for pieces in the Literary Supplement was more ‘academic’ than this effort (he later found someone else to write about the book; Sichel herself was a regular reviewer). Given a second try, Virginia Stephen, as she then was, received two guide books, one to ‘Thackeray Country’, the other to ‘Dickens Country’. This time it was a success. The piece appeared under the heading ‘Literary Geography’ on March 10, 1905, and the Lit Supp had a new, bright young writer. The relationship occasionally dipped, with the editor’s readiness ‘to object or delete’. Years later, Woolf protested to her Diary that there would be ‘no more reviewing for me, now that Richmond rewrites my sentences to suit the mealy-mouths of Belgravia’. 16She persisted, however, and was to become one of the paper’s best and most prodigious reviewers.
Editors of literary journals are forever in search of new voices and bright ideas with which, when combined, they hope to attract young readers. This in itself is not new. Writing to the books editor of The Times on Christmas Eve 1901, three weeks before the appearance of the first Literary Supplement, Moberly Bell lamented: ‘I find The Times patronised mainly by older men and alas they die …. I don’t want to abandon the traditions of The Times but I want to move with the times.’
Thus do things continue from one era to the next – the thing in this case being the one referred to by Richmond in 1930. In the second half of the century it became familiarly known as the TLS.
*
The NB banner was an attempt to introduce something new and bright into the TLS in the autumn of 1987. It was not at first the portal to the free-standing column it would later become, but sat at the top of a page as a section heading, sheltering a miscellany of non-review articles. The reader turning the page on to this version of NB, near the middle of the paper, would be aware of a modulation from the plainsong of TLS book reviews to something sparkier – a scherzo or a minuet – intended to create a more journalistic mood, occasionally light-hearted, though no less serious for that. The introductory acts on that first NB page of September 11, overseen by Isabel Fonseca, were a discussion by Anthony Glees of Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher (‘probably the most important publishing event of the decade’) and a report on the Nicaraguan Book Fair, a gathering that was mixed in with ‘celebrations of the Eighth anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution’. The author, Amanda Hopkinson, told readers 17that Alice Walker refused to sign copies of The Color Purple at the official United States stand.
Over the following weeks, K. K. Ruthven wrote about Ezra Pound’s happy habit of treating other writers’ verses as the raw material for his own, Jane O’Grady discussed the phenomenon of mushrooming literary prizes, and Timothy Garton Ash and others wrote retrospective evaluations of literary magazines and specialist periodicals. A hint of NB to come can be traced to Christopher Hitchens’s full-page American Notes, by then a regular feature of the paper. In December, however, Hitchens announced at the foot of his monthly column that, as he had been writing American Notes for five years, ‘I should prefer to stop while there is still a chance that people will ask why instead of why not. Godspeed to the NB page, on which I still hope to appear from time to time.’
The NB page was also the progenitor and original guardian of Hugo Williams’s Freelance column, one of the most popular features ever to appear in the TLS. It took a hesitant step out of his Islington living room on January 8, 1988, with the observation, ‘Coffee is the drug of the chronic freelance.’
In time, Freelance would be overseen by me, and Hugo would come to be identified with the column. He would carry on writing it for over twenty-five years, irregularly at first, then fortnightly, going down to monthly in the new century. The burden was shared by other writers, notably P. J. Kavanagh in Gloucestershire and Michael Greenberg in New York – each acting as Hugo’s foil on the alternate week, the intention being to offer a different tonality. The routine changed again when I assembled a team of writers that included A. E. Stallings in Greece, Adam Thorpe in the Cévennes, Zinovy Zinik dreaming of Moscow in Chalk Farm, Lydia Davis in and out of her garden in upstate New York, Alan Taylor roaming Edinburgh and its environs. It was my hope to have each of them give the reader a sense of reporting from his or her own patch. 18
In addition, I made regular columns ready for the page by William Boyd, Barton Swaim, Michael Dirda, D. J. Taylor, Caryl Phillips, Will Self, Sean O’Brien, Nicholas Murray, Katherine Ashenburg and others. Dealing with them was almost always a pleasure: querying an obscurity here, requesting smoother continuity there, cutting an excess sentence at the top, suggesting a concluding one near the bottom. These working partnerships are, ideally, instructive to both writer and editor. I conceived of the page as Isabel Fonseca – and no doubt the paper’s editor at the time, Jeremy Treglown – had thought of Hitchens’s American Notes: as an invitation to the reader to take a lighter step in the weekly tread over the firm ground of the TLS.
When it emerged as a separate entity, the NB column had a similar purpose. It arrived as part of a new design on February 8, 1991. Both the feature and the design – ‘we hope that readers will find the lay-out clearer and more attractive’ – were introduced by the paper’s incoming editor, Ferdinand Mount, who had lately taken over from Treglown. Occupying at first about a third of a page, the column was the work of David Sexton, already a respected critic and the first staff appointment made by Mount.
Sexton wrote a waspish, cheeky NB with a Private Eye touch (he was also a contributor to that magazine). He had a predilection for taking on, and taking down, the establishment: prize-giving committees; literary festivals that were barely literary, more like celebrity parades; Arts Council bureaucracy; the well-publicized daytime and nighttime doings of a band of successful male writers who were then around the age of forty-five. His first column addressed the row in progress between Salman Rushdie and John le Carré, over a harsh review by Rushdie of le Carré’s latest novel, The Russia House.
For Rushdie, it was cuttingly personal: he alleged that le Carré had accused him of having brought the Iranian 19fatwa down on his own head on purpose, ‘to profit from the notoriety that would result’. Put like that, it was an absurd notion; more likely, le Carré meant to raise an objection, in response to a sour review, to what he and some others saw as a characteristic arrogance in aspects of Rushdie’s behaviour – ‘almost colonialist arrogance’, le Carré called it. As to the criticism of his own latest work, he suggested that the author of The Satanic Verses disliked books that offered readers ‘accessibility’. Rushdie rejoined that, in the role of critic, he had a responsibility not to let an exalted reputation stand in the way of ‘calling a turkey a turkey’.
It was rapid-fire stuff, relayed by Sexton with a feeling of being written off the top of the head. At the foot of each dispatch were fixed the initials ‘D.S.’ As it grew familiar to TLS readers, the column began to lay claim to a regular half-page. A colophon was devised, depicting two cherubs, one grappling with a massive fountain pen, the other holding an open notebook, on the pages of which the pen was inscribing something or other – possibly that week’s NB. A well-stuffed hobby horse for the contentious columnist was the growth of political correctness. Some of D.S.’s comments from the early 1990s would seem topical if printed for the first time thirty years on:
Alison Prince was asked to change the opening phrase of her book, A Job for Merv: ‘Things were looking black’ was objected to in favour of ‘things were looking bad’…. Another author had a list of racial pejoratives removed from a book even though they were ‘roundly condemned in the text’. A publisher, Heinemann, actually sent a contributor a list of suggested names for ethnic characters. An illustrator, Val Biro, reported being required to fill a racial quota.
When David went on holiday, or had pressing business to attend (a stint of jury service, for example), he asked me to house-sit. So it was that I began an apprenticeship as the NB 20scribe. The first stage in the process happened in July 1993.
The lead item for the week tackled Susan Sontag, who was the object of worldwide admiration at the time for her audacious plan to mount a production of Waiting for Godot during the siege of Sarajevo, at the heart of the war in Bosnia. Sontag ignored many of Beckett’s strict stage directions, while at the same time taking liberties with the text. A large section of the play was cut. Beckett was no longer alive to extend or withhold his blessing, and the director and her team, hunkered down in Sarajevo, did not wait for permission from his famously obstinate estate. Possibly they did not even ask. ‘Sontag plans to enlarge her troupe to include actresses in her production of the all-male play’, I wrote. ‘She wants “three Vladimir-Estragon couples …. One woman-woman, one woman-man, one man-man.”’
Who could object? It’s not clear that the Beckett estate ever did. Yes, but I had a column to fill, and bland gestures of solidarity in the direction of the entrenched theatricals were not likely to be of much interest. I happened to know through a friend that Beckett had refused to endorse an all-female production of Waiting for Godot by a troupe from Holland. After his death, they took it to court, as a matter of freedom of expression, and a Dutch judge ruled in their favour. They went ahead, with an announcement stating the objections of the playwright’s estate made from the stage each evening before the house lights went down.
From a sceptical point of view, it could appear that the play that had made Beckett’s name was no longer his by right. ‘Sontag seems similarly disposed to disregard an author’s prerogative’, I wrote, after making reference to the Dutch actors, following up with a quote from Sontag: ‘Beckett was still thinking in that old way of thinking; that if these characters are to be representative then they should be men.’
This was an example of sheer cant, a sort that was to 21become more common as the 1990s progressed and the new century began. It wasn’t an ‘old way of thinking’ to suggest that performance rights in theatrical works, and conditions attached to granting them, rested with the authors of those works (or with their estates), just as publication rights in Sontag’s books should lawfully remain with her. Asked at that feverish time if she would have commended a pirate publication of one of her books by a Sarajevan publishing house, she might well have uttered a spontaneous ‘certainly’, but few would encourage the precedent.
A remark made by an exasperated Vladimir Nabokov regarding Lolita came to mind and added a little ballast to the argument. He was addressing the wily but invaluable French publisher Maurice Girodias, of the Olympia Press, who had dared to issue Nabokov’s once untouchable novel, then had shamelessly assumed ownership of it. ‘Dear Mr Girodias, I wrote Lolita.’ And, said J.C., ‘Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot.’
One commentator had suggested that Sontag on the stage was fiddling while Rome burned. With more justice, we could have been accused of fiddling in a comfortable London office while she took her chances in war-torn Sarajevo. You are conscious of these things at the time. But you have a story to write. The path for going-against-the-grain was laid then. It is not all there is, but it has its uses.
*
I worked for six editors of the TLS. One of them started me off, as a reviewer, in 1980. One hired me as a part-time editorial assistant in 1983. One installed me in the NB chair. One offered space to expand NB, giving it the back page, the first article subscribers would see when unwrapping the latest issue. One tolerated the column’s campaign against the increasing, and increasingly reflexive, warnings of ‘you can’t say 22that’ which began the work of deadening literary production in the second decade of this century. The sixth had barely started on the job when management obliged him to instruct several editors to put down their blue pencils once and for all.
I encountered John Gross, my first editor, at the Times building on Gray’s Inn Road in the spring of 1980. He was standing at the entrance to the TLS offices on the second floor as if guarding his cultural project, arms folded, with a characteristic half-smile on his lips. Through the poetry and fiction editor, Blake Morrison, John gave me my first reviewing assignments for the paper. At the time, I was running a quarterly magazine in Scotland, the New Edinburgh Review. On one of my regular visits to London, I had come to Gray’s Inn Road in the company of a friend who wanted to correct the proofs of his review for the following week’s issue.
It was a notable event in my early literary consciousness, to have walked from the offices of the New Statesman at Great Turnstile, off High Holborn, where my friend worked, to climb the stairs at the Bloomsbury premises of the TLS, there to make the acquaintance of people whose names were familiar only from their bylines, to leave with three books in my grip, with the request from Blake to turn in 1,200 words.
The books are within reach on my shelves now: an assortment of essays, Was That a Real Poem by Robert Creeley – the second half of the question being ‘or did you just make it up yourself?’; an ecology tract by the Californian Beat poet Gary Snyder, A Place in Space; and a slim collection of interviews with Edward Dorn, author of the cult long poem Gunslinger and Creeley’s pupil at Black Mountain College in the 1950s. I can still recall portions of the books. Dorn’s response to an earnest question about his readers amuses me whenever I think of it: ‘I know almost exactly how many they are, and I even know a large percentage of them personally.’ Blake asked me to write another piece, and then another. 23
Gross’s editorship of the TLS is regarded by many as having had the strongest cultural undertow of any in the paper’s 120-year-long course. He arrived from the New Statesman in 1974 and left seven years later. One of his first acts was to abolish the institution of reviewer anonymity – not a move welcomed by all reviewers and readers – and thereafter to establish a range of contributors whose names would appeal in their own right. It is startling to realize that the TLS had rarely enjoyed this advantage before. (A few freestanding essays were printed with the name of the writer attached – that of Henry James, for example.) Virginia Woolf’s association with the Lit Supp continued almost until her death in 1941. At stages along the way her reviews appeared weekly, yet every one was printed without a byline.
On Gross’s front page, the names of the reviewers were intended to attract attention, as much as those of the authors and subjects of the books under discussion. Anthony Burgess wrote on music, Anita Brookner on art, Gore Vidal on American affairs, Lorna Sage on literature, Clive James on literature and everything else. Noel and Gabriele Annan formed one hospitable couple, John and Hilary Spurling another. Patrick Leigh Fermor had licence to roam the world in typical rococo manner; the name-dropping Alastair Forbes to be shamelessly bad-mannered. The TLS as a cultural project was never more assured than under Gross. But the project was often interrupted by strikes, and eventually by the management’s decision in 1978 to impose a shutdown on all the journals in the Times stable, brought about by an increasingly frustrating sequence of disputes with the printers’ unions.
Since 1967, The Times, the Sunday Times and the supplements – the Times Educational and the Times Higher Education, as well as the Times Literary Supplement – had been owned by the Canadian media group, Thomson Newspapers. In November 24 1979, after almost a year of closed doors, the papers came back to life, but the Thomson family had had enough, and in early 1981 sold the titles to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Gross departed, with exasperation and not a little resentment, towards the end of that same year. He moved from one job to another: first, as an editor at the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson, then as a book critic on the main body of the New York Times, and later, back in Britain, as theatre critic for the Sunday Telegraph. I’d hazard a guess that he never found anything as engaging as his work at Gray’s Inn Road. ‘He saw it as an opportunity to put down a marker for the kind of worldview that he espoused’, Roger Scruton told an interviewer in 2015. ‘He took seriously the question of developing an argument and a philosophy through the journal, just as Sartre had done, to opposite [political] effect, in Les Temps modernes.’
*
John Gross was replaced by Jeremy Treglown, until recently a lecturer in the English department at University College London, which was under the direction of Karl Miller. During the Times shutdown, Miller, in partnership with Frank Kermode and with the moral support of the New York Review of Books, founded the London Review of Books, an obvious rival to the wounded TLS. The main financial backing came from Mary-Kay Wilmers who, until the Times lockout, had been editor of the TLS’s Commentary pages. When unions and Times management reached an accord that permitted the printing machines to roll again, Treglown left UCL and joined the TLS at Gross’s invitation. After Gross’s departure, the editorship was advertised and Treglown was urged to apply. The other candidates on the high-class shortlist were John Gross’s deputy editor and foe, John Sturrock; the biographer and literary editor of the Sunday Times, Claire Tomalin; and 25the editor of the magazine New Society, Paul Barker. The interview proceedings were overseen by Rupert Murdoch.
‘When Murdoch asked me what I would like to do with the TLS if he made me its editor’, Jeremy told me, ‘I didn’t say I would do my utmost to save the paper from Rupert Murdoch but that was my main hope.’ The Murdoch takeover of The Times and the Sunday Times had led to pessimistic speculation about the fate of the TLS and the likelihood of its diminished standing in the world of letters – in short, concern about ‘the brand’, though the term was not then in use. Jeremy acknowledges, however, that his editorial decisions, ‘good and bad’, were made in complete freedom. ‘If, for nine years, I played a part in saving the TLS from Rupert Murdoch, neither he nor – until my last few months – any of his managerial underlings took a step against me.’
Treglown strove to maintain the intellectual standard of Gross’s TLS, but in one respect, at least, his editorial ambitions departed from those of his former boss. ‘The TLS had played a small part in the 1970s’ British high-cultural turn towards neoconservatism’, Jeremy says, ‘and one of its senior editors still seemed to draw most of his commissioning ideas from the American neoliberal magazine, the New Criterion. An element of contrarianism was something I valued in the paper but what had seemed refreshing in Harold Wilson’s day was less so now that Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives were in power.’ Saving the paper from Murdoch ‘surely meant, among other things, bringing in younger, leftier voices, both among the staff and as contributors’.
He was not long in the job when he received a letter from me, now the former editor of the New Edinburgh Review and lately removed to London. I was scraping a living by writing articles and reviews for various publications, including the London Magazine, the New Statesman, New Society, the Scotsman, occasionally speaking on the radio – the bob-a-job literary life. 26I had also been offered a contract with a modest advance from Weidenfeld and Nicolson to write an account of a voyage by thumb and foot through Scotland, with distant echoes of Edwin Muir’s book of 1935, Scottish Journey. The commissioning editor, recently installed at the firm, was John Gross.
In my letter of approach, I asked Jeremy about the chances of office employment. I knew that the TLS had part-time editors who were also aspiring writers, or else academics with an untenured university post (usually at Oxford), who would work in the office for three or two or even one day a week. He lamented that there was nothing available at present, but said that he would bear my name in mind when there was. He hoped, meanwhile, that I would continue ‘to write for us’.
It was a standard polite gesture, but encouraging enough. I had carved a minor niche in the pages of the paper as a reviewer of books on a variety of Scottish subjects: a collection of the literary criticism of Francis Jeffrey, for example, the co-founder and first editor of the Edinburgh Review in the early nineteenth century – a few doors down the street from the offices of its reincarnation, which I had just left. I also reviewed an account of the history of writers, magazines and publishers in Edinburgh through the ages; a book of the uncollected criticism of Edwin Muir; the Selected Poems of Robert Garioch; a clutch of reissued novels by James Kennaway, the never-quite-but-nearly man of modern Scottish fiction who died of a heart attack at the wheel of his car in 1968, aged forty. Blake Morrison kept them coming my way and, when he left the TLS to become Terence Kilmartin’s deputy on the books pages of the Observer, his successor Alan Jenkins did the same.
One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1983, while preparing to make a final trip north to fuel the book commissioned by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, I received a phone call at home. Jeremy wanted to know if I was still interested in that part-time editorial post. ‘Only two days a week’, he said, 27half apologetically. If so, would I like to come in the following afternoon to have lunch and talk about it?
I was still interested – I certainly was – I could come in, and by the time the bill for our café lunch was settled I had a job at the TLS. There was no interview with Personnel (or Human Resources – HR – as it would later be known), no paperwork to complete, nothing to sign, no bank details to register. I came to the office, then in Saint John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, fulfilled an editing shift of general literary duties on Monday and another on Tuesday, picked up a bundle of notes at the cash desk downstairs, and walked through Covent Garden to Soho to meet someone at the French House or the Coach and Horses in the happy prospect of spending some of it.
My colleagues for the next decade and more – the TLS wheel was slow to turn – included Sturrock, the most deeply informed intellectual the majority of us would ever work closely with but still, to his chagrin, deputy editor; Mandy Radice and Elizabeth Winter, usually paired by name, though unalike except in shared congeniality; the Alans, Jenkins and Hollinghurst; Anna Vaux, lately down from Oxford; the naturalist and jungle adventurer Redmond O’Hanlon; the philosopher Galen Strawson; Lindsay Duguid and Holly Eley, the last a sharp-nibbed editor and sharply amusing presence at her desk, from under which her black Labrador sometimes kept half an eye on office proceedings. From time to time, Holly would appear with a plump sack of freshly plucked game, shot by her and shooting pals in Oxfordshire a few days earlier, offered for selection by colleagues. Before long, she became Mrs Treglown. The senior editor mentioned above by Jeremy, who ‘seemed to draw most of his commissioning ideas’ from American neo-conservative journals, was Adolf Wood, a gentle, witty man with humane and liberal views concerning his native South Africa, and a stubbornly conservative outlook on his adopted land. 28
On my first morning in the office, I was guided to a desk next to Lindsay, then overseeing the TLS’s wide coverage of children’s books, soon to be in charge of arts, and later fiction. She presented me with a two-page review in typescript and showed me how to mark it up with a pencil in readiness for the printer. ‘It’s our style to write “realize” and not “realise”. “Premiss”, as in “the basic premiss”, rather than “premise”, which is how everybody else does it. Don’t ask me why.’
Lindsay returned to her seat, leaving me with my first office task. It was something to do, the new boy’s most desired objective. As Lindsay put it: ‘Just in case you need an alibi ….’
*
When Sexton was offered a job as literary editor and resident critic on the London Evening Standard, in the spring of 1997, Ferdinand Mount invited me to take his place. My two paid days were upped to three, without the obligation to appear in the office on the third, and the keys to NB were handed by D.S. to J.C.
I set out with no mission or plan, not even with a determination to establish a different tone from that of my predecessor. But a column naturally reflects the personality of its author. Paradoxically, it takes practice to let this show. The hardest thing of all in writing is to sound like yourself. And only by writing a lot can you hope to hear yourself as you do sound, to recognize which effects and devices you can control and which remain beyond your reach. In short, why you sound as you do.
The going-against-the-grain habit, evident in that first outing, with Sontag’s Godot, wasted little time in showing up again. When everyone appears to be of one accord in thinking the right thing, go the other way. There is something of this in the Private Eye rule, as expressed by the magazine’s first 29editor, Richard Ingrams: So-and-so is up? Ok, let’s pull down so-and-so. An example was the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Bailey’s Prize, and before that the Orange Prize), treated by right-thinking types as indisputably a good thing, a beneficial intervention into the tired and traditional world of publishing, a modest but necessary correction in the rapidly increasing catalogue of male-enabled wrong. No matter what the personal views of the writer behind the initials might be, it is the job of the columnist to be contrary. In NB, the prize was invariably referred to as ‘the segregationist Women’s Prize …’. Feel free to say it isn’t so.
Another example of going against the grain was displayed in a series which bore the heading ‘Racial segregation in the literary world’. In the late 1990s, renewed attention began to be paid to the status of black and Asian writers in Britain, not a topic I was unmindful of in its wider scope. What failed to appeal to me was consideration of black writers as a group apart from the community at large, with supposedly innate disadvantages and special needs that required help. Wasn’t that approach what they (we) were trying to overcome?
In the columns of NB there were regular protests against the idea, and the practice, of ‘separate-but-equal’ treatment of British black writers, which was gradually becoming embedded in the general conversation – a return to the bedrock of pre-civil rights segregation in the United States. Separate workshops for women of Asian origin sprang up in London and elsewhere, often funded by local authority culture departments eager to find worthy ways of spending taxpayers’ money. Would a woman of non-Asian appearance be asked to present ethnic certification at the door, on pain of being turned away? Anthologies reserved for black and Asian short story writers (the term BAME, standing for black, Asian and minority ethnic, had yet to come into common use) were announced, as well as prizes restricted to those who 30consider themselves black. If that condition of entry is broadly acceptable, then the argument is settled: we do live in a society in which people – in this case writers – can be separated according to the colour of their skin.
A question that raised itself in the course of considering these events was: who is black (or brown or white) and who is not? Does the contentious question of self-identification come into it? Not many in the arts world seemed willing to engage with such complications, even to show awareness of them. Rather, the ‘literary establishment’, so disdained by D.S., rushed to offer a new, British form of what Americans had once called ‘black uplift’ to this disadvantaged sector.
It had an unwelcome echo of the one-drop rule that in certain Southern states fixed the racial status of many unwilling Americans, determining their destinies, up until the 1970s and to an extent until the present day (the one drop being that of a single distant African American ancestor, bestowing ‘invisible blackness’). The scenario seemed to me absurd, the invidious effect being the opposite of the intention. Apart from anything else, it was surely in contravention of the terms of the Race Relations Act. If there could be a book of stories restricted to so-called black writers, what was to stop someone advertising an anthology of work reserved for authors who proudly proclaimed their Aryan purity? In NB, we tried to avoid use of the term ‘black’ to describe writers and their work; and disavowed ‘white’, too, which is vague and misleading in its own way.
We failed, of course, but can at least claim to have tried to do our duty as we saw it. One day a BBC producer rang up with the suggestion of making a radio programme on some aspect of this question. When he gave his name, Tony Phillips, I recognized him as the brother of a friend of mine, the Caribbean-born writer Caryl Phillips. Caz and I shared an acquaintance with, and devotion to, James Baldwin – had met 31originally, in fact, via Baldwin’s introduction. Nothing came of the radio proposal, but I retain a memory of Tony’s voice on the telephone, enlivened by a rippling chuckle. ‘No one else is saying this.’ Why not? ‘Because they’re afraid.’ Of what? ‘Of being seen to be on the wrong side.’ In view of that response, we didn’t fail completely.
*
One of several notional publications the reader will find mentioned in the succeeding pages is The TLS Reviewer’s Handbook. Its intention was to offer elementary advice to practising writers, and to give guidance to ‘our style’.
House style is something the common reader encounters at every journal, usually without being aware of the steadying hold it exerts over the words on the page. The rules vary from one publication to another – a simple example of house style is the choice between -ise and -ize verb endings: ‘recognise’ or ‘recognize’? – but the most important thing is that, once laid down, they should be adhered to.
This would sometimes be lost on the individual contributor. A writer might try to insist on a lower-case m for Marxism, for example, whereas TLS house style favours upper case. House style requires First World War, not World War One or the Great War, Muslim, not Moslem, italics for nom de guerre but not for nom de plume, Scotch to be used only in phrases involving broth, whisky, mist … and observance of numerous other rules, some of which outsiders might regard as paltry, if not eccentric. Upper-case the definite article for The Times but not for the Guardian; cap T for The Economist but not for the Spectator. It was once the style of the New Yorker (not The New Yorker, though they style it that way themselves) to avoid ‘wig’ and ‘midget’. Why? Because the editor of the time, William Shawn, said so. It doesn’t take much more justification than 32that. House style should, however, be open to change, and after Shawn’s departure ‘wig’ broke down the barrier and stormed the New Yorker’s from then on less decorous columns. Midget, too, probably. In the late 1980s, it was TLS style to avoid ‘gay’ and to stick with ‘homosexual’. That changed – the homosexual usage became mainstream – and TLS style changed with it.
Good. But a going-against-the-grain columnist might silently insist on a regular non-gay use of ‘gay’, just to draw attention to its continued existence, while not disputing the validity of the newly accepted one. That’s good, too. Above all, The TLS Reviewer’s Handbook wished to be seen as taking a stand against lazy-minded linguistic habits.
Some advice from the Handbook: don’t use ‘iconic’ – which has come to be applied to anything from Beethoven’s iconic Ninth Symphony to a brand of perfume (the iconic Chanel No. 5) – except in relation to iconography; avoid ‘interrogate’ – a fashionable item of sub-academic jargon used to indicate close reading – except in relation to criminal proceedings; do not pursue ‘the usual suspects’, unless in aid of a police investigation. The reader will find more examples in the main part of this book. There is never any need to use ‘within’, a senior colleague once insisted; ‘in’ will always suffice. We gave him a copy of Graham Greene’s retitled novel The Man In, and promised to add his name to the acknowledgements in the next edition of the Handbook.
The TLS Reviewer’s Handbook, though real enough in the world of NB, was a notional publication. It never existed beyond the page. From time to time, a reader would write to office general inquiries (not ‘enquiries’) to request a copy, at the same time asking how to pay. Some had tried to order it at a local bookshop. One of many hopeful purchasers was the film director Martin Scorsese. It was pleasant to imagine these loyal subscribers eager to raise their literary level by a 33notch or two, and to know that they believed possession of The TLS Reviewer’s Handbook would help. To each of the requesters, including Scorsese, I wrote what I hoped was a good-humoured note, receipt of which would not provoke a feeling of being thought foolish.
Both good writing and bad writing come in many forms. It was easy to make a public display in NB of the bad kind – the Incomprehensibility Prize was set up for exactly this purpose – but establishing guidelines for the good is a risky enterprise. Many intelligent, thorough reviewers consistently get tangled up in awkward phraseology. Just about any sentence of more than two clauses is susceptible to objection on some point or other. As the years passed, and peer pressure incorporated more and more politically correct usages into common speech – we don’t say ‘peasant’, we say ‘country people’; we don’t say ‘suicide’, we say ‘took his or her own life’; we don’t say ‘slaves’, we say ‘enslaved people’ – the advice offered by The TLS Reviewer’s Handbook went unheeded, not least by TLS reviewers.
*
An essential feature in the continuing life of the TLS since the Second World War, if not before, has been ‘the brand’. It was, in fact, formulated and broadcast, without recourse to that term, in connection with the first issue in January 1902. A note about the forthcoming launch was inserted in the journal Academy and Literature, with which The Times had a connection. ‘A special Literary Supplement is published with The Times on Friday. This Supplement is an impartial organ of literary criticism and a comprehensive medium of literary intelligence.’
The last sentence is a stirring one. Not only that, it proved to have enduring spirit. Over the next century and more, the 34paper aspired to live up to it. If you were to be introduced to a group of professors of literature at the universities of Chicago or Paris or Cairo, in the 1970s, 80s or 90s, maybe even later, with the information that you were an editor at the Times Literary Supplement in London, your hosts would know immediately where to position you by way of the cultural compass – no matter that they might not have read the paper for years. There would be courteous gestures of restrained awe. There are few equivalent brands in the world of letters. A ‘comprehensive medium of literary intelligence’ may be read as embracing information as well as critical thought, but it none the less evokes an element resistant to facile change in a too fast changing world, in which the standard bearers of culture, including literary culture, are liable to appear as an array of blurred shapes from one season to the next. ‘Literary intelligence’ holds out a promise of reliability in the realm of the humanities and sciences. Even if the TLS has been overtaken in recent times by other journals, trading in a richer currency than the much-resented Murdoch shilling (taking it at its most literal: we were seldom able to pay our hard-working reviewers what they deserved), it could still claim to stand for what the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson called, in another context, ‘items of best being’.
My view, intuitive as it is, is that the brand slipped into the danger zone not when it was taken over in 1981 by News Corporation, which broadly speaking supported the cultural project, but when it receded, in later years, from Rupert Murdoch’s individual gaze. There had been scant attempt to exercise direct control from above, as Treglown says, except in the appointment of the editor, which will always be the proprietor’s prerogative. After Treglown’s departure, in 1991, Murdoch oversaw the appointment of Mount and then, in 2002, of Stothard, formerly the editor of The Times, keeping the TLS in motion as a medium of literary intelligence. It 35had changed since those words appeared in the Academy and Literature advertisement in 1902 – of course it had – but its fundamental purpose remained the same. By the time of the replacement of Stothard, management arrangements at the peak of the company, now known as News UK, had undergone significant reorganization.
On February 12, 2016, my colleagues and I stumbled on a headline on the Guardian website: ‘Sun managing editor … to become editor of the TLS’. The instinctive first reaction was to read it as the prelude to a parody. The author of the article was the veteran media journalist Roy Greenslade, and the managing editor in question was Stig Abell. In a follow-up interview with Abell (May 1, 2016), Greenslade described the process by which the new editor had been appointed:
With the planned retirement after fourteen years of its editor Peter Stothard, there were vague plans to approach a high-profile figure …. But they were abandoned when Abell sent a two-page document with ideas for revitalizing the weekly to News UK chief executive Rebekah Brooks. She showed it to News Corp’s chief executive [in New York], Robert Thomson, who said: ‘Go for it.’
None of those on the shop floor assembling that week’s paper had been told about the ‘planned retirement’ of Stothard. All were left out of the ‘vague plans’ to approach someone with a famous name to be our next overseer – blue-pencil experience not essential. We were likewise in the dark about radical ideas, conceived by an outsider but convincing enough to persuade the top people at News Corp, for ‘revitalizing the weekly’.
The new editor made his way downstairs from the Sun in due course – the offices of all the papers were now housed in the News Building at London Bridge, with spectacular views of the river Thames – and set about introducing himself to a staff with which he had no previous acquaintance. Two and a half years as managing editor of a tabloid newspaper represented the best part of his journalistic experience. The 36passage of 120 years is perfectly captured in the semantics of the transition: from ‘a comprehensive medium of literary intelligence’ to ‘Go for it.’
The three editors who succeeded John Gross in the editor’s chair – Treglown, Mount, Stothard – obeyed an identical impulse to that which had carried Gross’s project forward. While not necessarily aware of doing so, they were ‘developing an argument and a philosophy through the journal’, as Scruton put it, according to the will of the individual in question. Each would doubtless claim to be different in outlook from the one who went before, but all were fuelled in their endeavours by a common energy: the energy of the TLS itself; a consciousness, much of the time just a quasi-consciousness, of the combined values of those on whom the project most depends: loyal readers, good writers, able and dutiful desk editors; not forgetting a keen alertness to literary status, ‘the brand’. For an editor of the Times Literary Supplement to be inattentive to this status would be tantamount to drawing the cultural project – Richmond’s ‘thing’ – to a close.
*
Postscript
The history of the Times Literary Supplement was related in detailed form by Derwent May in Critical Times, published in 2001 to coincide with the approaching centenary. It is, as May wrote in his Preface, ‘a history of the paper’s editors and staff, from their literary trials and triumphs to the office comedies’. Critical Times was an official account, commissioned from May ‘by the publishers of the TLS’.
This book is, in non-adversarial fashion, an alternative version. Among the humble functions of NB was the largely accidental one of acting as an extended series of footnotes to 37the history of the paper. One example may be found in the brief obituary notices we included of figures who had played a part, large or small, in TLS life. Another can be seen in the series The TLS in Literature, which unearths occurrences of the TLS in fiction, including detective and romantic fiction; in poetry; also in film (we had a role in Iris, based on John Bayley’s book about his life with Iris Murdoch); in television soap opera (yes, the TLS has featured in EastEnders), and in painting. Philip Roth puts the TLS at the centre of an early short story; Jorge Luis Borges includes it in one of his tales. It turns up in poems by W. H. Auden and John Berryman, in novels by writers as unalike as D. H. Lawrence and Barbara Pym – in the latter case proving useful as wrapping for decayed flowers about to be dumped in the bin. Imaginary books that figure in real novels – novels by Rose Macaulay, Eric Linklater, Ian McEwan and others – receive imaginary TLS reviews by imaginary TLS reviewers. Never-existing poems are accepted for publication in this never-existing journal which, however, bears the name of our own. The reader will find a selection in the pages that follow. More than once I tried to force the series into abeyance, only to have it revived by a reader proposing an irresistible cameo.
In a parallel fashion, NB provided a way of footnoting my own life, while in the office and out of it. It brought many gifts. The most valuable was the provision of a structure that invited me to exercise my faculties at large over an extended period of time. It gave me a reason to think about external affairs, in the literary realm and beyond, from one day to the next. It was NB that drew me out to poke around in dusty second-hand bookshops in remote parts of London, and over time in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Brighton, across the Channel, in New York and elsewhere. NB duty led me to ponder grammatical enigmas, such as the potential of ‘whom’ to ignite class war; the invasion of the impertinent preposition (‘meet with’, ‘next 38up’); the anxiety-provoking apostrophe. Seated at work next to genial Etonians and Oxbridge graduates, it was right that J.C. should speak for the benefits of a Poor School education, from which the scholar emerges with qualifications in the Lesser-Used Languages of Britain and Europe (qualifications acquired, for the most part, on the day of writing), as well as Rock and Roll A levels and much else. NB was the Poor School. Writing the column for twenty-three years was a further education all by itself.
Assistance in these researches came from colleagues, naturally, and from readers. The basis for the next instalment of the column might arrive on a Monday morning email flight from Greece or New Zealand or China – or, as likely, from Inverness, Cambridge or Cheltenham. To a significant degree, engagement with readers was the raison d’être of the enterprise. One example involves a Scottish woman living in British Columbia, who sent some French-derived words found in Older Scots usage that she remembered from her grandmother’s speech. They were added to a brief series on the subject, and she duly became an NB pen pal. In the course of a subsequent exchange, I remarked that the battery charge of the column came from the knowledge that it was read, week after week, in places unfamiliar, by people like her.
During a trip to London, my correspondent came to the News Building and left a miniature, leather-bound volume at reception: Beauties of the Scottish Poets (Glasgow, 1825). I was in the office at the time, but she did not attempt to make contact; only asked that the book be delivered to the initialled persona on the fourteenth floor. On reflection, I saw the gesture as representative of the discreet exchange of feeling that connects writer and reader.
Why not say it straight? It was a great job. I hope that some of the enjoyment of doing it is reflected in the pages that follow. The complete NB comes to something like 1.5 39million words. This selection from twenty years offers under one-twelfth of that total. If some years seem to the reader to have been fatter than others, it is mainly through an effort to lend variety to the material.
NB 2001–2006
2001
March 23
Anyone nursing a rejection slip is likely to feel better after perusing the current issue of the Missouri Review. The latest in its ‘Found Text’ series is a feature on readers’ reports from the archives of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The list of rejectees is spectacular, and the comments are frank. In 1949, for example, a reader recommended turning down a collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph, with the comment ‘they are utterly untranslatable, at least into anything that could be expected to sell more than 750 copies’. The reader himself found the stories ‘remarkable’, but thought they would appear to the general public as ‘$50-a-pound caviar’. El Aleph would not be translated for another twenty-one years.
Anaïs Nin was felt to be ‘a small, arbitrary, overpraised talent who has been able to hide her emptiness behind a lot of chinoiserie’, and A Spy in the House of Love, later a Penguin Classic, was kicked out. In 1953, the young Peter Matthiessen submitted ‘a very bad novel’ called Signs of Winter. ‘We had great hopes for this guy’, sighed the reader, before stamping ‘REJECT’. The title has never seen the light of day. Two years later, Knopf saw off Italo Calvino, with reluctance, and the young James Baldwin, without it. Giovanni’s Room merited extended comment, as Baldwin had published a promising first novel with the firm in 1953. The novel seemed to the first reader ‘an unhappy, talented, and repellent book’, to the second ‘a bleak little tale’, and to the third ‘hopelessly bad’. ‘We must try to persuade him to put this away; it will do neither publisher nor author any good. It will have bad reviews and bad sales.’
Sales to date have probably topped the million mark. 42
In 1956, it was the turn of Lolita (‘impossible for us’), followed by a novel by John Barth (‘I cannot conceive of a healthy mind producing this’), Isaac Bashevis Singer (‘not worth Knopf’s time and effort’), an apprentice Joyce Carol Oates (‘for all I know the long-hairs may single this out as a masterpiece … but it is incomprehensible’). Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar got a similar reception – ‘ill-conceived, poorly written, occasionally atrocious’ – as did Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and The Joke by Milan Kundera. The last was found to be ‘a long sentimental wail’. Knopf published later novels by Kundera.
Apart from their entertainment value, the reports give an intimate glimpse of the times in which they were written. Knopf readers no longer write reports.
April 13
Carrie Kipling, Rudyard’s wife, was ‘one of the most loathed women of her generation’, according to a new book about her. It is also reported there that Henry James called her ‘this hard capable little person’. You may be wondering how it is possible to gauge degrees of loathing for an entire generation; you may even be aware that what James said was ‘this hard, devoted, capable little person’ – somewhat different – but only a pedant would want to spoil good hype.
The book in question, by Adam Nicolson, is part of a new series, Short Lives, published by Short Books. The ninety-six-page Life of the devoted and capable Carrie is called The Hated Wife. On the back cover, Nicci Gerrard, the Observer journalist, joins in: ‘Adam Nicolson takes Mrs Kipling – for so long despised – and gives her back her humanity.’ Hated, loathed, despised? Well, you say, at least Carrie had the consolation of being married to a great man. Wrong again. ‘It was she who 43provided the backbone that her husband privately lacked.’
Even Mr Nicolson acknowledges that Carrie Kipling could be awkward. Her sister-in-law Mai, as well as certain friends, ‘thought there was something mad about Carrie’. She was jealous of Mai’s beauty, and as a result, Mr Nicolson says, was apt to ‘patronize’ her. She suspected her brother of cheating her financially, and treated him ‘with a miserliness which any man would have resented’. But the time of the great writer’s wife has come – Fanny Stevenson, Frieda Lawrence, Nora Joyce, Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald and others have been receiving their rewards at last. There is no reason to leave Carrie behind.
As part of the process, the great writer himself must undergo revision. Not only did Kipling lack backbone, he was secretly queer. ‘It was not Carrie with whom Kipling fell in love’, Mr Nicolson writes, ‘but her brother Wolcott.’ Does he mean that the two men were lovers? ‘The way in which, in later life, Kipling wrote and spoke with such frantic loathing of homosexuality as a beastly and bestial business has been taken as a sign that they were.’ It couldn’t, by any chance, be a sign that they weren’t?
April 27
Is our regard for literary figures commensurate with our memorials to them? Take Ruskin. He was raised in Herne Hill, in south-east London, and later lived in Camberwell, not far away. Rosemary Hill, a frequent contributor to the TLS, lives there, too. As an admirer of Ruskin, she wanted to see how he is commemorated locally, and writes about the experience in the magazine things.
Ms Hill’s quest for Ruskin in the stones of Camberwell began on Denmark Hill, at the Ruskin Wing of King’s 44College Hospital. It is, unfortunately, ‘a building so banal as to be striking’. She was reminded of a remark by Ruskin himself: ‘Who are they who like these things? I have never spoken to anyone who did like them.’ Neither has Ms Hill. Neither has anyone at King’s. Attempts to discover from the Hospital who designed its Ruskin Wing were in vain. They appear to have disposed of the plans.
Ms Hill moved on past Ruskin Park (‘a noble gesture in a Ruskinian spirit, if a slightly scruffy one’) and the graffiti-stained blocks of flats which occupy the site of the villa where, in the 1840s, the Ruskin family kept cows. She came to Ruskin House, a nursery for two-to-five-year-olds, and for a moment Ms Hill’s spirits rose. ‘The school is in a converted house whose square-headed windows and Venetian details proclaim the influence of its namesake.’ On enquiring, however, ‘I was informed crisply that the school “has nothing to do with Ruskin, we just called it that”.’
