Books
Pleasing themselves. Clive James, Peter Ackroyd and J M Coetzee are among numerous writers to have published collections of literary journalism this year. But what is the point of such books? Does anyone read them? By D J Taylor
Published 17 December 2001
Pleasing Myself
Frank Kermode Allen Lane, Penguin Press, £20.00
ISBN 0713995181
One of the funniest scenes in Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish a Room (1971) - funny, that is, to anyone who writes about books for a living - takes place in the immediate postwar era at the party to launch the monthly magazine Fission. Among the guests are a brace of celebrated literary critics, Bernard Shernmaker and Nathaniel Sheldon. Shernmaker is a lofty grey eminence, a kind of lay version of Professor John Carey. Sheldon is a bouncing tabloid hack. Publishers, we are informed by Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins, debate endlessly the question of whether Shernmaker or Sheldon "sold" any of the books they discussed.
"The majority view was that no sales could take place in consequence of Sheldon's notices, because none of his readers read books. Shernmaker's readers, on the other hand, read books, but his scraps of praise were so niggardly to the writers he scrutinised that he was held by some to be an equally ineffective medium. It was almost inconceivable for a writer to bring off the double-event of being mentioned, far less praised, by both of them."
Neither Shernmaker (who offers young writers "guarded encouragement, tempered with veiled threats") nor Sheldon may shift any product, but there is an essential difference between them, a distinction that holds good even 50 years after the period Powell was elegising. Certain kinds of critics (the Shernmaker kind) get their reviews parcelled up in book form, to be reviewed by other Shernmakers; other kinds of critics (Sheldon's kind) do not.
But perhaps one ought to start by defining terms. What do you call the pieces of prose - customarily, but not always, and often only notionally, attached to a book - that appear together with two or three dozen close relatives in volumes entitled Odds and Ends or Miscellaneous Trifles, or, if the writer happens to be a notably grand literary personage, Selected Essays 1963-? An essay? A review? And what constitutes the piece of writing itself? The sort of thing that gets printed in the culture section of the Sunday Times? The sort of thing that I am writing here? In the preface to his current selection, Pleasing Myself (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press) - a title faultlessly characteristic of the genre, it must be said - Professor Frank Kermode takes the trouble to consider exactly what force he sets in motion every couple of months in the hospitable pages of the London Review of Books, and decides that there is something called the "review essay", a bit longer than the average newspaper hand-wave and a bit shorter than the usual academic grind. Somewhat surprisingly, given the economic constraints of modern-day publishing (who, one wonders, actually buys a book like Pleasing Myself?), the form - if indeed it is a form - survives.
The disadvantages of rounding up the stray literary journalism of several decades, usually on more than several themes, declare themselves in almost all of this autumn's offerings in the genre. Procedural tics that would go unnoticed over 20 pages become obsessions at 200 pages: I left Michael Hofmann's Behind the Lines: pieces on writing and pictures (Faber and Faber) - and Hofmann is always worth reading when found in a weekly magazine - with only a vague feeling that the author admired the poetry of Robert Lowell. Idiosyncrasies of tone begin to grate. For example, the fragments collected in Reliable Essays: the best of Clive James (Jonathan Cape) are possibly a bit too reliable: about halfway through, one gets the measure of James's relentless ironising, his habits, his flaws, not least his irritating trick of training remorseless hindsight on the hot productions of his youth. Having read an essay on Malcolm Muggeridge, first rolled out in 1981, and reflected that it was the best demolition of Mugg's pretensions I had ever encountered, I was faintly peeved to come across a postscript suggesting that this is exactly what James himself thinks.
Once promoted to Shernmaker status, what sort of attitude should you cultivate to the items that end up on your desk? On the evidence of Pleasing Myself, Kermode is an enthusiast, although his partiality often comes tempered with professional caution. The essay on Roy Fuller is a good example of the way in which Kermode works: instantly seeing the point of Fuller and the circumstances that formed him, but concentrating on what sent some of his later work off track.
J M Coetzee, alternatively, in Stranger Shores: essays 1986-1999 (Secker & Warburg), approaches works of literature in rather the same spirit that a government nutritional scientist might approach a plate of roast beef and root vegetables. What exactly is the calorific value of these items? And the fat content? How much flour was added to the gravy? I read through the piece on A S Byatt's novel Babel Tower twice in an attempt to work out whether Coetzee liked the book and enjoyed reading it, but could find only an ambiguous remark or two about "the operations of a sophisticated but rather passive critical intelligence". A sentence in the next-but-one essay - "In fact [Salman] Rushdie is far from being a programmatic metafictional postmodernist" - leads one to ponder who exactly Coetzee is writing this for, and whether the target audience is his students, his editor or merely himself. It could hardly be the readers of the New York Review of Books, where the piece first appeared.
The career of the average literary essayist looks as if it follows quite a similar trajectory to that of the average literary novelist: youthful fire; middle-aged grasp of medium; late-period Olympian musings. Clive James makes this point in the afterword to his Muggeridge piece: "The moment has come for the writer to go back to his middle period and find out how he used to do it, in that blessed interval between trying vainly to get too much in and trying successfully." All too often, this process is hastened by the milieu in which the writer operates. The journey travelled by Peter Ackroyd in the course of The Collection (Chatto & Windus), from twentysomething iconoclast to middle-aged ruminator, is quite foreseeable, so much so that you imagine the younger Ackroyd foresaw it himself: make someone the head book reviewer of the Times, give him a mass audience, and it is hard to stop him turning out the kind of sedate little essays in which Ackroyd now specialises. The slashing style of his early Spectator pieces would be as out-of-place at Wapping as an ibis on a suburban lawn.
All this prompts the question of motive. Rather than putting himself diligently through his paces, a la Coetzee, the reviewer-essayist, given the demands of his medium and his readers, might be said to have only a single duty: to stir interest. Happily enough, most of D J Enright's Signs and Wonders: selected essays (Carcanet) lives up to the promise of its title. Reading his essay on Elias Canetti, I was conscious of so many changes of reader focus that I started to jot them down. Initial prejudice against the subject on non-literary grounds (his cameo in Peter J Conradi's recent Iris Murdoch) gave way to faint alarm at how anyone could take seriously a man who maintained, among other gnomic utterances, "the fact that the gods die makes death more brazen", and finally, such is the pitch of Enright's enthusiasm, to a resolve to haul down the part-read paperback of Auto da Fe from the shelf and have another go.
To return to the Fission party, Nick Jenkins's view of the lit crit function is too reductive. It is possible to be Bernard Shernmaker with a smile.
D J Taylor is working on a biography of George Orwell
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