Lives and Works: profiles of leading novelists, poets and playwrights Edited by Annalena McAfee with portraits by Eamonn McCabe Atlantic Books, 246pp, £14.99 ISBN 1843540797

Ian Hamilton, in his introduction to the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Essays, excluded the long literary profile from his republic of letters. The long profile, he wrote, was not an essay, because it is too time-specific and too easily "sucked into the book-publicity machine: critical comment gets sacrificed to personality-portrayal. It is difficult to think of a magazine profile that has had, or could have had, the impact of, say, a Randall Jarrell essay in the 1940s."

Reading this book of long literary profiles - most of which I missed first time round in the Guardian - I thought often of Hamilton and his forlorn advocacy of Randall Jarrell, a superior poetry critic who, I guess, is scarcely ever read today. Not a month passes, by contrast, but I encounter someone who has read, and been influenced by, Martin Amis's The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, a collection of journalism first published in 1986, but one that continues to enjoy a radiant afterlife. The Moronic Inferno includes some of the best profiles of writers ever written. They are as memorable as any postwar literary essay I have read. In journalistic mode, Amis is without peer: when he writes about writers - indeed, when he writes at length about anyone, such as Hugh Hefner - the long profile becomes, in his hands, a capacious, infinitely flexible form in which to combine reportage, criticism, humour, exalted phrase-making, gossip and a clear-eyed, penetrating sense of purpose. The Moronic Inferno is Amis's best book (it's a wonderful book) because, freed from the monotonous sublime of his cartoonish fictional world, and disciplined by facts, he exhibits a restless fascination in the mystery of other people that is largely absent from his cool, hyperreal fictions.

A restless fascination with other people is what defines the most accomplished profile-writers. But the modern newspaper profile is little more than a gallery of gossip. What is required is news: the interviewee should ideally be ensnared into revealing something new about themselves, something that exposes the essential flimsiness of personality, the instability of the self. When I worked on the Times, a few years ago, I used regularly to write profiles of writers and other cultural figures. I was then, naively, more interested in the work of the person I was interviewing - good people, such as Ian McEwan, J G Ballard, V S Naipaul, George Steiner, Toni Morrison and Annie Proulx - than in the life. But more was required; the interview, I was told, was akin to psychological warfare: you had to trap your subject into intimate revelation, into self-exposure. "Unless you have asked at least one truly embarrassing question, you have not done your job," my features editor urged. The profile is, like the self, often no more than a fallacious construct; the constraints of space, the pressure for an "angle" and selective quotation result in an artificiality of form and content.

What distinguishes the profiles in this book, apart from their great length, is the absence of prurience. Here is writing about writers that is at once celebratory and insightful; there is much more on the work than on the life, and what there is on the life is invariably refracted through the work. There is, I concede, little of the frisson of excitement that accompanies a profile by a great such as Lynn Barber. The intrigue of a Barber profile is that you never quite know what she will say or whom she will like; in this, Barber is entirely without prejudice and beyond influence: she simply makes up her own mind. So you read her less as an exercise in style than for her unpredictability and candour - and for the art of her technique.

Perhaps some of the contributions to this book would have felt more urgent if the writers had been more contrary and argumentative, had written against their own fandom. In a profile of Julian Barnes, Nicholas Wroe, an honourable journalist, informs us that the author of Flaubert's Parrot is a "wonderful prose stylist"; that his friends speak of his "extraordinary loyalty and kindness"; that he has a "beautiful house"; that he is "an excellent cook"; that he wrote "high-class TV criticism" and writes "stylish essays"; that he "reverses truth and honesty"; and that he is "irresistible to women". Oh, all right, I made up that last one: but you get the drift. No one doubts, after reading this piece, that Wroe admires Barnes; but you are left longing for a more sceptical reading of his life and work, for a greater sense of confrontation. After all, Barnes himself is a tough, unforgiving critic; he can cope. Without that sense of confrontation, as Hamilton warned, the profile is sucked in to the controlled environment of the book-publicity machine.

But perhaps there is already enough spite and malice in the newspapers; we should not wish for more. This book, with its many fine pieces on the writing life, not least an interview with W G Sebald published a few months before his death in a car accident, has an attractive timelessness. There are profiles here that are worth preserving, profiles that, against Hamilton, one can dignify by calling essays.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website