Articles of Faith: the story of British intellectual journalism
Neil Berry Waywiser Press, 271pp, £13.95
ISBN 1904130089
A rather handsome young man in a Regency coat looks out from the dust cover of Neil Berry's book. He has the informal haircut of the day, slightly hooded eyes and the hint of a sneer. This was Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, most often remembered now for having panned the Lake poets, though it was its contemporary Blackwood's Magazine that was said to have driven Keats to his grave. Jeffrey's judgements were more measured than those of Blackwood's and, in any case, the sneer could have had little to do with any satisfaction he may have got from damaging the reputations of poets. It was his articles on the affairs of the day that gave Jeffrey his self-esteem and his entree into the houses of the great, and particularly those of the leading Whigs. He is the starting point of Berry's lament, and one can see the force of it, for how many people like Jeffrey can be found today among the sportsmen, entertainers and business leaders who enjoy the private hospitality of Tony Blair? Who is Blair's favourite newspaperman or woman? Hello, Rupert, do come in.
In those days, and until well into the 20th century for that matter, politicians had time to read, and were assumed to be educated. I love the story (not told here) of Gladstone who, when Chancellor, spent part of the morning of Budget Day reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall. In Jeffrey's Edinburgh Review, there was no division between politics and literature, no front and back halves. As Neil Berry writes, politics and letters, statesmanship and reviewing, were "complementary activities".
It was the sort of synthesis Kingsley Martin was still striving for, a hundred years or so later, at the New Statesman, ever seeking to reconcile the journal's halves. And why not, he argued. Martin believed in an educated and enlightened democracy and made it his business to help with the enlightening. Berry gives a pleasing picture of the Prince of Great Turnstile, looking eccentrically unkempt and surrounded by a shifting coterie of journalists, politicians, bookmen, diplomats and refugees from oppressive regimes. In December 1957, an unsolicited contribution arrives from Nikita Khrushchev, replying to something Bertrand Russell had written the month before - itself a reply to a piece by J B Priestley launching the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - and bringing an equally weighty response by John Foster Dulles. "Martin practised his craft," Berry reminds us, "in the belief that a well-timed article, 'written with distinction', might not merely capture public attention but even stimulate 'a whole movement of thought'," and indeed there seemed to be no reason why the world might not be put to rights from a rather shabby office off Lincoln's Inn Fields. Back in the 1880s, the then famous editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W T Stead, could claim with- out being mocked, that an editor such as himself was "the uncrowned king of a modern democracy". There were times when Kingsley Martin, in his frequent intervals of despair over the future of the human race, must have thought the same.
Karl Miller's London Review of Books was - as it still is - another literary magazine in the Edinburgh Review tradition, regarding life on the one hand, and literature on the other, as a more or less indivisible whole. Not for Miller the literary-intellectual snobberies of his old supervisor at Cambridge, F R Leavis, nor the deliberate philistinism of Encounter's editor Melvin Lasky, whom Berry reports as having described Stephen Spender's bookish part in that magazine as "Elizabeth Bowen and all that crap".
Berry sees Miller as the last of the really influential magazine editors. He imagines him sitting like Canute as yet more Sunday supplements lap his feet - and remembering, no doubt, the great days before The Listener, whose editor he had been, was junked by the BBC as surplus to requirements, while the people who might have been reading the New Statesman, the Spectator or the London Review of Books were beginning to read the New Scientist instead. Today, the LRB may argue at length, and the New Statesman's pages sparkle just as brightly as they did in Kingsley Martin's time, but these are not the masters now.
That is the theme. One tradition from Jeffrey's day that does survive is the vindictiveness of reviewers, or perhaps one should say certain reviewers (notably in the Times Literary Supplement, but in other places too). Coleridge complained that Jeffrey deliberately chose books for review that would appeal to what he called "the malignant passions of human nature", though Berry points out that Jeffrey was not the worst in this respect. But it is true that there is still plenty of envy, malice and general bitchiness, which affect so many writers and academics. True, too, that we all like a bit of blood on the carpet, so long as it's not we who've been stabbed. When we are, there is always a reliably consoling thought: any fool can write knocking copy.
I certainly feel no need to knock Berry. He is full of good stories; I could discover no major inaccuracies (though it was surely Sussex, not Essex, that Martin retired to); and his prose has caught a bit of the grandeur of those old Victorian reviewers, marred in his case only by a tendency to Elegant Variation (Shaw is "the great Irish dramatist", Russell "the elderly philosopher" and so on) and an irritating dandruff of superfluous commas, but I think those must have been the work of an overzealous copy-editor.
He ends by telling of a visit he made to Karl Miller while still writing this book. He found him, writes Berry, "in no mood to luxuriate in cultural pessimism . . . and he mocked me for being a 'catastrophist'. He also warned me to mind that I did not turn into that facile figure, the laudator temporis acti." The only answer, I suppose, is nil desperandum.
Nicholas Bagnall is a former literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph
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