Better than glory
Christopher Hawtree
A DICTIONARY OF DEDICATIONS by Adrian Room
Bloomsbury, £17.99, pp.354
Stand up, Julian Barnes!', remarked William Boyd when the improbably-named Adrian Room sent a letter of peculiar pedantry to the TLS after Boyd had written an article about his novels' sometimes wayward translations. In fact, Mr Room turns out to be a real person, at any rate as real as somebody can be after choosing to sacrifice his life to the compilation of reference books.
For his latest work, he has again turned over libraries, second-hand shops and — ah! — lumber-room, this time needing only to glance at each book's first page to justify the description 'sedulous'. He has here hit on the notion of elaborating the often enigmatic phrase which gets a page to itself unless the publisher contrives to hide it away amid a list of his sub-agents in Kuala Lumpur and on the Gold Coast: the dedication.
None of Boyd's five novels and his short-story collection figures here: each is simply dedicated to his wife, Susan — although close students will have noticed that she evidently did not wish to be associated with the torrid screenplays and essay which make up School Ties. Barnes, too, is absent. His novels have invariably been for his wife, the hip-shooting literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, except for the Laurien of Metroland; those by his B- team alter ego Dan Kavanagh are allotted to his friends and her clients, among whom was Kingsley Amis, who honoured her with Jake's Thing. This metropolitan banter is the stuff to have F. R. Leavis throw a wobbly while he sweats it out in Purgatory. (If Amis was a 'pornographer' in his eyes, what on earth are the others?) Still, as Mr Room reminds us, Leavis was himself not above log- rolling, especially when the object was himself. Can there be more nauseating a dedication than the one in Dickens the Novelist, co-authored with his batty wife? We dedicate this book to each other as proof, along with Scrutiny (of which for 21 years we sustained the main burden and responsibility), of 40 years and more of daily collaboration in living, university teaching, discussion of literature and the social and cultural context from which literature is born, and above all, devotion to the fostering of that true respect for creative writing, creative minds and, English literature being in question, the English tradition, without which literary criticism can have no validity and no life.
Anybody would think that English wri- ters since the year dot had existed only for the benefit of a pair bereft of all sense of prose rhythm. The invidiousness of such appropriation of others' efforts can be seen in the way that one of their lackeys, Morris Shapiro, presumed to dedicate an edition of James's essays `to Downing College' (one trusts that his bedder was flattered).
This is not an area broached by Mr Room (except for the OED and Her Majesty). Even as excellent a work as Roger Lonsdale's edition of 18th-century verse is tainted by 'for Anne, Charles and Kate', although Donat Gallagher had the grace to remove something similar from the Penguin of the Waugh essays. Still, Mr Room supplies more than enough to be going on with, and it is a tribute to him that a reviewer should continually leap up to pull other books from the shelf in a manner that makes the end of Earnest resemble a Quaker meeting.
More could have been made of Waugh than Put Out More Flags and the hapless Randolph Churchill. Who is the 'N' of A. N. Wilson's Gentlemen in England? Rumour has it that this is Naim Attallah. Who is 'my friend "the Inspector" ' of Patrick Marnham's Lucan odyssey? The S. A.' of Seven Pillars of Wisdom is here studied at length: the poem is partly the work of Graves and the initials probably those of 'one of the two young men loved by Lawrence' — presumably this is not the same 'S. A.' who appears at the front of Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage (I have been waiting 17 years for an oppor- tunity to make this point). It is cavalier of Mr Room to say that The Gold Bat is 'one of "Plum's" last books' — it came out 71 years before he died.
Curious that D. H. Lawrence rarely dedicated his work — perhaps nobody was deemed to rank highly enough. Virginia Woolf, too, rarely appended a name, although when Lytton Strachey, whose dedications are always fitting, proposed to put 'for V. W.' before Queen Victoria, she insisted that her name be spelt out lest some Victoria Worms or Vincent Wood- louse claimed the credit. This letter cannot have been known to Strachey's sister, Dorothy Bussy, who dedicated Olivia by Olivia `to the beloved memory of V.W.'
The removal of dedications is a subject for study. Who, for example, is the 'Jennif- er' of the first edition of Michael Holroyd's Strachey? Mr Room also does not reveal how dedications are received, so perhaps the last word should be with Graham Greene, who, during his celebrated dust- up with Anthony Burgess, remembered 'with pleasure . . the novel (not one of your best) which you dedicated to me.' Or
not quite the last word: in the forthcoming You've Had Your Time, Burgess concedes that 'the reviews of Devil of a State were, for the most part, no worse than the book deserved'; not that he was entirely re- sponsible for its shortcomings: the pub- lisher's fear of libel meant that he had, within two days, to transpose it from Borneo to an East Africa he did not know.
Burgess, naturally enough, is unique in using Middle-Eastern script with which to dedicate a novel. Mr Room could have included — and translated — this, and also asked Ken Follett why he dedicated The Pillars of the Earth to a woman's magazine. No, there cannot be a last word.
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