Rarely bored, never boring
Philip Hensher
THE COLLECTION by Peter Ackroyd, edited by Thomas Wright Chatto, 125, pp. 465, ISBN 0701173009 0 n the whole, one can't be doing with volumes of people's collected journalism. It just seems a bit pompous, and if a journalist or a reviewer has any sense of his trade, he will not write his articles with half an eye on how they will look between hard covers in ten years' time. For some people, however, it's worth making an exception. Peter Ackroyd's ephemeral reviews are as worth preserving in permanent form as Cyril Connolly's, Philip Larkin's, or V. S. Pritchett's. One of the reasons, indeed, for his excellence as a journalist is that he retains a proper respect for the judgments which may be made in newspapers, with all their untidiness and daring provisionality. Every piece here is strongly redolent of the moment it was written, and each feels as if it were written not for the Collected Essays but to entertain an idle minute over the breakfast table. Brought together, these pieces do not look like attempts at final, authorative statements, but the first salvos in an argument. The arguments are mostly long over; their dandyish instigator still intrigues and entertains. Ackroyd, I've always thought, can't stand being bored for one second, largely because his boredom threshold is so high (remember, he knows Blake's epics backwards) that when a Tarkovsky or a Pynchon exceed it, he is first outraged and then incredulous. This, let it be said, like most of his books, may well evoke outrage and incredulity from time to time; but boredom, never.
With that underlying sense of propriety which has always characterised Peter Ackroyd, even at his most apparently perverse, this is the first time he has collected his occasional writings. Rightly seeing such pieces are only very rarely worth preserving, he has, until now, modestly left a vast body of commissioned commentary in obscurity. Too modestly, indeed; his journalism has always been a delight, and one's main complaint about this volume is that it is far too short. Contemporary reviews have a period charm — how fascinating to read Ackroyd's thoughts on the first episodes of EastEnders, incidentally reminding us that it used to comment freely on politics. But that alone wouldn't sustain our interest. For much of his career, he has pointedly occupied himself with journalism of the most routine kind. The vast bulk of his ephemeral writings — Thomas Wright, the editor, says that it amounts to over a million words, but that must be an underestimate of the busy labours of 30 years — would certainly supply material for a book two or three times this size, without any slackening in quality.
The story of how George Gale appointed the 23-year-old Ackroyd as literary editor of this magazine has passed into journalistic legend; Ackroyd was trying to get commissions as a reviewer, and his first piece on Wyndham Lewis so impressed the then editor of The Spectator that he diffidently offered him the job. For 15 years or so, Ackroyd operated something of a slashand-burn policy, reviewing books and subsequently films with such learned brio that some of his efforts are remembered with awe a quarter of a century on, and not just by his victims. The Spectator, for much of Ackroyd's period there, was operating something not far from a guerrilla war on public life in general, and his dashingly committed reviews kept up the war on the cultural front.
For some reason, he is always remembered as being a startlingly rude reviewer, but it would be truer to say that he was always ready to embark on polemic in defence of the virtues his hapless subjects
so conspicuously lacked. For instance, his impatience with Larkin springs, you feel, from a prolific writer's disapproval of a costive one; his list of Larkin's failings — 'secretive, self-obsessed and always plaintive' — is, inverted into 'public, outwardly curious and stoic', a fair and plausible summary of the sort of writer Ackroyd wanted to be, and became. A splendidly funny assault on Ted Hughes's Gaudete — it's all about bloody animals, it's obsessed with extreme suffering — is basically making a case that literature ought to stick to human beings who, on the whole, don't routinely get chopped up into little bits.
As it happens, though I agree with Ackroyd's general case here, I think he was quite wrong about Gaudete, which, much abused at the time, now looks like a brilliantly bizarre piece of work. The review is superb — 'Every time I open Ted Hughes's latest book, there is something about testicles, bone tissue or vomit. It's like watching General Hospital' (a line so good, you wonder whether Ackroyd hasn't tailored his judgment and his principles so that he can use it; after all, Ackroyd's own novels would subsequently go full pelt into the charnel house.) But I think it's wrong in the most fundamental, thumbs-up or thumbs-down way. And over and over again, one is struck by the same feeling. The argument is dazzling, deeply considered, founded on admirable and correct principles, but his final judgments are, more often than not, difficult to agree with. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gravity's Rainbow, Nabokov, Apocalypse Now, Larkin are briskly dismissed; J. H. Prynne, Brian de Palma, Edward Dorn are held up as models. He is right, I think, when he says in 1981 that contemporary American culture is nowhere near as interesting as generally supposed, but it is hard to go along with the advice that what we ought to be reading instead is 'Alan Sillitoe and Beryl Bainbridge, Francis King and Angus Wilson'; Bainbridge apart, it is an implausible pantheon for anyone.
Ackroyd is so good and interesting a writer, however, that his curious judgments on individual cases may be disregarded. And often, even when denigrating something interesting, he perceives something which its slacker admirers fail to notice — the crucial vein of vulgar melodrama in Garcia Marquez or Tarkovsky, for instance, or the accurate and perceptive comment that Gravity's Rainbow has a 'narrative of such staggering insouciance'. He has seen exactly what is most characteristic and pervasive about the book; he has expressed it exactly and evocatively; he has refused, however, to accept that the high vulgarity of Garcia Marquez or the casual, slack obscenity of Thomas Pynchon might conceivably be a basic constituent of their imaginative virtues. It is most peculiar; tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner is decisively disproved, as Ackroyd labours, understands exactly what a writer is trying to do,
and rejects it with cries of scorn. When praising second-rate writers, he very often finds something deserving of high praise; his quotations adroitly make J. H. Prynne sound like a remarkable writer. The truth is that Ackroyd's opinions are interesting because they are Ackroyd's; not just because he is an important writer, but because writers discovering themselves read in a particular way, like magpies, picking up and polishing individual gems they themselves can use, throwing away anything which doesn't suit them.
What suits him above all is a powerful personal canon of London visionaries. Hogarth, Blake, Dickens, Pritchett are all read through the great prism of London, and London unites their imaginations with Ackroyd's. Sometimes you feel that the spirit of place is not quite so grandly uniform as Ackroyd proposes (Johnson and Hogarth look like very similar figures to him, which is preposterous), but within his heroes he saw the latent promise of the writer he wanted to become, the great poet of London. They are perceptive, original readings, but they are something more; they reveal a powerful imagination, digesting them for ends of its own.
The selection of pieces, presumably by the editor, Thomas Wright, I have to say, is not brilliant — there should be fewer long lectures and more film and TV reviews. I could have done, too, without the three short stories, all commissioned for 'Christmas issues'; they are perfectly OK, but, deprived of its characteristic expansiveness and appealing blots, try-outs and pratfalls, Ackroyd's fiction loses a great deal. Neat, but unengaging. Reviews are dutifully sampled from all of Ackroyd's career, with a slightly regrettable effect. Once he had made his name, like most star reviewers he tended to cover big biographies and histories rather than new original work; the early responses to novels, poetry and film are, however, of much more pressing interest than the accounts of various biographies of Cyril Connolly, Cole Porter and Truman Capote which fill the later pages of the book. Some of these inclusions — one can only guess at what has been left out — give the impression that his editor was rather vague about what made Ackroyd's reviewing of lasting interest and importance. I mean, no one's going to dash to the bookshop eager to remind themselves what Ackroyd thought about some life of Walter Pater. (The pay-off, though, inquiring what, exactly, you would have to do to burn with a hard, gemlike flame, is worth the price of admission, I must say.)
The other thing to be said is that Wright's introduction is decidedly careless. The play is not called The Importance of Being Ernest, and when Ackroyd said, a propos of EastEnders, that 'a little rhyming slang can go a very long way indeed' he was not 'advising its script-writers to introduce more Cockney rhyming slang'. It is hard to believe Ackroyd took much interest in the production — he might have been expected to object to this last interpretation after the most casual reading of the introduction. This, however, is a book which hardly needs recommendation. The best compliment I can pay it is to report that halfway through the last film column he wrote for this magazine, I was struck by the sense of familiarity, and indeed of knowing how the column ended, with the boast that he had never used the word `movie' and never written a sentence which the publicists could emblazon across their posters. There are plenty of able and literate reviewers out there, but not many who write so vividly that a column published in 1987 is still rattling around the head of a reader 14 years later. Volume II, please.
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