Just Say No
Idon't absolutely believe this myself, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that all book reviewing — some would say all reviewing full stop — is essentially an ephemeral exercise. Certainly it follows fashions like so much else, and nothing bet- ter reveals the changing buzzwords than the 150-year-old publishing habit of puffing a book with the aid of extracts skilfully prised from the surface of recent reviews.
My copy of Saki's novel The Unbearable Bassington is a case in point. A fifth edition issued in 1913, with its handsome Prussian blue binding and thick cream-coloured leaves awaiting the pleasures of the paper- knife, the volume is a veritable monument to self-confident Edwardian literary taste, not least in its final 20 pages. For here, alongside details of the current fiction list, with Chesterton, Buchan and Edith Whar- ton nudging writers with names like H. F. Prevost Battersby and Mrs Horace Trem- lett and novels entitled Love Birds in the Coco-Nuts, The Progress of Mrs Cripps Mid- dlemore and Bildad the Quill-Driver, is a lavish harvest of critical comment on Saki's short story collection, The Chronicles of Clovis.
`A chuckle-provoking book,' said the English Review; 'a witty man,' agreed Public Opinion; 'unrivalled entertainment for all classes,' conceded the starchy old Morning Post, while the Daily Telegraph ventured that here 'the elusive art of the conte is thoroughly mastered', and our own Specta- tor, percipient as ever, hailed 'a first-rate phrase-maker in the extravagant vein'. But I say, hang on a bit, what's this from the New Age? 'Why, oh why, can we see no humour in these stories?'
Hats off to the publisher, John Lane, one of the greatest of the breed, for throwing this plaintive critical miaow into the lauda- tory chorus. He knew perfectly well that Saki's readership, strongly Tory, flustered by the appearance of anything too modern or serious in the literary way, would be delighted to have its enthusiasm rubber- stamped, as it were, by the New Age's dis- approval. That magazine, after all, numbering H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and Katherine Mansfield among its con- tributors, was the earnest, high-minded standard-bearer of women's suffrage, Irish home rule, vegetarianism and dress reform. Who could imagine the uncorseted, nut- cutlet-eating lobbers of bricks through Mr Asquith's window giggling hysterically at the exploits of Septimus Brope and Lady Bastable?
Yet the New Age's complete refusal to be seduced by Saki, deplorable though it seems, must strike a chord with any reader who has ever been expected to applaud an author merely because everyone else does. Hasn't our enjoyment of books got as much to do with how we felt when we got up this morning or the way in which the heroine does her hair as it has with the lofty sum- mits of critical dispassion? So let's hear it, occasionally, for the heretical voice, the solitary dissenter, the disenchanted maver- ick, the killjoy Carabosse at Princess Auro- ra's christening.
Consider for instance Henry James's magisterial rubbishing of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend on its first appearance in 1865. James was a mere 22, with no full- length novels to his credit, Dickens, 40 years older, was one of the most successful achievers in the annals of fiction, yet the stripling New Yorker dared to call his lat- est colossus 'the poorest of Mr Dickens's works, poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of perma- nent exhaustion'. Seldom, he claimed, was there a book `so intensely written, so little seen, known or felt'.
The fact that James was probably right, that Our Mutual Friend, for all its spurts of genius, is a case of Dickens wearily plod- ding through his Dickensian routines assist- ed by some grotesque over-writing, is less important than the younger novelist's courage in not choosing to prostrate him- self at the shrine. I recalled his noble exam- ple recently when refusing to register a `yes' vote alongside my fellow reviewers of a novel which has now turned up on the Tye won a Round the World Cruise.' Booker shortlist. Whom it's by I shan't tell you, since trashing the same book twice over simply isn't cricket. Enough to say that if I am not Henry James, then the author by the same token is hardly the Dickens de ses fours, though the pen in question has produced far better books than this one. But there, it will of course go on to win, with the plaudits redoubled, thus intensify- ing the mystery, where I am concerned, of its hold on discerning readers.
The trouble with adopting the New Age pogition is that it makes you feel so lonely. Yes, Tolstoy had famous difficulties with King Lear, and it often seems as if George Steiner would much rather Shakespeare had written his plays in rhymed French alexandrines, not forgetting the caesura in the middle, no onstage deaths and the statutory requirement of a confidante for the heroine (imagine the Waiting Gentle- woman calling Lady Macbeth 'madame!), but however distinguished such examples, they are scarcely consoling. Almost certain- ly there's somebody out there who feels as you do but may be too frightened to acknowledge it.
Is there anybody lurking in the shadows who wishes, for example, that Dostoevsky had enjoyed the benefit of a thoroughly candid, no-nonsense editor armed with an industrial quantity of blue pencils? Does anyone share my view that Flaubert, never having managed to write a masterpiece, is the more interesting for this very failure (Madame Boyary not excepted)? Who will join me in being unable to laugh uproari- ously (a terrible confession to Spectator readers, for whom, I suspect, he is sans reproche) at old Plum Wodehouse?
Leave it to Psmith, and don't be afraid of those pompous asses who tell you they would never sit down to dinner with any- one who couldn't go into paroxysms over Jeeves and Wooster. In this age of ridicu- lous hype, mass grovelling before media- manufactured idols and cringe-inducing solemnity in the presence of bad art, authors and readers need you, the unconverted, the disbelievers, the sturdy swimmers against the current. Go one better than the substance-abusers of America, who so obviously didn't heed the advice handed them in the slogan coined by the egregious Nancy Reagan, and Just Say No.
Jonathan Keates
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