GOODBYE TO GRUB STREET

A. N. Wilson forsakes the

reviewing of books so that he can write them

ALMOST exactly ten years ago, I pub- lished my first novel. Not long afterwards, the telephone rang and a voice at the other end of the line said that it was the Times Literary Supplement. I could not have felt more awestruck if it had been the Albert Memorial. The voice asked. me if I would be interested in writing a review. Yes, yes, yes! The excitement of receiving my first review copy was almost greater than my excitement at having published a book. There was the parcel arriving, there was the chance to see one's name in print almost instantaneously. There was the money. Not much, but it was money.

Since that summer, ten years ago, I cannot count the number of telephone calls, nor the number of parcels, nor the number of words written. Over the years, I have written something for the papers most weeks. New Statesman, Spectator, the New Review, the Observer, the Sunday Tele- graph, Literary Review, Washington Post, have all been on the line, not to mention Harper's and Queen, Tatler, Oxford Mail and Private Eye, all offering what felt at the time like money for jam. I felt grateful to them not merely because money and jam are nice to have, but also because they were all persons from Porlock, stopping me from writing a book. No bad thing, it might be supposed, since, in spite of their siren voices, I have been unable to stop myself writing 14 books in the period. If I ever succumbed to the vanity which makes hacks suppose their newspaper work worth preserving between hard covers, I would have to read through about half a million words, written over this period for the papers I have mentioned. Of that half- million words, I suspect that only a tiny proportion would be 'worth' preserving, by any standards of worth I chose to devise.

Just lately, I have begun to weary of it all. The things that Cyril Connolly wrote in Enemies of Promise about reviewing are all true. You can't go on being a hack forever if you also want to write books which will 'last'. And since the latter ambition seems portentous and even, in a nuclear age, rather silly, I have been tempted many a time, over the last decade, to stop writing books and concentrate full-time on the hack-work. The money was adequate, and the work is a good deal less lonely. Not only is it possible to kid oneself, after writing a thousand words of the stuff, that the day's work is done. It is also possible to persuade oneself that one 'ought' to go into London, waste someone's time in an office, have lunch, linger in a pub. The book can wait.

As I enter on middle age, however, I find myself imperceptibly less energetic, and it is not possible to go home after a day in Grub Street, and get on with Chaptei Eleven. It may be that the book will turn out to be no good, but if so, I should stop writing it for that reason alone, and not because at my back I always hear the Sunday paper hurrying near. I have de- cided — anyway for the time being — to give up writing for the papers altogether.

It is not simply because I want to spare the time and energy for writing books. It has started to occur to me that nearly all reviews — my own half-million words included — are not worth very serious consideration. To any unfortunate egotist smarting from some unfavourable mention of his latest book I would want to point out the following facts. It is also worth pointing them out to some swollen-headed fool who is convinced, on the say-so of some hack in a Sunday or weekly paper, that they have composed a 'tour de force'.

(1) Nearly all books sent for review are interruptions to the reviewer's life. There is the telephone call; there is the postman. If you are out when the postman calls, then there is the wearisome visit to the parcel office. Even if you are nothing but a literary hack, one book arriving for review is likely to interrupt your thoughts about another one. How can I be expected to collect my thoughts about Volume Nine of X's letters if, by Friday, I have to write a review of Y's novel? So, the book, if not an actual cause of irritation or anxiety, is never purely welcome — except to greenhorns — and the reviewer is there- fore going to get it done with as soon as possible.

(2) The second fact is impossible for any author to believe. That is, the book is almost bound to be bad. Writing is a difficult art, and even the best writers seldom write well all the time.

(3) Even books which are, by their own standards, good might not be to the re- viewer's taste. This, again, is an obvious fact, and a perfectly inoffensive one, but you would not think so, to read the letters from aggrieved authors in the columns of this and other papers.

If the reviewer has been around a bit, there is a fourth and much more insidious fact. It is: (4) The reviewer has almost certainly met the author at a party, or been in love with the author's publisher, or just had a quarrel with his agent, or been at Cam- bridge with his sister. In other words, he is not in a position to be purely objective about the book.

This fourth fact very seldom, in my experience, makes people write unfavour- able reviews; nearly always the opposite. I can truthfully say that I have never written an unkind review of a book because I disliked the author, or the author's friends and relations. What has come to tire me so much about reviewing is the discovery that I do not really admire much of what is being published at the moment. And every time I read a book which is sloppy, badly written, pretentious, or otherwise unsatis- factory, I am faced with a dilemma. Very few authors would believe that it was possible to dislike their book for reasons other than extraordinary personal malice. We all know, from ordinary private read- ing, that one can dislike a book while having no feelings at all about the author. We all know, moreover, that these feel- ings, quite sincerely held, can change. Ten years ago, for example, I found Trollope largely unreadable. Now, as it happens, I have changed, and love Trollope, even the bad Trollope. I could review him with genuine enthusiasm. But my view of him as a person is unaltered, and has nothing to do with my enjoyment of his books.

People find this commonplace incredi- ble when it is applied to living authors. Just occasionally, I have really enjoyed a book which I have been sent for review, but for the most part my 'rave' reviews have been if not lies, euphemisms. This fact has forced me sometimes to tell the truth, and the consequences have not always been happy. When I have dishonestly said that Miss X is to be praised for qualities which anyone except Miss X is well aware she does not possess, there have never been letters of complaint. But when, out of my honest truth, I have found it impossible to lie about Miss X, all hell has been let loose. A particular book comes to mind, It was `written' by an author of established reputation. I say 'written' but, as Henry James once remarked in a letter to Hugh Walpole, 'it was not really "written" at all'. After about eight goes', I decided that it was unreadable. I had tried the usual method of starting at the beginning and going through to the end. No good. Then I had taken to reading individual chapters, but I found my head was spinning, because every page seemed to be such pretentious nonsense. Perhaps it was 'just me'? So I tried reading passages aloud to friends. I did not choose pages of particular absurdity, but one and all greeted the work with derision.

I was going to abandon the task of reviewing it — the first time I should ever have done such a thing — when I began to realise something. This book by Miss X was on an interesting subject about which a number of famous critics could write fascinating essays of their own, instead of reviews. Miss X was universally liked and admired. Everyone would say that this book was a triumph, and salute Miss X's learning, skill, and powers of expression. There would have been no harm if they had, but the thing nagged me. So, I sat down with a pencil in my hand and spent two days reading every word of the book, and every word of the 'bibliography', which bore no relation at all to the books actually quoted within the body of the text. Then I took the plunge.

Stupidly enough, I tried to make a bit of a joke out of the thing, and write the review in a humorous spirit. I posted in my copy and waited for the other notices to appear. Needless to say, they were almost all composed of interesting essays on the subject of the book, punctuated with adulatory comments about Miss X. Only two notices which I read, mine and one in the TLS, attempted to examine the book on its alleged merits. In both cases, Miss X was given the thumbs down.

I was in the innocent position of never having met Miss X, but this did not stop people from accusing me of malice. I bear the author no ill will, though I cannot feel that her talents are well exercised in a literary direction. It was with mixed feel- ings that I was told, by an irate friend of hers, that my review had 'stopped her being able to write'. One was tempted to reply: 'So what's different?' The whole episode made me feel a bit of a monster, but, worse, it made me feel that most reviews are written in circumstances where it is not possible to be entirely truthful.

In the last ten years, I have missed only one masterpiece, but it eats me that I did so. This was when I was sent Martin Amis's Money and told to produce 900 words as soon as I could. I am now ashamed of my fundamentally stupid reaction to a very clever, and more than clever, novel. The first things which struck me about the book were its obscenity and its multiplicity of in-jokes, and these were things I chose to dwell upon when I went upstairs to the electric typewriter. But, since then, the book has haunted me. I had completely failed to see its bigness, its linguistic richness, its extraordinary cohesiveness, its moral weight. It is a terrible, serious book, much the best novel to be written by any of my contemporaries, and one which — if the peace holds — will last, and still be read, when most of us have been forgotten. But its density was not to be grasped all at once. I did not, to use the Amis phrase, crap all over it, but — much more annoyingly to me — I missed the point.

All this makes me take book reviews with a pinch of salt. If someone, some- where, is eagerly pulling down her knick- ers, ready to perform the reviewer's office over my next novel, I am fully aware that the burden unloaded will bear little rela- tion to the book. If the reviewer is in a hurry, he or she will probably not read the book at all. Those are the reviewers on the whole — fearful of being caught out in a misreading or a non-reading — who Will praise the thing most extravagantly. It 1s only those with time to linger on the critic s stool who are able to do a really decent job. The finished result — whether or not the publisher considers the book 'well' or `badly' reviewed — will bear no relation to the book's actual qualities. Reviewing is not like proper reading. Reviewers seldom remember anything about the books on which they have been paid to pass judg- ment. So, for the time being, Vale. And to Miss X, and the others like her whose vanity I have wounded, Write on. I won't be there to review you. Or, not for a while.