AND ANOTHER THING
Don't blame the literary monkeys, it's the organ-grinder who calls the tune
PAUL JOHNSON
the public of journalism little known to tne public is what goes on behind the books Pages. It is an important aspect. Literary editors decide not only what books are well or ill received but to some extent what books, and authors, are published. Let us not exaggerate their power. They cannot keep down a writer of real merit or pro- mote, except briefly, one who lacks it, but at the margins they are determinant. And never believe them when they disclaim responsibly for the thrust of a review. On books or authors they care about, literary editors always get the reviews, good or bad, they want. To a great extent, the reviewer is merely the monkey: it is the organ-grinder who determines the tune. Some secrets of literary editing are dis- closed in two recent books: Lit Ed. by Anthony Curtis (Carcanet, £25) and Dark 116rses by Karl Miller (Picador, £16.99). Anthony Curtis was a literary editor for 30 Years, first of the Sunday Telegraph, then of the Financial Times. Karl Miller was in the business even longer, at The Spectator, the New Statesman and the Listener, and then as the inspired creator of the London Review of Books, which he ran successfully ft31. murky years and which has withered !inder his nonentity-successor (who owns These works are not caviar for the gener- al; rather, required reading for the literary Profession. I found both fiendishly difficult to buy, a sign of the times: only last month an assistant in a branch of W.H. Smith told 'Oh no, we don't stock the Times Liter- coY Supplement any more, we need more space for girlie mags.' Curtis provides a huge amount of information, not always accurate, about literary journalism during the past half-century. Miller's book is 'less accessible (as he would put it): one must read between the lines to get the often dark and disconcerting message. Miller was one of the two lit eds I most admired. When I took over the New States- In 1964 I inherited this saturnine genius, and in due course lost him. I account that one of my failures. Miller was argumentative and coping with him took up a lot of time. I was overworked and harassed, preoccupied with affairs of state Which seemed to me more pressing than lit- e_rarY niceties. Nevertheless, I should have f,een. more patient and understanding. It is liae Job of an editor to put up with difficult people who have much to give. Mea culpa.
The other man I not only admired but loved was John Raymond. Curtis rightly devotes much attention to his superb reviewing, which was in the Cyril Connolly class — sometimes above it — and his skills as a literary strategist. He taught me an immense amount about books, French as well as English and American. He was also my Best Man. Curtis laments his lost promise and early death — a melancholy reminder to me that of the dozen ushers at my wedding in 1957 only two are still alive. Drink was the great destroyer of literary talent in those days. Now it is Aids and drugs in addition.
The great difference between reviewing in the 1950s and now is the virtual disap- pearance of the jack-of-all-trades men of letters, polymaths like Maurice Richardson and John Davenport, Philip Toynbee and Harold Nicolson, who could write about anything with magisterial authority and an enviable command of language. There are still a few around — John Gross, Auberon Waugh and Ferdy Mount, for instance, and younger fellows like A.N. Wilson, David Sexton and Alain de Botton. But most of the more portentous reviewing is now undertaken by academics, often log-rolling and self-serving. They will review for virtu- ally nothing — pay you, indeed, if allowed — since they include their efforts in the bibliographies they compile for profession- al advancement. So they have taken the bread out of the mouths of the old bohemi- ans who led precarious, even vertiginous, lives in Chelsea, Hampstead and Belsize Park. A great but diffident man like V.S. Pritchett would never make a living these days.
But literary editors remain, and have not changed all that much. Thus Mount, who now runs the TLS, reminds me of Terence Kilmartin, who for what seemed an eternity controlled the literary pages of the Observer, in a tetchy, high-handed but just and judicious fashion, so that most cognoscenti accounted him head of his pro- fession. Kilmartin told me he had begun the job with no qualifications, and was given it only for saving, in wartime, the life of his proprietor, David Astor. But he became so adept at the game that he ended up re-translating Proust, a task I would have regarded as impossible but which he discharged in triumph. The first literary editor I knew well was Janet Adam Smith, a rarity in that she became an expert journalist while remain- ing a lady, indeed in her case a grande dame. She ran the literary department of the New Statesman like an Oxbridge women's college, and could make even bul- lies like R.H.S. Crossman and Thomas Balogh cringe with fear. But she was chatty, too much so for the taste of John Ray- mond. As her assistant, he occupied a desk which faced hers across the office. In order to discourage her observations he gradually turned his position into a Great War entrenchment, with a high parapet of books behind which he retired, invisible.
Janet Adam Smith has found a natural successor in the beautiful and elegant Miri- am Gross. Now that Claire Tomalin has retired from literary editing to write hugely successful books, Miriam (or Lady Owen as she is properly known) is queen of the lit eds or, to vary the metaphor, the prize thor- oughbred from the famous Kilmartin stable.
The worst lit ed I have ever known is the present man at the Sunday Times, but I have written about this dreadful person before and will not weary Spectator readers. When I enquired from an old hand about his merits, there was an embarrassed silence, eventually broken by, 'Well, he's an Old Etonian.' But this makes no sense on a Murdoch publication, so the thing remains a mystery.
In general, however, there is less unfair reviewing than in the past. In the golden age of the Edinburgh Review, books you attacked were known as Fools. The fero- cious Macaulay, hungry with malice, would write to the editor, Jeffrey, 'For God's sake send me a Fool.' John Raymond had a dif- ferent term. He would phone down from his office saying, 'Fix bayonets, Paul — I've got something for you!' Half a century ago I relished this finical butchery. Now I could not do it to save my life. I only review books I like or ones I can welcome in some way. Books I deplore I refuse to review, unless there is some specific public interest in exposing their iniquities. Books are writ- ten in agony and ecstasy, in sweat and fear, often in poverty and distress, nearly always with love. Milton called a book 'the pre- cious life-blood of a master-spirit'. Alas, they are rarely that, but the worst of them deserves a fair hearing, or at least a bat- squeak of pity.
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