diary james campbell
A Butcher’s Trade
When I began working at the Times Literary Supplement in the 1980s, an older colleague would hand me a piece of typewritten copy, pristine just an hour before but now heav- ily marked in pencil, with the faux-solemn words: ‘Here is the bleeding corpse. Yours is a butcher’s trade.’
The source of the remark was said to be a letter from Henry James to Bruce Richmond, the first proper editor of the TLS, enclosed with the proofs of his piece on Balzac, which James was returning. In the years before his death in 1916, James wrote several articles for the paper. Richmond had the reputation of being a severe editor. James was not alone in seeing his creation cut, chopped, boned – whichever butcherly term you prefer. Even the best reviewers come to accept it as part of the process. The 22-year-old Virginia Stephen’s first attempt at a review in 1904 was turned down, with an explanation from the editor that his preferred style was more ‘academic’ (she made it in with her second effort, and as Virginia Woolf became a prolific contributor). Paying tribute to Richmond in 1961, T S Eliot recalled that he ‘did not hesitate to object or delete’. Like others at the sharp end of the pencil, Eliot flinched at times, but he concluded on reflection, ‘I had always to admit that he was right.’
As if to emphasise their submission to the greater good of providing intellectual nourishment to the nation, neither Woolf nor Eliot had the pleasure of being published in the paper under their own names ( James was sometimes allowed a byline). A butcher’s trade indeed.
Over the years, James’s phrase gained a life of its own among sub-editors. It might even be taken as justification for laying into something by a well-known figure of our own day that had failed to live up to expectation. ‘Yours is a butcher’s trade’ – and down the glinting blade would fall. If Henry James had said it and Bruce Richmond had once wielded the cleaver, who could object?
The trouble is that James never referred to Richmond as a butcher. Some years after the elderly colleague’s departure, by which time I was writing a weekly feature on the back page under the heading NB, I set out to verify the remark in the hope of filling some column inches. The TLS archives have substantial gaps. Richmond, maddeningly, kept few letters. A small num- ber do exist, however. A little volume of correspondence called Pardon My Delay (1994) revealed that what James had actually written as he surrendered the proofs of his Balzac piece was, ‘My dear Bruce! I have done it tant bien que mal – though feel- ing it thereby bleeds. But it’s a bloody trade.’
Richmond had evidently asked for a cut and had offered the author the opportunity to be his own trimmer. It is a strategy employed by tactful editors, who sense that the more eminent the writer, the greater the tact required. But all the courtesy in the world is sometimes not enough. If you happen to come across James’s Balzac essay (in the edition of the paper dated 19 June 1913), take a look.
So it comes that his mastership of whatever given identity might be in question, and much more of the general identity of his rounded (for the artistic vision), his compact and containing France, the fixed, felt frame to him of the vividest items and richest characteristics of human life, can really not be thought of as a matter of degrees of confidence, as acquired or built up or cumbered with verifying fears. No chopper got near that sentence.
It is a butcher’s trade in other ways. When I walked out the door for the last time in September 2020, I left a part of myself behind. This is a commonplace: anyone who has worked hap- pily at an institution for many years would feel the same. In my case, it was more literal than in most – closer to the bone, let’s say. I was parting company with an alternative persona, a dop- pelgänger, even, who had shadowed me day by day.
For over twenty years, I had written my column under the nom de plume JC. By the time I left, this figure had established a distinct tone of voice and a separate identity. I also wrote for the TLS and other journals under my own name, but the registers of our respective contributions were quite different. I used to say that I wished I could write like JC – a cute remark but, as JC might have rejoined, ‘No jest but jostles truth.’ JC was preparing a multi-volume collection of epigrammatic sagacity called Wise Man Say, in which that apophthegm might have found a place (with a blurry credit to John Berryman). He was the author of numerous works, oversaw many literary prizes, all in a parallel realm, all existing in a state of perpetual proofreading and long-longlisting. The most eagerly anticipated book was The TLS Reviewer’s Handbook, which, once published, promised to be the standard work of reference for literary journalists worldwide. Whenever mention was made in the column of a forthcoming edition, readers would write to ask how to purchase a copy. One was the film director Martin Scorsese. To him, as to others who enquired, I wrote what I hoped was a note of gentle enlightenment.
JC had his own opinions. He took a recklessly unfashionable approach to all the fashionable attitudes of the day and delivered the news that in the contemporary world of letters ‘identity approval trumps critical approval’ – another maxim worthy of inclusion in Wise Man Say, should fact-checking of that work ever be completed.
It won’t now. But I have assembled a selection of JC’s columns, giving him the chance to do a little Lazarus act. The entire run of NB, spanning twenty-three years, comes to roughly the length of War and Peace twice over. From that I have extracted 90,000 words. The rest have ended up on the butcher’s floor. But it ’s a bloody trade – as Henry James actually did say.
november 2022 | Literary Review 1
