p u l p i t p i e r s b r e n d on
Confessions of a Jobbing Reviewer
George Orwell painted an unforgettable picture of the hungry hack in a moth-eaten dressing gown, surrounded by cigarette butts, half-empty teacups, mounds of unpaid bills and parcels of books to review. One lot, which his editor says ‘should go well together’, consists of Palestine at the Cross Roads, Scientific Dairy Farming, A Short History of European Democracy (680 pages), Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa and a novel, probably included by mistake, entitled It’s Nicer Lying Down. Struggling to formulate a coherent response to such a gallimaufry, Orwell’s drudge pours ‘his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time’.
Of course, the out-at-elbows scribbler has always been an object of satire and Orwell’s caricature is an updated version of the Grub Street penny-a-liner starving in a garret, classically derided by Swift and Pope. Today’s reality is rather different. It is true that the financial returns remain pathetically meagre – when I protested about this journal’s rates of pay its editor at the time, Auberon Waugh, replied, ‘All our contributors are philanthropists.’
Yet no one but a blockhead aspires to survive by penning notices of other people’s books. And there are other kinds of rewards, as I can testify, having been a jobbing reviewer for almost half a century. During this time, as I was informally hired and fired by this literary editor or that, enjoying in independence what I lacked in security of tenure, I’ve written for many organs of the press. And most have edited my stuff sensibly, though some newspapers insist on explaining every allusion and labelling every person – it wouldn’t surprise me if the New York Times identified Jesus Christ as the well-known Saviour.
Like others, I got into journalism by accident. In 1965 I won a competition to produce a review of Simon Raven’s novel Friends in Low Places, the second volume in his Alms for Oblivion series. The judge was Malcolm Muggeridge and I think he liked my entry because it was neatly handwritten and thoroughly scurrilous.The prize was publication in Books & Bookmen, an eccentric magazine that paid erratically but allowed contributors to say what they wanted at length. This freedom particularly appealed to its star performer, none other than Auberon Waugh, whose articles were outrageous and hilarious.
Soon I was tearing open packages of books hot from the press, a thrill that has never palled. The tomes piled up and I relieved the congestion by trailing along to Gaston’s in Red Lion Court, like a hardened Fleet Street-walker, and selling pristine copies at half price. Although it felt more like a hobby than work, I was engaged in a modest domestic industry. The biro gave way to the typewriter, which was later superseded by the word processor, just as the post, supplemented by copytakers, was usurped by fax and then by email. The last is something of a curse, incidentally, since one now seldom talks to literary editors and one’s messages are liable to be ignored (as was my importunate reproduction of John O’Hara’s demand to Harold Ross, ‘I want more money I want more money I want more money’, etc).
Although nominally a historian, I spent most of my time at university reading novels and at first I mainly reviewed fiction.
It provided me with a vivid source of vicarious experience, less synthetic than drama, more accessible than poetry and far more compelling than mere records of fact. Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, a searing exposé of Victorian hypocrisy, had made a deep impression on my adolescent mind and I was especially drawn to novels that revealed hidden truths. Best among them was Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, with its demonstration that the person most likely to kill you in war is your own commanding officer.
With age, though, I found that fiction increasingly failed to satisfy my intellectual curiosity. I wanted to know more about the Antipodes at the expense of Erewhon, more about Carlyle than Casaubon. And as I became less interested in the fate of imaginary beings, however artfully constructed, my resistance grew to being purged with pity and terror on their account. Needless to say, one’s heartstrings are not wrenched by Jeeves and Wooster, which is why I have them constantly to hand. And I do still enjoy the occasional seriously good modern novel, such as David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. But as regards reviewing, which is (as V S Pritchett said) a process of educating oneself in public, I now focus entirely on memoirs, letters, biography and above all history.
Lord Melbourne said that he didn’t believe in education because the Pagets had done so damned well without it. Unencumbered by that patrician prejudice, I find that the hardbound annals of the past which thud through my letter box in miscellaneous abundance are an incomparable medium of instruction. I value and relish learning but, like many reviewers, I’m lazy; and nothing concentrates my mind more than 600 pages to assimilate, 1,200 words in which to adjudicate, and a tight deadline to meet. Of course some historical studies are indigestible while others are Chinese meals for the mind, but many provide lasting insights into the human condition as well as piquant individual details.
History may be a register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind, but it ’s also unparalleled entertainment. Just as the Devil has all the best tunes, history has all the best jokes. These are frequently illuminating, as when Russians commented on Stalin’s capacity to control the past, ‘You never know what’s going to happen yesterday.’ Sometimes historians, the best of whom are masters of wit as well as literature, augment the comedy. Thus in The First Bohemians, a marvellous account of life and art in 18th-century London, Vic Gatrell observes that the Duke of Norfolk, ‘who never washed if he could help it, got clean only when he took a girl or girls to a bagnio or when his servants hosed him down when he was drunk, which luckily was often’.
We’re living in a golden age of history writing and sampling it at random before publication is a boon as well as a treat. It helps me with my own books, affording knowledge seldom supplied by narrower forms of research. To be sure, serendipity is no substitute for scholarship and my head is full of oddments. But oddments can sometimes say more than reams of academic abstraction. And anyway, as I struggle to write books, my reviews remind readers that I am not yet dead. r n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 1
