Literary London’s reviewers united to empty a bucket of ordure over Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: The Biography last November. There is, shamefully, always a Christians and Lions enjoyment to be had in such spectacles – assuming, of course, that it is not oneself who is being rent limb from limb. And even then there is the consolation that it gives one’s friends so much pleasure. Perhaps Bradford’s book deserved the kind of flogging it received (Leo Robson hauled it over the coals not once, but twice, in the New Statesman).
Against the tide I found Martin Amis: The Biography highly instructive, although not probably in the ways the author intended. Although not directly addressed, the question hovering over the book was: what precisely jet-propelled Martin’s early career? How did he become so famous so young by what seemed a process of anointing rather than critical adjudication? One of the malicious jokes retailed about him is the New Statesman competition for the most unlikely titles ever-winner: ‘Mein Kampf: Martin Amis’.
The surname obviously helped him on his way, as did native genius, and good looks (how good looking was displayed in Angela Gorgas’s 2009 exhibition at the NPG, ‘Martin Amis and Friends’). All these constituents were mixed with a measure of career shrewdness. But as important in the Making of Martin was what could loosely be called, as by Gorgas, ‘friends’ – not in the sense of ‘patrons’ (friends in high places) but like- minded members of the same literary in-group with a cause, or joint character, in common.
There have never been good English words for such collegial combines. The loan words in the eighteenth century were ‘cabal’ and ‘salon’; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ‘coterie’ and ‘clique’. We shall not need to borrow in future since, as I see it, coteries etc. no longer exist; or, at least, not as influentially as they once did.
That these power elites had authoritative and sometimes dictatorial power in the past is a fact of literary history. It was something irrespective of circulation figures. The English Review or The Criterion had immense authority – and subscriptions barely in four figures. Lawrence Rainey has convincingly demonstrated how T. S. Eliot (specifically ‘The Waste Land’) was ‘made’ by Ezra Pound and the Dial. In his recent chronicle of Henry James’s reputation, Monopolising the Master, Michael Anesko credits this journal, and its outriders, as being part of the coterie which was responsible for ‘reimagining’ James (malignantly, as Anesko – a contrarian by nature – sees it). The London Magazine, under John Lehmann and later Alan Ross, was one of Literary London’s powerhouses. So too was Horizon (under Cyril Connolly), the Listener (under Ackerley) and somewhat later Encounter (under its literary editor – coadjutor of Lehmann, Connolly and Ross – Stephen Spender).
The image that comes to mind is of a vessel (a magazine) with a skipper on board, and a crew pulling together. The cooperative enterprise went well beyond ‘regular contributors’ – names on the Rolodex. It implied a common aim: usually one which was rarely proclaimed and of which not everyone enlisted in its cause may have been entirely conscious.
There were other coteries. Some, like the ‘Bloomsberries’ or ‘The Movement’, were formed out of what sociologists call ‘affinity groups’. At least one, the ‘Scrutineers’, was based in a university around the dictatorial figure of F. R. Leavis. Publishing houses – Faber under T. S. Eliot, notably – also had their coteries. Secker, for example, under Tom Rosenthal and John Blackwell, with David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Tom Sharpe and Howard Jacobson on its list, was the nursery of the British campus novel.
In the main, however, coteries worked best with ‘organs’ – magazines – to organise themselves. The diversity of every issue and the pulsing rhythms made magazines living components in the literary world. An editor would make thousands of decisions – commissioning, rejecting, enforcing revision – over the course of a year. Those decisions would fuse into a character.
Bradford is highly informative on the mid-1960s coteries that dominated Literary London when Amis’s talents were coming into flower. Centred in Holborn, at the Great Turnstile, was the New Statesman. Amis was recruited by Anthony Howard and Claire Tomalin onto its editorial staff. The luminaries who were gathered around him, in his ‘back half’ of the magazine (then selling around fifty thousand copies), included James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes, Jeremy Treglown.
In deepest Soho, in a kind of polar relationship, was Ian Hamilton and his New Review crew (Ian McEwan, Craig Raine, Clive James, Salman Rushdie). As Clive James recalls in his memoir of the period (The North Face of Soho) both coteries were blokeish. ‘In Fleet Street,’ writes James, describing his recruitment into Ian Hamilton’s orbit:
The pubs were near the newspaper offices, sometimes so near that the drinkers could feel the vibration through the pub wall when the presses started rolling. But a Grub Street pub could be anywhere. The most important one was in Soho. At the Pillars of Hercules in Greek Street, Ian Hamilton set up the drinks while he persuaded me that I was ideal for providing unpaid articles for his acerbic little magazine the Review but paid articles for the Times Literary Supplement of which, wearing his other hat, he was the literary editor … Right there in Pillars, he would blue-pencil your copy while everybody else watched.
‘They hold the pen,’ complained Jane Austen in Persuasion – ‘they’ being men. At the period James writes about they also held the beer glass. The New Reviewers were, James recalls, more ‘Cambridge’. Martin’s ‘crew’ were ‘Oxford’.
A little to the north, and less bibulous, was Karl Miller, in Portland Place, editor of the Listener. His protégés included Seamus Heaney, Dan Jacobson, and a whole new contingent of unusual television and radio reviewers: James (on furlough from Hamilton), John Carey, even the venerable Raymond Williams.
James, as ever, is amusing on Miller’s more austere editorial style: A classically educated Scot, a rebel angel from Dr. Leavis’s dour Empyrean who gave the impression that he had found its irascible ruler insufficiently serious, Miller had not time for the light-minded. The Listener was still the printed voice of the BBC as Lord Reith had once conceived it, and Karl Miller was universally acknowledged as a worthy successor to the paper’s founding editor, J. R. Ackerley … Such was Miller’s reputation that to be invited to write for the Listener was a sure mark that one had arrived at the point where Grub Street’s reeking gutters turned into polished marble.
Miller was plausibly seen by his admirers as a direct descendant of Francis Jeffrey, and the Edinburgh Review: the organ which put ‘higher’ into ‘higher journalism’.
There was much crossing of lines although Amis and Hamilton fell out, as Bradford chronicles, over a woman, inevitably. The editor of the New Review gets only one slighting reference in Amis’s memoir, Experience: Martin lost that particular sexual contest. He has not, if Bradford is to be believed, lost many and probably did not enjoy the experience.
There is a charming photo in Bradford’s book showing young ‘Mart and Jules’ (Barnes, that is) lustily striding to the wicket in their cricket whites – it being the 1970s, fashionably bellbottomed, hair King Charles length, grinning companionably. They were then on the same team (bright young men on the ‘Staggers’ – the New Statesman) and bosom pals. Their achievements were not merely their own but their team’s. In one of the more celebrated literary spats of recent years they fell out when Amis transferred his business from Barnes’s literary-agent wife, Pat Kavanagh (who had lovingly nurtured both their early careers) to Andrew (aka ‘the jackal’) Wylie. It was not business but what was felt to be a betrayal that fuelled the row, one deduces.
I was, in the 1970s, on the far rim of these three coteries – about where Uranus is in the solar system. I did some reviewing for Amis (I still hear that courteous drawl in my ears wondering whether ‘I was free to do’ whatever) and some big articles for Ian Hamilton’s New Review which helped my career no end. Why was I invited to write them? Because colleagues Jeremy Treglown (later editor of the TLS) and Karl Miller
(later editor of the LRB) had mentioned my name as someone who might be given a chance. In a small way, I was pushed on and up by coterie favours and the university department/higher journalism overlap which existed at the time.
One of the principal ways in which it worked for major writers (as they would become) like Amis and Barnes was in reputation building – ‘making one’s name’. Ian McEwan would not be where he is today, nor Craig Raine, one could plausibly argue, were it not for editor Ian Hamilton giving them space to become what they became. Seamus Heaney would surely have made it to the podium at Stockholm on his own merits but the assistance of Miller did no harm. The leaders of coteries (editors in the main) were, in short, power-brokers.
The three magazines mentioned above were co-axial: but in different ways. The New Statesman literary ‘back half’ was in an axial relationship with the political front half (hence Hitchens, as well as Barnes). The New Review was in an axial relationship with the little magazinery and slim volumes in which poetry dribbled out to its fragmented readerships (Hamilton wrote what is still one of the best monographs on little magazines). The literary pages of the Listener had an axis into the world of media: television and the BBC. Miller virtually invented serious television reviewing at the Listener.
Coterie-dominated Literary London had the defects about which Cyril Connolly had been eloquent, twenty years before, in Enemies of Promise: favouritism, nepotism, log-rolling, captiousness, feuding, hatchet jobs on those considered enemies. But it had one thing going for it – community, and a network of communities which in its ensemble constituted a literary ‘world’.
That world and its supporting framework – medium-sized general trade publishers, independent bookshops, public libraries (and their guaranteed ‘safe library sale’) – are decayed or decaying. London, unlike New York, has a profusion of national newspapers and journals, all of which were once component parts of the literary world. Those parts have shrunk alarmingly. Or they have been relegated. The Observer, under Terence Kilmartin, was a powerful literary presence – books, in the review section, were primary objects of attention. In the current paper’s ‘New Review’ (it evokes an ironic echo in those with a long memory), books trail along at the end after the rock stars, film stars, C-list celebs and just ahead of the Sudoku, chess and classifieds. Robert McCrum (‘editor at large’) floats above the small territory ‘books’ (not literature) occupies, columnising airily but without any sense that it is from the captain’s deck.
Literary editors – among whom there has been a turnover amounting to carnage (Mark Amory, at The Spectator is the longest lasting) – are much less prominent figures in the literary landscape than they once were. Many, even those reviewed in their pages would, I suspect, be hard put to say who is running things. Some still preside over what are recognisably coteries – notably the LRB. The journal has, manifestly, consolidated the careers of leading writers in its stable, such as John Lanchester, Colm Tóibín or the artist/art critic Peter Campbell (a recent sad loss). When taxed on the authority she wields, the editor/proprietor of the LRB, Mary-Kay Wilmers lightly replied that she merely ‘looked after the commas’. She is (as the festschrift, two years ago, on her seventieth birthday, testifies) much more than a checker of punctuation. But literary editors nowadays do not throw their weight about. Is it a matter of editorial style – or the fact (as I suspect) that there is no longer much weight to throw about?
A new shape of things is emerging, as I see it, in which coteries are no longer fundamental. That new ethos is marked by two elements that can be called ‘gladiatorisation’ and ‘cosiness’. They exist in uneasy conjunction with each other. Between them they constitute the new communities and social channels through which literature is conceived and delivered.
The gladiator image is suggested by the extraordinary profusion of British literary prizes and awards. A hundred years ago there was none. They all have a feature in common in that they set authors against authors. Typically there is one winner and lots of losers. It creates a literary environment in which ‘community’ is subordinate to ‘competition’; ‘achievement’ subordinate to ‘success’. One could, with a little ingenuity, see it as literary Thatcherisation.
I have sat on or judged a fair number of prizes. I have always felt uneasy about the work because there is, I think, something inherently wrong-
headed about trying to quantify literary quality. Is Drabble better than Byatt? It is a category mistake. On the other hand I usually accept invitations when they come because I like the feeling of actually helping to ‘make’ literary history – creating the canon. It is grandiose, but more of a reward than the pittance one usually gets in money.
The latest prize competition I have been asked to judge is called ‘Fiction Uncovered’. Relatively new, it is unusual in that it nominates, after adjudication, eight of the year’s works of fiction which might have escaped attention. It is not accidental that eight is the number of books a reading club will, on average, get through in a year.
A vast number of new novels are published annually nowadays – five times as many as in the 1950s if one includes second-life paperbacks. How, in the ruck, is a career made? Not by collegiality, but by winning contests. Out of the novels submitted for Fiction Uncovered I quote from a blurb which is typical of many. The author is Jill Dawson, the novel Lucky Bunny (the racy tale, told by herself, of a working-class girl who becomes a working girl in a 1950s Soho run by the Krays and other heroic criminals):
Jill Dawson has written six previous novels, Trick of the Light, Magpie, Fred and Edie, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize, Wild Boy, Watch Me Disappear which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and The Great Lover which was a Richard and Judy Summer read in 2009 …
What is striking here is the sense of the author progressing through the prize system as so many rungs on a ladder. Winning, or being shortlisted, is ‘exposure’. It creates ‘profile’. All of Dawson’s novels have been published by the same publisher. As it advertises itself, ‘Sceptre is the literary imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, home to prize-winning authors like David Mitchell, Andrew Miller and Melvyn Bragg’. One day, presumably, Dawson’s name will swell the prize-winner’s host.
Conventional reviews help a writer like Dawson on her way onwards and upwards. But, most helpful are the ‘reader response’ reviews (so- called) posted in places like Amazon. These build up ‘loyalty clubs’ – constituencies. Ideally, there will be interviews, humanising the author. Word of web – electronic chat – is generated. Authors have their own websites – itself a sign of the times (can one imagine Amis bothering?). The book, if the sun shines on it, is taken up by reading groups and featured at literary festivals. The big picture which emerges is of a strangely soft environment, a literary world without cutting edges, and, importantly, no blokishness. ‘Our hand,’ a modern Austen might say, ‘touches the keyboard.’
Every year entry into the writing profession is more and more flavoured (and its population enlarged) by a crop of graduates of the Creative Writing courses. Dawson, one notes, ‘has held many Fellowships, including the Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich’. Since they were pioneered at UEA Creative Writing has been introduced into many British institutions of higher education as a useful adjunct to the traditional English Department, along with commercial ‘academies’ – such as those run by Faber, or the Guardian – which, over an intense (and expensive) few days or weeks, undertake to professionalise your creativity. Cosiness, as I call it, is most clearly evident in the one place where literary pages have, against the ebbing tide, expanded – namely the Saturday Guardian ‘Review’. It is a fascinating new literary life form. The Review has two connecting tiers – printed expression (articles, reviews, columns) and electronic participation. The effect is to create cross-media togetherness. Typical, for example, is a lead item on 13 February:
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, we’ve asked writers to share their perfect love poems with us. Read choices by A. S. Byatt, Seamus Heaney, Margaret Drabble and many more – and tell us which poetry gets your pulse racing …
It elicited a hundred and seventy-five posted responses – most of them, it has to be said, pulse-slowing.
Reviews in the Review strike one as well-written but artfully sub-critical; as are the titular handles attached (e.g. ‘John Smith finds Mary Jones’s novel intriguing’). At the supplement’s core – and main part of its outreach – is the Guardian Book Club, superintended by John Mullan. A major
author is invited to attend King’s Building to discuss a major work, with Mullan, in front of a paying audience (eight pounds a ticket), with a follow-up report that Saturday. The GBC generates a gemutlichkeit which harmonises with a larger literary environment dominated by book clubs and literary festivals – a world without cutting edges (let alone slashing reviews).
No one had to ask who was in charge at the Listener, or the New Review or the 1970s Guardian (under Bill Webb) nor the current LRB (it is there on the masthead). The Saturday Review is carefully and most effectively composed – but by whose hand? The editor, Lisa Allardice, is an editorial Macavity.
The literary milieux which are evolving are hard to see or make sense of. It is even harder to see where they are going. But, wherever they are going, coteries – and the old systems of patronage, privilege and favouritism they fostered – are, for a certainty, literary history.