It is not unusual for periodicals to produce books applauding their own achievements, especially on their anniversaries, but this volume, put together by the editorial staff of the London Review of Books to celebrate the 40th anniversary of what they call “the paper”, is singular. Though a sort of anthology, it is more like a handsomely produced scrapbook, with photographic reproductions of original letters, draft articles and scribbled notes. (Great diplomacy has been shown in getting the permissions to reproduce some of these.) The result is a kind of coffee table book of intellectual contention.
The LRB began in 1979, when the labour dispute at the Times meant that the Times Literary Supplement was not appearing. Karl Miller, former editor of the Listener and head of English at University College London, decided to start a new review. His former deputy at the Listener, Mary-Kay Wilmers, joined him. This volume illustrates the LRB’s rickety yet oddly confident beginnings, first as an insert within the New York Review of Books, which initially provided necessary funding. It split off a year later. Wilmers had inherited some money – “I didn’t want it … So I found a use for it” – and when Miller left in 1992 Wilmers became editor, and is still.
The first issue still seems impressive, with William Empson on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, John Bayley’s review of William Golding’s Darkness Visible, and new poems by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. Pages reproduced from early issues are, however, forbidding: unbroken columns of print as far as the eye can see. The LRB demonstrated its intellectual seriousness by allowing contributors unparalleled wordage. (Cannily, the compilers have chosen to reprint only tantalising snippets of interesting items rather than whole pieces.)
We see the page from Miller’s jotter with its list of desired contributors, most of whom are eventually nabbed. A few grand refuseniks are commemorated. Karl Popper, both lofty and needy, had his assistant at LSE tell the LRB that he didn’t write reviews but would be “interested to know if you have published reviews of his own books”. Of the 66 well-known names on Miller’s intellectual celebrity list, just six are women. There is later some fretting about the predominance of male contributors in the LRB’s recent as well as distant history.
It may seem odd to have a coffee table book where the pictures are of texts, but many of these are surprisingly expressive. There is the extraordinary typed letter from the poet Laura Riding complaining about Martin Seymour-Smith’s biography of her former partner, Robert Graves. “Mr Miller!” it begins, before expressing indignation in rambling sentences, where the very print – letters overtyped, words crossed out – is a chart of her feelings. It is a reminder of what an eloquent mess a typewriter could make. In contrast, the thickly but precisely corrected typescript of Julian Barnes’s Diary article about the Booker prize (“posh bingo”) is a diagram of fastidiousness.
We get the graphic drama, as it were, of the handwritten letter, in what looks like blue felt-tip, from Bruce Chatwin in 1988, protesting against an article about Aids by John Ryle – indeed protesting at the very use of the word “Aids”. The un-joined-up script somehow makes the repressed fury all the clearer. Differently eloquent is the magnified note of thanks to Frank Kermode, for his review of The Blue Flower, from Penelope Fitzgerald, written in a hand both eccentric and highly legible: “I don’t know whether you’d agree that writing, like teaching, produces considerable spells of depression & moments of great happiness.”
Somehow it is great to see the actual faxed page of an extremely anxious lawyer’s advice about a Christopher Hitchens piece on Conrad Black. “The real problem comes with Christopher Hitchens’s opinions about Mr Black – that he is a mad, tyrannical egotist, a sinister eccentric, a megalomaniac.” There is also a problem with the Labour politician Michael Meacher being designated “a prefect with a reputation for frigid sadism”. An editorial pen has written “cut” alongside both offending flowers of rhetoric.
There are some good spats. Here is Al Alvarez’s ex‑wife, Ursula Creagh, reviewing his book Life After Marriage: Scenes from a Divorce – and then, for good measure, Kermode writing to Miller to express his indignation at this “virtually inexcusable” choice of reviewer. “I do not believe in ‘unprejudiced’ reviewing,” Miller unanswerably replies, signing off with the sad acknowledgement that “the time has come for us to have no more to do with one another”. What Dr Johnson called “the acrimony of scholiasts” gets its delicious due. In 1993 it is both Elaine Showalter v Camille Paglia and Judith Butler portentously denouncing Terry Eagleton.
The LRB likes to show the LRB in process. On the one hand, pages proudly display memorandums in which the staff debate hyphens and the best ways to split words across the end of lines. On the other hand, we get the cock-ups over arty covers that turned out to be rubbish. LRB editors are exacting and are often themselves gifted writers (Andrew O’Hagan, Susannah Clapp, John Lanchester). They also have a collective reputation for overconfidence, illustrated in some of these pages. O’Hagan explains how staff disliked the last lines of poems that they were printing. “They were often too ‘last-line-y’.” So some were just docked. There is an example here (“Cockcrow”) from Patricia Beer, with her terse, infuriated letter of complaint. “The poem is, of course, ruined,” she writes, with justification.
Showing process also means displaying political choices. Here is Wilmers’s letter to Anne Applebaum, explaining that the journal had refused her review of a book on the last days of the Soviet Union because it spent too much time reminding the readers “that Stalin was bad”. There is Hitchens, once a favourite son who faxed in copious copy at all hours, being disinvited to the intellectual gathering when his geopolitics shifted. The book reproduces some of the notorious collection of responses by LRB contributors to 9/11, with Marjorie Perloff’s outrage that most think that, in a phrase she picks up from Mary Beard’s piece, “the United States had it coming”. As Wilmers nicely observes, “Beard didn’t quite say that, though she didn’t wholly not”.
Devotees will appreciate the well-deserved tribute to advertising manager David Rose, who pioneered the LRB’s famous personal ads (nowadays but shadows of their former selves, sadly). The book reproduces the very first such ads, from October 1998. Some of which deploy poetry, bursts of Spanish or allusions to the writings of Jacques Lacan – but some of which have a bluntness unmatched in the paper itself. “Bald, short, fat and ugly male, 53 seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite.”
“It’s not gossipy, cosy or cliquey,” observes long-time contributor Alan Bennett. But, in a mostly productive way, it is cliquey. It has always had favourites and has nurtured them. With pages catching the work of writers including Lorna Sage and Jenny Diski, this celebratory volume looks like a justification of that habit. There is a leading instance. Kermode evidently got over being told by Miller that this was the end and eventually contributed over 200 pieces (more than anyone else). That is the equivalent of at least 10 lengthy books. With his unrivalled ability to “hover as a writer between academia and journalism”, he was the LRB’s tutelary spirit. A good role model to leave us with.
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