Happy Birthday

It comes as a surprise to be reminded that, for all its amiable idiosyncrasy and august image, at 100 years old the Times Literary Supplement is younger than the airplane and pretty well as modern as Stravinsky and non-figurative art. Derwent May affects no venerable stoop. Dry institutional history this is not: Of 600 enthralling pages, only some 50 deal with the journal’s origins and editorial intrigues under press barons from Lord Northcliffe to Rupert Murdoch. In “Critical Times,” May has written a review of reviews in narrative form, a running cultural critique of the 20th century that keeps you reading to find out who says what about whom next.

The TLS has what the French call “a confidential circulation” that has never topped 50,000. Two-thirds are sold abroad, mostly to Americans. That leaves about 12,000 in Britain, of which perhaps half go to universities and libraries. Individual subscriptions of 6,000 in a population of 59 million, despite a vast expansion of higher education, is modest. It seems the highly educated have better things to do than read their country’s preeminent literary magazine, even though it covers stage, cinema and art shows and sports superbly designed covers in color.

And, as if this weren’t enough, rivals have increased, including some excellent literary supplements distributed free, notably in America. Given all this competition and the ravages/seductions of the visual era, it is amazing that this 100-year-old literary dog continues to dance at all (and it is picking up pace: Under editor Ferdinand Mount, the circulation has increased by some 10,000 with no narrowing the formidable coverage).

In literature, there is much fun to be had. And TLS has often led the game. There is even an element of suspense. Who will deflate reputations begging to be pricked? We all have our favorites. Would the TLS critics ever “get” T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound? They did--Eliot quite quickly, Pound eventually. And how long would E.H. Carr, the TLS’ communism expert, get away with intellectual murder in his stubborn rationalization of a literally murderous regime? From the mid-’30s almost till his death in 1982.

To revert to the TLS’ beginnings in 1902, if we expect to find out-of-touch Edwardians getting things badly wrong, we will be disappointed. In general the solidity, intelligence and readability of many early critics are impressive. Monkish fellows they may have been, many of them Etonians and classical scholars, yet by and large they and their immediate followers were a formidable bunch, at once intellectually well-grounded and up with the times.

Some monks were jollier than others, and a poker-faced E.V. Lucas could write of Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” that “as a contribution to natural history the work is negligible.” Though when they hit the nail, they hit it square. On Edith Wharton, in 1904: “Studying new combinations of circumstances, new types of people and new theories of conduct.” On G.K. Chesterton: “ ... a cordial promiscuous gusto, an unpruned fertility of healthy and manly thinking.” On “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: “Mr. Joyce gives us wild youth, as wild as Hamlet’s, and full of wild music.” Naturally there was uncertainty about D.H. Lawrence, but generations are there for the changing and, as we have learned, the intellectual establishments that we should distrust the most are the ones who seek to neuter their avant-garde by pre-emptive assimilation.

Had the TLS founding fathers been as otherworldly as we imagine, they would hardly have shoveled books at a young woman reviewer named Virginia Woolf, who was 23 when she got her first 3 pounds per column, and her fine intelligence illuminates the first part of the book. Her startling subtlety, tremulous yet substantial, confirms that without her Bloomsbury would have been not much more than a nest of upper-class sexual naughtiness. “How neat and acute that silvering greyness is--the sparkle that is really dull,” she wrote of a collection of topical essays, catching in a breath an era of literary consumerism that was still to come. She had her blind spots (“Ulysses” was “a memorable catastrophe”), but made it up with praise for Joseph Conrad and other awkward fellows.

Of the battles that swarmed beneath the surface, one was American versus English literature. It wasn’t that American writers were ignored, just that at first they tended to be noticed more often than they were liked. F.T. Dalton dismissed Pound as “a strange mixture of the commonplace and the recondite,” exquisitely missing what was to prove the chief strength of American writing--its enviable ease of transition from the demotic to the cerebral and back. Another reviewer was as shocked by Hemingway’s “unconcern for the conventional features of good writing” as by his heroes’ capacity for drink. Yet another disliked “The Great Gatsby” for “the really very unpleasant characters of this story.”

Even the blessed Virginia could be sniffy: “There is every reason to believe that America can bring something new to literature; it is high time, we may add, that America did”--though she later confessed that Walt Whitman’s new preface to “Leaves of Grass” “rivals anything we have done for 100 years.”

Over the decades, TLS reviews were to illustrate, inadvertently, how the English preference for social comedy over Balzacian comedie humaine shrank our novelists’ horizons, privileging the easy, knowing rictus over the reflective smile. The (at times unbearable) lightness of The Movement--the 1950s set comprising John Wain, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis--contrasted painfully with the avoirdupois of Nabokov, Bellow, Updike et al. The last two were well noticed in general, though “Lolita” caused the TLS the same unease as it caused the American publishers who turned it down.

Many editors, from John Gross to Mount included, have striven to embrace America, though the imbalance in coverage is to an extent organic. The TLS is a London-based periodical, and even in the global village no paper can alienate its roots. Marshall McLuhan was glowingly reviewed in the TLS, almost as if it foresaw the compensatory boon for print of the Internet, but in retrospect he underrated the extent to which the global and parochial can coexist. His village turns out to be more of an electronic, Spenglarian megalopolis, and in literature as in life, the local is where the heart is. So it was inevitable that Amis should be treated as if he were the equal of Updike and Larkin of Wallace Stevens. May recounts some of the delicious gossip surrounding the Booker Prize but, had American authors not been arbitrarily excluded, the gossip would have been transatlantic and many an award different (that’s in stark contrast to the National Book Award, which is open to all English-language authors).

The ascent of literary theory, Gross feared, would ruin reading, as if “no one were allowed to go to church without taking a degree in theology.” Even Elaine Showalter, a supporter of the new canon, feared “a new orthodoxy, as muffling as scholastic Latin.” Soothingly, Robert Alter suggested that the study of literature in Britain had always been “under-conceptualised” and was merely catching up. As I write, the war has flared again, with Raymond Tallis and Richard Sennett arguing about whether or not Michel Foucault knowingly infected his partners in San Francisco after contracting AIDS. If he did, says Tallis, he was living his lie about AIDS being a myth of the “anti-sexual forces of authority.” Tough stuff for a gentlemanly journal, but then, as W.B. Yeats (for some reason under-reviewed in the early TLS) wrote, an intellectual hatred is the worst.

The end of anonymous reviewing came in the mid-1970s, gradually, sensibly, under Gross. Lawrence Durrell was in favor (less faceless, catty reviewing), Nikolaus Pevsner against (what happens when one’s friends write bad books?). Star reviewers like Gore Vidal can still be attracted, if the bait is to vilify Updike, though the growth of specialism, notably in science and philosophy, employs an army of mouse-poor academics whose rewards are as meager as Woolf’s: In London’s laughably overpriced restaurants, a thousand words will buy you a single good meal for two, which could explain why the meals tend to be delivered more promptly than the reviews.

“It is essential for the preservation of the quality of the culture of a minority that it should continue to be a minority culture,” Eliot laid down in “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” a view that would argue against anything so vulgar as the TLS’ promotion campaigns. H.F. Carlill’s 1948 review disagreed: “There is an ethos, a sensibility, that one can imagine permeating a whole community and becoming part of the tradition of every member of it.”

Carlill’s is the argument for pushing circulation without dropping standards. What else can we do except keep the good things going, while we continue to imagine? Eliot was on safer ground when he said how wrong it was to see life as a smooth-running machine, and that irritation was essential to culture. On that criterion, the TLS is both admirably cultured and ultra-democratic, for as May shows in “Critical Times,” there is something in its history to irritate just about everyone.