Literary London

...Amis: "For a few seconds, every cell in my body shakes with ravenous applause...

...The charmed circle, needless to say, persists in the absence of its favorite son...

...They do not confront issues, provide "insights" or launch crusades...

...Oh, very well, ma'am, if you prefer the attentions of Frederick Comyn!'" (Heyer, Devil's Cub) "'Why were you holding his hands, anyway?' '"He was comforting me...

...Yet those who might conceivably do something about it—the lions of Literary London and their media pride—seem content to ignore it and pour their energies into pet projects and pamphlets of poetry...

...Eliot—authors like Barbara Pym and Denton Welch who were quietly writing their stylish masterpieces...

...On the financial side of the literary equation, the news is that fiction houses are being bought up by large conglomerates—a direct result of the publishing austerities of the '70s...

...I was miserable about the baby.' "Rory held out his hands...

...Surely not everyone concurs with Günter Grass' dictum that "even bad books are books, and therefore sacred...

...We drizzle through life like prisoners on parole...

...Grub Smith, a new contributor to the NL, has written for the Tatler, Private Eye and the Literary Review...

...Since the need to make a bigger splash confines everyone except the most stylish practitioners to a depressingly familiar routine, genuinely talented young writers feel obliged to pile on the grisliness to get into print...

...Nor has the LRB yet found a philosopher's stone to make the social sciences easy going...

...Waugh has a particular dislikeof State subsidy, and his diatribes against those publications that benefit "whenever the State milch-cow lifts its tail" are as combative as his many Swiftian assaults in the Spectator and in the Private Eye of old...

...The ideology is a fair one to adopt when reviewing works of an economic or historical bent, but it wears a bit thin on fiction...

...July Cooper, doyenne of modern romance, seemed to have drawn inspiration from Georgette Heyer...

...Snow and concluded that they were the most brilliant company in the world...

...A lately discovered diversion is the unmasking of plagiarists...

...Between the fusty TLS and the feisty LR lies the London Review of Books, which is subsidized by the State (to the tune of $66,000 per annum...

...The niggling politics of subsidy does not greatly interest the more scurrilous elements of the British press, who are more concerned with squabbles among the literati and reports of million dollar payouts for brick-thick novels about sex, chauffeurs and champagne...

...The Times Literary Supplement is very much the princeps of the triumvirate, an august offshoot of the London Times and the recognized forum for dessicated academic feuds...

...If you prefer Finn to me.'" (Cooper, Emily) If words too often betray a certain familiarity, it must be said that themes are more diverse than ever...

...If the decline continues, they will surely go down in posterity—like Connolly before them—as having averted their lunch-rosy gaze from vital endeavors and squandered their abilities on trivial things...

...He was generally believed to be a Grand Master in the charmed circle that "ran" literature—one of the lions whose roaring reviews in the heavyweight Sundays decided the reputations of young authors, and whose witty Soho lunches were greedily reported by the gossips...

...This perhaps explains the spate of Martin Amis / Ian McEwan type works, distinguished by scabrous prose and battering-ram unpleasantness...

...Martin Amis, the cynosure of Literary London, was found to have lifted the odd phrase in his novel Success from Kurt Vonnegut...

...Although the purse string-holders at the Arts Council certainly know this, they are too pusillanimous to do much about the situation...

...Compare: "'Why was that fellow holding your hands?' '"For comfort,' said Miss Challoner desolately...

...Any reduction of gift or rebate is met with howls of "Censorship...

...Clink, Bogg, Drumlargen, DarkFisher, Filch, Stroller, What Tower?, Gairm, Mesh—these are not walk-ons from Tolkien, butsomeof the minnows (mostly poetry magazines) vying for smaller crumbs of the government cake...

...Oh, have it your own way,' he snapped...

...This is a fine example of Rubikery in verse, a "cluedo for pseudos" as Auberon Waugh would say...

...Clearly this does not augur well for the future...

...The effect on writing has been gradual but deleterious...

...Jack Higgins, the thriller writer, was discovered to have plagiarized himself on numerous occasions...

...Her embarrassment was gleefully charted by Fleet Street...

...I'll hold them instead.' "I shook my head...

...I suspect it will be seen that in the middle years of this century, the most distinguished literary geniuses in the English language were those who never, or seldom, cackled with Elizabeth Bowen, puked with Dylan Thomas, or genuflected with T.S...

...Bad books—andperiodicals—are nearly always a waste of tree...

...As every newspaper began to sniff out stolen words, a few literary aristocrats joined Her Royal Highness in the tumbrel...

...At publishing functions, men who ought to know better, or at least ought to know it will do no good, initiate petitions and promise "action...

...There was such a curious lump in my throat which made it impossible for me to say anything...

...It began—explosively— last year when Private Eye proved that Princess Michael of Kent had purloined great chunks of her book about foreign princesses from recent works on the subject...

...Consider this nugget from Jeremy Reed ("the most outstanding poet of his generation"): Our brains are crucibles of Dante's Hell, we smell the leaking gas of our own death like cabbage rotting in a sodden field, its arsenic coats our blood, our camel's breath filters from flues in which our brain-cells burn, our souls cinder to Carthaginian pyres, and yet we agitate those flames, liquor and drugs and venery force feed the fire until we hiss with autocombustion and ignite like a torch doused in petrol, a red hot poker rammed up Lesbia's bum...

...One might argue that it is unfair for a market place where several similar literary periodicals are competing to be distorted by the injection of public money into one of them...

...One begins to wonder if it's worth it to save the likes of Filch 2 or More Bogg...

...The proliferation of such pamphlets is supposed to attest to the health of English letters, yet the naked truth is that if one took away their funding few would produce another issue: Far more people want to write for them than want to read them...

...At the opposite end of the scale is the Literary Review, edited by the satirist Auberon Waugh with the avowed intention of "sweeping a new broom through the Augean stables of British publishing...

...If the LRB were to disappear that would be sad...

...There was a curious lump in her throat that made speech impossible...

...In its vanguard are the three leading literary magazines known (in the manner of large corporations or brutal secret police forces) by their initials: the TLS, theLR and theLRB...

...Each has its own distinctive character...

...Concern for profit margins has eaten away at the creative end of the market and boosted the production of middle pulp in the Jackie Collins mold...

...Give them to me.' "Miss Challoner shook her head...

...they concern themselves instead with sly little jokes about Victorian architecture and homosexual clergymen...

...To be involved in Literary London was to court an "enemy of promise," he declared solemnly, employing the celebrated phrase of Cyril Connolly—who perhaps more than anyone else this century had his talent destroyed by parties, frittered conversation and weekend journalism...

...We don't read any of them now...

...but sadder still would be the consequences of the whole publishing trade becoming addicted to State subsidy—like so much else in England...

...Amis, it may be remembered, had earlier griped that an American by the name of Epstein had duplicated his first novel, The Rachel Papers...

...Impassioned letters are written by the dispossessed editors to the TLS, rejected, and then written again to the LRB, where they are duly given column inches...

...Wilson has made one attempt at a serious political novel—about a Tory MP who gets involved à la Profumo with a grande horizontale partial to bondage—but everybody thought it was meant to be funny anyway...

...No one begrudged Wilson his tickling the Establishment's ribs because, as literary editor of the Spectator and a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, he himself was verymuchapart of it...

...It wasn't possible, Wilsonmaintained, to be a good writer and someone who sat on pen committees or judged literary prizes: "Thirty years ago one might have gazed around a room containing Connolly, Philip Hope-Wallace, James Pope-Hennessy, Stephen Spender, and C.P...

...The ingredients of Heathrow schlock—sex, drugs, pain, and money—are all there, with a literary gloss...

...The label, although less impressive than "Imagist" or "Vorticist," is apt: Guessing the poet's feelings is like deciphering the clues in a whodunit...

...He held out his own...

...a book must have a "selling hook" to reach the store shelves...

...As for content, the LRB is a stable, Augean or otherwise, of obtuse modernisms and Center-Left politics...

...Recently, however, he threw it all up and retired to Oxfordshire, vowing publicly never to write a review again...

...Poetry in particular has become increasingly complex in the 1980s, and might now be described as going through its "Agatha Christie" phase (with some noble exceptions...

...Publishers are less free, thanks to their accounting overlords, to put out quality novels that have not proved their mettle commercially...

...Vonnegut: "A moment went by and then every cell in Billy's body shook him with a ravenous gratitude and applause...

...Its letters page includes comments from the most revered and prolix intellectuals, who give freely of their opinions to the 7X5 while scorning offers of payment from its less highbrow rivals...