In the attic of my congested Philadelphia house, full of books infiltrating crannies and corners the way Roman soldiers once bivouacked wherever open space permitted, six corroded boxes of old weekly newspapers still retain a pride of place, dragged from city to city, from student apartment to grown-up home, even as the contents yellow and break apart.
All hold copies of The Times Literary Supplement from my teenage and college years, when I’d subscribe at the introductory price, then pass up renewal for a second and third subscription at the introductory price. (Is there a statute of limitations on this offense?) I remember hoping that the distinguished paper’s formidable attention to detail did not extend to dispatching agents in bowler hats to the United States to determine whether a link existed between the impecunious C.P. Romano, the indigent C. Paul Romano, and other cognate American supporters.
On those fateful moving days, requiring instant decisions on what matters eternally and what only ephemerally, the internal voice would warn, “I’ll need that omnibus Vico article some day,” or, “I can’t remember everything that requires reading in that pile, but there are heaps of things, and I’ll get around to doing it.”
One simply couldn’t throw them out. And dip into them, I have.
In my obsession -- my loyalty? -- I enjoyed trans-Atlantic company.
“Same here,” confides Derwent May, “Lit Ed” at one time or another of The Listener, The Sunday Telegraph, and The European, now author of the splendid 606-page Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement, to be published in the United States by Trafalgar Square this month as part of the paper’s 100th-anniversary celebrations.
As glasses and cutlery clink at Chez Gerard, a Times hangout just a walk from the paper’s current home, in Times House on Pennington Street, the sprightly mid-60s veteran of English literary journalism (a former TLS staffer to boot) admits he squirreled away copies even before launching on the mammoth task of chronicling the world’s finest book review.
“I think it’s the old English ethos of common sense and fair play that marks it out, really,” May says, asked to explain the paper’s enduring attraction to educated readers. “It’s both fairly omnivorous and selective, but it’s never been cliquey. ... Over all, it’s tried to be large-minded, but tough-minded, too.”
That doesn’t entirely explain the love affair many subscribers experience with their TLS, which from the first 8-page issue, on January 17, 1902, to the 48-page centenary blowout of January 18, 2002, has high-mindedly aimed at reviewing everything that’s fit to read, often commenting on 50 or more books at a clip.
It can’t capture how keeping up with the TLS becomes a badge of pride, or even a suggestion of proper pedigree.
For Americans, an atavistic, pre-Emersonian deference to English authority undoubtedly plays a role. Surely many of us harbor the batty notion deep in our Jungian substrata that the TLS editor must look like James Murray, fabled editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (a similarly charmed English literary institution), in the photo that fronts most editions of K.M. Elisabeth Murray’s adoring biography, Caught in the Web of Words -- bearded, distracted, adrift in a rabbit warren of bookshelves stuffed with paper and books (the OED’s Scriptorium), yet unquestionably the most authoritative bookman anywhere.
If that’s so, stop reading here -- or the TLS mythos in your life will have to survive simply on the sound, up-to-date principles May notes, and other kindred virtues.
As Ferdinand Mount (“Ferdy” to all who know him) -- novelist, TLS editor since 1991, and former chief of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit -- ponders how much the projection of “authority” plays a role in the TLS’s longevity and success (especially since 1974, when the paper dropped its “This is the Establishment speaking” tradition of keeping reviewers anonymous), one notices the banal, banausic scene outside the window of his functional, ultramodern office: a Texaco Express Shop and Car Wash, backed by three hideous apartment towers, architectural love children of Mies van der Rohe and Stalin.
He admits it keeps his august position (appropriate for the aristocratic nephew of the late novelist Anthony Powell) in perspective.
“We’d like to have authority,” Mount, 62, a witty, ruddy-faced man, replies cheerily. “But I’m not sure that’s what keeps us going. Because you’re always uncertain and people are always coming up and telling you, you know, that you no longer have authority in this or that!”
Mount’s TLS domain outside his corner office consists of a single rectangular space within Times House, about the size of a university classroom, lined with wall and waist-high bookshelves. The sartorial style is much updated from Murrayish black: One editor works in T-shirt, with banana on desk, as he might at Rolling Stone, Salon, or Spin. Although the 10 editorial staffers represent the largest TLS employment ever, its size is constrained by reality. With a circulation a shade under 35,000, half in the United States, the paper, in Mount’s words, hovers “on the edge of profitability.”
To Mount, the TLS prospers critically because, even given “a kind of oomph, a weight, attached to continuity over such a long period,” it retains an “unchanging sense of mission” that he instantly recognized when revisiting the first issue: “To look at new books -- now also new plays, new films, and so on -- and try to get the best view of them that’s available to you,” usually by “trying to get the best people.”
At the very least. But there’s more. Let others describe in detail the book-reviewing tasks at which the TLS’s rivals fail. Here are four at which the TLS ritually succeeds:
1. The TLS reviews the book under review. To outsiders, that might seem faintly obligatory. Insiders know better. As Mount indelicately puts it, in every TLS review, “there will be some effort made to say what the hell the book’s about, and whether or not it succeeds in that.” Once the reviewer accomplishes that task, “if you like, at the end, the reviewer can say what he thinks the book should have been about.”
2. In an English-speaking literary world rife with hostile ideological encampments -- at least in the United States -- its pages remain officially open to writers of diverse political and aesthetic castes, as well as to oldsters and youngsters, Regius professors and ambitious graduate students on the make. And they know more about their subjects than what are in the books before them.
3. Long before anyone uttered the phrase “Listserv thread,” the TLS Letters section established itself as the Hyde Park Corner of Olympian disagreement about issues of taste, knowledge, and truth raised in the paper, with debates raging for weeks or months at a time.
In the pages of Critical Times, May recalls prolonged exchanges about whether, for instance, Roman peasants lacerated their fingers on the prickles of briars, or whether that belief depends on a mistranslation of Virgil’s Georgics. Currently, Richard Sennett and Raymond Tallis are at one another’s throats, or other parts, about Foucault’s notorious sex life in his final years, and its relevance to his relevance.
4. Finally -- whimsically, fetishistically -- the TLS not only honors truth but insists on accuracy in small things. Here the signature paragraph has always been the final, anticlimactic one, in which reviewer Jowett Trevelyan Macaulay huffs, “One should note that mutatis mutandis (sic) on p. 327 lacks italics, and that the much-mentioned Mr. Socrates downed his terminal libation in Athens, and not, as stated in footnote 37a, in suburban Corinth.”
In Critical Times, an indefatigable tale of both opinions and the chronically opinionated, May traces these phenomena through all 100 years, rescuing scores of immortal sentences from the magazine’s past, such as its 1917 view of G.K. Chesterton’s A Short History of England: that Chesterton “stands on his head to proclaim that the world is upside down, and fails to realise that that is what he is doing.”
May records the rise of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf as prolific behind-the-curtain reviewers, documents the TLS’s Houdini-like escapes from shuttering, notes later editor Stanley Morison’s boast that he had made the paper “hard to read again,” and captures all the strands of excellence that lead even a frequent critic like literary theorist Terry Eagleton to declare it “one of the towering intellectual achievements of 20th-century Britain.” For all this, TLS -- centenarian, yet no mere cento -- we love you (even if you did miss Ulysses, The Rainbow, and a few other 20th-century books that matter).
One must note, nonetheless, that in the February 22 issue, columnist J.C. repeatedly refers to departing Slate editor Michael Kinsley as “Kinsey,” and states that “a replacement has been found for Kinsey.” Not so -- the bake-off between aspirants continues. And that Lindsey Hughes’s review, in the December 28 issue, of H. Bruce Lincoln’s Sunlight at Midnight, a history of St. Petersburg, fails to mention that the British Perseus edition is bound upside down -- rather like someone standing on his head.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy at Temple University.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B11