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Table of contents The First 1,000 Issues, 1902-1921
The 1920s and 30s
1939–45
1947–49
1948–59: The TLS under Alan Pryce-Jones
Swinging Sixties, Slipping Seventies
Sources and methods
The First 1,000 Issues, 1902–1921 G. K. Chesterton described journalism in Edwardian times and before as "the largest work ever published anonymously since the great Christian cathedrals." He didn't have The Times Literary Supplement in mind but perhaps he should have done. The journal whose modest first eight-page issue appeared on 17 January 1902 has been a key influence on, as well as record of, contemporary culture. Yet until 7 June 1974, even the most famous of the paper's contributors were—for the most part—unnamed. Still today, no list of the editorial staff appears. This self-effacingness was partly a matter of standard practice in the daily journalism of the time, though it was already becoming rare in literary periodicals. It also reflected the personality and views of Bruce Richmond who, after a start had been made by his Times colleague J. R. Thursfield, became the Supplement's first long-serving editor. In the words of one of his successors, John Gross, Richmond (1871-1960) was "a self-effacing man, who was content to work behind the scenes and whose name never meant much to the literary public at large; but he deserves to be remembered as one of the most remarkable editors of his own or indeed of any epoch." He remained editor through political dramas and economic crises, whether international or local to The Times, for thirty-five years. He created and sustained one of the most durable of modern British institutions, an achievement officially recognised with a knighthood in 1935. Yet in his brief entry in Who's Who he was content to summarise his career as no more than that of a "Journalist" who had "joined editorial staff of The Times, 1899." Richmond was a quintessential member of the high-cultural establishment. He had won scholarships both to Winchester—then, as now, intellectually the most demanding of the English ‘public’ schools—and to New College, Oxford. After reading for the bar he joined The Times, remaining there until he retired. To many people of his formation, anonymity was a virtue in itself, not least because it helped to give the impression of a still greater one: unanimity. The Times and institutions like it aimed to speak with a single voice: intelligent, considered, unexcitable, slightly aloof––the kind of voice which, once the power of radio was recognised, was also required of people talking on the BBC. It was the voice of authority in the sense both of expertise and of another, more collective kind of power: that of members of a club. Literally so. More than 20 per cent of TLS contributors in this period belonged to the Athenaeum and as many more to other gentlemen's clubs in central London. It's easy to find fault with freemasonry of this kind, which certainly involved risks: of undetected favouritism; of the secret settling of scores; even of a kind of self-promotion the more flagrant for being furtive. In 1903, the Rev. Dr Charles Cox, reviewing the Hampshire volume of the Victoria County Histories, used the cover of anonymity to compliment himself on the readability of his own contribution. In 1911, Lieutenant-Colonel S. H. Hooper seems to have achieved a unique double by publishing a book anonymously and then reviewing it anonymously in the Literary Supplement. Doubtless these instances were practical jokes rather than abuses, and a few such pranks among tens of thousands of sober, responsible reviews must have cheered things up at Printing House Square (the Colonel was a military correspondent of The Times, which was how the author of the book he reviewed was described). But to people outside the club, what went on inside could sometimes look less venial. In the decades after the Second World War, when widening social and educational opportunity had made readers less respectful of authorities and establishments, attacks on the continuation of anonymous reviewing in the TLS became frequent and increasingly vociferous: nowhere more so than in F. W. Bateson’s article in a 1957 issue of his journal Essays in Criticism, which became the locus classicus of the argument that "the reviewer’s name is an essential part of the meaning of the review." From the beginning, a small number of pieces were in fact published under their authors’ names. We don’t know what determined these decisions, though they seem in some cases to have anticipated Bateson’s assertion: signed pieces by, for example, Max Beerbohm, Sir Arthur Evans, George Moore, Edith Wharton and Henry James (the last two of whom also wrote anonymously) clearly carried extra clout, in a way that ones by then unknown authors would not have. But Bruce Richmond’s belief was that anonymity more often protected than endangered good judgement. Anonymous reviewers were less tempted to show off, and in many cases people who would write well about a book but who might have refused to do so under their own name—whether for professional reasons or just out of the kind of reticence which Richmond himself embodied—could be persuaded to do so by knowing that their identity would be protected. Under anonymity, talent could come before acknowledged expertise. As T. S. Eliot was to put it, "one gradually became an authority in the field allotted." It was for the TLS that the young Eliot wrote some of his most influential essays on seventeenth-century drama and literature, benefiting along the way from what he called "the discipline of anonymity": "I am firmly convinced that every young literary critic should learn to write for some periodical in which his contributions will be anonymous…I learnt to moderate my dislikes and crotchets, to write in a temperate and impartial way." Famously, too, the future Virginia Woolf wrote very often for the paper from her early twenties—even more often than was previously known, as our index of contributors reveals. The index also gives access to previously unattributed pieces by scores of other well-known writers. Even the idea that Richmond himself never wrote for the paper turns out to have been untrue.
The first item in the first issue of The Times Literary Supplement, after a list of contents and a brief introductory announcement, was a review of a book which epitomised the idea of the Victorian "man of letters": a selection from the correspondence of Edward Fitzgerald, a biographer, translator, friend of Thackeray and Tennyson, and above all a letter-writer, who had died twenty years earlier. The author of the piece—in publication terms, the TLS’s first contributor—was Augustine Birrell. At this stage Birrell was himself best known as an essayist, the author of Obiter Dicta (1884), of a life of Charlotte Brontë, and of a forthcoming book on Hazlitt. But while the subject of his review had been a retiring dilettante, never taking a job or making journeys much more adventurous than between his native Suffolk and literary London, Birrell himself, however unsatisfactorily, embodied another ideal: the writer as homme d’affaires. He was a lawyer, interspersing literary work with publications on matters such as employers’ liability and the history of copyright. And he was a Member of Parliament, soon to be President of the Board of Education in the Liberal government, and from 1907 to 1916—years when Irish independence was among the most crucial issues on the British political agenda—a damagingly ineffective Chief Secretary for Ireland. The complex layering of identities personified by Birrell, with its mixture of priorities (he later attributed his having ignored the rise of Sinn Féin to his absorption in contemporary Irish literature and drama), typifies something both about Englishness, albeit more so then than now, and about The Times Literary Supplement. The paper’s very title somehow manages both to assert and to qualify the centrality of literary values in a way which was replicated in the opening announcement. Readers were informed that Literature, the Supplement’s more assertively named but less durable predecessor, had been subsumed into another review, the Academy (which had included Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley among its early contributors but was now being fatally popularised by a new proprietor and editor). Meanwhile, the new Literary Supplement––which was published as an insert in The Times until 1914––modestly declared of itself that it would appear "During the Parliamentary Session…as often as may be necessary to keep abreast with the more important publications of the day." But what was an important publication? As far as the first issue was concerned, the works chosen were, in order of review: the Fitzgerald book; a study of Scottish men of letters in the eighteenth century; a history of Napoleon’s first war with Russia (and, on a later page, two novels about Napoleon); a reissue of a book about Kensington by the nineteenth-century essayist Leigh Hunt; an intellectual history of China; a polemic against British rule in India (case dismissed); a social history of part of Hampshire; collections by two women poets, Katharine Tynan and Mary Robinson; and some handbooks for clergymen. These reviews were followed by surveys of current developments in the sciences, the visual arts, the theatre and music; a piece on a study of Shakespeare; notes on forthcoming publications and a list of recent ones; and two chess problems. It would be hard to imagine eight less compelling pages as having inaugurated any journal, least of all one which now shows every sign of continuing into its second century. The early 1900s were, after all, a heyday of competition among British literary magazines, though few were as long-lived as the TLS. The Bookman had been founded in 1891, the Sphere in 1900. In 1908, Ford Madox Ford and others began the English Review and A. R. Orage became editor of the New Age. Meanwhile, many older journals continued to flourish, among them Blackwood’s, the Athenaeum (later to be subsumed by the New Statesman) and the Saturday Review. In due course, in a pattern which was often to be repeated later, writers associated with the Literary Supplement moved on to run journals of their own. John Middleton Murry, who was in his mid 20s when he first wrote for the TLS, was to edit the Athenaeum from 1919 and the Adelphi from 1923. And when T. S. Eliot began the Criterion in 1922, his chief editorial influence was—as he later acknowledged—Bruce Richmond. The TLS’s initial pattern of eight pages per week of book reviews and related short articles remained generally the same until 1916, when the usual number of pages went up to twelve. (It rose again to sixteen in 1921.) And the style continued to be calm, impersonal, ‘objective’. Yet in its unobtrusive way, the paper steadily gained not only in influence—by 1914, sales were averaging 38,000 to 41,000—but also in distinctiveness. For example, the Supplement gave exceptionally full coverage to new books in French. A key figure, here—one of the previously unacknowledged heroines of the British literary establishment—was the poet Mary Robinson, one of whose books was briefly mentioned in the first issue. She had recently married Emile Duclaux, director of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. In the first 1,000 issues of the TLS Mme Duclaux reviewed 338 books, among them many of the leading French publications of the day, by authors including Marcel Proust (whose A la Recherche du Temps Perdu was reviewed in the TLS from the beginning, as each volume appeared in France), as well as Maurice Barrès, Julien Benda, Paul Bourget, Anatole France, André Gide, Jean Giraudoux, Valéry Larbaud, Pierre Loti, Maurice Maeterlinck, François Mauriac, the Comtesse de Noailles, Marcel Prévost, Ernest Renan, Jules Renard and Romain Rolland. Paris was, of course, the capital of modernism: a word which, so far as it meant anything in England, was as yet mainly associated there with recent developments in Christian philosophy condemned by Pope Pius X in the 1907 encyclical, De modernistarum doctrinis. But as the list of names reviewed by Mary Duclaux makes clear, far from all modern writers even in France were modernists. One of the uses of the TLS Centenary Archive is to facilitate enquiry not only into the reception of cultural movements like literary modernism—to which, despite some lapses, the paper was generally sympathetic—but into their wider contexts: the books which seemed important then, and the interests which they reflected. This was, of course, a crucial time in the battle for women's rights, and while women hostile to the suffragette movement, such as Mrs Humphry Ward, were among TLS contributors, as was George Calderon, Hon. Secretary of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage, so too were Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Bell and the campaigning feminist and pacifist Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Again, it was an important era in Anglo-Irish relations: one in which the paper published contributions by, among people with quite different views, the Irish nationalists Darrell Figgis and Aodh de Blacam. (Erskine Childers, the yachtsman and spy novelist who became a convert to Irish Republicanism and was executed for gun-running, also wrote for the paper, but not about Ireland.) Of the forty-six reviewers in this period who were or became Members of Parliament, 16 were Liberals (a further seven contributors stood unsuccessfully as Liberal candidates). Another, Edmund Morel, became Labour MP for Dundee in 1922 after a career as a campaigner on African affairs. We are not claiming that the early TLS was a journal of radical social reform. The Webbs did not write for it; nor, except in published letters, did Shaw or H. G. Wells. But it was a much more open forum than tends to be assumed. Then, as often since, its conservative reputation is belied by the variety of its contents and its effectiveness, while making the case for values which it thought should be left intact, at persuading even the most hidebound of readers when it believed other views should be heard. One of the most moving instances is the front page of the issue of 13 August 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the First World War. It was more or less obligatory that the paper would publish a poem by the Laureate, Robert Bridges. "Thou Careless, Awake!" spoke bloodthirstily of the cleansing power of suffering and ended with the words "ENGLAND STANDS FOR HONOUR / GOD DEFEND THE RIGHT!" But the rest of the page was filled by an article by the Fabian Times staff member Arthur Clutton-Brock, headed "The Two Kinds of Courage", which acted as a commentary on Bridges's lines in calling for another sort of courage, that of maintaining "a contempt, partly moral and partly intellectual, for national vendettas and all the false romanticism that springs from them."
The main task of our index of TLS contributors, 1902–74, is to fill in the largest gap left by the public record: the names of reviewers and, since far from all of them are, or ever were, well known, whatever basic biographical information about them we have been able to find. These details can be searched in a variety of ways. Most people will simply want to know who reviewed specific books and authors, or what a particular author contributed to the TLS at a given point in a career or throughout a whole lifetime. But beyond that, the index answers—and leads to—still other questions, including ones about the literary establishment. Users can call up information, for example, by contributors’ specialisms, by a range of dates, by gender, educational background, profession, publications, or by combinations of these and other elements. They can learn—so far as we have been able to find these or other facts—what other journals reviewers worked for, and through this, something about the informal networks which influenced the reception of books. They can also find out who was related to whom. Although (or perhaps partly because) TLS contributors appeared anonymously, Bruce Richmond and his colleagues took great care not only in selecting them but in getting to know them: inviting them to the office, keeping in touch with them by letter, suggesting topics on which they might write. Next to none of the editorial correspondence of the time has survived. Richmond notoriously drafted his replies to contributors on their original letters, which he threw into the wastepaper basket when the fair copy was done. But there is plenty of evidence of a degree of personal attention to regular reviewers, which is the more impressive given how many wrote for the paper and the volume of material they supplied. The first 1,000 issues alone contain 23,346 reviews and articles by 1,036 separate authors, and 3,761 letters by a further 1,596. Keeping pace editorially wasn’t easy—least of all during the First World War, in which a tenth of the paper’s contributors fought (some of them having previously served in the South African War) and several died. Among these was a redoubtable New Zealander, Noel Ross, who volunteered at the outbreak of war, was wounded and, though declared unfit for further service, concealed his medical records in order to continue fighting until he died of war-related typhoid in 1917, just before what was to have been his wedding day. Ross wrote half a dozen pieces for the TLS about Gallipoli and the Somme, but for obvious reasons few other serving soldiers were also reviewers. 200 contributors appeared in the TLS for the first time in 1914, and the number of newcomers—among them, despite his claim that he was being ostracised by London editors, Ezra Pound—remained high throughout the war. It is well known that such authors as Richard Aldington, T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, the Humphry Wards and Leonard and Virginia Woolf wrote for the journal in the early years, but users of the electronic archive will also find that the best-selling novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes reviewed many hundreds of books in this period, Edmund Gosse sixty-three and Edith Somerville seventeen. The other half of Somerville and Ross, Violet Martin, also contributed, as did John Buchan (principally on South Africa), John Galsworthy, George Gissing, H. Rider Haggard, A. P. Herbert, Aldous Huxley, Henry James, Andrew Lang (who reviewed a surprising range of books including Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and stories by Mark Twain and Bret Harte), Arthur Quiller-Couch, G. W. Russell ("Æ"), Logan Pearsall Smith, Edward Thomas, and Edith Wharton. One of the recent discoveries which will catch readers’ attention is a hitherto unknown review by Virginia Woolf (then still Virginia Stephen) of a 1907 book on the orient by Charlotte Lorrimer. The piece has been described by Hermione Lee as shedding light on the development of Woolf’s thinking in the period between her travels in Greece and Turkey at the end of 1906 and the inception of her first novel, The Voyage Out. Of course, as we have seen, it is not only in a narrow sense of "literature" that the TLS is the leading literary journal of the twentieth century. It has always dealt with anything that books themselves deal with. The first 1,000 issues included pieces by the pioneering geneticist William Bateson and the Nobel Prize-winner Ronald Ross, who discovered the cause of malaria. There were reviews by the Everest explorer Colonel C. G. Bruce and the composer Sir Charles Stanford; by William Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, on a book about miracles; and Robert Baden-Powell, on one about pig-sticking. The actor Ernest Thesiger was among the paper's contributors, as were the architect of the Bank of England and the Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police. Some pieces on African languages were contributed by Alice Werner, a self-taught specialist who later gained a chair at London University. Rollo Appleyard, an engineer who invented the rubber-cored golf ball, wrote about calculating machines and radio. Town planning and the countryside were the topics of an early twentieth-century campaigner for rights of way and the preservation of open spaces, Sir Robert Hunter. Meanwhile, one of the main threats to the countryside, "automobilism", was the subject of Archibald Weir, who combined pig-breeding with writing books on philosophy and proselytising for the motor car in the TLS (he was one of the founder members of the Royal Automobile Club). Children’s books were also reviewed, though in this category as in others the paper’s judgement was not entirely infallible. The Wind in The Willows fell for review to E. V. Lucas, a frequent contributor and, with his interest in rural life, one who must have seemed a safe pair of hands on this occasion. Lucas had admired Kenneth Grahame’s earlier books but was now at a loss: "‘The chief character is a mole,’ Lucas puzzled, ‘whom the reader plumps upon on the first page whitewashing his house. Here is an initial nut to crack; a mole whitewashing. No doubt moles like their abodes to be clean; but whitewashing? Are we very stupid, or is this joke really inferior?’" Lucas had similar difficulties with most of the cast, not least Mr Toad, who "becomes a rabid motorist". He concluded in baffled exasperation that despite some vivid passages, The Wind in the Willows was neither amusing nor convincing and "as a contribution to natural history the work is negligible." As well as tracing the subjects on which individual contributors wrote, users of the index can explore the social groupings to which they belonged. Few will be surprised to learn that of 1,036 contributors in these early years, the number of women (seventy-six) was exceeded by the number of clergymen (eighty-one) and almost matched by those of men educated at a single Oxford college, Balliol (sixty-seven). But while women constituted only 7 per cent of the reviewers, they were responsible for over 12 per cent of the books reviewed. The notion that academics were not prominent in literary life early in the century has to be qualified: they were the largest single professional category––almost a third—among reviewers in the first 1,000 issues. The other main occupations followed by reviewers, in descending numerical order, were journalism; the civil service and diplomacy; museum curatorship (especially at the British Museum) and librarianship; imaginative authorship (novels, poetry and plays); exploration; the law; the armed forces; school teaching (in no case at a state school); and parliamentary politics. A significant number were or became social campaigners, among them Norman Bentwich, who worked on behalf of Jewish rights; Cornelia Sorabji, who, though a woman and an Asian, succeeded in being called to the bar and subsequently fought for the legal rights of women behind the purdah; and Brinsley Richards, an activist against child labour. Then there were sportsmen and scientists, musicians and archaeologists––and a vast array of specialists who wrote just a single piece: on British violins, on medieval popes, or on the history of the pointer dog. Sixty-five contributors also wrote for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Then as later, there is an immense spread between the one-off experts and those who wrote scores, sometimes hundreds, of TLS pieces. Some seemed willing to write on almost anything; others to write any amount. Thomas Humphry Ward reviewed 441 books in this period, Walter de la Mare 450 and E. E. Mavrogordato around 600, but few came near Harold Child, assistant editor of the Burlington Magazine and later theatre critic of the Observer, who had reviewed more than 1,500 books by 1921––an average of 1.5 per issue––and was still going strong in the 1940s. And if literary historians will learn more than was previously known about the range of topics covered by individual men and women of letters in this period, there is another absorbing by-way in the number of reviewers who were related to each other: not only Andrew and Leonora Lang, the Humphry Wards and the Woolfs but almost 30 other teams of husband and wife, siblings, parents and children, including a good proportion of the tribe of the first Baron Aberdare: his son, one of his daughters, three of his sons-in-law and one of his grandsons, who was…Bruce Richmond.
The 1920s and 30s The economic slump that followed the First World War had its effects both on the Times Literary Supplement and on the rest of the publishing world. Books with titles like Britain’s Economic Plight, England’s Crisis and Facts and Figures about the Crisis poured in for review throughout the 1920s and 30s, as did those which offered one or other of the extreme political solutions which were being tried out in Europe in those years. Meanwhile, the depression had a direct impact on the TLS’s sales, which by the early 1920s had almost halved by comparison with their highest wartime level of over 40,000. The owner of The Times, Lord Northcliffe, had never been enthusiastic about what he saw as the excessively arty and intellectual Supplement and in 1922 he decided that the twenty-year-old experiment should end. On 30 March, the TLS was to carry an announcement saying that it would cease publication two weeks later. The story goes that, whether by chance or skilful under-management, it was noticed at a late stage that not every department had received this instruction. By the time the paper was going to press, various people had gone home and it was impossible to confirm the announcement’s authority, so it was prudently pulled out. Northcliffe had other preoccupations and was ill, the stay of execution continued and in August he died. The TLS survived him, and Bruce Richmond remained as editor for a further fifteen years. The editorial challenge, as for any journal that hopes to survive beyond a decade or two, was to build on the paper’s strengths, bringing in new writers without losing the best of the original ones and responding constructively to cultural change while maintaining what were seen as indispensable values. Of course, many of the books reviewed in the TLS, then as now, were in one way or another historical. In particular, editions and studies of writers of the past represented a central aspect of the paper’s coverage. But Richmond and his staff also had to take decisions about books on pressing contemporary political and social issues, and about the work of new writers in a period when literary modernism reached its peak and younger authors with different concerns began to dominate the publishers’ lists. Forty years later, it was said of the New Statesman that it was radical in politics but conservative in its view of literature. Broadly speaking, the opposite was true of the TLS in the 1920s and 30s. Over 100,000 books were reviewed in those decades, whether fully or in short notices, and more than 900 of the reviewers had not written for the paper earlier. While we have been able to provide biographical information about most of the contributors, some remain no more than names and we would be glad to hear from anyone who can tell us about them. As with the first decades, the introductory comments in the accompanying sections are intended to help users find their bearings, and to suggest possible lines of enquiry.
Among the most prolific of those who first began writing for the TLS in this period was Marjorie Grant Cook, who reviewed more than 1200 books in the 1920s and 30s, including work by many of the leading women writers of the day both in Britain and the USA. Cook was an early advocate of Willa Cather, wrote discriminatingly about the first novels of Rosamond Lehmann, and also reviewed books by Radclyffe Hall, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Wharton and Rebecca West. Her tastes were catholic: she also covered the work of popular authors such as Richmal Crompton and May Sinclair, and was the person who introduced Tolkien’s The Hobbit––"one long enchantment"––to readers of the TLS. The work of other influential critics of new writing, among them Edgell Rickword and Alex Glendinning, and the important political contributions of E. H. Carr, H. M. Stannard and Geoffrey West, are discussed in the separate sections on literary and political coverage. Other very frequent reviewers included the poets Edmund Blunden and Austin Clarke, the novelists Charles Morgan and Angela Thirkell, the historian Denis Brogan and the economist Douglas Jay. More than 1100 books were reviewed in this period by the assistant editor and subsequently editor of the TLS, D. L. Murray. His wife, Leonora Eyles, was also a contributor, as was her son-in-law, Mario Praz. Twenty-two of the books on the First World War published in the period were reviewed by Archibald (later Field-Marshall Lord) Wavell. The traveller Cicely Fox Smith wrote often on the sea, whaling and kindred topics. Among other specialist reviewers was the fishing champion William Radcliffe, whose 1921 book Fishing from the Earliest Times prompted one of the longest correspondences in the TLS’s history. Some books of Russian poetry, especially by Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Blok, were reviewed by Prince Dmitri Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who died in prison in Siberia in 1939. New contributors also included the anthropologist Sir James Frazer; the travel writer Peter Fleming; the poet Ivor Gurney, who wrote lucidly on Cotswold dramas for the TLS before his breakdown; Margaret Cole, the Fabian and co-author with her husband G. D. H. Cole of detective stories; the naval adventure author ‘Taffrail’ (Commander Dorling); Margery Perham, a distinguished scholar of race relations in the last years of the British Empire; Dilys Powell, who was to become film critic of the Sunday Times; C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, the authorised translator of Proust and Pirandello; the military historian Basil Liddell-Hart; the landscape gardener Brenda Colvin; the historian A. L. Rowse; the surgeon and bibliographer Geoffrey Keynes; and a host of literary historians, critics and essayists. The bibliographer Stanley Morison, who was to be editor of the TLS for a brief spell in the 1940s, first contributed in 1931; Storm Jameson, who was to be a key influence during the Second World War, in 1938. Occasional or single pieces were written by Kenneth Clark (on Michelangelo), Edward Gordon Craig (including one on Inigo Jones), C. S. Forester, E. M. Forster (on Jane Austen’s letters), C. S. Lewis, G. E. Moore, J. B. Priestley, John Rothenstein, Vita Sackville-West, George Saintsbury, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freya Stark and J. R. R. Tolkien. Among the more unexpected items was Stephen Spender’s first contribution to the TLS: a one-page article published in October 1938, calling for an increase in anonymous reviewing. We don’t know whether it was at the request of Spender, who was not famous for authorial reticence, or as a gentle editorial joke at his expense, that the piece was both signed with his name and illustrated by a handsome portrait of him by Henry Moore.
The Red and the Black: political coverage in the 1920s and 1930s As an editor, Bruce Richmond was apolitical and broadly tended towards whatever line was followed by his close friend the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson. The sub-editors on the TLS in the inter-war years included the bibliophile and historian of publishing F. A. Mumby and Eric St John Brooks, a mathematician by training, who had wide-ranging interests but no particular bent for politics. D. L. Murray, the assistant editor, gave the appearance of never taking anything very seriously: his main enthusiasms were the theatre, horse racing and middlebrow fiction (he soon became a commercially successful novelist). But he was a clever man who, after winning scholarships to Harrow and Balliol and taking a First in Classics, had published a book on pragmatism while he was in his early 20s and spent the First World War in the Intelligence Department of the War Office. He later wrote a study of Disraeli. In 1938, Murray reluctantly succeeded Richmond as editor and it must have been partly under his influence that the TLS steered its way through the political minefields of the 1920s and 30s. On Communism, the TLS Centenary Archive fills out the picture sketched in Ferdinand Mount’s Communism: A TLS Companion (1992), a useful selection of the journal’s more polemical responses to the movement between 1902 and 1991. In the 1920s, the reviews were as often supercilious as morally hostile. A front-page piece on "The Aims of Socialism", for example, was written in the autumn of 1927 by Arthur D. Shadwell, a leader writer for The Times who had travelled widely, including in Russia, and had contributed regularly to the TLS since it began. Although Shadwell had published books on social questions such as water supply, industrial efficiency and legislation on alcohol consumption, and although––or because?––the works under review included some by authors of the distinction of Harold J. Laski and A. D. Lindsay, his approach was nit-pickingly unsympathetic to the human concerns which lay behind their subject. He was more interested in spotting inconsistencies both in Marx (if socialism is an inevitable evolutionary process, Shadwell asked, why try to persuade anyone to help it along?) and in the books under review (which he said failed to distinguish between economic equality and economic justice) than in trying to get at what might have prompted such ideas, however misguided they were. There were many other pieces on related subjects and by a number of different reviewers. Some were straightforwardly descriptive, such as H. M. Stannard’s 1928 account of an interim collection of Stalin’s statements on Leninism. Others, especially those dealing with the more sentimental works of the 1930s literary left, were justifiably exasperated: Geoffrey West on John Middleton Murry’s The Necessity of Communism (1932), for example, which incidentally demonstrated once again the TLS’s willingness to deal frankly with its own contributors; or Herbert Charles O’Neill on Stephen Spender’s Forward from Liberalism (1937: ‘Mr Spender would probably flinch at paradox, but he does not disdain incoherence’); or Stannard, again––one of the TLS’s most frequent contributors on politics and, like West, someone who first began writing there in the 1920s––on C. L. R. James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936: "Here is truth. It must be true because the writer believes it. Yet the facts contradict it." The most complex of the paper’s reviewers in this area was also to be its most controversial. E. H. Carr, who later joined the staff of The Times, was a Cambridge-educated diplomat who had spent his mid-thirties in the British Legation in Riga and had written a book on Dostoevsky. To him, Marxism was "amazingly penetrating, incisive and convincing" as a critique of nineteenth-century capitalism. Opinions of this sort have been seized on by his conservative critics, especially since his death, so it is instructive to look back at some of the pieces which he wrote anonymously in the 1930s and to see how his views changed and to what extent then, if not later, he opposed Stalinism. The words about Marxism just quoted, which appeared in the TLS in 1936, were followed by another sentence: "Constructively, it has nothing to offer but a workers’ paradise no more substantial than the rose-coloured dreams of the French Utopian Socialists." Earlier that year, reviewing John L. Spivak’s Europe under the Terror, Carr said that the "Red Terror" was quite as obnoxious as the "Black", on which the book concentrated. And in 1937 he was still clearer and more specific in a review of three books on the current situation in the Soviet Union, pointing out the number of people mentioned in them who had subsequently been shot or arrested, and concluding that nearly all of the arguments put by one of the authors in favour of "Soviet democracy" "could equally well be used to substantiate Herr Hitler’s claim to have established ‘true democracy’ in Germany." What should be done about Hitler was a different question. Carr was one of the TLS’s contributors who upheld the pro-appeasement line of The Times, not least as late as June 1939 in a supportive review of Neville Chamberlain’s The Struggle for Peace. Like many well-informed and well-intentioned people between the late 1920s and 1939, contributors to the TLS havered over Nazism and still more over Italian Fascism. Sixty-five works on Fascism had been reviewed by 1939. Some reviewers, such as the Catholic historian R. E. Gordon George (‘Robert Sencourt’), were at pains to point out the hazards of any threat to democracy and individualism, whatever its political colouring. But others, especially Stannard, were increasingly won over by the social improvements which Fascism brought to Italy. In June, 1934, a twenty-eight page special issue on Italy began with two long pieces on Fascism, in one of which Stannard not only applauded Mussolini’s social achievements but found a resemblance between his prose style and the poetry of Hardy. British Fascism, meanwhile, was treated with more caution, though it was accepted by H. C. O’Neill in a short notice of A. K. Chesterton’s Oswald Mosley: Portrait of a Leader (1930) that Mosley’s career contained "a thread of not ignoble purpose". Most reviewers saw that totalitarianism in Europe had been born out of the First World War and there was an especially strong wish to see Italy––a wartime ally of the British––succeed, as well as to see Communism fail. In the case of Germany, there was also an awareness of the mistakes that the victors had made in the post-war Versailles settlement. The Italian special number had been preceded by one on Germany, published in April 1929, which focused on what could still then be seen as hopeful elements in the country’s development, including the in retrospect chilling revival of the Jugendbewegung: "a living faith which rejects all credence in the world-picture of modern science." (The article––by Rolf Gardiner, something of an enthusiast for Nazi Germany in its early days––related the movement’s spirit to that of D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent and pointed out that the achievement of world peace was entirely unimportant to its adherents.) It was a very long time before Hitler and Nazism were taken as serious dangers. Reviewing Wyndham Lewis’s Hitler (1931), Stannard mildly took issue with Lewis’s view that despite the intrinsic antisemitism of the movement, "Hitler himself, if he attained to power, would treat Einstein with proper honour." Stannard also judged that although Nazism "is for the moment in eclipse, more is likely to be heard of it." But in 1933 another regular political contributor, J. H. Freeman, writing about The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and Hamilton Fish Armstrong’s Hitler’s Reich: The First Phase, opined that it was "unduly alarmist" of the latter to suggest that a European war was not excluded from the Nazi programme. The following year, Leland Stowe’s book Nazi Germany Means War was again dismissed as exaggerated, though a study of Nazism by Henry Wickham Steed, himself a frequent TLS contributor (and a former editor of The Times) was treated more respectfully. The book called for a readiness in Britain "to sacrifice the sovereign right of neutrality in order to redeem law-abiding mankind from…lawless violence." This was towards the end of 1934 and the reviewer––Freeman, again––was evidently coming to accept Steed’s view that "those who believe in responsible freedom and democratic government must marshal their strength now." Among the pieces of evidence which were beginning to increase readers’ pessimism about Hitler in the early to mid 1930s were some powerful accounts by people who had been in Nazi prisons. In 1935, Gollancz published I Was Hitler’s Prisoner by Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian journalist who had been held without charge for more than six months. Among his fellow-prisoners was the Jewish former curator of pictures in the Munich Pinakothek, who was beaten up by his captors so badly and so often "that he answered all questions in the affirmative. If he had been accused of the murder of the Emperor Maximilian he would have pleaded guilty to this crime as well. The inspectors perceived what a torment their questioning was to Professor Mayer. So they had him brought up every day. ‘Let’s take it out of the Jew a bit.…’" Lorant also related that when he was released and returned home to Budapest, his three-year-old son greeted him with the Nazi salute and a cry of "Heil, Hitler". These bitternesses were relayed in the TLS’s review, the author of which, once again, was Freeman. By April 1936, Freeman was writing of Nazism as "the resuscitation of medieval barbarism" in a review of another Gollancz book, The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany, paired with Norman Bentwich’s The Refugees from Germany: April, 1933 to December, 1935. The piece was headed plainly, "The Nazi Persecution." Opinions evolved, then, and part of the value of the TLS to modern readers is as a uniquely detailed record of such processes, as well as a guide to the very many books––including books in German, Italian and other languages – published on these and other then-topical concerns. If few of them are still read today, far from all have been forgotten. The Spanish Civil War famously produced some of the best, including George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. The TLS’s review of that book, by Maurice Ashley, brought two combative letters from Orwell. Ashley, a future editor of the Listener, had joined the staff of The Times in 1937 and began writing for the TLS at the same time, making a small corner in publications on Spain, perhaps on the basis that he had just written a book about the English Civil War. He was no supporter of the socialist writers who went to Spain, and Orwell was able to show that he had misrepresented Homage to Catalonia so as to suggest that it was critical of the Spanish militias. When Ashley replied, Orwell pointed out that his words had once again been distorted. Not for the first or last time, some of the most closely argued writing in the TLS appeared in its Letters columns.
From Ovid to Pooh Bear: literary coverage before the Second World War Because of the still striking modern-ness of literary modernism, it can be easy to forget quite how distant the 1920s are. Hardy, Shaw, Conrad and Housman––all of them born between 1840 and 1860––were not only alive but still publishing then, and all of them contributed to the TLS, albeit for the most part in the form of published letters. The team of reviewers which Richmond had built up since 1902 was of a younger generation but no longer the youngest, and its remoteness from new authors sometimes showed. However well-known Evelyn Waugh was among his large circle, to the author of the TLS’s short note on his first book he was no more than ‘Miss Waugh’. And for all the commitment to new writing represented by the Hogarth Press, Virginia Woolf was to conclude that the 1930s generation was incapable of producing great literature. Woolf wrote the bulk of her TLS pieces in the journal’s first two decades but there were many still to come––on the Brontës, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Hardy and Conrad, and on essayists like Montaigne, Browne and Hazlitt. T. S. Eliot’s contributions had begun more recently. The first of his substantial pieces, on Ben Jonson, appeared in 1919 ("I have been asked to write for the Times Literary Supplement––to write the Leading Article from time to time", he told his mother in a letter on 2 October. "This is the highest honour possible in the critical world of literature.") It was followed in the 1920s and 1930s by his essays on Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and on Metaphysical poets, as well as important pieces on a range of other subjects including the influence of Ovid, "Creative Criticism", Wilkie Collins and Dickens, on Julien Benda’s influential book La Trahison des Clercs and on the French philosopher and Catholic convert Jacques Maritain. Meanwhile, of course, both writers were themselves the subjects of reviews. Being a contributor to the TLS has rarely won any editorial favours there but the qualities of Woolf’s novels were always recognized by the journal’s reviewers, principal among them the prolific Harold Child and A. S. McDowall, regular contributors since 1902. McDowall’s 1925 review of Mrs Dalloway is notable for making a comparison with Joyce’s Ulysses, which the paper failed, or refused, to review until the publication ban was lifted in 1937. "Mrs Woolf’s vision…produces something of her own", McDowall wrote. "People and events here have a peculiar, almost ethereal transparency, as though bathed in a medium where one thing permeates another. Undoubtedly our world is less solid than it was, and our novels may have to shake themselves a little free…Here, Mrs Woolf seems to say, is the stream of life, but reflected always in a mental vision." Eliot was less fortunate in the reception of his poetry by the TLS, though the paper’s criticisms of The Waste Land were a matter of substantive critical disagreement, not––as has sometimes been suggested––of mere blindness to the poem’s qualities. The reviewer was Edgell Rickword, a poet and critic then in his mid twenties, who was to become a powerful literary figure on the Left (and an influence on F. R. Leavis). He wrote for the TLS almost every week between the autumn of 1921 and 1925, when he began the important but short-lived periodical The Calendar of Modern Letters. A list of Rickword’s pieces is a roll-call of significant publications: Elizabeth Bowen’s first book of short stories, the first novels of Carl van Vechten and Liam O’Flaherty, first volumes of poetry by Roy Campbell and Edwin Muir, work by other young writers including Vera Brittain, John Dos Passos, David Garnett, Robert Graves and Alec Waugh, as well as new books by established figures as diverse as Valéry, Saki and Arnold Bennett. His verdict on The Waste Land, which appeared on the opposite page from an appreciative review by McDowall of Lawrence’s Kangaroo ("a fine book: experimental, masterful, challenging the rules and his readers"), recognised––and illustrated––both the poem’s sophistication and allusiveness and how its methods could be theoretically justified. Ultimately, though, it judged it an unsatisfying and somewhat exclusive experiment which, by its unwillingness to allow the reader "a direct emotional response", had taken Eliot in a wrong direction. Rickword was one of several young critics published by the TLS in this period whose reviews brought to attention original work which otherwise might have taken much longer to break through. Both Joyce, despite the lacuna over Ulysses, and Ezra Pound, despite his claims to the contrary, had been scrupulously and for the most part favourably reviewed from early on and fragments of Finnegans Wake were painstakingly elucidated in the 1930s by Alex Glendinning, who also wrote favourably and with insight about Leavis’s early criticism, among other topics. Users of the TLS Centenary Archive will want to pursue their own examples but Faulkner, Lorca and Hemingway provide three interesting cases. The prolific Orlo Williams reviewed the first half-dozen of Faulkner’s books published in England, beginning with a single-column piece which left no one in any doubt about Soldier’s Pay: Faulkner had "a fertile invention," he wrote, "a power of illustrating and differentiating character, a force in depicting both tragic and comic incident and a nostalgic sense of…poetry". Among other pieces by Williams are a sympathetic but far from uncritical account of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and a favourable review of Stephen Spender’s 1935 book of essays The Destructive Element: "New winds are beginning to blow through English literature, and in a book like this one begins to feel their refreshing force". (Spender’s poetry was greeted more equivocally, George Buchanan pointing out that in Vienna "We are led…not only to pity…but also to a view of the poet himself in the act of being pitiful. This poem reveals that Mr Spender’s charm…the readiness of his sympathetic response…is also his danger.") In the case of Lorca, Canciones (1927) was reviewed by the first critic outside Spain to have written about the poet, J. B. Trend. And it was a letter from Trend to the TLS, published in October 1936, which first told the world the truth about Lorca’s murder: "The circumstances of the arrest," Trend wrote, "the trumped-up charge, and the barbarous detail of the burning of books of verse show what the attitude of the military-clerical reaction in Spain is likely to be towards literature and art." By one of those chains of association which the TLS index is full of, another book of Lorca’s, Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter, leads one back to Hemingway’s bullfighting classic, Death in the Afternoon. Hemingway’s novels were well received in the TLS, especially by Orlo Williams, who described A Farewell to Arms as "a novel of great power" and wrote vividly about its author’s "keen but selective vision, his dismal animation, his unrationalized pessimism". The review of Death in the Afternoon was more specialised. Its author, who was the book illustrator John Kettelwell, pointed out that the publisher’s claim that this was the first book in English on bullfighting was wrong: there had been three others, published in 1683, 1852 and 1928. A connoisseurial discussion of Hemingway’s account of the sport followed, praising his visual description but criticizing his prose style and saying that his "supercharged ‘he-manishness’ is brutal and infuriating". Seventy-five years on, a very different item catches the eye. In 1924, A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young was described as ‘the pick of this Christmas bunch of books’, Marjorie Grant Cook rightly identifying its secret as the ability to amuse both the child being read to and the adult reader. As for Winnie the Pooh, two years later, the TLS expressed its hope "that ‘that sort of Bear’ may have a long life…"
Depopularisation? A new look and a new editor In 1935, in anticipation of Bruce Richmond’s retirement, the TLS was given a face-lift. The normal number of pages––eight in the paper’s earliest days, sixteen in the early 1920s––rose dramatically: forty-page issues became quite common. Illustrations appeared regularly for the first time and were used with increasing boldness. Some were even allowed to break into columns of type, rather than fitting tidily into the grid. The typography was generally more open: no rules between columns; fewer rules between items; headings and book titles a point or two bigger; section titles like ‘Other New Books’ centred on the page with space around them, rather than squeezed into the top of a single column. For the first time, too, many articles were treated as blocks of type, instead of running on in strips. Soon, the front page was composed of three wide columns instead of four narrow ones. These changes were not universally welcomed, and further would-be popularising efforts by D. L. Murray in his first months as editor brought, or at least coincided with, a new drop in sales. For a while, it looked as though having escaped being killed off in the early 1920s, the TLS was about to commit suicide in the late 30s. What saved it was the Second World War.
1939–1945 Perhaps The Times Literary Supplement should have been renamed Survival, the title of the fictional wartime literary magazine in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. The outbreak of war helped the previously struggling journal in various ways. Paper shortages necessitated restrictions in the size of daily newspapers, forcing them to reduce space for book reviews and to turn away a proportion of their advertising. Publishers consequently bought more space in the Supplement. Meanwhile, literature in general found a growing market among a population forced to sit around in barracks and air-raid shelters, often with little to do but read books and magazines. In these circumstances, D. L. Murray’s more populist editorial approach began to pay off, bringing the paper a new audience. Meanwhile, some smaller literary periodicals which had previously represented competition, if only at the margins, closed down under the various pressures of the time: among them the Bookman, the London Mercury, T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, and Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse. On 2 September 1939, a TLS editorial declared a new agenda: "to man the strongholds of the mind. Against the poisoning of human relationships, we oppose [i.e., we set up as a form of opposition] the spirit of Europe." One form taken by this opposition was increased coverage of such foreign books as could be obtained––especially, until they stopped appearing, books from European countries threatened by Nazism. The, reviewers too, were more international: during the war, no less than 12% of new contributors were originally from outside Britain, as compared with 2% in earlier years. Murray also broadened the editorial scope by publishing more poetry and a little fiction. Here, too, he looked beyond Britain, printing a poem by Antonin Slonimski, for example, and translations by Frances Cornford and John Lehmann of other foreign work. Among English poets, Vita Sackville-West and Edith Sitwell were frequent contributors. It was the TLS that first published work by Dirk Bogarde––then an aspiring poet––as well as H. E. Bates’s story The Bell (under his pseudonym of "Flying Officer X"), Alun Lewis’s poem Raiders’ Dawn and, posthumously, two poems by Keith Douglas. Another of the TLS’s poets was its future editor Alan Pryce-Jones, then serving in the army. The young John Buxton, later an authority on Elizabethan culture and the biographer of Sir Philip Sidney, sent poems from Oflag VII B, where he spent most of the war as a prisoner. Cheques in payment––resonantly, for three guineas––were sent to his wife. The more traditional articles and reviews showed impressive confidence about the post-war future of Europe, including possibilities for democratic unification. In May 1940, a Times leader-writer, Dermot Morrah, wrote a sympathetic piece for the Supplement on William Beveridge’s pamphlet Peace by Federation? and this apparently quixotic optimism was apparent again in a special issue celebrating the paper’s 2,000th issue, which appeared on 1 June 1940, within days of the retreat from Dunkirk. Under the sub-heading, "Germany’s Place in the New Europe," E. H. Carr reviewed a book on French War Aims by Denis Saurat, director of the French Institute in London. "M. Saurat assumes as his starting-point that Western and Central Europe must somehow be welded into a single Europe," Carr wrote. "The Germans are trying to do this in their way. We must do it in a way which we believe to be better than theirs." In the titles of both books and reviews, a new key word was "planning": "Planning for Freedom", planning the war, planning the second front, planning the victory, the peace, the future, planning for Africa or for Plymouth or for the theatre. On 6 September 1941––three months before Pearl Harbor finally brought the United States into the war––a special issue appeared, entitled "England Looks to the Future". A strong woodcut on the front page depicts a woman holding the hands of a departing man, against the background of a storm-lashed coast. Inside, Edith Sitwell’s poem "Still Falls the Rain" was published for the first time, along with resolute analyses of books on the links between England and Russia and the future of Anglo-American relations, as well as of other more or less undisguisedly propagandist works by established literary figures––War in the Air, by David Garnett, for example, and Margery Allingham’s The Oaken Heart, an account of English village life aimed at stirring nostalgia in American readers. The main piece, though, was by J. B. Priestley, prophesying a post-war future in which "England will…be the eastern outpost of a new oceanic English-speaking power…[in] a democratic pioneering kind of world…creative rather than subtly appreciative. It will be rough-and-ready rather than smooth and finished. Its culture will rest on a broader base." Much of what is anticipated here sounds like an idealised extension of Priestley himself but it proved none the less accurate for that. He hastened to reassure TLS readers that he was not looking forward to "an orgy of ‘proletarian’ literature with hymns to concrete mixers." On the contrary, he hoped that "it may well be a far more deeply philosophical culture." Whatever form this vaguely-imagined philosophicality might have taken, he was confident that it would belong to "a better world than the one that is currently being blown to pieces." Priestley’s piece was signed: an increasingly common occurrence in Murray’s TLS. 24% of new contributors in this period were credited by name at least once. Another humanising element, albeit one forced by melancholy necessity, was the regular appearance of obituaries. And a "News & Notes" section was compiled by Arthur Crook, a printer’s son who had joined The Times as a clerk in the 1920s, soon moved to the Literary Supplement and was eventually to become editor. From these pieces readers learned, for example, that royalties in the English translation of Mein Kampf were being diverted to the Red Cross; that the Germans had destroyed Tolstoy’s house but that, alas, the flattening of the house in Lübeck which Thomas Mann used in Buddenbrooks was caused by the RAF. The section also carried information about the literary work of exiled Europeans in England: new foreign-language publications such as Poètes Casques, an anthology of poems by French soldiers; or a scholarship scheme offered by PEN to potential translators of Polish literary works into English. There were regular reports of the effects of anti-Semitism, not least in literature and scholarship––for example, the fact that the Nazi Party Commission of Examination for the Defence of National–Socialist Writing required authors to separate work by Jewish and Aryan authors in their bibliographies. In May 1942, it was reported that in Croatia, the Czech propaganda board had conferred what the TLS wryly called "the honour of the index" on writers including Karel Capek, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorki, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, André Maurois and Emile Zola. Censorship wasn’t, of course, confined to the Axis powers, and the TLS took a stern line with publications thought likely to harm the war effort. John Middleton Murry was eventually dropped as a reviewer because of his pacifism. The paper was quick, too, to put Lord David Cecil in his place when, in its own columns, he criticised the domination of the wartime book trade by political subjects and complained of a decline in what he called "real" literature – a debate which touched many of the arts at the time. Cecil made a claim of art-for-art’s-sake, even when
An editorial in the same issue thundered back that artists must buckle to: "Is not the Nazi threat to men’s liberty…sufficient to move them?…Here are themes enough, full, rich and complex. We can dispense with the perfumery." This was the voice of one of the TLS’s assistant editors and most prolific contributors, Philip Tomlinson. A similar line, comical in its effect on readers living in less urgent circumstances, was taken by another very frequent contributor, the elderly E. E. Mavrogordato, in a review of Evelyn Waugh’s 1942 satire Put Out More Flags:
Orotundities like these, with their echoes of the First World War, were consistent with a more subtly conformist approach in reviews of political books, especially those on foreign policy. There was a noticeable shift, for example, in the paper’s attitude to the Soviet Union after June 1941. Many criticisms of Soviet totalitarianism continued to be voiced in the TLS during the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (not least in a review of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon). But after mid-1941, when Germany turned against the Soviet Union, the note became one of respectful enthusiasm for Soviet military strength and the greatness of Russian literature. The novelist William Gerhardi, who had been born and educated in Russia, contributed a signed piece which, though not wholly uncritical of the Soviet system, emphasised its coherence, resilience and admirable rejection of class-distinctions. While looking to the future, the TLS continued to give space to authors who found sources of strength and hope in the past. There’s something touching about the blithely unruffled air of business as usual which comes across in the more scholarly literary articles. On 2 September 1939, for example, just after Germany invaded Poland, the journal published a letter from Maynard Mack elucidating a couplet in Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot. Britain declared war the following day. At the beginning of 1940, Georgina Battiscombe asked for information relevant to her biography of Charlotte M. Yonge. The early years of the war also saw correspondence about a forged letter from Peele to Marlowe, and about "A Line in Baudelaire". On 2 May 1942, immediately after the ‘Baedeker’ raids on the cathedral cities of Exeter, Bath, Norwich and York in which 1,000 civilians were killed, readers were treated to the text of a lecture given by Dorothy Margaret Stuart on "Minor Verse of the Regency Period". Week by week they learned, too, about new books on Etruscan sculpture, medieval music, ancient Greek drama, ornithology and bibliography. Meanwhile, some of the material culture being discussed was sold off. The TLS’s literary versions of war-casualty lists reported sales of rare books and manuscripts. January 1942, for example, saw a first edition of Lamia inscribed to Hazlitt, offered at auction in London, along with a first edition of Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855). Tom Jones, six volumes in a contemporary calf binding, went for £30; more than 1,300 original woodblocks made by Thomas Bewick, in four wooden chests, for £300. "They have presumably gone…to some American museum or library," the paper noted. Clearly, the value of these and other aspects of the Supplement’s wartime coverage lay in their stubborn upholding of the national culture, a point spelt out movingly by Philip Tomlinson in the "News and Notes" section in the last issue of 1941:
Such were the conditions against which the TLS stood, week by week, year by year, in more than 300 war-time issues, containing between them more than ten million words. Who wrote them?
Since most of the able-bodied young were directly involved in war-work, Murray was to some extent tied to the personnel he and his predecessor had built up earlier. Edmund Blunden, for example, not only wrote for the paper often during the Second World War but was brought on to its staff. Other well-established literary and academic figures who continued to appear included Laurence Binyon, Ifor Evans, Roger Fry, Roger Fulford, Philip Guedalla, John Hayward, Christopher Hollis, Lewis Namier, Mario Praz, Peter Quennell, Herbert Read and Michael Sadleir. The youngest of these had been boys during the First World War and were now in their mid to late thirties. The others could remember the reign of Queen Victoria. None the less, there are more than 250 newcomers to the index of contributors in these years: a rate of growth comparable to that earlier in numbers, if not in volume of work. They include the economist Friedrich von Hayek, the political scientist Harold Laski, the physicist Edward Appleton, the Chinese author Hsiao Ch’ien, the art historians Tancred Borenius, Joan Evans and Nikolaus Pevsner, the natural historian H. J. Massingham, the journalist Tom Driberg, a number of novelists, among them Richard Church and Richard Hughes, and other literary people: Geoffrey Faber, M. H. Abrams, Phyllis Hartnoll. George Bernard Shaw, hitherto not a TLS reviewer though he had contributed frequent letters, wrote his first review for the paper in 1945, on a book about the Webbs. The social and professional profile was changing. In general, new contributors were more middle-class (fewer than 1% from the aristocracy and baronetcy, as compared with 5% earlier), less bureaucratic (civil servants, in these administratively hectic times, accounted for 9% of new reviewers rather than the earlier 16%), slightly less academic (23% against 29%), more cosmopolitan, more worldly (there was an increase in reviewers working in business and commerce), more literary––largely as a result of the inclusion of new writing––and more journalistic, with a notable increase in people whose jobs were on papers other than The Times. There is also a striking rise in the proportion of specialists commissioned to write just one item. A small but significant percentage of those enlisted to help "man the strongholds of the mind" were women: 11% of new reviewers during the war, compared with 7% in the paper’s first two decades (but 13% in the 1920s and 30s). Some of them, including Naomi Royde-Smith, Elizabeth Sturch, Marjorie Hessell Tiltman and the editor’s wife Leonora Murray, wrote pieces almost every week. Of course, as the poet and novelist Gertrude Woodthorpe pointed out in a TLS review in 1940, it was not the Second World War but the First which had secured most of the emancipations women then enjoyed. For many, 1939 brought an interruption to established careers which should have earned them a larger and more fully recognised role at the TLS, as elsewhere. There was a marked degree of gender-stereotyping in how reviewer was matched to subject: children’s books and books about clothes, for example, were invariably reviewed by women. On the other hand, almost every work on the pressing topic of the British colonies and their future was reviewed by Margery Perham, Reader in Colonial Administration at Oxford. Even the TLS’s main wartime reviewer of books on the sea and sailing was a woman. A good proportion of the poems were by women, among them "HD", as well as Vita Sackville-West and Edith Sitwell. Other well-known female contributors included Georgina Battiscombe, Clemence Dane, and Elizabeth Middleton Murry. Most tellingly, the paper’s first major statement on the role of writers in the Second World War was not only written by a woman but appeared under her name: Storm Jameson. The piece appeared on 7 October 1939 with the heading "Fighting the Foes of Civilization: The Writer’s Place in the Defence Line." Jameson wrote fervently about how the "forces of regress"––anti-Semitism among them––had persisted throughout the supposedly civilised world since the First World War, and warned of how easily a new conflict might produce other regressions, particularly in the form of censorship. For her as for many writers of the time, one prediction about the war was that in combating Fascism, the Allies would find themselves taking on some of its colouring. Authors could be useful, here: "The writer, because he is used to breaking through his own solitude in order to speak, is more able than other men to reach the individual in time to save him from choking in the officially induced fog." It was essential, Jameson insisted, to avoid the crudifications of jingoism––of a sort which she criticised in The Times itself. "A correspondent in The Times wrote lately, ‘We have no other aim than to destroy Hitlerism, and no elaboration of that simple purpose should be permitted.’ The writer cannot allow himself to share this comforting simplicity." Literature’s task, she continued, was nothing less than that of "imagining for Europe a future from which the poison of nationalism has been drawn....The rest is to experience despair as a stage in courage...the thought of defeat as a reminder that no Dark Age has outlasted, or can outlast, the unquenchable energy of the mind." Jameson, then in her late 40s, was among the most prominent British novelists and cultural activists of her day. A lifelong socialist, she had begun her career as a writer in 1913 with a piece about Shaw for A. R. Orage’s journal New Age, where she became a regular contributor. By the 1920s she was in effect the editor of a shorter-lived little magazine, New Commonwealth. An early, vocal and consistent opponent of Fascism (she and her husband, the publisher Guy Chapman, were among those who went to see at first hand what was happening in Germany in the early 1930s), she helped organise practical support for refugees and in 1938 was elected as the first woman president of PEN, a position which she held until the end of the war. Jameson was a close friend of D. L. Murray, whom she later described as "like a good-humoured priest, large, soft, delicate in mind and manner, with no vanity and not a great deal of male energy." It’s not clear what kind of male energy she may have wanted from him but intellectually, at any rate, she seems to have supplied some of what was missing herself. Certainly the ideas expressed in her article at this early stage of the war, though (as she admitted) not entirely original, were to become theme-tunes of the TLS in the coming months and years. Arthur Crook recalls that Murray admired Jameson’s novels enormously, "and also her general attitude and thoughts about the war. She was quite an important part of the Supplement. They dined together frequently and he took a lot of guidance from her." So much so that in 1944, as she later described, Murray "set me down to write his editorial" on the liberation of Paris, which took place while she was staying with him, his wife and his father at their home in Brighton, convalescing from an illness. According to Jameson, Murray was "deeply proud" of his editorship of the TLS and mortified by what she describes as his "abrupt dismissal" in 1945. His successor, Stanley Morison, claimed that Murray––in whose appointment he had been involved––had fatally "lightened" the paper, and Morison liked to boast that when he took over, he made it "difficult to read again". But Murray was right to feel that he had done a good job: one which he carried out in exceptionally difficult circumstances, and with little recognition. Most historians of modern British literature still write as if the only wartime British literary journals were Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and John Lehmann’s New Writing. D. L. Murray’s TLS deserves a place in the story. Murray had spent a quarter of a century on the staff. Another epochal event for the paper at this time was the death of Harold Child in November 1945, at the age of 76. Child had reviewed 3,062 books over 2,268 issues, the first of them in May 1902. But great institutions are more than the sum of their members and in the post-war years the TLS was to enter another ambitious new phase.
1945–47 D. L. Murray’s successor, albeit for the shortest editorship of the TLS since J. R. Thursfield’s in 1902, was in some ways representative of the nascently ‘meritocratic’ world of socialist post-war Britain. Born into a poor family in 1889, Stanley Morison had left grammar school early to earn his living as a bank clerk but continued to educate himself on Saturday afternoons in the British Museum Library. His enthusiasms were orderly: stamp collecting, bibliography, the Roman Catholic church, Communism. But enthusiasms are what they were. His experience of reading a supplement of The Times on printing was as much a revelation as his conversion to Catholicism in his teens. It led to his becoming typographical adviser of Cambridge University Press in the 1920s, and of The Times itself in 1929. In the latter role, he created Times New Roman, the most widely used typeface of the twentieth century. At the TLS between 1945 and 1947, he created a bridge between his intellectual passions, his love of order, and the austerity of post-war Britain. The self-effacing, even subservient terms which he set out before accepting the job could not have been more remote from the increasingly commercial and promotional climate of journalism. The editor of the Literary Supplement should, he wrote, be a kind of acolyte to the editor of The Times: "I should act as an assistant… placed in charge of the editorship." Wherever The Times had a line––political, even literary––the TLS’s reviewers should follow it. Beyond this, Morison wanted the Supplement to be more scholarly and of greater practical use to publishers and librarians, especially in sifting "the output of philosophical, religious, political and historical works", while giving "their due" (there is something a little chilling in the phrase, as well as in the pecking order) to "poetry, biography, memoirs, art and art history, and fiction." He carried most of this out, while retaining an element of wartime gungho-ism not mentioned in his manifesto. A typical week-by-week sequence of subjects for front-page review-essays during his editorship consists of: Proudhon; ancient India; the French Third Republic; naval power since the Bomb; Abraham Lincoln; an apologia for Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris and his book Bomber Offensive; Dumézil; linguistic philosophy; international peacekeeping; the postwar British economy ("Theorists may labour to formulate the inexorable laws which determine the rise and fall of civilisations; it is for Great Britain to prove the exception. The country of Shakespeare and Milton, of Newton and Faraday, of Chatham and Churchill is not going under….", etc); the ceiling of the Sistine chapel; the plight of Germany; Pan-Slavism; Léon Bloy; British foreign policy between the wars; Louis-Adolphe Thiers; Shakespeare; Ciano and the fall of Mussolini; Halifax; contemporary France; the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament; and Vinaver’s new edition of Malory. By the standards of the TLS before and after him, let alone those of the rest of British journalism, Morison’s TLS looked forbidding, and its appearance wasn’t helped by paper rationing. A normal issue ran to only twelve pages and Morison was determined that what space he had would be given to reviews. The four-column layout gave way to a more crowded five columns: a pattern which was to last until the 1980s. He published no poems and in each issue only one picture, almost invariably either a reproduction of an old master or an English rural scene, at the top of the front page. Not everything that followed was predictable or complacent. It was under Morison that the TLS published the only review written for it by George Bernard Shaw (a biography of Beatrice Webb). In 1946, the paper reviewed Sartre’s Les Chemins de la Liberté in the course of an absorbing three-page history and evaluation of existentialist ideas, written by Alexander Dru. The following year, in a very critical account of a book on American big business, the TLS developed its by now well-established view that Britain could "no longer afford to contract out of a common European destiny". And another ‘front’, reviewing eight books concerned with the position of blacks in the USA, pronounced that "Seen against the claims of the American credo, the position of the American Negro is an outrageous defiance of public doctrine." These words were written by the historian Denis Brogan, who had been a TLS contributor since his, and the century’s, twenties. But Morison’s radicalism was always at war with his conservatism and it is typical of him that one of the longest reviews he published was of the latest volume of The Times’s official history, of which he was in effect editor-in-chief. All too often, the institutional voice of the TLS was that of R. D. Charques, huffing that in Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh "has his felicities of illustration and phrase, of course, but….", or attacking Cyril Connolly’s aestheticism in The Condemned Playground: "worship…of Art should produce the healthy corrective of moral and political puritanism". These were respectively the 2,331st and 2,437th books that Charques had reviewed for the Lit. Supp. While they continued to depend heavily on old hands, Morison and his staff brought in new contributors. To Morison, they were all something of a nuisance:
In keeping with his interests, an above-average number of the reviewers he brought in were from the book trade: booksellers, librarians, publishers, bibliographers; and there was also a high quotient of clergy and schoolmasters. The single largest category were academics: in this, the TLS reflected the cultural shift by which intellectual specialisation was increasingly becoming the domain of universities. 1945–47 saw the first contributions by Noel Annan, Max Beloff, Maurice Bowra, E. R. Dodds, G. S. Fraser, Lewis Namier, J. E. Neale, Hugh Seton-Watson, James Sutherland and A. J. P. Taylor. The emphasis on history was strong, as some of these names suggest, though Morison’s newcomers also included several theologians and moral philosophers. Hardly any good imaginative writers made their TLS debut in 1946, though William Plomer was one. Books on sport continued to fare quite well: golf, tennis, horse-racing, and sailing are among the areas of expertise of new contributors in the postwar years, and one of the minor coups of 1946 was the recruitment of the working-class poet, ex-policeman and cricket commentator John Arlott. He reviewed not only books on cricket but also novels, among them Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet, and The Devil in Woodford Wells, by the future theatre critic Harold Hobson. Arguably, however, the most important event for the TLS during Stanley Morison’s caretakership was the rapid identification of his successor. Alan Pryce-Jones was recruited amid a flurry of competition from the Observer which involved financial negotiations of a kind to which The Times of those days was still unaccustomed. ‘What price Jones?’, Morison was heard to ask. The editor-in-waiting was a gifted, charming and intensely sociable Etonian of the Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell generation, who had worked on J. C. Squire’s London Mercury and had published books of poetry and fiction, travel and memoirs. He came in as an assistant editor, though it was understood that he was to succeed Morison in just over a year. His first day at Printing House Square, 1 November 1946, provides us with the first vivid description we have of the atmosphere of the TLS: an atmosphere which Pryce-Jones was to transform. "Opposite me Edmund Blunden is reading the Times of 1826", he wrote in his journal. "He is like a knobbly, charitable little bird, neither clean nor dirty, neither shaved nor unshaven. Not much talk––but what there is comes out with a most charming, immensely gentle, radiance. He is writing an article on Test Cricket for the Church of England Newspaper, I gather. Beside him is Philip Tomlinson––equally small and kind – dictating a small, kind letter. Whatever I wear I feel my clothes are wrong. If I put on a dark suit it looks like the suit of an interloper who has thrown in his lot with the editor. If I wear tweeds they are the wrong kind of tweeds….I hide my umbrella behind a tin-box, because I ought to be carrying a mackintosh. I feel like a family solicitor, or shareholder, or dilettante––anything but an unobtrusive new-boy."
1948–59: The TLS under Alan Pryce-Jones V. S. Pritchett was to tell Alan Pryce-Jones that he had turned the TLS into "by far, far the best literary periodical in England." Never before had the paper so thoroughly treated literary works as topics not just ‘of record’ but of urgent interest. Who were the living writers who mattered – German, French, Russian, Czech, American, as well as British? Which works were unjustly neglected? Which were being argued over, and why? TLS reviewers became sharper, more contentious, less ready to stand on their dignity. The critic and crime novelist Julian Symons was a crucial element in this change, reviewing almost 900 books during Pryce-Jones’s years and continuing as one of the paper’s liveliest, most discriminating writers for, in all, forty-five years. Pryce-Jones himself wrote hundreds of pieces, as did the novelist Anthony Powell, whom he brought on to the staff, and the poet Alan Ross. Many authors who began contributing then, while their tallies of books reviewed for Pryce-Jones are in tens rather than hundreds, helped create the new climate: John Bayley, Christine Brooke-Rose, D. J. Enright, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Hamburger, James Hanley, John Willett; in art criticism, Douglas Cooper; in music, Wilfrid Mellers. To an extent, of course, the paper was responding to a broader postwar social and intellectual shake-up. Julian Symons was an early sympathiser with ‘The Movement’, its literary values plain-spokenly opposed to what were seen as the pretension and obfuscations of modernism, and to the concentration of literary power among a select few––Old Etonians, in particular. But Alan Pryce-Jones and Anthony Powell had been at Eton and Oxford together. If an important part of their success at the TLS derived from their openness to new literary talent, of whatever social origin, it also depended on encouraging critical disagreement within their own pages. One innovation in this direction was the regular use of ‘middles’––long centre-page pieces, facing the editorial and letters––to appraise whole areas of literary activity and debate: typically, a writer’s œuvre, a school, or the work of an influential critic. (The paper was much less good at synthesising political discussion, in this period. The Suez crisis and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956––arguably, the events most important to the western political consciousness since Hiroshima––prompted a spate of books the following year, but they were reviewed briefly as they appeared, one or two at a time, and no attempt was made at an overview.) These centre-page essays were usually occasioned by the appearance, or sometimes reprint, of an important work: F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Simone Weil’s L’Enracinement, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a reissue of Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps. But anything of literary or cultural significance might serve: pieces by Middleton Murry on Gissing and by Julian Maclaren-Ross on P. G. Wodehouse, for example, were prompted as much by the contributors’ wish to write them as by any external reason. In a striking shift from Stanley Morison’s insistence on an editorial ‘line’, the articles often took issue with the paper’s own previous verdicts. Kingsley Amis is a subject in point. In 1954, Alan Ross greeted Lucky Jim in the TLS as "richly comic", anti-pretentious and sharply observant. Describing Jim Dixon as "the Schweik of the red-brick university", he particularly relished "the imaginative gusto of Dixon’s thoughts about what he would like to do with those around him". Four years later, however, using I Like It Here as the peg for a centre-page essay, the poet and novelist Rayner Heppenstall discussed the school to which Amis’s novels could be seen as belonging and the arguments which it had stirred up, while taking the opportunity to deliver his own more negative verdict on Amis’s work. He was particularly acute about the novels’ soft centres: "A great deal of anxious knowingness is coupled with much groping after rock-bottom decency. Though hot on the scent of humbug, Mr Amis is tolerant of fraudulent humanity." The article produced some indignant letters, including one from Amis himself and another (not published) from Robert Conquest. In the light of the common assumption that the defining fault-line in 1950s British culture was social class, not the least piquant element in the controversy is the fact that, unlike Ross, Heppenstall had actually been at a ‘red-brick’ university. Another example of overt disagreement between TLS reviewers in this period concerns Camus’s La Peste, reviewed admiringly by Gabriel Marcel on its publication in French, but much more critically in translation the following year by Anthony Powell, who made telling comparisons with Defoe and Poe, leading to a criticism of Camus’s romantic over-abstraction. It’s possible to detect in such debates the influence––though both Powell and Pryce-Jones would have denied this––of the pugnaciously re-evaluative F. R. Leavis, and in not only his destructive but also his positive mode. Like Leavis, the TLS took pride in drawing attention to undervalued good work. From 1949 onwards, for example, it campaigned for Robert Musil, described by Ernst Kaiser in a front-page review-essay as "the most important novelist writing in German in this half-century [but] one of the least known writers of the age". The article helped to make Musil’s name in the anglophone world and led to translations which were themselves warmly reviewed in the TLS as they appeared. Another aspect of the paper’s more creative role as a large weekly version of a ‘little magazine’ was the new prominence which Pryce-Jones gave to poems (which Stanley Morison had dropped altogether). Work by most of the best poets of the time, both established and young, American as well as British, can be found in these pages: Auden, Causley, cummings, Durrell, Frost, the Fullers, Gunn, Hughes, Jarrell, Jennings….the alphabet almost writes itself. Partly for reasons of his own background, Pryce-Jones was particularly attentive to Welsh poets, among them Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas (the former responding to his help with new importunacies: could he be paid before the poems appeared?) The personal dimension of Pryce-Jones’s approach to his work, the relation of his interests to various aspects of his upbringing and social life, combined with his encouragement of a more individualistic mode of criticism, makes his adherence to anonymous reviewing all the more puzzling, and, as we shall see, it came under ever-increasing attack. But two other aspects of the paper’s history in this period need to be touched on first: the number and range of its contributors; and the nature of the archival records.
An international clique of thousands One of the most striking facts about the TLS’s contributors in these years is their sheer number. By 1959, about 4,000 people (excluding authors of published letters) had written for the journal since it began in 1902. No fewer than 1,600 of them––40%––first did so during Alan Pryce-Jones’s eleven-year editorship. In 1954 alone, 700 contributors appeared in his pages: four times the annual average under previous editors. There were various external factors behind this widening of horizons, among them growing competition for good reviewers from the books pages of the Sunday papers and the weeklies, and from radio broadcasting. Increased specialisation was also an element. But clearly the expansion was a matter of editorial policy. At a time when the London literary world was often accused of cliquishness, the TLS was determined to be a very big clique indeed. An international one, too. Pryce-Jones was the most cosmopolitan editor the TLS has had, and he used his frequent lecture tours for the British Council and his work on the committee of PEN to extend his already formidable range of contacts among writers. Eighteen different nationalities are represented by contributors in these years, from Chinese to Uruguayan. One thread of cultural change which the TLS Centenary Archive enables readers to pursue is post-colonialism. V. S. Naipaul and the Guyanan novelists Wilson Harris and Edgar Mittelholzer were among those who wrote for the TLS in the 1950s. More contributors meant wider coverage, and also the break-up of monopolies. No longer were all the books in a specialist area routinely assigned to the same reviewer. To be sure, old pockets of influence remained and new ones grew up. The Roman Catholic tendency increased under Pryce-Jones, and more of the Catholic reviewers were professionally so: Dom Aelred Graham of Ampleforth Abbey, Dom Sebastian Moore and B. C. Butler of Downside, Fr Illtud Evans of St Dominic’s Priory, Fr David Mathew, Secretary of the Pontifical Commission on the Missions and his brother Fr Anthony Mathew, and priests with strong social and literary connections like Philip Caraman and Thomas Gilby––these were powerful figures in international as well as British Catholicism. As their role at the TLS increased, so that of Anglican clergymen diminished. Again, the social widening among reviewers, evident not only in exceptional cases such as those of John Arlott and the former renegade seaman and dockworker James Hanley, but more generally in the number of those who had been educated at grammar schools, operated also at the other end of the scale. Professionally as well as personally, Pryce-Jones was very fond of the high-born. His reviewers included displaced royalty––Princess Callimachi, Princess Cantacuzino, Prince Ghyka––and more than a sprinkling of the British aristocracy. Princesses apart, women did not fare better as reviewers. Between 1930 and 1945, the proportion of contributors who were women had risen from about 10% to about 14%. Under Pryce-Jones, it dipped fractionally to 13% ––though of course this figure represents a numerical increase. Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, Olivia Manning, Iris Murdoch, Iris Origo, Kathleen Raine, Christina Stead, Muriel Spark and Eudora Welty all wrote for the TLS between 1948 and 1959. And while no one contributed with the frequency allowed to some in earlier decades, a quarter of those who reviewed more than 100 books during Pryce-Jones’s editorship were women: principal among them the novelist and social commentator Gwendolen Freeman and the poet Naomi Lewis. The TLS greeted Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex enthusiastically on its appearance in English translation in 1954: "In spite of Margaret Mead’s provocative study, Male and Female," wrote Jane Jack, "there has not been so important a contribution to this subject since the publication of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and that of the brilliant pamphlet, Women, by Willa Muir." None the less, it remained true that one of the main entry-routes for a female reviewer was marriage to a male one. If the Establishment was no less well represented than usual, plenty of individualists and intellectual adventurers also contributed. Al Alvarez, Gerald Brenan, Roy Campbell, Robert Graves, Christopher Logue and Malcolm Muggeridge were among the anonymous reviewers. So were paid-up members of the opposition such as Eric Hobsbawm, a frequent contributor from 1948, and some prominent Labour politicians: Anthony Crosland and Richard Crossman both reviewed on several occasions, and Harold Wilson once. Others who wrote for Pryce-Jones’s TLS included David Ben-Gurion, with an essay on Hebrew literature published in the year that he became Israel’s first prime minister; John Betjeman, who wrote frequently on church architecture and English topography; and Ian Fleming with a review of a book about Jamaica. As always, in using the TLS Centenary Archive it is difficult not to get waylaid. In the same 1954 issue as an absorbing letter from Eric Hobsbawm about Georg Lukács, there are reviews of Freya Stark’s Alexander’s Path and Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy ("a work of unique authority in its confident evocation of the very breath and being of life under captivity…scarcely ever can dialogue have been handled with such a virtuoso understanding of accent and rhythm…"), and a piece by Colin MacInnes, the future author of City of Spades, criticising confusions in government policy on immigration––in particular, given the decision to admit citizens of former colonies in the West Indies, the lack of any corresponding new housing provision. "The English," MacInnes wrote, "self-gratified by their own initial liberality, closed their eyes and hoped blindly for the best." The number of American reviewers was still relatively small, though Arthur Schlesinger made the first of what were to be several TLS appearances with his 1951 review of the first volume of E. H. Carr’s History of Soviet Russia. Among US readers, there was increasing criticism of the paper’s tendency, in line with that of the rest of British culture, to patronise anything American. After the Second World War as before it, plenty of individual examples can be found of appreciative TLS reviews of important new American books––James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, for example, was described as "so remarkable that it brushes hesitations and criticisms aside". Still, there is no question that the "yes, but…" note of much TLS reviewing in this period was disproportionately applied to American writers. One of the chief qualifiers, as far as imaginative writing was concerned, turns out to have been Julian Symons: a discovery which will surprise those who remember his deeply appreciative responses, later in his career, to new American literature. Of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, Symons wrote that "clearly some kind of interpretation is intended, of life or fate or America. This is not meant to be simply a picaresque novel: but what is it, more than that?…."; of Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, "perhaps wisecracks like this are respectable coin in the United States…."; of Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park, "Mr Mailer writes often as clumsily as Dreiser, without Dreiser’s power…" Other reviewers showed a similar degree of what it is hard not to interpret as anti-Americanism, combined with a reluctance, no less common at the time, to see beyond what they found shocking. J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was written off on the ground that although "the boy is really very touching… the endless stream of blasphemy and obscenity in which he thinks, credible as it is, palls after the first chapter". And despite the TLS’s new openness to controversy, Nabokov’s Lolita, published in Paris in 1955 and widely debated, went unreviewed until its UK publication by Weidenfeld and Nicolson towards the end of 1959, when its reception in the paper (by then under new editorship) was sceptical.
MS Uncat., Vault 571: The Alan Pryce-Jones archive at the Beinecke Library, Yale Alan Pryce-Jones had a stronger sense than his predecessors of the future historical value of the present: it was one of his qualities as an editor. His papers, now at the Beinecke Library, Yale, include seemingly everything, from the notebooks in which he kept details of his school assignments to two and a half boxes of letters from Mollie, Duchess of Buccleuch, some of which he did not trouble to open. There are vivid if intermittent journals, daily appointment diaries, manuscripts of poems. Above all, there are letters and memoranda, including thousands relating to his work at the TLS. A full study of this material, linked to the information made available by the TLS Centenary Archive, will provide unique insight into the work of one of the most influential literary entrepreneurs of the mid twentieth century. As far as the history of the TLS is concerned, it enables us to reconstruct many editorial decisions and processes: occasions when authors suggested reviewers for their own or their friends’ books, successfully or otherwise; when potential reviewers declined to take on particular assignments; when responses to one article led directly to another. There is a hidden, fantasy TLS in these boxes––the pieces that might have been written, but weren’t: Elizabeth Bowen on Edith Wharton; Evelyn Waugh on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (a suggestion of Waugh’s own which Pryce-Jones took up, but which Waugh did not carry through); Isaiah Berlin on G. E. Moore. And there is background information about the pieces which did materialise. Pryce-Jones built up an international network of advisers whose recommendations were sometimes of significant influence. It was W. von Einsieder, for example, who recommended Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften to Pryce-Jones in 1947 as "the most remarkable prose work written in German during the last twenty years". A researcher in the Beinecke encounters Georges Bataille struggling with an article on Blanchot ("J’ai eu beaucoup de mal a l’écrire. Et quelque effort que j’aie pu faire, il est bien obscure"); or Marianne Moore, nervously accompanying a poem with a piece of pink scrap paper on which she has written, "If disappointing, / do not hesitate / Mr Pryce-Jones / to decline it." And there is Isaiah Berlin in full private spate against Kingsley Amis. Has Pryce-Jones read a book called Lucky Jim, Berlin asks? "It lowers me more than I can say." No doubt it is a realistic, possibly even talented account of what it describes, "but I cannot bear the tone, the contents and the images which it brings up to me… I think it revolting." The letters from Isaiah Berlin are particularly absorbing. They include an insider’s account of the English publication of Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, as well as several responses to material published in the TLS. In one case, Berlin accepts a commission, then, offended by something (tantalisingly unspecified) which has appeared in the paper, changes his mind. Like many contributors, he has ideas about potential reviewers of his own work: "don’t send my Büchlein [The Hedgehog and the Fox] about which I tremble horribly, to some grim literary strigil’, he implores, but to someone imaginative and humane: ‘yourself! yourself! yourself! why not?" (Pryce-Jones gave it to E. H. Carr, who wrote an interesting editorial about it, though one which did not satisfy Berlin.) And he urges the merits of other people’s books and of potential reviewers. Much of the interest of the TLS material, of course, derives from enabling one to match specific suggestions against their outcomes. Maurice Bowra successfully asked Pryce-Jones to "be an angel" and send his forthcoming Problems in Greek Poetry to Bowra’s Oxford colleague Antony Andrewes for review, though the resulting piece was more judicious than Bowra might have hoped. Edith Sitwell’s onslaughts on Pryce-Jones for unfavourable references to her work in the TLS were so copious and vehement that he took on her Collected Poems (1957) himself, judging it––no doubt quite sincerely–– "outstanding" and describing Sitwell as "among the most consistently interesting of modern English poets". The historian of modern Hungary, C. A. Macartney, by contrast, did not get his way after a possibly less than whole-hearted intervention on his behalf by his All Souls colleague, John Sparrow, who told Pryce-Jones in September, 1956, that Macartney had written to say that he hoped ("all authors do") that the Lit. Supp. would do justice to his forthcoming book, "as it is…IMPORTANT". Macartney didn’t ask for a favourable review ("no author does"), but had pointed out that "he has made enemies of all Left Wing persons in that field, particularly one MIKES––and hopes it won’t fall into their hands. There, I have done my bit!" Macartney’s two-volume October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929-1945 was reviewed the following May––by George Mikes. But if evidence were needed that authors aren’t the best people to choose (or to blackball) their reviewers, here it is. Mikes, a Hungarian journalist working in exile in Britain since 1938, and a regular TLS contributor from 1952, found plenty to disagree with in Macartney’s work, and confirmed one of his fears by criticising the fact that his personal Hungarian acquaintance seemed ‘to be limited to the Right and extreme Right’. But Mikes described the book as "by far the best and most comprehensive treatment in any language of the period of Hungarian history with which it deals", praised Macartney for having "carried out his task in face of almost insuperable difficulties", and described his approach as essentially fair and his knowledge as "awe-inspiring". Even where reviewer and author are most at odds, the response is so passionate that it leaves the reader, even today, wanting to get hold of the book. Intricacies of specific commissions apart, the archive fills in some of the editor’s life outside the office: his first encounter with Iris Murdoch, on holiday in France ("she sweeps back her white-fair hair and simply looks on, except when a general question suddenly grips her interest for a moment"); the perils of British Council lecture tours; writing a Times leader at no notice, after giving a party which went on late into the night and before catching a lunchtime flight to Madrid with his friend the Duke of Wellington. And there are also many documents of a more directly relevant, if also more prosaic, kind: letters to do with his appointment at The Times, including from its Chairman, Viscount Astor; memoranda from Pryce-Jones’s deputy and eventual successor, Arthur Crook, on matters to do with office organisation, promotions and salaries; correspondence from members of the staff and would-be reviewers. Of the many editorial issues mentioned in the correspondence, one which crops up very often is anonymity.
Naming no names: The 1950s debate over anonymous reviewing Alan Pryce-Jones always publicly defended the house policy on anonymous reviewing but in 1954, perhaps to test the mood over a possible change, he published a 48-page insert entirely made up of signed pieces, under the (ambiguous?) title "Personal Preference". It appeared in August, so could have been passed off as a silly season jeu d’esprit, but its contents were serious enough. The contributors were listed boldly on the otherwise unadorned and elegantly uncluttered front cover: a visual admission that names in themselves could be interesting. Stuart Hampshire wrote on Maynard Keynes’s posthumous Two Memoirs, Wyndham Lewis on a selection of Matthew Arnold, Rose Macaulay on Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades, William Plomer on Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, Stevie Smith on Robert Graves’s King Jesus, Stephen Spender on Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems, 1930–1944 and Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems, 1934–52, A. J. P. Taylor on Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler. In each case, if to differing degrees, the contributor’s identity was clearly important to the article, though no one exploited this aspect as strongly as Rosamond Lehmann, whose essay on Henry Green’s Loving talks not only about the context out of which Green’s 1945 novel had appeared, but about what Green––who was a close friend––had meant to her personally during the war. Loving, she rightly and revealingly asserted, is "the masterpiece of this disciplined, poetic and grimly realistic, witty and melancholy, amorous and austere voluptuary": not a choice of words likely to have been found in an unsigned piece. Ever since he had joined the paper, Pryce-Jones had been under pressure from some quarters to do away with anonymity. One friend and future contributor, writing in 1946 to congratulate him on his imminent move to the editorial staff, said that "though it’s nice to have a Private Face in a Public Anonymous Place", he had "never approved of anonymity". Inevitably, some of the criticisms made about the policy came in response to hostile reviews construed, rightly or wrongly, as acts of deliberate malice. But it’s clear from letters in the Beinecke archive that reviewers themselves, for reasons of principle as well as out of more personal motives, increasingly wanted to have th | |