Pierre Bayle's Notebook
by Keith Botsford
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When reviewers gang up on a writer with single-minded venom, as is the case with Martin Amis' Yellow Dog, the smell of something rotten extends well beyond Elsinore. Amis, whom both Mr. Bellow and I count as a friend (let's get that straight up front) and respect as a writer of great skill and verve, seems to have, from the beginning, attracted more poisonous reactions than most. One could account for this in a number of ways. There are his teeth, which he notoriously had fixed at a great price; there is the very rich six-book contract which Mr. Wylie (the Shark) obtained for him and which sits round Amis's neck as the Nobel sat round Mr. Bellow's, obliging him to become an 'authority'; there is the fact that he is Kingsley Amis' son, as Kingsley had as many enemies as friends; and there is also the unevenness of his fiction, which has had its ups and downs. There is also plain penis envy: the silver spoon in the mouth, the money, the fame, and the resolutely talented and beautiful woman he has married (Isobel Fonseca's Bury Me Standing is the best book on the Romany I know)

I don't think any of that can account for the near-unanimity of the shellacking he has received. I don't know—because I haven't got around to reading it yet—whether his new book is as awful as that gang of Grub Streeters allege. I only know that good writers (and Amis is one, though an uneven one) deserve something more careful than invective and ad hominem attacks. No critic worth mentioning as such should be so glad that Yellow Dog, if indeed it is a failure, should be one. That kind of mad-dog attack can cause far more harm to a man of talent than good to literature, which is, God knows, already beleaguered enough, whether in the British broadsheets or in such paltry and venal organs of criticism as the New York Times Book Review.

Help Wanted!

We have a sort of loose association with L'Atelier du Roman, one of the few genuinely international literary magazines published in France—now on its thirty-seventh handsome edition. While L'Atelier prints more literary criticism than we would care to do, it is adventurous, literate, lively and wide-ranging stuff. It is run by a diminutive, excitable Greek called Lakis Proguidis, who cares more about literature than is good for him—but then, though not all editors of literary magazines are diminutive, you would think they are all enthusiasts. That is not so. Enthusiasm is contagious; it encourages; it propagates; it is directed toward readers. To be a proper enthusiast, an editor must have a good cause and an ability to convey a passionate concern in that cause. An editor, after all, is making something out of nothing.

That is why The Republic of Letters and L'Atelier are joined together in a task, and why we need your help.

Issue by issue we plan to publish a series of articles on twentieth-century prose-writers who are either unjustly forgotten, unknown, misread, too little known: who have, in short, dropped off our screens.

Anyone who cares about literature—and our readers certainly do—is aware that the art of canon-building is an inexact one. The field has shifting boundaries. We often overlook the obvious. And it is the job of magazines like ours to reconsider, to re-read, to re-explore. By doing so, we may find the pleasures of art are not limited, say, to Proust and Kafka and Joyce.

As Lakis and I sat in a Parisian restaurant we jotted down names of writers who, regardless of reputation, we greatly enjoyed and thought valuable, yet not properly valued. We are not the only people who enjoy and value such writers. Some of them had considerable reputations in their lifetimes, and some have since been under-valued as the result of promotions to the canon. The question we posed ourselves was, is D.H. Lawrence that much 'better' a writer than William Trevor, David Garnett, Walter de la Mare, Hubert Butler, Victor Pritchett, Graham Greene, etc. etc. etc.?

The answer is—as Wystan Auden once forcible pointed out to a younger me—that writers are all different and valuable in different ways. They are not to be ranked, as best, second-best, third-best, and so on.

If this is true in English, it is equally true in other literatures: in some cases because we don't even know the names of those writers, because they remain untranslated, or write in minority languages.

Our project, with your help, is to go through the literatures and see what's been insufficiently acknowledged or unavailable. Your lists—for any literature—would be gratefully received. We will publish in each issue a review and an important sample of the writer's work. Our editorial offices are at 120 Cushing Ave., Boston MA 02125.

Help!

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At a recent conference in Montreal—sponsored by an enterprising French Canadian magazine with the wonderful title of L'Inconvenient—your diarist was called upon to answer why literary magazines exist at all. Here follows my answer, in lieu of the manifesto Mr. Bellow and I never produced when we founded this third of our joint magazines.

Why literary magazines?

1. We publish things we think no one else does and few would think of doing, for instance whole novellas or long extracts. We are like the Greek anthology, fragments of a culture rescued from oblivion.
2. Because there are readers out there in the woods, waiting. And if we didn't do what we're doing they'd be waiting forever.
3. Precisely because of the absence of standards, because of publishing conglomerates, the media world, Madonna and an Academy that favors criticism and theory over creation.
4. Because there is always a place for ephemera. That is the contemporary part. Our non-temporal job is to rescue writers and ideas from silence, as the monks did in their bad times.
5. To permit the young to measure themselves against the old, the present against the past.

I think we have to acknowledge that the times are against us. We are exceptions to the rules created by the mass media, which are themselves a form of intellectual hedonism. A pursuit of instant fame, quick gratification, and let's pass on to the next thing. Where the NRF and the Mercure, or their equivalents, were a form of communication within a well-established 'club' (see Léautaud for details on just how incestuous the club was), our magazines—fully three quarters of which are devoted to the precarious art of poetry—exist as a form of desperation.

Because the mass media don't do it, we must. If, that is, we want to save literature from its many enemies: especially the mandarin professorate whose new orthodoxies actually despise both Writer and Reader, making them secondary to theory.

It may be eccentric to 'talk about' literature. After all, our writers speak for themselves. But there is (or was) a valid form of talk about literature. It was a 'conversation' among writers and largely consisted of mutual interests such as, 'have you read A and B?' 'Did you spot this underlying metaphor?' It is not formal criticism but it engages in the activity of 'forming' writers and readers. And it is the sort of conversation writers engage in with other writers, living and dead. Which is why we've always been happy to admit that this magazine probably belongs in another time, a time when membership in the Republic involved both responsibilities and privileges, when (as in the seventeenth century) you could tuck it under your arm and be as eagerly received in Milan as in Antwerp or Dublin.

We aim to show all aspects of writing and to invite the Reader to enjoy what he cannot find elsewhere.

At the Montreal conference, Proguidis suggested that such magazines as his and ours constitute une forme de critique. He's quite right. Our magazines are a form of criticism, and they do share with literature 'une même forme de pensée', a like way of thinking.

We have no fear of elitism at all. Literature is one of the higher arts. Its democracy is that of the Guardian of old. Neville Cardus was one of the most competent of England's music critics, and a nonpareil writer on cricket. When young the Guardian of yore—not the trendy chic lefty Youf journal of today—sent him out to review a play performed in Greek, and in his review he duly quoted in Greek. Angry letters came in to C. P. Scott, its great editor, who answered them by saying that it was not the obligation of the paper to attend to its readers' level, but to bring its readers up to the Guardian's level.

Such newspapers no longer exist. And but very few magazines.

Keith Botsford is editor of TRoL.