| Letter
‘Criticism - and its humble cousin, reviewing
- is not a democratic activity,’ wrote the
critic Richard Schickel in the Los
Angeles Times. He went on: ‘It is, or
should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken
by individuals who bring something to the party
beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a
book (or any other cultural object). It is work
that requires disciplined taste, historical and
theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense
of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's)
entire body of work, among other qualities.’
In all the debate about whether to blog or not
to blog, to read blogs or not to read them, this
sums it up really. Only the professional critics
– Anthony Lane, Alex Ross, James Wood, AS
Byatt, Claire Tomalin – know what they are
talking about; bloggers are merely expressing
an opinion. This is not to belittle blogs, which
have brought a whole new life, interest, occupation
and friendships to hundreds of thousands of people
(and we at Persephone Books are hugely grateful
that we are sometimes mentioned on people’s
blogs). It is just, as Schickel says, that we
should not confuse opinion – ‘I loved
this book, yes I too have this book on my TBR
pile, I couldn’t get along with this book’
– with a book review or with literary criticism.
As Schickel concludes, blogging is chat: the half
an hour it takes to write a daily blog is akin
to a telephone call to a friend. (We found the Richard Schickel piece
on the excellent Arts
and Letters Daily; if anything interesting
has been written in the arts world, it will be
there.)
Ten days ago I went up to Edinburgh, where thirty
of us gathered at Annabelle’s wonderful
tearoom for tiny scones with cream and jam and
the best meringues in the world. After this sparkling
occasion I went to stay with a friend who does
bed-and-breakfast in her beautiful house near
Alnwick (ask me for her address should you be
planning a trip in that direction) and the next
day went to Newcastle for lunch with Eva Ibbotson,
the hugely successful writer whose mother wrote
Manja,
Persephone Book No.39, and for which Eva wrote
the Preface. One of her books, The Morning
Gift, is a particular favourite with us because
it is in some ways a continuation of Manja.
It is being republished, alas not by us, this
autumn.)
Otherwise we have been immersed in David Kynaston’s
Austerity Britain 1945-51, which has
just appeared to rapturous reviews. David wrote
in the Guardian about his search for
diaries by women to use as a corrective to ‘years
of heavily masculine resonance, with politicians
such as Attlee and Cripps, Bevin and Bevan, industries
such as steel and coal-mining, the docks and the
railways, and pastimes like football and rugby
league, speedway and the pub, not to mention the
female retreat (voluntary or not) from working
in offices and factories.’ His belief is
that female diarists, of whom Vere
Hodgson is one – she continued her diaries
after the period she wrote about in Few
Eggs and No Oranges and David quotes
from her more than twenty times – ‘move
us towards a rather different type of history
– more intimate, less top-down, less one-sided,
more real – than is often presented.’
‘The article seems to chime perfectly with
the Persephone ethos’ one of our readers
wrote to us and we certainly agree with David
Kynaston that the following extract from Vere’s
(as yet) unpublished diary is as relevant and
important as more conventional detail about Attlee,
steel, the docks and football. She wrote in mid
March 1950, ‘We could hardly believe it
but last week we had eggs OFF THE RATION. Absolutely
remarkable and unheard of… What this means
to us only an English housewife can understand…
at last we could beat up two eggs and put them
in a cake... THE FIRST TIME FOR TEN YEARS.’
Nicola Beauman
30 May 2007
Lamb’s Conduit Street
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