Diary
Mary-Kay Wilmers
In December 1947 the American writer Susan Sontag was invited to have tea with Thomas Mann. She was 14, a high-minded schoolgirl full of literature and the seriousness of life. She had one friend, and this boy, her disciple, had written to Thomas Mann, who was then living in California, telling him that they had been reading his books and admired them above all others. The young Miss Sontag was shocked that a great writer should be disturbed by two schoolchildren; and shocked again when the great writer acknowledged their letter with an invitation to tea. It seemed ‘grotesque’, she said, that Mann should waste his time meeting her; and besides, she asked, why would she want to meet him when she already had his books. The visit took place the following Sunday, and her disappointment was so painful that for forty years she didn’t mention it to anyone. It wasn’t that she and her friend made fools of themselves or that Mann himself gave them a hard time. He wasn’t forbidding or scornful or difficult to understand – all of which she had expected. On the contrary, what he said was too easy – banal, pompous and boring. ‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ she says now, ‘if he had talked like a book. I wanted him to talk like a book. What I was obscurely starting to mind was that he talked like a book review.’
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Letters
Vol. 10 No. 19 · 27 October 1988
From Richard Lansdown
I read Mary-Kay Wilmers’s Diary (LRB, 15 September) with interest – especially in so far as it dealt with the dearth of new fiction at the moment. It is a sad reflection on those of us who publish, review and read books that we have become so preoccupied with literary biography in recent years. There are many valuable literary biographies, and some classic ones, but I feel that we are beginning to write too many, for the wrong reasons, and to place too high a value both on them and on their authors. We have just had the first part of Bevis Hillier on John Betjeman, and the second part of Lyndall Gordon on T.S. Eliot. In addition, Michael Holroyd has produced the first of three volumes – no less – devoted to George Bernard Shaw. Not only was Mr Holroyd given an exceptionally large advance on his labours by Chatto and Windus, but he was apparently ‘invited’ to write his book by the Shaw Estate, on the grounds that no one had made ‘a serious attempt’ on their property since 1956 (see Frank Kermode’s review – same issue). There has been fuss made, too, of recent books on Ezra Pound, Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde. Finally, we have the story, at once funny and pitiful, of Ian Hamilton’s pursuit of J.D. Salinger, written, not by some third party, but by Mr Hamilton himself. In this case, the author writes to his subject, pretending to have an orthodox biography in mind, knowing all the while that Salinger will resist his interest. While being at pains to register his disapproval of Salinger’s non-co-operation with an accredited biographer and critic – ‘Who does he think he is?’ we are supposed to ask – Mr Hamilton goes on to admit that an orthodox biography was never his intention. On the contrary: he wanted to write a book about the difficulties of writing a biography, and chose Salinger for his literary experiment, knowing him to be the ideal subject. Bravo.
It must sound old-fashioned to say so, but some kind of decorum exists between reader and writer, which is intangible, fleeting and delicate, and which has surprisingly little to do with the kind of life we think, or would like to think, the writer led. Biographical information is valuable, but not absolutely so, and biographies of the kind I have mentioned seem, to me at least, to endanger the continuity of that decorum.
Richard Lansdown
London N19
Vol. 10 No. 20 · 10 November 1988
From Norman Page
Mary-Kay Wilmers is excessively gloomy, or excessively modest, in declaring that ‘there are few great book reviews’ and that ‘the best one can hope for is that some will prove memorable over the lifetime of an editor or his magazine’ (LRB, 15 September). Has she forgotten that a not insignificant proportion of the canon of non-fictional prose consists of books reviews – by, for instance, George Eliot, Henry James, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, W.H. Auden – often disguised by re-labelling as ‘essays’? The genre is threatened, however, by the restrictions on space imposed by most papers these days: Macaulay’s classic essays on Boswell and Byron (both book reviews) hardly get going within an 800-word limit, and some recent collections of reprinted reviews look disturbingly anorexic. May the LRB, unseduced by delusions of ‘coverage’, long continue to set an example in this respect.
Norman Page
University of Nottingham
