Pretending to be the parlourmaid

John Bayley

• Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell edited by Regina Marler, introduction by Quentin Bell
  Bloomsbury, 593 pp, £25.00, November 1993, ISBN 0 7475 1550 6

‘Serious’ has become a cant word in a literary context, in rather the same way that ‘fine’ (‘she’s a fine person’) is the accepted fallback among clerics and do-gooders. As a general-purpose convenience word ‘serious’ is fairly recent: anything consciously Post-Modernist qualifies on grounds of technique; anything feminist or angry or otherwise committed, on moral grounds. Dr Johnson and his contemporaries would not have recognised our use of the word, nor would most 19th-century writers (Dickens or Tolstoy wanted to be ‘true’, not serious). Like ‘discourse’ it seems to have acquired its own seriousness from France, where ‘une somme sérieuse’ means a lot of money. In general, obviously, good writing is always serious; but a merely ‘serious’ poet or novelist, without any further recommendation, is seldom very good.