Vol. 21 No. 1 · 7 January 1999
pages 19-20 | 2614 words
What’s Happening in the Engine-Room
Penelope Fitzgerald
- John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure by Adrian Wright
Duckworth, 308 pp, £20.00, November 1998, ISBN 0 7156 2871 2
The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts:
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 2 · 21 January 1999
From Bernard Crick
Penelope Fitzgerald (LRB, 7 January) has written a thoughtful and informative review of Adrian Wright's biography of John Lehmann, but she says one strange thing: 'He wasn't an intellectual, wasn't original, but he breathed literature's changing air.' Whatever can she mean by 'intellectual'? Must intellectuals be 'original'? Such a very exclusive definition would massacre the ranks and leave few editors alive. For my part, I can tell the difference between an intellectual editor and the new breed of corporate editors.
Bernard Crick
Edinburgh
Vol. 21 No. 3 · 4 February 1999
From Penelope Fitzgerald
Bernard Crick made me out to be more charitable in my account of John Lehmann than I intended (Letters, 21 January). I should have put: 'He wasn't an intellectual, neither was he original, but he did have an editor's instinct for the latest thing.' Certainly intellectuals don't have to be original. 'All shuffle there, all cough in ink' and it's a thousand times truer now than it was in Yeats's day.
Penelope Fitzgerald
London N6
