Vol. 21 No. 11 · 27 May 1999
pages 36-37 | 2717 words
Diary
Frank Kermode
If you wanted to make your way as a literary journalist in the days of Addison you might have done well to begin by heading for Button’s coffeehouse in Russell Street where the great man held court, and be as submissively impressive as possible. Almost three hundred years later, though sadly not for very long, you could make your way to the Pillars of Hercules in Greek Street, where Ian Hamilton, editor of the New Review, was usually to be found. The suppliants, mostly young men not then long out of the universities, have very properly combined to congratulate the sage or gaffer on his 60th birthday.[*] Some of them got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route.
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[*] Another Round at the Pillars, edited by David Harsent (Cargo, 151 pp., £25, 5 April, 1 899 98006 7).
[†] Grub Street and the Ivory Tower (Oxford, 292 pp., £15.99, 19 November 1998, 019 818412 3).
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 14 · 15 July 1999
From Graham Martin
Frank Kermode's Diary about literary journalism (LRB, 27 May) reminds me of a little-known cultural achievement for which Baroness Thatcher is entitled to such credit as seems appropriate: aborting the possible creation of a second New Review. During 1978, as a member of the Arts Council Literature Panel, I would work through applications for Writers' Grants from poets and novelists in the form of a small amount of published material and longer excerpts from projects to come. The overall funding was tiny enough. Nevertheless, the policy seemed right. How better to help writers still finding their way to the creation of original work?
The Literature Panel also had the job of approving grants to literary periodicals, and it was during 1978 that Ian Hamilton's New Review, even in its drastically reduced format, was held by the Council to be finally beyond financial rescue. But (I then wondered) supposing it had been from the start funded generously enough for its contributors not to have had to languish in the queue behind printer, paper-supplier, London Electricity et al: so generously indeed that they could have been paid really well? Wouldn't that make better use of Council money than doling out minimal sums behind closed doors in the form of Writers' Grants? An editor with a reputation to establish would make the decisions, not a group of Council appointees none of whom could be identified as responsible for any particular judgment. The Literature Panel came to accept this argument. It invited Robert Gavron and myself to come up with a suitably costed proposal for an Arts Council literary periodical of the quality and size, though perhaps not the frequency, of the New Review. In the spring of 1979, the Panel approved our scheme and at once formally recommended it to Council. The next meeting was scheduled for June. Informal comments from the top brass promised well.
The General Election intervened. Its result seemed to confront the Council with a number of problems, among which the direct funding of a new literary periodical was so far down the list as to be scarcely visible. 'Absolutely not the right moment,' we were told. I still think of what happened as the virtual hand-bagging of a promising idea.
Graham Martin
London SW3
