Michael Mason

With his three London novels Colin MacInnes hit on a marvellous subject-matter, into which he saw deeply. In other departments, however, he did not have the qualities to match. The books are consequently a frustrating experience – giving the sense of something thwarted, or half-realised. Taken as a group, indeed, they testify to the author’s unease about how best to convey his materials and vision. Each of them has its own distinct, extreme principle of style and/or organisation, while their subject-matter remains extraordinarily uniform. There is very little in common, for example, between the alternating first-person, colloquial narratives of City of Spades and the sententious, schematic narrative of Mr Love and Mr Justice. The theme of the pimp, however – one of MacInnes’s most idiosyncratic preoccupations – dominates both plots.

It is common knowledge that British publishing is in the doldrums. This is generally thought of as a temporary state of affairs, but it is conceivable that something irreversible is taking place. Today’s new wisdom about publishing may become as enduring, familiar and dispiriting as the truism of the decline of British cinema. That decline had much to do with television. Book publishing has seemed, hitherto, robust on this flank. The industry prospered in the 1960s, when television was completing its conquest of film in Britain. Books and television do not compete for the same ground, it might be said. In particular, there is a difference in respect of cultural quality between their undertakings. Books can be learned, beautiful, experimental, mentally searching, subversive and fanciful to an extent that television very seldom permits itself to be. Television is almost always banal.

For those outside Cambridge University who are curious about recent events in the English Faculty there, and who want to assess the ‘repulsiveness’ of either party, or of both, Colin MacCabe’s book on Joyce is among the few pieces of hard evidence available. One tendency of the stories coming out of Cambridge has been to represent MacCabe as an irenic figure, peaceably intent on exploring and teaching European culture and English grammar while bayed about by his attackers. To read the Joyce book is to be quickly disabused of at least this impression of what is going on at Cambridge. It is a tremendously aggressive piece of writing. Its aggression is directed both at current academic literary criticism, and at certain texts or traditions in English literature itself. For MacCabe, the two targets are connected: the literary criticism he attacks is that which makes the same assumptions about language and reality as the literature he dislikes.

Should we use ‘disinterested’ to mean ‘uninterested’, or ‘infer’ to mean ‘imply’? What about ‘hopefully’, and ‘whom’, and the present subjunctive? This is the stuff of innumerable dinner-party arguments, vehemently conducted, and generally leaving in the mind a nasty sense of muddle. It often happens with controversies of the vehement, intractable sort that separate issues have become mixed up with one another. If we approach them piecemeal, it turns out that there are answers after all, but diverse answers to the diverse problems that have composed the muddle. The American journalist John Simon has for some years been writing a column in Esquire in which he takes a conservative view of linguistic change in true dinner-party fashion: opposing almost every innovation in contemporary usage, and mixing up several independent considerations in the process. Pieces from that column published between 1977 and 1979, together with a few other items, were put out as a book in America, and the collection recently appeared in Britain.