Midwife

I was prompted to read this life (reference 1) of Edward Garnett by a review in the TLS, with Garnett being a publisher's reader and once very well known in the literary world. Which was odd because from an early age I have had the pretension of always going to the man direct, reading (say) Marx himself, rather than reading books about Marx. So while I might read D. H. Lawrence, I would not read books about Lawrence, be they collections of letters, biographies or books of literary criticism. A book about the chap who read books for his living would have stood no chance. With the passing years, this stance has softened a bit, and I do now read a fair amount of literary biography, although still no letters and little criticism, beyond what one gets in book reviews. I am not now sure why I latched onto this book; perhaps it was the fact that his wife was the famous translator of the great Russian fiction from the nineteenth century, Constance Garnett.

Even then I was not sure about the price of £30, but the deal was clinched when I found that Abebooks would do me a new one for £20 - which was £10 better than Amazon could manage. For a while, I was slightly puzzled why I was reading about this chap, but I am glad I persevered, it turning out that Garnett had a large part in bringing the likes of Conrad, D.H Lawrence, T.E Lawrence and sundry Irish writers into the world. This last including a spat with Pound about Joyce's 'Portrait of an artist'.

I imagine that most people who write books want those books to be published. Writing for their own private amusement, or that of a small circle of friends and acquaintances is not enough. They want to strut and fret on the world's stage, for which see reference 2. Now I think that some writers can just pour the stuff out and publish it more or less unchanged. My impression is that Simenon was one such: he would churn his story out at the rate of a chapter a day, send the thing off to be typed and then to his publisher and that was the end of it. Wait for the royalties to roll in.

Presumably Simenon, in the beginning, made direct contact with publishers. Publishers who liked what they saw, thought they could make some money out of it and struck a mutually satisfactory deal with Simenon. Not much room here for agents or publishers' readers.

But it is clear from this book that other writers, including some who went on to become famous, need a bit more help than this. They might have talent, but that talent needs to be nurtured, to be brought on, to be brought up to a publishable and profitable pitch. And it seems that this is what Garnett's special talent was. He did try to write himself, not very successfully, but he did have an uncommon talent for bringing on the writing of others. A talent which often meant complicated relationships with his authors, relationships which did not always survive those others finding their own feet in the world. Very much the midwife rather than the governess.

And in Garnett's case a complicated life generally, with a wife of whom he was very fond but with whom he did not live, with a long term mistress and, I think, one or more others. Complications which extending to selling to an American, for a considerable sum of money, his large collection of letters from Conrad. I have always been a bit uneasy about publishing letters, not being sure whether that was the writers' intention and being even less sure that one had any right to publish in the case that it was not. But I do allow that some writers do write with an eye to publication. From where I associate to stories from the days when letters were read aloud and passed from hand to hand. I suppose we can afford to be more squeamish about such things when we have so many alternative entertainments.

Garnett also got cross about a fictionalised life of one of his writers, a life which minimised his own role in it. He thundered about it being very wrong to muddle up fiction with biography - although it did not bother him when T.E Lawrence muddled up fiction with history.

Maybe the fact that 'Revolt in the Desert', the abridged version of 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom', made Jonathan Cape a good deal of money, had something to do with it. This last proved elusive, and it took me some minutes to put my hand on my rather nice, deluxe edition from New York. Bought second hand, naturally.

Sticking with trivia, I learned that the book about a boy, 'Bevis', a book which I think my elder brother was fond of and which I think I read but did not like, was written in the second half of the nineteenth century. I am not sure that I ever knew this.

Also that a rather odd book, 'Sleeveless Errand', contains a dedication to Garnett, who was mixed up in the censorship controversy about it, back in 1929. My own copy, brought from I remember not where, was published in Paris where the censor, if there was one, had a lighter touch.

And by an odd coincidence, my copy of T.E Lawrence's 'The Mint', with its dedication to Garnett, sat right next to my copy of 'Tarka the Otter', a book with which Garnett had much to do, reading it in proof and writing fulsome reviews of the published book. With the connection between the two being quite unknown - until the day before yesterday.

Closing on a higher plane, I was moved to ponder on the difference between the good and the useful. Quite often one reads something, perhaps a scientific paper, which one feels is rather badly written and presented. Maybe it reaches conclusions which one does not share. Nevertheless, reading the paper led one into all kinds of useful and productive channels; to use a well-worn phrase it was thought provoking. The paper has done good work, but I shrink from calling it good. While Smith talks of some writers being writers' writers. These other writers admire the skill and craft with which something has been done, but without that something appealing to the public at large and making lots of money.

PS: I suppose it is possible that some writers are just in it for the money; writing is just a trade that they thought would do. But I think that they are going to be few and far between because if you have the ability to write you are going to want to be read, to have literary merit, at least of some sort. You might say that you were only in it for the money, but I would doubt whether that was the whole truth.

Reference 1: The uncommon reader: a life of Edward Garnett - Helen Smith - 2017. Published under the Jonathan Cape imprint of Penguin Random House, a nice touch as Garnett worked for Jonathan Cape for the last fifteen years of his life, more or less from its foundation as a then independent publisher by Mr Cape, a chap who had a very ordinary start in life as the son of a builder's clerk. Whatever one of those might have been, he was clearly not one of us.

Reference 2: http://www.strutnfret.com/. Or Macbeth.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/tls.html. Preliminary notice.