That someone can write is no guarantee that they can talk or that meeting them would be worthwhile. “I think like a genius,” said Vladimir Nabokov, “I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.” And when Marcel Proust met James Joyce, their whole talk, the latter remembered, “consisted solely of the word ‘No.’ Proust asked me if I knew the duc du so-and-so. I said, ‘No.’” Asked if he had read Ulysses, Proust likewise replied, “No.” “The situation,” Joyce recalled, “was impossible.” But the literary scene has no shortage of Boswells, eager to hobnob with greater writers. John Walsh, the Sunday Times’s erstwhile literary editor, has now written Circus of Dreams, wherein he chronicles how he inserted himself into the finest literary circles of ‘80s London.
The ‘80s, with its excesses, convulsed British literature. Tim Waterstone opened his first bookstores. The London Review of Books was founded. The Booker Prize became reinvigorated. Flush with new money, publishers began paying six-figure advances. Literary parties suddenly became glamorous, with the Groucho Club to host them. Novelists were, for a little while, borderline famous. This now seems inconsequential, but not to Walsh. To socialize with writers and publishers, he writes, “was heaven.” He is keen to impress that feeling — the slightest thing becomes material for him to raconteur. Harold Pinter, we’re told, once gave him a forbidding look at a cocktail party. Early on, when he was an assistant at Gollancz publishing house, he briefly spoke with Angela Carter on the phone. He once shared a bottle of Saint-Emilion with Ian McEwan, an episode I rather doubt McEwan will include in his memoirs.
But Walsh’s core thesis, that the ‘80s rejuvenated British literature, isn’t without merit. A bright generation of novelists came to prominence, with a recognizably new, bold style. “In the fiction of the 1980s,” he writes, “the English language was cleansed of indolence, fog and banality; in their place came hyperactivity, attack, clarity, surging narrative.” He seems to have modeled his own style on those lines, but with less subtlety. To convey his excitement, he repeatedly turns to martial cliches: Novelists become “literary gunslingers”; Martin Amis is praised for his stylistic “swordsmanship”; Lord George-Brown is not just a dipso but a “weapons-grade drunkard.” It is incongruous phrasing for literary matters, unless one’s subject is Norman Mailer, but restraint is not Walsh’s game. “Tina Brown,” he writes, “hit the journalistic empyrean like a sleek blond rocket.” Discovering Angela Carter’s works, meanwhile, “was like finding a clump of Venus Flytraps in the agreeable bluebell wood of contemporary English prose.” Roger Scruton stands next to Paul Johnson “like some upmarket Red-Headed League of Irascible Thinkers.” His prose is simply too much.
Walsh’s first (but not last) experience of “literary hero-worship” centered on Martin Amis. He went up to Oxford four years after Amis, but that was near enough to make him swoon. Amis had seduced half of the town, graduated with a Congratulatory First, and then gone on to write a string of novels in his twenties. Successful in both love and literature — “a swordsman of the boudoir” — he had everything Walsh wanted. Indeed, the mere idea that he might have sat in the same chair as Amis overwhelms him. “And perhaps — holy s**t! — that dusty seminar chair in which I’d been sitting for two hours was precisely the one on which Mart (I’d begun to think of him as ‘Mart’) had actually parked his denim-clad bottom.” His fixation soon verges on the erotic: “I thought: we’ll probably meet very soon. We’ll get on really well. […] We’ll probably end up, you know, sharing digs.” He calls his hero worship “frankly idiotic,” which is bracing both for its honesty and truth but makes it no less embarrassing.
After graduating, Walsh works in publishing for a few years, moves into business journalism, contributes freelance reviews to Books and Bookmen, and then joins the Evening Standard. At some point, he picks up the journalistic habit of giving everyone epithets. Ted Hughes, the poet laureate, is thus nonsensically called the “chief executive” of the poetry scene. And John Betjeman is repeatedly introduced as “the National Teddy Bear.” Martin Amis wrote The War Against Cliche, but Walsh has not signed up for it. Conventions are “moth-eaten.” Books aren’t read. They’re “devoured.” No one drinks a glass of wine. They “floor” them. People “bang on about” things. Trying not to repeat Ringo Starr’s name in two consecutive sentences, Walsh calls him “the skin-walloping Scouser.” This is only a simulacrum of style, not the real thing. It isn’t, however, unreadable, merely uninspired.
British writers in the ‘80s had three common themes, Walsh writes: (1) the use of 20th-century historical events and persons, such as in Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard; (2) frank portrayals of homosexuality, for example in Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers or William Golding’s The Rites of Passage; and (3) the clash between religious values and worldly corruption. Walsh is well-read and a good guide to the literature. His enthusiasm is pleasant to read. But the main thrust of the book is his socializing with writers, publishers, and reviewers. Here, his enthusiasm becomes excessive. He feels like he finally sees “a glimpse of la vie haute Bohéme” when he is invited to his first real literary party, where Kingsley Amis badgers him to say that he is pro-torture. He had been let “into the magic garden, where literary dinosaurs crashed about and wide-eyed young pretenders could have their first glimpse of greatness — and wonder how to join them.”
Walsh starts fraternizing properly when he becomes literary editor of the Sunday Times. He is soon a regular at Lord Weidenfeld’s parties and a member of the Groucho Club. I grew up reading many of the novelists that Walsh meets, so his subject should interest me, but I found myself bored. I am not saying that Walsh cannot be funny — he has a cutting portrait of Rupert Murdoch — but his humor only punctuates the longueur. While I could take reading how he met Umberto Eco, his 16-page Who’s Who of London publishing is outright soporific. Why does he insist on telling us so much that is utterly negligible? “I rather enjoyed the theory of management, though, and read several books on the subject.” Is it really merited to have a whole chapter on how the Sunday Times organized its 1982 and 1983 “Best of British Writers” photo shoots? And why is there a four-page review of Midnight’s Children? Circus of Dreams is a long-form essay stretched into book-length. Dross, lots of it, is the result.
No examination of London’s literary set is complete without reckoning with the United States. It held British writers in its gravitational field simply because it was where things happened. It was richer, bigger, wilder. Tina Brown moved to New York to edit Vanity Fair. When she would call Amis in London, she felt that she could hear the rain in his voice. Eventually, many of the best British writers moved stateside: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens, etc. But Walsh sees none of it even when it is right in front of him: He interviews Amis, who wistfully hopes to visit Chicago because Saul Bellow lives there. When Sonny Mehta leaves for New York in 1987, Walsh notes that “there was much weeping in Authorland” because his private parties had reputedly been unsurpassed, but he sees no larger trend. Instead, he thinks the vector of influence ran the other way: England exercising its weight on America. He thus misses that London lost much of its talent because New York took it.
As an introduction to British literary life in the ’80s, Circus of Dreams has some merit. But it offers little that’s fresh. The kind of person who might read it is likely already familiar with most of what’s in it. Its stories have often been told elsewhere better — if one wants to read about the Friday lunches organized by Clive James and Terry Kilmartin, one can read what the participants themselves have said. This redundancy is noticeable, for instance, when Walsh writes that Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie “of course” came on Valentine’s Day. That “of course” concedes that the reader probably knows enough about the Rushdie affair that they know what day the fatwa was issued. Thus, most of what he writes about other people is recycled material; unfortunately, most of what he writes about himself is not very interesting. The book has some strengths — I laughed once or twice. Still, give it a miss.
Gustav Jonsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in the United Kingdom.
