The TLS blog

Modern classics before they became modern classics

By MICHAEL CAINES

"A modern classic rarely seems able to venture out on to the bookshelves unchaperoned". So D. J. Taylor writes in the recent double issue of the TLS, in a sampling of six recently reissued novels that claim to be modern classics: "it needs a sponsor to plead its case". The sponsor being whoever supplies an adulatory preface, or an obliging line for the front or back cover, to reassure potential buyers that they are not picking up a mere modern non-classic. Louis de Bernières writing in praise of Barbara Pym's Crampton Hodnet. Candia McWilliam in praise of the "purity" and "tension" of In the Making by G. F. Green. And so on.

If you've read Taylor's piece, you'll know by now whether he agrees with such kind assessments or not. But before the books in question became "modern classics" (whatever that means), they were just novels – what did their first reviewers in the TLS make of them? Do the critics agree, across the years, and do they dare to prophesy lasting fame for any of these books? Has the critical language changed out of all recognition?

August 31 . . .

is the date of the next issue of the TLS, in case you were wondering. Last week's TLS, that is, was a "double issue", and there won't be a new one out this Friday. People do sometimes get confused about this . . . .

(You can, however, now read a fresh selection of pieces from last week's issue online, including Maria Golia's round-up of books about the Arab Spring, Carol Birch's appraisal of the not-so-dead British short story and Michael Anderson's review of a memoir by the "Cinderella Gentleman" himself, Harry Belafonte.)

 

Sprint for Shakespeare - or beware Bohemian bears

BY PETER STOTHARD

Every day the Durrants company sends the Man Booker judges the latest advice, speculation and comment on our work from the pages of the press.

For those of us with long newspaper memories this is still a strange arrival. The name Durrants means to me  those old  library envelopes in which their cuttings service used to be kept last century, the cuttings that were prey to chaos and carelessness in every newspaper office but which were still the nearest thing to permanence that most of our articles ever had.

Now, of course, Durrants is all electronic, a line of blue www-type in place of the yellowing print. But by Durrants we Man Bookerists still get to know how we are seen — from Bombay to Bournemouth — and which of our long list is judged the most worthy or likely to win the prize in October.

Alongside my distinguished and industrious colleagues I have been living with this decision all year. We now have a long list of twelve from an original cast of 145 novels. And in a few weeks we will have a short list of six.

But shhh! Say it quietly. For the past few days the Chair of the Man Booker judges has been off the job. Guiltily (for with our long dozen to reread and reread by the end of the month I ought not to be straying) I have been reading The Winter’s Tale instead.

An Ira Aldridge mystery

By MICHAEL CAINES

A couple of months ago, Douglas Field reviewed a new two-volume biography of the celebrated nineteenth-century actor Ira Aldridge, the "African Roscius", the "first black actor of note". We know that he played Othello (predictably) and was eventually to add a "Jim Crow song-and-dance routine to his act", once he got to touring the English provinces during the 1830s (he was American by birth but was by then claiming to be a "scion of Senegalese royalty").

But what about his other roles – and in particular the role depicted in this painting, recently discovered in a garage in Birmingham?

Lovely Serpentine

by Adrian Tahourdin

Well, the Games are over. The general feeling is that they went pretty well. They were certainly very enjoyable — even if the closing ceremony seemed interminable. Spice Girls, anyone?

I earlier expressed disappointment at not getting tickets for events at the Aquatics Centre (see post, June 21), but partly made up for it by seeing the Men’s Marathon Swim, a 10 kilometre event (10k, without any breaks!), which was held in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. There was a small temporary stand of ticketed seats, but most of us were in the unticketed areas all around the Serpentine which, I have to say, looked an absolute picture. The atmosphere was fantastic and the sun even shone.

The swimmers were attended by a whole flotilla of inflatables and canoes, while the feeding/refuelling pontoon was an extraordinary sight as the competitors poured liquid down their throats before swimming off. The Tunisian Oussama Mellouli won gold in a time under 2 hours, the first swimmer to win medals in both pool and open-water events (he won a bronze in the 1,500m freestyle). Six long laps up and down the lake, which didn’t appear to be taking it out of him at all. He seemed pretty pleased: “I can’t explain it, I can’t really describe it. What happened today is a miracle . . . “. Mellouli had vocal support too (see below).

But the biggest cheer was reserved for the swimmer from Guam, Benjamin Schulte, who finished nearly ten minutes behind the next-to-last (out of only 25) and had his own little flotilla by the end. This was the Olympic spirit at its best: the crowds driving him on coupled with his determination to finish. Great stuff.

 

 

The Law Society vs Joseph Mendham

By MICHAEL CAINES

Great book collections are constantly rising and falling – to the horror of book historians, when they realize that unique incunabula have vanished for ever, or that some insight into how a writer's mind worked has disappeared along with their library.

If you read the "In Brief" reviews of the TLS, you'll (surely) remember David Finkelstein's brief account of what happened to the collection of some 16,000 books belonging to the humanist scholar Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, published a few years ago: the attacks of Turkish pirates accounted for a third of it, as it was transported to Naples after Pinelli's death; the Allies bombed the rest out of existence during the Second World War.

Less dramatic but somehow more puzzlingly uncivilized than that is the current action of the Law Society of England and Wales – already condemned by the religious historian Diarmaid MacCulloch as "vandalism", and the subject of an online petition – in seeking to break up the unique collection of books made by the nineteenth-century clerlgyman-controversialist Joseph Mendham.

The humanities online

By MICHAEL CAINES

“Armed with computers, humanities scholars have been performing once-unimaginable feats. They have recreated early modern London and American Civil War battlefields with the help of geospatial imaging. They have trawled, or 'text-mined', the vast corpus of Google-digitized books to establish how many times certain words or linguistic patterns appear. They have created a searchable database of almost 198,000 trials held at the Old Bailey between 1674 and 1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org). They have mapped the Republic of Letters by tracing the journeys of 50,000 letters written and received by Voltaire, Locke, Franklin and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century luminaries (https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/).”

For anybody interested in the current debates among the "digital humanists" about these once-unimaginable feats and what could and should be done next: Jennifer Howard's review of a new collection of essays on that subject is now freely available online on the TLS website; it also appears in print in this week's TLS, along with pieces on Jane Austen, Rousseau, Gore Vidal and . . . Manchester City FC.

It's a widely ranging piece, taking in "spirit of open, collaborative experimentation" that "inspires much of what digital humanists do", as well as the humanities' "gnawing sense of irrelevance", from which digital projects are not immune. (See the photo above for a flagship example, the British Library's digitized version of the 700-year-old Sultan Baybars' Qur'an.) 

But rather than repeat here what Jennifer Howard says so well, I'll just note the fine coincidence that, on the day we put online a piece about how digital humanists are currently revising their expectations of their work, and debating what happens next, if you follow the second link above, for the extraordinary Republic of Letters website, and this is what you see:

(The two lines below the website's logo read: “Mapping the Republic of Letters is undergoing an upgrade. It is all happening today.”)

Just a coincidence, of course. But somehow appropriate . . . .