A Peevish Pleb

Let’s take a shufti at the letter pages of the London Review of Books.

____________

A major magazine, whose writers are the glitterati of Lit Crit, and whose readers… dare we call ourselves The Quality… Well, such a magazine should, surely, silence a hoi polloi afraid to reveal their lack of talent, their woeful ignorance, their poor literary culture on its public pages. Show oneself up in print...?

It is a pity that Perry Anderson felt it necessary to present his appreciation of Anthony Powell through such an invidious comparison to Proust (LRB, 19 July). The template of the argument, that a very good writer who builds on the achievement of a great writer and adds some important touches of his or her own, could also be written up to argue that Dryden is better than Milton, Trollope is better than Austen, Wharton is better than James, and Pinter is better than Beckett. Powell’s achievement can stand on its own.

Poor Jacob Sider Jost! This is the problem when an elite journal goes mass circulation: it attracts many not up to its mark. Clearly not a literary man, Jost cannot see that Anderson, in what is a major reappraisal (and a rebuke to the academic establishment, illustrated as much in style as in argument: “Allusions are the light infantry of reference, quotations the cavalry”) is using the comparison with Proust for rhetorical effect; Anderson pushing the Frenchman down in order to pull the Englishman up, from his low critical standing. Not interested in awarding stars - though useful in the case of Jost who has missed both the meaning and force of the argument: eight to the famous Parisian, nine to the almost forgotten Brit - Anderson wants to hike his author to the top of the authorial ladder, where he is recognised as the genius he is; Jost’s “Powell’s achievement can stand on his own” utterly missing the point: it can’t, as his own response so sadly shows. Powell needs his advocates; Anderson the brilliant defence lawyer, who uses a scintillating rhetoric to enhance his impressive forensic skills, his mastery of the subject; Proust leaves the witness box in tears. Who would have thought that the dialectic could be used with such literary skill, that a Marxist historian have this much critical tact.