Books Out of Print

Collections of Essays
Half way between a scrap-yard and an open-air museum, this section of the site will be dedicated, in the first instance, to articles (“pieces” as they were always called when I was an apprentice) that were once collected into books. Back at the start, I planted pieces at random in the London newspapers and magazines; but soon, with a book in prospect, I became more calculating about it; and even today, assembling books out of carefully distributed future chapters is one of my favourite ways to work. Even As We Speak (Picador, 2001), still in print, strikes its author as a recent publication, and its successor, The Meaning of Recognition, has been out in paperback only since late 2006. But by now some of those non-fiction books have reached the end of their march and dispersed. To put it less romantically, they have gone out of print. The Metropolitan Critic, At the Pillars of Hercules, From the Land of Shadows, Snakecharmers in Texas, The Dreaming Swimmer — their brave titles shone from the Picador spinners for a gratifying length of time, but in the end their ranks had to be thinned, lest the bookshop proprietors, confused by the problem of which books to order, solved it by ordering none at all.

Sufficiently pleased to have had collections of literary essays published in the first place, I tried to accept their disappearance without too great a show of distress. Some of the articles that had been reprinted in the withdrawn books have been reprinted yet again in such “best of” collections as Reliable Essays (London, Picador, 2001) and As Of This Writing (New York, Norton, 2004). Inevitably however, quite a lot of pieces went missing, and since I was always fond of them in the first place, I now find myself in the position of believing that the world should not be thus arbitrarily deprived of what I consider to be amongst the most cogent of my early work in prose. (I could be terrifically wrong about that assessment, but I would prefer to give readers the chance to judge for themselves, rather than just to accept the natural wastage of time as a verdict beyond appeal.) With the aid of my dynamic chief executive officer (i.e. sole assistant) Cécile Menon, I therefore began, in late July 2005, to scan, proofread, code and load some of this early material. What a team we make, I weeping over what can’t be recovered, and she slaving over what can. Raiders of the Lost Books! Tombraiders of the Last Gasp! Yes, we’re talking action-archaeology here, with me as Indiana James and Cécile as Lara Croft. As Cécile would be the first to say, correcting the inspired typos of the scanner is work short on thrills (dépourvu de charme). It does, however, take heroic amounts of time. The pace of exhumation will therefore be slow.

To keep the project within bounds, we are attempting, at this early stage, to recover only those books originally made up from journalism and literary essays. My novels and books of autobiography are either still in print or else easily available second-hand. But even in paperback form, my books of literary journalism don’t come on the second-hand market all that frequently. I would like to think that this is because they are jealously kept, but perhaps they have just disintegrated, like the expository audio tapes in those episodes of Mission Impossible that were already in re-runs before Tom Cruise acquired his first short pair of long pants. Either way, I lack the largeness of heart to contemplate their loss with equanimity. To begin at the beginning, the first sequence of pieces has been retrieved from my very first book, The Metropolitan Critic. Their dates of first publication are supplied, as a reminder that they were written once upon a time, and not just yesterday. They were written when things were different, and one of the things that were different was the writer, who had no idea that he would come this far, and still be here. By its nature, a website is as timeless as a space station; but for that very reason, it should have a sense of history; and a personal website without a sense of personal history would be a claim to have been born wise. If only.

Television Criticism
Television criticism has been an important part of my working life and I have never really stopped writing it in one way or another. The main way was the weekly television column I wrote in the decade 1972-1982 for the Observer in London. There was a prelude when I wrote once a month on the same subject for the Listener, but those pieces were never preserved in book form in the first place, so it would be straining the reader’s tolerance to preserve them now. The Observer column, on the other hand, I did preserve in book form: three successive collections and a final compendium. The compendium, published last, was called On Television and contained the complete text of the three earlier collections, namely Visions Before Midnight, The Crystal Bucket and Glued to the Box. As with the books of literary essays, scanning the column-length component pieces of each television book can’t be done all at once, but in the course of time, I hope, everything will be there, in which case this sentence will be deleted.

When I began my Observer television column in 1972, the idea of collecting the weekly instalments would have been in my mind more often if anybody had thought it a commercial proposition. But in the early days, nobody did. Theatre critics were the ones who wrote for posterity: television critics wrote for the stipend. I always wrote the piece, however, as if anybody reading it this week would remember what I had written last week. A large assumption, perhaps. The story of how I composed the column is told in some detail in my fourth volume of autobiography, North Face of Soho. The story of how I compiled the volumes is somewhat simpler. When Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape asked me to put a collection together covering the years 1972-1976, all I had to do was throw out the pieces I no longer liked. The collection was called Visions Before Midnight and actually contrived to put its nose into the best-seller list, partly because I hit on the wheeze of selling it direct through the Observer’s discount scheme.

The second collection, covering 1976-1979, was called The Crystal Bucket, a phrase I stole from Sir Walter Raleigh, who never objected. The third and last individual collection, covering 1979-1982, was less romantically entitled Glued to the Box. Later on, in 1990, Picador kindly published the omnibus edition referred to above. Simply but accurately called On Television, enchantingly tubby to the eyes of its proud author, it contained all three individual collections plus a specially written long introduction, which I reproduce here in a link to the book’s title, together with the other preliminary pages to the same volume. Most of the valedictory conclusions drawn in that introduction I stand by, but it should be remembered that even the year 1990 was a bit early in the game for predicting technical and artistic developments in the television medium, so some of my confident pronouncements sound a bit dated now. I preserve them here in order to show just how thoroughly time can make a monkey of the pontificator. That the USA’s effort as an exporter of quality television would continue to be weak seemed a safe guess. As things have turned out, NYPD Blue, The West Wing, The Sopranos and Band of Brothers have overwhelmed the world with their artistry. Another sure bet was that even the best of television would be forgotten. Instead, thanks to VHS, DVD and the web, almost nothing else is remembered. So it turned out that I was in the right business after all. But I never doubted it, even when the evidence seemed all to the contrary. When I called television a curate’s cornucopia, I meant that although the abundance was good only in parts, the bits that were good were good like nothing else.