'A Shadow Cabinet of Writers'

“All of us, probably, have some favorite unfashionable author. Occasionally a minority taste can be powerful enough to make for some isolated masterpiece a small niche in literary history -- Henry Green’s Loving and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune's Maggot have both deservedly achieved this status through the persistence of a small band of admirers.” 

I understand the impulse but question it. It’s easy to get abusively idealistic. What’s the use of plumping for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa or the Goncourt Brothers if people no longer read or remain merely “voracious readers,” to use Nige’s phrase? That’s a question I’ve stopped asking myself after coming up with an answer that will satisfy no one, including me: We do it out of self-respect and, if you’ll pardon the expression, love. Some of us still love good books and sharing our enthusiasm with like-minded people. It feels like an obligation. The impulse is a good one, at least until we start getting resentful if no one is listening. Ours is the age of reduced literacy and a renewed enthusiasm for ”cancelling” the past. Sometimes it seems as though all writers are, to use Michael Holroyd’s word cited above, “unfashionable.”

 

Holroyd is the author of a two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey and four volumes devoted to the life of George Bernard Shaw. His essay “Out of Print” is published in the Spring 1970 issue of The American Scholar. Holroyd’s first book was a 1964 critical biography of Hugh Kingsmill, one of many forgotten English critics and anthologists. Six years later Holroyd published The Best of Hugh Kingsmill: Selections from his Writings. His introduction begins:

 

“Behind the big names of twentieth-century literature there stands a shadow cabinet of writers waiting to take over once the Wind of Change has blown. My own vote goes to Hugh Kingsmill as leader of the opposition.”

 

In the essay, Holroyd’s tone is politely combative, but it’s no longer 1970 when a critic could still ask, “[W]hy doesn't someone start a library of autobiographies, from Benjamin Haydon to Edwin Muir and Gerald Brenan's A Life of One's Own? A country that neglects such books doesn't deserve to have them.” And, in effect, doesn’t have them.

 

[Holroyd’s essay serves as a sort of introduction to “Comments on Neglected Books of the Past Twenty-Five Years” in the same issue of The American Scholar. The editors ask fifty-three writers and critics to identify books deserving of rescue.]