The London Review of Books is 40 this month. The paper, which has always considered itself something of a red rag, celebrates its ruby anniversary with a handsome anthology of articles, letters and manuscripts from 1979 to the present day: Julian Assange, Alan Bennett, Iraq, a cartoon by Kurt Vonnegut. Described as a scrapbook, this “incomplete history” looks sumptuous. It also looks secure. Who would have thought it in 1979? Not I. Who, for the first 13 years, was there.
First published as a supplement in the New York Review of Books, the paper was from the beginning clear about its general direction. The founding editor, Karl Miller, had worked with Mary-Kay Wilmers (who has been editor for the past 27 years), the designer Peter Campbell and myself on the BBC’s the Listener at the beginning of the decade. 1979 was the year Margaret Thatcher came to power: we weren’t keen on her. It was also the year in which, due to a lock-out at Times Newspapers, the Times Literary Supplement was not published. We shaped our publication partly in response to the TLS’s position as a paper of record. We could be selective in our coverage and take up positions (though not attitudes). “I do not believe in ‘unprejudiced’ reviewing,” Miller wrote. “But I do believe in accurate reviewing.”
Much in those early numbers still looks fresh. But the apparatus and surroundings that produced them seem antique. Typewriters. Letters covered in blotches of Tipp-Ex, for which the office name was “eczema”. No screens; hand-drawn maps for layout; tins of Cow Gum. I put in a comic appearance in the new book mightily cursing while wrestling overmatter onto the photocopier. Smoking – of cigars and cigarettes – long after it was considered advisable. Clive James, noticing one of us puffing away when he dropped off a review, said: “It’s like seeing someone doing the twist.”
The first office – off the packing department of Dillons bookshop, across the road from University College, where Miller was a professor – was tiny: I sent a week’s worth of invoices into the wastepaper bin by moving too quickly to one of the (two) phones. Rooms subsequently acquired in Bedford Square, with furniture from Ian Hamilton’s recently folded New Review, were lofty but ramshackle. A note from the publisher, Nicholas Spice, to the landlord pleads: “It is raining here, inside and out”. A huge dry rot mushroom, big enough to serve as a chair, grew in the room where the paper was pasted up. After a burglar bashed a hole in our front door, we kept the petty cash in the bookshelves behind a volume of Ezra Pound.
Later, in Tavistock Square, the editorial staff shared one room, with the desks (green leather tops and blotters) arranged around three sides of a square. Required to sit, surrounded, on the fourth side, job interviewees must have felt as if they were being quizzed in a bear pit. An extra challenge was provided by the tip-up backless wooden chairs, bought from a second-hand shop in Gray’s Inn Road, on which a candidate had to wobble. The best survived. Chaps who came for interview ready to spend days opening Jiffy bags and running to the printers have turned into writers of essays and of books after whom printers run. The elfin-locked John Lanchester clinched a job by saying that he wanted to write about his school-fellow Jeremy Bamber, who had recently been convicted of murdering his family. Andrew O’Hagan, in his early 20s and a borrowed green suit, had swaths of the paper’s content by heart.
These writers have lately helped to establish the reputation of the LRB as a home for reportage. There was non-reviewing work to be proud of in those early years too. Tony Harrison’s forceful long poem V (“The rabble has taken over,” said a Tory MP when Richard Eyre directed a televised reading); Ahdaf Soueif’s vivid short stories about hovering between English and Cairene life; Blake Morrison’s verse tale about the Yorkshire Ripper; Ian Hamilton’s account of the Comedy Store. And a short story by Salman Rushdie – the first time he had actually been asked to write something. Midnight’s Children had just escaped being turned down at Jonathan Cape: when we published a long praising review, Rushdie came in to read it – and had to sit down, astonished.
In the days before email, contributors, when not fibbing about pieces being in the post, often came in to deliver articles. Tony Blair, invited to discuss “the state and future direction of the Labour party”, dropped off a judicious piece in Tavistock Square in 1987. At Dillons, Angela Carter, an impresario of the baroque excuse for late copy – “I went deaf and I trod on a rabid squirrel” – turned up muffled in an enormous coat to discuss writing about Bertolucci’s La Luna. In Bedford Square, Ted Hughes arrived in oilskins; AJP Taylor, appearing in a deerstalker, was mistaken for a motorcycle messenger; and William Empson, whose glorious essay on A Midsummer Night’s Dream was printed in the first issue, arrived sans teeth, with his specs bound with coloured tape. He sat in a swivelling chair (the only other unoccupied seat was broken) and explained he used to think he wrote slowly because he wrote when drunk, but now found that being sober made no difference. “You mean,” said Karl, “you wrote The Structure of Complex Words IN YOUR CUPS?”
In these offices, I learned to think that there was no necessary chasm between the “creative” and the critical. Book reviews could spin a phrase without, God forbid, turning into a sonnet. Poets were expected to be precise. Karl rang up Seamus Heaney to point out a mistake in a stanza: “Scottish sheep don’t chatter – they blether.” Then, as now, the London Review was said to be edited as attentively as if it were a book. There was no absolute distinction between editing and copy editing: Mary-Kay Wilmers’s exemplary bringing into focus of Oliver Sacks’s imaginative effusions showed this perfectly. The editorial staff did not aim at show-off interventionism, nor did we spend a lot of time standing around being deep. Semi-colons (abhorred) were as often a subject for dispute as the matter they separated or linked. In the silence of proof-reading, a question would float out: “Neo-platonism?” Long pause. A wait for the ideal form. Then the response. “Hyphenated.”
Still, questions about impartiality and unfairness came up time and again. Isaiah Berlin complained at discussions of Israel and the Palestinians by the “fanatical” Ian Gilmour. When Al Alvarez’s book about divorce was reviewed by Ursula Creagh, his first wife, Frank Kermode sent a letter to his fellow board members protesting that this was an “inexcusable lapse” for “a journal which relies for its reputation on unprejudiced comment”. Miller made a stirring case for publication: “If it is all right for Al to publish a book belittling his first wife, then it cannot be all wrong and virtually inexcusable to publish an intelligent discussion of the book by that first wife.”
The covers, pictorial at a time when literary journals were mostly typographical, were definitely partial, as all covers are: they stuck up for favourites and suggested an agenda. Photographs by Christopher Killip provided a dark summary of the landscape of Thatcher’s England; David King supplied a picture of the young Alan Hollinghurst and Francis Wyndham, looking, as a friend said, “like two cardinals”. You can trace a generation of writers through these pictures. Ian McEwan, snapped by Peter Campbell in a snowy Bedford Square (“Am I clever enough?” he wrote in response to my request for a piece). Martin Amis looking sultry (I took a breathless call from a woman asking that I urgently send her a copy). Angela Carter, Ahdaf Soueif. Julian Barnes was the only writer to make the cover twice: once as Barnes, novelist; once, disguised with a moustache, as Dan Kavanagh, his nom de plume as a writer of thrillers.
Anita Brookner also made the cover, wittily pictured with her immaculate hair in the shape of the tulips beside her. It was Brookner who, in 1982, when we were looking for someone to write against the not-much-criticised Falklands war, suggested Tam Dalyell – “TAMDALYELLMPFORWEST LOTHIAN” as he used boomingly to announce himself on the phone. He did us proud, with his forthright articles, handwritten on House of Commons notepaper. Other politicians turned us down because the fee was insufficient, but hardly anyone else did so. The endeavour was serious: prosecuted with jokes and shouting and concentration. No one was in it for the money: indeed, in the manner of leftwing papers, money was barely mentioned.
I am speaking only about the time I was on the paper: I left in 1992. I imagine that with a larger staff – eight editors compared with the original three – and more efficient technology, some procedures are smoother and some rudimentary blunders are avoided. Such as my postal error with the venerable scholar Elsie Duncan-Jones, grandmother of the now regular contributor Bee Wilson. Having dispatched a proof to her, I realised too late that I had put it in an envelope holding something to which I’d been looking forward at the end of the day: a Valium.
In 1979, Ian Hamilton issued a trenchant warning of the difficulties for any new paper: “The appalling thing about our literary culture at the moment is that a large section of its representatives seem to get more of a kick out of seeing things collapse than they do out of seeing them survive.” In an introductory essay to the anniversary book, Mary-Kay Wilmers suggests that things have changed: that the world is now “much more friendly to us”. Let’s hope, in an ever more bilious culture, that lasts.
• London Review of Books: An Incomplete History is published by Faber (£35). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15
