‘An Unprincipled Rascal’ in London

Buford is not “Buffalo Bill” to Londoners because he’s from the West, although he was very much a California kid.

He never succeeded at surfing but enjoyed scuba diving, was captain of his football team and student body president at Granada Hills High School. He went to UC Irvine and then Berkeley, graduating in the mid-’70s.

He won a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge University and found himself deeply drawn to the place--or rather to the role he was formulating for himself in it: to take a moribund 90-year-old literary magazine (named after the Granta River in Cambridge) and turn it into a souped-up intellectual quarterly.

In 1979, Buford wrote 25 letters to established American writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Sontag and Donald Barthelme.

He asked for unpublished samples of their writing and implied that he wanted to dedicate an entire issue of the magazine to each one.

He was amazed when he received 19 replies that included the kind of manuscripts he was hoping for.

The result was the first issue of the new Granta: a compendium of those replies in an issue he called “New American Writing.”

About this strategy, Buford is unrepentant. “I don’t want to deny the operator in me. What was I? A 24-year-old student, maybe 23?” And he smiles in a way that says: You can see I got away with it.

That first issue sold out its 800-copy printing. Since, Buford has built Granta to a circulation of thousands, primarily in the United States and England, and has published fiction and journalism by such writers as Saul Bellow, John Updike, Graham Greene and Martin Amis.

Buford’s ways of operating are sometimes at odds with the way things are done in British publishing circles. He is viewed as aggressive, doggedly persistent, a hustler--or “an unprincipled rascal” as one colleague describes him.

Robert McCrum, fiction editor at the venerable British publishing firm Faber & Faber, says, “Bill’s always pushing the outside of the envelope, that’s for sure. He has ridden into town from the Wild West and he shoots from the hip. But Granta is the great literary success of the 1980s.”

It is arguable that Buford has influenced British literary life as much as any American since Henry James and T. S. Eliot.

However, as a character, he is almost their opposite, having consciously retained his American accent and Americanness, whereas James and Eliot strenuously tried to become more British than the British.

“Henry James and T. S. Eliot were buying a certain upper-middle-class notion of British culture. They were participating in selling it while the culture was selling it (to them),” Buford says.

While still excluded from some cliques, Buford is tolerated, even liked, in Britain.

When he recently married in a Cambridge ceremony, Salman Rushdie came out of hiding to be his best man.