Long Live the King of Book Reviews

LONDON--Two great British institutions celebrate special anniversaries this year. One is respected the world over, is highly regarded particularly in America and during the course of a turbulent century has successfully kept both its integrity and reputation as the exemplar of the highest standards. The other is the monarchy.

The Times Literary Supplement--known universally as the TLS--is a hundred years old this month. From its first densely printed, eight-page edition of Jan. 17, 1902, to its special bumper 48-page centenary issue currently on newsstands, it has carved out a unique position in the world of papers and journals as the reviewer of all that is best and most important in new books, from novels and poetry to academic studies and biographies.

Even people who don’t read books often read book reviews, and sections devoted to them in daily newspapers, magazines and even on the Internet have expanded and proliferated. But when it comes to critical credibility, the cachet of a good review in the TLS remains unsurpassed. Despite a relatively small circulation of just under 40,000--with nearly half of that comprising American readers--it is still considered the most influential English-language critical journal in the world, remaining for a century at the center of intellectual and cultural life.

So, even as Queen Elizabeth marks her 50th year as monarch, the TLS celebrates its own milestone by launching a poetry competition and London’s National Portrait Gallery presents an exhibit depicting portraits of famous figures who have reviewed for the paper throughout the years. A major history by Derwent May, “Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement,” has been published, and, in honor of the supplement, a Round Table Literary Debate was scheduled this month at New York’s famous hotel of men and women of letters, the Algonquin.

That location is fitting, for in some respects, the TLS is now something of an Anglo-American journal. “In the early years,” says May, “there was a resentful feeling in the U.S. academic world that British reviewers were a bit haughty about American scholarship.” The paper argued that it was applying evenhanded standards; even so, by the ‘50s there was certainly a fresh attempt to get the paper read in America, in line with the growing interest in American writing. In fact, American academic work became so powerful and important that the TLS found itself including more and more U.S. material. Now, American books, and reviewers, are just as prominent as British ones.

Originally published with the Times of London at a time when the practice of reviewing new books was becoming increasingly popular, the TLS was first sold separately (for the princely sum of a penny) in 1914. Since then it has remained autonomous, with virtually no link to its parent paper other than common ownership, a situation that remains today. Its ultimate proprietor is Rupert Murdoch, and it operates out of the News Corp. complex in the district of Wapping, just east of the famous Tower Bridge in London.

Its modern offices give little immediate clues to its illustrious history, for a list of the writers and critics who have contributed to the TLS reads like a roll call of the greats of 20th century literature. T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gore Vidal, Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, George Steiner and Martin Amis are among the hundreds who have been featured as reviewers in its pages and contributed to its debates.

In 1919, Eliot wrote to his mother saying that he’d been invited to write for the Lit Sup (as it was then nicknamed) and that “this is the highest honor possible in the critical world of literature.” In the past 30 years it has been joined by similar publications, most notably the esteemed New York Review of Books, but the position it occupies between the literary and academic worlds, and the fact that it reviews so many books each week--about 60 each issue--are what make it unique.

“It’s the only journal of high culture that I know of,” says Richard Sennett, an American and a professor at the London School of Economics, and a frequent contributor of 25 years’ standing. “The others, such as the New York Review, are different animals. That makes its survival extraordinary.”

That survival is due in no small part to a continuing sense of purpose and identity. “It’s kept a very even keel--a steady, thoughtful, conscientious survey of books in all fields,” says May. It doesn’t pretend to create bestsellers--that is not really its point. “The TLS doesn’t have that colossal an impact on the general reading public,” says May, “but it has an impact on people who are interested in literature.”

The trickle-down effect of this, along with its discussion of intellectual issues of the day, such as the decline of literary theory, multiculturalism and the death of Marxism, is, of course, all-important in determining the general cultural atmosphere. In this postmodern age of instant gratification, dumbing-down and attention-deficit disorder, qualities of thoroughness, steadiness and conscientiousness might seem quaint, dusty even. But they are also the characteristics that produce a singular authority, one that has remained remarkably intact.

“Contrary to our stuffy reputation,” says Ferdinand Mount, the paper’s editor for the last decade, “we’ve always had a lot of young reviewers--people tend to start really quite young.” There are something like 3,000 reviewers on the TLS database (although, jokes Mount, some of these are probably dead, and some mad), and reviews are anywhere from 400 to 3,000 words long. Writers must be invited to review for the paper--as is the practice at many publications, unsolicited reviews are not especially welcome.

“It’s quite a cunning little art form,” says Mount. “You really are engaging in a conversation with the author of the book.” Intelligence and a certain modesty are required, he says, to do it well. How can he tell whether a new reviewer has what it takes? “It’s whether they can produce an article with a beginning, middle and an end, and a convincing argument running through it, and whether they are capable of enlivening what they write with the odd flash of wit, or sympathy.”

You can tell very quickly it seems, whether someone can do the job. “People can get better with practice,” he says, “but you’ve got a fairly good idea.” Reviewing for the paper would always be a labor of love--it’s the prestige that counts, as it pays only about 100 pounds per thousand words or roughly $70. In the early days, Woolf would have received around 2 or 3 pounds for her efforts, when a special ruler calibrated in pounds and pennies was literally placed on each article to gauge payment by column inches. “Nobody ever got rich writing for the TLS,” says Mount.

In this era of the cult of personality, it’s interesting to consider that all the pieces in the TLS were, until 1974, anonymous. Reviews and essays appeared without bylines as a common practice, and it has only been with the publication of May’s book that the identities of the authors of more than 50 years of articles have been made public. Bylines were not included because, says May, “there was the feeling then that this was the voice of all reasonable, educated men. This was the voice of truth, as it were. There was the general sense of sharing the same ‘civilized’ values.”

As times and philosophies changed, the notion that anybody could claim to speak with such implied impartiality became unfashionable. There was the feeling that people should stand up for their opinions and that such monolithic truth didn’t exist. Author Edmund White, who has written over the years for the TLS and who contributed an article on George Eliot for the centenary issue, is resolute that he wouldn’t have reviewed for the paper during the “anonymous” era. “The reviews were much more poisonous when they were unsigned,” he says. “There is no such thing as objectivity.” Now, who is writing about what is blazoned across the cover--in today’s celebrity culture, no doubt a good commercial impulse as well.

But where does the TLS stand in a world where, it is often said, reading is going out of fashion? “I can see the TLS being there even in a world of mass illiteracy, which I don’t think we’re destined for anyway,” says May. As long as there are people who take books and literature seriously, the TLS will thrive. Film, music and drama criticism may not be what it was, but the quality of literary criticism has remained high. “People want books to be good,” says May.

Although reading may appear passive, it is actually an active pursuit. “You can sit and watch a film and have all sorts of emotional responses and at the end not really know what you’ve seen,” says May. “You can’t really read a book and not know what you’ve read. You can’t read a book with glazed eyes.”