A genial tour of the modern literary landscape

In recent years, many readers have come to John Bayley through “Elegy for Iris,” his loving tribute to his late wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch. (The book was later turned into a splashy film, making Bayley the rare literary critic to get the Hollywood treatment; even rarer was Jim Broadbent winning an Oscar for playing one.) The publication of “The Power of Delight,” a vast selection of 30 years’ worth of literary journalism, turns the spotlight back on Bayley, the man of letters and literary critic.

Even more than Sir Frank Kermode, the doyen of modern criticism, Bayley writes with equal skill about a dazzling variety of literary genres and time periods. Among English critics, Bayley, now 80 and still vigorous, is further distinguished by his mastery of the literature of Eastern Europe and Russia: This packed anthology includes a representative sampling of his essays on such greats as Pushkin and Tolstoy, two of his passions -- “the power of sheer pleasure in reading and remembering Pushkin’s verse is as great as anything one is likely to experience in a lifetime with words” -- as well as penetrating appraisals of difficult moderns such as Robert Musil and Paul Celan.

But Bayley is equally superb when he is on his native ground; some of the best essays in “The Power of Delight” are on the familiars of the English canon -- Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin, to name but a few of Bayley’s topics.

Throughout, his tone is relaxed, genial, sometimes gruff, but mostly joyous. (The book’s title is well chosen.) Virtually all of the 69 essays collected here display a sublime dedication to the old-fashioned art of close reading, though Bayley is not so text-obsessed that he neglects a relevant bit of biographical or historical context. These are well-rounded essays, pitched to the general reader.

Though a lifelong academic -- he taught at Oxford University for several decades -- Bayley never writes as an insider. In a splendid essay on V.S. Pritchett, “In Praise of the Amateur Approach,” Bayley remarks pungently that “the theory processor is not concerned with natural talent ... but men of letters are, or were, in the paradoxically more tricky position having to write for those who can and those who can’t -- for readers with a gift for understanding and appreciating literature as well as for those with little or none.”

This is a balancing act Bayley achieves with wonderful ease. If some critics like to hand down Olympian declarations and push their readers around, Bayley does just the opposite. His verdicts are authoritative but never arrogant. He enters his demurrals gently. Indeed, he has a robust allergy to bossiness of any sort, whether it be from critics or novelists. Contrasting George Eliot’s bien-pensant hauteur with Trollope, Bayley writes how the latter is “less bossy in his judgments, more pragmatic, more ready to accept in his easygoing way the complexity of human weakness and social interrelation, less foreign, in fact, from our own contemporary viewpoint,” words that just as readily describe the generosity of Bayley’s sensibility.

Elsewhere, he states how D.H. Lawrence “would browbeat the rest of the world into seeing him as the only one in step, and make a mystique of the elemental needs of his own individuality,” a compact formulation worth a hundred academic monographs.

Bayley has a love for the quotidian and the unfashionable; he takes pleasure in the ordinariness of daily life. He is an avid reader of poet John Betjeman, that celebrant of plain-spoken Englishness. Still, I don’t want to give the impression that he is crotchety and out of step -- his opinions are as sophisticated as those of any highflying comp lit professor (and certainly easier to grasp).

In his own quiet way, Bayley is a daring revisionist who unsettles standard literary opinion. Take his essay on the English poet Cecil Day Lewis, a short master course on the evolution of the modern poetic consciousness. If Lewis today is now one of the lesser-known figures of an era that W.H. Auden now seems to dominate, this is because of our narrow view of what a poet should sound like, for “since the romantic movement we have been conditioned to the poet who finds and speaks in voice.” Lewis was instead a “debonair craftsman,” who “could produce ... glittering pastiche, from homely Hardy to Frost or Browning or Hopkins, turn out elegant detective novels, sing madrigals, recite verse incomparably well, and chair with charm any metropolitan literary gathering.”

Bayley suggests that a modern poet such as Auden suffers from a kind of imprisonment, “stuck with his own inescapable personae,” whereas Lewis enjoyed liberation through ventriloquism, “free to derive a poetic voice from anywhere he chose -- from Italy to the English past, other voices, other rooms.”

A discriminating connoisseur of the varieties of English writing, Bayley’s other spiritual home lies to the east, in the section titled “Mother Russia.” Bayley’s passion for Turgenev and Chekhov was such that it drove him to learn Russian, which gives him a great advantage as a critic.

He ranges from the lower depths of Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg to the comic fancies of Gogol, which are quite up to date, as he reminds us: “It is surprising that he has never been claimed, so far as I know, as the father of Magic Realism, perhaps because his writing is in fact more free-floating and evasive than anything by that genre’s more conventional practitioners.”

“The Power of Delight” summons us to follow Bayley’s lead and revisit the writers we think we know best. Few of us may have the time for such an ambitious project, but Bayley has been lucky enough to make a vocation out of fine-tuning his perceptions, much to the benefit of readers everywhere. *