Looking for the common readership

LITERARY CRITICISM: Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics By Stefan Collini Oxford University Press, 368pp

LITERARY CRITICISM: Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics By Stefan Collini Oxford University Press, 368pp. £25AN INVALUABLE study of 20th-century critical thinking whose central tenets are the author's running battle with biography and his resistance to cultural pessimism, writes Eve Patten.

'One has to give something of oneself to the devil that one may live: I have given my criticism," wrote Yeats, one of the few refusenik voices noted in passing in Stefan Collini's account of a remarkable 20th-century investment in popular critical writing. Collini, Cambridge Professor of Intellectual History, has pursued variations on the status of criticism since his early work on Matthew Arnold, but his interest in Common Reading is specifically the kind of material aimed at non-specialist readers, and inhabiting the woolly territory between academia and journalism proper; a territory riddled with questions of definition and purpose. At what point does a "reviewer" become a "critic"? The "critic" a "littérateur"? Are well-turned reviews more valuable than bad books, and how many words at a sitting does the common reader actually want to read?

Much of this ground is familiar from Collini's 2006 Absent Minds, a leisurely and hugely informative study of British (and the odd American) intellectuals and the ambiguities of their position in modern public life. There, in several fine portraits of individual writers (and most pointedly perhaps in a rather touching depiction of the "gracefully fatigued" TS Eliot), Collini probed not only the curious function of the intellectual but also the nature of claims to intellectual authority - a keyword for this study and its successor.

Common Reading turns to those designated in Absent Minds as "amphibious"; 20th-century thinkers who were also lively publicists of their ideas. There is a good deal of overlap between the two books, but initially Common Reading is decidedly less satisfying. Its introductory profiles of individual historians and literary journalists are mostly occasional pieces, some no more than Collini's padded reviews of recently published biographies or collected letters. Of course, these serve as examples of the very craft under analysis, but they do little or nothing to challenge conventional accounts of the various personalities - an eclectic mix of hacks, scribblers and boffins - under discussion. Cyril Connolly is, as ever, defined by disappointed promise ("no author has written so much, or so well, about not writing"), Aldous Huxley is still the impenetrable Brave New World weirdo; Stephen Spender, for all the intrigue of his recently uncovered CIA associations, remains irretrievably bland.

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THAT SAID, THESE profiles do engage, partly because Collini's linguistic unpredictability is so refreshing - see his piece on William Empson's love of literary "smacking", for instance. But at times the necessarily cursory reading strategies do poor justice to his subjects. Rebecca West is an unfortunate case in point. Distracted by her longevity and productivity as a literary journalist, Collini seems confused by the visionary modernism of her essay The Strange Necessity, passing too quickly over its groundbreaking polarisations towards a begrudging conclusion, geared largely to defending West against Virginia Woolf's remarks on her shabby dress-sense.

The significance of Collini's vignettes becomes clearer, however, in the second half of the book, where they gain context and connection in a vibrant series of negotiations with the public scene. Here he fleshes out his thesis with sparkling accounts of distinct epochs, such as the 1950s and its vexed cultural hierarchies, or of British cultural quirks, such as the working-class autodidact. Somehow, he manages to bring to life the dull practices of literary sociology, delving neatly into the growth of Dent's Everyman library or the "Penguinification" of the reading public, without losing his narrative to statistics, successfully grounding the other half of the "common reading" story in the surprising resilience of a book-purchasing or book-borrowing public.

Other literary historians have charted this territory: Jeremy Treglown's edited Grub Street and the Ivory Tower (1998) springs to mind as one forerunner. Collini's distinctions, however, beyond the richness of detail and speculation that make this book (its second half anyway) invaluable as a study of 20th-century critical writing, lie in two thematic mainstays of his discussion. The first is his running battle with biography, a genre that, he argues, obscures in its often blinkered focus on the individual the kind of cultural elites and common idioms that make up the fabric of public intellectual life. This perspective turns Common Reading into an intriguing conversation of sorts with leading literary biographers and prompts a stringent assessment of the new Dictionary of National Biography. One wonders too, if it also registers Collini's slight panic at the possibility that biography has finally come to replace literary criticism as the repository of his much-prized "authority".

The second tenet of this wide-ranging book concerns its author's now trademark resistance to cultural pessimism and the kind of reactionary nostalgia treated here in essays on notorious Jeremiahs AL Rowse and Roger Scruton. Forcefully, Collini's account of a periodical and journalistic history refuses the mythology of a glorious Victorian heyday, emphasising instead the health of a lineage carried through into the 20th-century stalwarts of Criterion, Horizon and Encounter; similarly, he insists, today's celebrity-based publishing scene has 19th-century precedents in the cultish adoration of popular writers such as Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard.

It's a valiant defence against cultural doom-mongers, but there are unavoidable touches of elegy in Common Reading. One obvious instance is in the author's disheartening meditation on the fate of the "corporate" university. Another, this more personal, shows up in his splendid reading of critic Perry Anderson. The last private scholar outside the confines of the academy, Anderson has become, writes Collini, an "untimely" figure, his esoteric vocabulary and Parnassian cultural constructions (deftly and wickedly collated here) falling as though into empty space, his presence bereft not just of a sympathetic left but of an old-style audience per se. His intellectual brilliance remains, yet "to what readership", Collini asks, "so much of the world having changed, does Anderson address himself?" This question, with its oddly poetic syntax, sometimes hangs in the general air of the book, shadowing Collini's persuasive argument that secure common readerships do indeed, for all the world's changes, continue to exist.

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Eve Patten lectures in English at Trinity College Dublin. Her most recent book, co-edited with Nicholas Allen, is That Island Never Found: Essays and Poems for Terence Brown (Four Courts, 2007)