Click the image to find this book on Amazon.
It is a truth universally forgotten until too late, that as soon as we call a kettle black we start turning into a pot. I know too much about Constance Garnett, her husband Edward and his father Richard. There are things about them that I don’t like, as Joseph Conrad and George Calderon didn’t. I am sure therefore that, like the good bishop whom I took to task in my penultimate post, I could not write an objective review of this recent biography of Edward Garnett — what I produced wouldn’t be cricket.
However, I have always said that with a couple of exceptions I am not reviewing books on this blog, but discussing them as examples of biography and focussing on the issues they raise. With that hat on, then, perhaps I can avoid becoming a pot.
On the evidence of Helen Smith’s densely researched biography, Edward Garnett was the greatest publisher’s reader of all time. He practically discovered Galsworthy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, H.E. Bates and many others. He tirelessly criticised them, encouraged them, found work for them, subsidised them, saved them from depression and helped solve their personal problems. The extent of his altruism in this respect is a complete revelation to me, as is the extraordinary accuracy of his critical judgement. T.E. Lawrence was not exaggerating when he wrote that ‘School of Garnett’ might be ‘the classification of English literature across a quarter of a century’.
But the phenomenon of Edward Garnett raises interesting issues. Dickens, say, or Chekhov, had friends who read their manuscripts and commented on them, but as far as I know these writers were not exposed to a ‘publisher’s reader’, let alone an ‘editor’ who rewrote their prose for them. When Garnett started as a reader for T. Fisher Unwin in 1887 the lowly post already existed in other publishing houses, but as he moved through Unwin, Heinemann and Duckworth to Cape he transformed it into the all-powerful one of today’s Publisher’s Editor (or even Publisher tout court). The reason for this, as Smith meticulously demonstrates, is that most of Garnett’s writers had poor literary taste and hardly any powers of self-criticism. He had to ‘educate’ them. What developed was a symbiotic relationship, often tempestuous, in which Garnett wielded enormous power. In that sense, it seems, today every publisher’s editor is an Edward Garnett. I don’t think this hegemony is beneficial to either writers or publishers.
Helen Smith has very successfully solved the biographer’s basic problem, which is (in Ruth Scurr’s words) to find a narrative form that fits the life in question. Her first chapter tells the story of the Garnett family from 1789 with terrific pace and by page twenty Edward is married to Constance and working at Unwin. The book then gradually settles into a chapter each on Edward’s distinguished literary protegés, whilst never losing continuity or ignoring his wider relationships. If you are irresistibly attracted to the lives of writers, you will love this book. If you are seriously engaged with English literature between the 1890s and 1930s, you must read it.
Related
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon, 1912
George Calderon c.1901
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Captain of the 11
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
The Editor-in-Chief
Click the image to find this book on Amazon.
It is a truth universally forgotten until too late, that as soon as we call a kettle black we start turning into a pot. I know too much about Constance Garnett, her husband Edward and his father Richard. There are things about them that I don’t like, as Joseph Conrad and George Calderon didn’t. I am sure therefore that, like the good bishop whom I took to task in my penultimate post, I could not write an objective review of this recent biography of Edward Garnett — what I produced wouldn’t be cricket.
However, I have always said that with a couple of exceptions I am not reviewing books on this blog, but discussing them as examples of biography and focussing on the issues they raise. With that hat on, then, perhaps I can avoid becoming a pot.
On the evidence of Helen Smith’s densely researched biography, Edward Garnett was the greatest publisher’s reader of all time. He practically discovered Galsworthy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, H.E. Bates and many others. He tirelessly criticised them, encouraged them, found work for them, subsidised them, saved them from depression and helped solve their personal problems. The extent of his altruism in this respect is a complete revelation to me, as is the extraordinary accuracy of his critical judgement. T.E. Lawrence was not exaggerating when he wrote that ‘School of Garnett’ might be ‘the classification of English literature across a quarter of a century’.
But the phenomenon of Edward Garnett raises interesting issues. Dickens, say, or Chekhov, had friends who read their manuscripts and commented on them, but as far as I know these writers were not exposed to a ‘publisher’s reader’, let alone an ‘editor’ who rewrote their prose for them. When Garnett started as a reader for T. Fisher Unwin in 1887 the lowly post already existed in other publishing houses, but as he moved through Unwin, Heinemann and Duckworth to Cape he transformed it into the all-powerful one of today’s Publisher’s Editor (or even Publisher tout court). The reason for this, as Smith meticulously demonstrates, is that most of Garnett’s writers had poor literary taste and hardly any powers of self-criticism. He had to ‘educate’ them. What developed was a symbiotic relationship, often tempestuous, in which Garnett wielded enormous power. In that sense, it seems, today every publisher’s editor is an Edward Garnett. I don’t think this hegemony is beneficial to either writers or publishers.
Helen Smith has very successfully solved the biographer’s basic problem, which is (in Ruth Scurr’s words) to find a narrative form that fits the life in question. Her first chapter tells the story of the Garnett family from 1789 with terrific pace and by page twenty Edward is married to Constance and working at Unwin. The book then gradually settles into a chapter each on Edward’s distinguished literary protegés, whilst never losing continuity or ignoring his wider relationships. If you are irresistibly attracted to the lives of writers, you will love this book. If you are seriously engaged with English literature between the 1890s and 1930s, you must read it.
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