James on Bayley

From this week's Times Literary Review is a wonderful review ofJohn Bayley's last work by Clive James.

Forty years of John Bayley’s book reviews have given us a book almost too rich to review. Where to start? Bayley himself at one point conjures the threat of “reviewer’s terror, a well-known complaint like athlete’s foot”. Tell me about it, mutters the reviewer’s reviewer. There are more than 600 pages in the book, and after reading it this reviewer finds that he has made almost 400 notes. Every reviewer knows that, for a 1,000-word review, a mere ten notes are enough to induce paralysis. So either this is going to be a 40,000-word review, or there will have to be a winnowing. It could start with a mass crossing-out of all the phrases and sentences transcribed merely because they are excellent. Since we don’t seem to need William Gerhardie’s novels any more, do we really need what Bayley says about Gerhardie’s life? “Like most butterflies, he was far too tough to be broken on a wheel”. But no, it’s too good: we do need it. And maybe we need Gerhardie’s novels as well, if they could inspire a critic to a sentence as neat as that. In this respect, if in no other, Bayley resembles the more slavish of the old-time bookmen memorialized by John Gross in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Hacking away week after week, they either enjoyed most of what they were force-fed or else they choked on its abundance. George Gissing was only the most famous victim of piecework literary journalism. Those who survived earned the tiny immortality of termites. For them, delight was compulsory. Bayley’s delight is compulsive: a different thing. He revels in everything that has been written well, and he himself writes so well that he adds to the total. Reviewing a writer’s biography, he reads, or rereads, the other books by the biographer, every book by the biographee, and brings in all the other relevant writers he can think of. Talking about a novel, he has not only read all the other novels by the same novelist, he has read all the novels by other novelists that are remotely like this novel. (Sometimes very remotely: the resemblance of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Northanger Abbey hadn’t occurred to me before, and I wonder if it will again.) He sees no end of connections, the best thing about which is that they are not theoretical.