Introduction to a ‘New Review’ Personal Anthology

I’ve lately been doing some research into the poet, editor and biographer, Ian Hamilton, for which purpose I’ve been spending a lot of time with his magazine, the New Review. Though it lasted only four years (1974–8) and fifty issues, no single publication, as far as I’m concerned, has had more of an influence on British literary culture over the past half century. Some of that is down to what it published – the many stories, essays, poems that have gone on to achieve canonical status; just as much is to do with its creation of what Ian McEwan has called “a milieu”. From its second home in the Pillars of Hercules pub on Soho’s Greek Street (the New Review’s actual offices were next door), the magazine became an intellectual meeting point for writers at all stages of their career, but crucially for the young, among them Julian Barnes, Jim Crace, Andrew Motion, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Blake Morrison and McEwan himself. Our bookshelves might look very different had these great writers not found the early encouragement and camaraderie they did here.

Immersed as I currently am in this milieu, I have decided to make my personal anthology a selection of twelve stories that appeared in the New Review. Since I love a great many more than just twelve, I have tried to be as representative as I can with my choices; to select a roughly equal number from each year of the magazine’s publication, and to mix the widely anthologised with the relatively obscure. Without being able to mention any of the poetry, criticism, reportage, interviews or editorials it published, I cannot show all that the New Review has done for our literary culture; but I can at least make a case for its enormous contribution to fiction.

‘A Scandalous Woman’ by Edna O’Brien

The first story the New Review ever published is also one of the best they ever published. Its title refers to Eily Hogan, the most beautiful girl in the village for whom the story’s younger, female narrator will do almost anything. This includes helping Eily conduct her assignations with a bank clerk, but doesn’t extend to admitting her own role in the affair when Eily gets pregnant and is forced into marrying the man. The resulting rupture in their friendship is heartbreaking, and the unhappiness into which Eily sinks in her loveless marriage a savage indictment of Catholic Ireland. “Ours indeed was a land of shame, and a land of murder, and a land of strange sacrificial women,” the story ends despairingly.

First published in the New Review, April 1974. Collected in A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974

‘Annie, California Plates’ by Jim Crace

If you weren’t personally acquainted with Jim Crace when you encountered this, his first published work of fiction, on its initial publication in the New Review, you’d have every reason to think he was American. It had this John Denver-esque title. It was accompanied by an author photo of, so far as I can tell, David Crosby. And then there was the story itself, which traverses both the landscape and language of the States with effortless authority and has for its subject that most American of things, a car. But the guy’s from Hertfordshire!

I struggle to think of a more accomplished start to a publishing career. It really is a perfect story that, when Hamilton produced a ‘Best of the New Review’ anthology in the mid-eighties, he put in pride of place right at the beginning.

First published in the New Review, June 1974. Collected in The New Review Anthology, Heinemann, 1985. Available online here

‘Mr Sookhoo and the Carol Singers’ by Shiva Naipaul

Mr Sookhoo has a “master plan”. “All them children you does see singing carol singing for charity” – what if the money were never to reach the charity? Left in no suspense as to the outcome of so great a deception, we read on not for the plot but for Naipaul’s dialogue, which is as charming as it comes. Here is our protagonist, a Hindu, explaining his newfound interest in Christianity to the local headmaster in a bid to conscript pupils to his choir:

    ‘I don’t know how to say this, Head – it going to sound funny coming from a man like me – but, all the same, I think I finally see the light.’
    ‘What light?’
    ‘Head! How you mean “what light”? That don’t sound nice coming from a man like you, a man of education.’
    Mr Archibald’s vanity was touched. ‘Sorry, Mr Sookhoo. But, as you yourself said, coming from a man like you…’
    ‘Sooner or later a man have to set his mind on higher things’, Mr Sookhoo intervened solemnly.

First published in the New Review, September 1974. Collected in Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth: Stories and Pieces, Hamish Hamilton, 1984

‘Last Things’ by Malcolm Bradbury

Observing in its prefatory note how Muriel Spark’s obsession with “fiction and death” has been “making her novels shorter and shorter”, this very short, very funny parody announces itself as “not an excerpt from, but the entirety of, her newest, shortest, and most deathly work, The Nuns of Terminus”.

And you could almost believe it, Bradbury captures Spark’s voice and mannerisms so well. From the start, we know that Sister Mercy, “who is famous for being stupid … will die, in distressing circumstance”, and are fairly sure how it’s going to happen: “‘I hope you are both keeping an extremely careful eye on the weather,’ says Sister Felicity, who is small and fat, with a shrewd mouth. ‘It is perhaps the commonest way available of procuring our downfall.’”

While we wait for the inevitable strike of lightning, Bradbury takes the opportunity to make some more general points about fiction. “‘You must understand, Mercy, I have been in a novel before’”, says Felicity, who indeed appeared in Spark’s novel of the previous year, The Abbess of Crewe. “‘It is extremely uncomfortable, unless one manages to stay entirely peripheral to the main line of the action … the best way is to be a member of the servant classes.”’ The founder of UEA’s Creative Writing Course and writer of all those great campus novels never could quite take off his teacher’s hat.

First published in the New Review, March 1975. Collected in Who Do You Think You Are?, Secker & Warburg, 1976

‘In Isfahan’ by William Trevor

An unusually exotic work from Ireland’s laureate of small-town disappointment, this story concerns the almost-romance of two tourists in the Iranian city of Isfahan. The tourist to whom Trevor’s camera predominantly cleaves is Mr Normanton. Middle-aged and greying, Normanton takes an immediate liking to the thick-lipped, “sensuous”, thirty-something Iris Smith when he first sees her in the office of a guided bus tours company. He likes her rather less when they begin to talk, for Iris is suppressing a “Cockney twang” and he is a snob.

Nevertheless, as two people alone in a foreign city (and alone in life, it is revealed), they continue to meet, and the rest of the narrative sees Normanton trying and failing to overcome his prejudices to make the connection he so desperately needs. He was never going to succeed, being a William Trevor character, but that futility is what makes the story so moving.

First published in the New Review, June 1975. Collected in Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories, The Bodley Head, 1976, and The New Review Anthology, Heinemann, 1985

‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ by John McGahern

McGahern began his relationship with the New Review as early as its second issue, when it published an extract from his brilliant novel, The Leavetaking. It is this self-contained piece from a year later, however, that I really love.

Composed, like its title, of three parts, it starts with the accidental death of an Irish worker on a London building site. Then it moves to County Leitrim, to the moment when the man’s family learn of their loss. Then it’s several weeks later, and we’re at a dance held to raise funds for the family, who have bankrupted themselves flying their boy over from England. All this, which says so much about Anglo-Irish relations at that time, and manages to be first shocking, then devastating, then heartwarming – all this in just a few pages. It’s a masterpiece of concision.

First published in the New Review, October 1975. Collected in Getting Through, Faber & Faber, 1978

‘Pornography’ by Ian McEwan

Besides Hamilton, there is probably no one more closely associated with the New Review than Ian McEwan. First appearing in Issue 4 with his story ‘Solid Geometry’, he would contribute six stories in total (more than any other writer), as well as serve as an occasional reviewer, interviewee and, when his first books began to come out, subject for review.

All six stories are exemplary and would be worth discussing here. I have chosen ‘Pornography’ for its mise-en-scène. Set in and around a Soho pornography shop, the story plays out a stone’s throw from where it was published, in the New Review’s offices in Greek Street, a reminder to those who only know the area as it is now that high literary culture wasn’t exactly what it was known for back then.

Not that we are given much cause to mourn Soho’s gentrification in ‘Pornography’. Bleak, sordid and, in its final pages, leg-crossingly uncomfortable, it is Ian McEwan at his most Ian Macabre.

First published in the New Review, February 1976. Collected in In Between the Sheets, Jonathan Cape, 1978

‘One Day in November’ by Cora Sandel, translated by Elizabeth Rokkan

Although it mainly ran Anglophone fiction, the New Review also published a number of stories in translation. This one, by the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel, I confess to knowing very little about, other than it appeared in the magazine two years after Sandel’s death, was translated by Elizabeth Rokkan and is a very fine story indeed. (I’d be grateful to anyone who can tell me more.)

The November of the title refers to November 1918, the month of the Armistice. This is not your usual war story, though. As tenants of “a splendid, but very antiquated, very ramshackle country estate” in rural Brittany, the family at its centre live well away from the fighting, only encountering it all when they offer hospitality to passing soldiers. But this is still too close for comfort. When they catch scabies from, they presume, one of their guests (“Scabies was rife in the trenches”), “at peace” is the last thing they feel when the Armistice is announced at the end of the story, and we leave our narrator abandoning the celebrations in search of a desperately needed bath. It’s a powerful metaphor for the irreparability of war.

Published in the New Review, November 1976

‘The Need for Something Sweet’ by Nadine Gordimer

Like ‘A Scandalous Woman’, ‘The Need for Something Sweet’ is the story of a formative but unequal friendship. In its case, the narrator is a young man, and the person to whom he attaches an attractive older woman by the name of Anita Gonsales. When they first meet, through the man’s job at the Civil Service’s international telephone exchange, he sees romance in the woman’s attempts to contact her estranged husband in Spain. In his innocence, it signifies a life lived.

As they get sexually involved with one another, however, he soon realises the truth: that she is a sad, lonely alcoholic whom he is far too green to help. Fast-forward thirty-one years and we now find our narrator middle-aged, materially successful but no more happy in life and marriage than Anita Gonsales. The perplexing thing she said when they first met – “You don’t realise it will all happen to you” – now makes perfect, haunting sense to him.

First published in the New Review, January/February 1977. Collected in A Soldier’s Embrace, Jonathan Cape, 1980

‘The Mobile Bed Object’ by Patricia Highsmith

The title of this bald and brutal story is about as euphemistic as it gets. “There are lots of girls like Mildred,” goes its more characteristic first sentence, “homeless, yet never without a roof – most of the time the ceiling of a hotel room, sometimes that of bachelor digs, of a yacht’s cabin if they’re lucky, a tent, or a caravan. Such girls are bed-objects, the kind of things one acquires like a hot water bottle, a travelling iron, an electric shoe-shiner, any little luxury of life … they are interchangeable.”

Terms defined, Highsmith proceeds to chronicle Mildred’s life, from her leaving home at fifteen to “the danger age” of twenty-three at which the value of a woman in her line of work diminishes. “Want[ing] to continue the same life but with a greater sense of security”, she attaches herself to wealthy, jet-setting Sam Zupp, who provides her with everything but that one big “nest egg” she needs to retire and escape this grim existence. If you’ve read any other of Highsmith’s Little Tales of Misogyny, in which disturbing book this story was collected, you’ll know not to expect a happy ending.

First published in a German translation as part of Kleine Geschichten für Weiberfeinde, Diogenes Verlag, 1975. The collection came out in English under the title Little Tales of Misogyny, Heinemann, 1977 – and reissued as a Virago Modern Classic in 2014. This particular story was published in the New Review in August of the same year

‘Obsessions’ by Francis Wyndham

“I still dream about the Manor, although I have not seen it for over thirty years and could not have entered it more than a dozen times in the days when I lived nearby.”

If the opening to ‘Obsessions’ leads us to expect a Rebecca-style gothic, then the character introductions that follow it soon put us right. There are the owners of the Manor, Sir Jocelyn Bignall and his wife Lady Bignall, “whose first name, by fateful coincidence, was also Jocelyn”. There is Lady Bignall’s daughter by her first marriage, Madge, who has “married a soldier much older than herself; General Sir Archie Fuller was indeed nearly the same age as Sir Jocelyn.” And then there is the Fuller’s son, “named after his grandmother and therefore confusingly called Jocelyn too.”

They are clowns, in short, but still, by dint of their rank, figures of awe and fascination for our narrator, who is terrified when his near-contemporary, the youngest Jocelyn, invites him to tea. Refusing this first invitation after some hilarious agonising about what excuse to give, he accepts the next one, and thereafter his life becomes forever entwined with theirs. His ambivalence speaks powerfully to how we still think about class in Britain.

First published in the New Review, September 1977. Collected in Mrs Henderson and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1985

‘The Loneliness of the Short Story Writer’ by Shashi Tharoor

Now a prominent figure in Indian politics, Shashi Tharoor was just twenty-one when he sold this story to the New Review. Reminiscent in its comedy of Updike’s Henry Bech stories, it has for a protagonist a writer with a quite different problem to the perennially blocked Bech: Jennings Wilkes can’t stop writing.

This would be fine were it not for the “verisimilitude” of his work: “He never concocted his plots: he found them in the quotidian experiences of living. He never created characters: he borrowed his friends, and occasionally his enemies, and populated his manuscripts with their likenesses.” The result has been his systematic alienation from everyone he has ever known and cared about, as well as the torching of every new relationship he forms; he just cannot help laying bare their lives and weaknesses in print.

It’s a terrific conceit and Tharoor has great fun with it – as do we. The story can also be read more satirically, however: as a critique of those writers like Updike, Bellow and Roth (much of the story takes place on a psychiatrist’s couch) who did so unthinkingly lift straight from life. Tharoor reckons with the ethics of this – and in a prose every bit the equal of those writers’. It’s amazing he was just twenty-one.

First published in the New Review, March 1978. Collected in The New Review Anthology, Heinemann, 1985; also collected in The Five Dollar Smile and Other Stories, Viking, 1990, under the title ‘The Solitude of the Short-Story Writer’