Several Strangers
Claire Tomalin
Viking £18.99, pp248
Even in the glimpses allowed here, Claire Tomalin's life has been so eventful that one almost wishes she had produced a full memoir rather than this retrospective collection of reviews and essays.
Although she is best known for her prizewinning biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Nelly Ternan and Jane Austen, Tomalin's career began in publishing and progressed to writing via literary journalism, and the short autobiographical chapters that preface each section of Several Strangers offer a rich and intriguing picture of literary London a generation ago.
This was a time when Shiva Naipaul, V.S. Pritchett, James Fenton and Craig Raine were among Tomalin's star reviewers and Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Timothy Mo were her bright young assistants, and her account of these years is infused with a deep affection and admiration for these writers.
She has divided the book into three sections to cover the distinct stages of her life, explaining her title in terms of the personal changes she experienced: 'Collecting reviews from three decades has brought me face to face with several strangers who went by my name.'
Most remarkable, however, is the turbulent personal life that ran parallel to, and to some extent fuelled, Tomalin's literary ambition.
Her family life is related matter-of-factly, without self-pity and only where it bears upon her career, but choosing to weight the book in this way means that she glosses over potentially devastating events with an almost complete absence of emotion. 'One of my daughters was struck by an illness which ran a grim course for a year and led to her death. Work became my refuge,' she writes in the chapter about her years as literary editor first of the New Statesman, then of the Sunday Times.
We hear no more about the death of her daughter, not even her name; the episode appears as a footnote, as do the accounts of her husband's serial adultery, the death of her baby son, the birth of a second son with spina bifida, and her husband's tragic death while reporting from the Golan Heights in 1973. Yet this refusal to allow any more than a fleeting glance at her private feelings appears as quiet dignity rather than coldness, a reminder that the point of this book is the collected book reviews to which the life is a backdrop.
The reviews and essays garnered in Several Strangers offer a useful overview for the general reader, since Tomalin covers a broad range of literary subjects without becoming enmeshed in literary theory. Instead, she displays a refreshing and infectious pleasure in books, particularly in rediscovering little-read works or writers; there are fascinating pieces on the letters of Caroline Norton, on William Hale White and Ethel Smyth as well as scholarly essays on, among others, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy.
It becomes apparent, however, that the review and the essay are two separate forms, and that the latter is the more durable. The weakest points in the book are the recent fiction reviews.
Taken largely from the review pages of broadsheet newspapers, they lack the substance of the longer journal pieces, and there is something curiously superficial about reading a short review of a novel published 10 years ago and which you will probably never read.
I would have wished instead for a fuller account of Tomalin's years in the thick of literary journalism, flavoured with more anecdotes of the kind where she recalls Andrew Neil complaining to Rupert Murdoch that Tomalin's books pages on the Sunday Times are too highbrow: ' "Leave the book pages alone," said Murdoch. "Nobody reads them anyway." I decided I would take this as an expression of support from our proprietor.'
Several Strangers is perhaps of limited appeal, but for those interested in the business of writing, it is a lively portrait of a career at the heart of the world of books.
