LITERATURE
Kathryn Hughes
Circus of Dreams
Adventures in the 1980s
Literary World
by John Walsh
Constable £25 pp432
In 1989 John Walsh found
himself unaccustomedly lost
for words. As the newly
minted literary editor of The
Sunday Times, one of his first
duties was to have lunch at
the Savoy Grill with the
brilliant academic polymath
and reviewer George Steiner.
Walsh had mugged up on
some topics in readiness.
But before he had a chance
to launch into a piercing
observation about the best
way to translate Dostoevsky,
Steiner shushed him. All the
Great Man wanted to talk
about was a story that had
appeared that morning in
a tabloid claiming that
Andrew Neil, Walsh’s editor at
The Sunday Times, habitually
left stains on his pillowslips
thanks to his use of a
particular hair tonic. “Do you,”
the author of On Difficulty and
Other Essays, asked, all agog,
“think it’s true?”
It is this mixture of high
and low, sacred and profane,
running through Walsh’s
account of literary London in
the 1980s that makes it such
a joy. There is no disguising
his excitement as he recalls
how, after a decade in the
doldrums, the novel burst out
in thrilling new shapes and
colours. Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children (1981),
Graham Swift’s Waterland
(1983) and Julian Barnes’s
Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
all played games with form,
throwing narrative fragments
into the air before
reassembling them in waysthat prompted questions
about the novel’s obligation to
look and sound a certain way.
Not forgetting Ian “Macabre”
McEwan, who had previously
stunned with his short story
about a pickled penis, or
Angela Carter, who was busy
rewriting classic
fairytales
in a prose style
that Walsh
describes as
standing out
like “a clump of
Venus flytraps
in the agreeable
bluebell wood of
contemporary
English prose”. He
is, you will gather, no mean
stylist himself.
All the same, Walsh is
careful not to position himself
as a friend of his heroes.
While delighting in how far he
has come from south London
grammar school boy to
literary editor of, first, the
Evening Standard and then The
Sunday Times, he is careful to
play the part of innocent
abroad. His role is that of a
picaresque hero in a
narrative that has touches
of Hogarthian sternness
about pride coming before
a fall. So, for instance, he
claims that when his
deputy literary
editor at The
Sunday Times
turns out to
be a young
Nigella
Lawson,who insists on
climbing on to his
lap to show him
how to manage his computer,
all he can do is mumble
awkwardly into her hair. He
also spends an excruciating
lunch at the Waldorf with his
hero Martin Amis, who picks
delicately at a minimalist plate
of moules marinière while
Walsh, having ordered poorly,
chomps through heartyWhen books
became
showbiz
Rushdie, Amis, McEwan, Carter and the
decade when literature suddenly got sexy
brisket and root vegetables
like a deranged trencherman.
Another time, thrilled to be
giving Seamus Heaney a lift,
Walsh blurts out that he
thinks the ending to the poet’s
new play, The Cure at Troy,
could be improved. Heaney
responds with crinkly but
ambiguous charm:
“I’ll have another look at the
script and see if anything can
be salvaged.. .”
Alongside these comic
beats Walsh offers a shrewd
analysis of the structural
shifts that allowed the
literary industry to
transform itself from
drab and worthy in
the 1970s to hip and
cool ten years later.
First up is something
called “prize
culture”.
Whereas
once upon
a time the
BookerThe wrong
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Rock’s
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Too many people are
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Ringmasters Ian McEwan,
left, and Martin
Amis, 1991.
Above: Jay
McInerney,
centre, and
publicist
Caroline
Michel in 1988John Walsh and
Anthony Burgess
in 198820 3 April 2022