Comfort reading for the interwar years

Spectator

5 hours ago

A prospective reader who chanced upon Recommended! without its subtitle might be forgiven for thinking that the six grim-looking portraits on the cover depict the Watch Committee of an exceptionally puritanical interwar-era seaside town. This would be a misjudgment, as, rather than being charged with censoring films or evicting courting couples from cinema back rows, Nicola Wilson's galère – Hugh Walpole, Clemence Dane, George Gordon, Edmund Blunden, Sylvia Lynd and J.B. Priestley – turn out to have made up the selection panel of the early 1930s Book Society.
The subtitle is, of course, a wild exaggeration. Even at its high-water mark, the Society's membership was in the low five figures. Victor Gollancz's propagandising Left Book Club had many more subscribers and shifted thousands more copies. On the other hand, the bestselling Walpole, Priestley and their colleagues had undeniable cachet. Gordon was the Oxford Merton Professor of English; Blunden a poet-don; and mesdames Lynd and Dane well-known figures of their time. To the average middle-class subscriber of middlebrow tastes they offered a failsafe route into the mainstream literary culture of the day.
Wilson, who teaches publishing studies at the University of Reading, where many of the relevant archives are stored, might have been expected to take an academic tone. On the contrary, her style is informal to the point of chatty. Everyone is referred to by their Christian names, and James Joyce and Nora Barnacle's wedding party is described as a 'proper do'. Happily, when she isn't coming across like a guest on The One Show, she offers a fascinating guide to bygone concepts of 'taste' and how you went about bringing them to the wider public.
Naturally, the tocsin of commerce sounds loudly. While the Society tried very hard not to look like a publishers' cartel, there were bitter disputes about the panel's keenness on books issued by Gollancz, William Heinemann and Jonathan Cape. At the same time, all those present were conscious of their duty to broaden their subscribers' sensibilities, and genuinely left-field choices such as Kate O'Brien's Without My Cloak (1931) could sometimes be found rubbing shoulders with less challenging work by A.J. Cronin and the popular historian Arthur Bryant. That said, E.M. Delafield's The Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels looks far more representative of the Society's approach than, say, J.M. Denwood and S. Fowler Wright's Red Ike: A Novel of Cumberland.
There were times, as Wilson acknowledges, when a selection could save a writer's career. Graham Greene, in lowish water after the failure of his second and third novels, had his prospects transformed by the surprisingly narrow (three votes to two) emergence of Stamboul Train (1932). Even then there was a corking row when Priestley, by this point no longer a selector, read a proof copy and imagined himself libelled by the portrait of the bluff, pipe-smoking, Dickens-obsessed northern novelist Mr Savory. Thirteen thousand bound copies had to be unstitched so that Greene could make the necessary changes.
Wilson is careful to salt her history with biographical sketches of the major players. Lynd was always obliged to balance the demands of her professional life with looking after her hard-drinking journalist husband Robert; Blunden frequently had to take the measure of an increasingly complex emotional round. Much of the tension which enveloped the Society as the 1930s wore on had a political subtext: Cecil Day-Lewis, who joined the committee in 1937, was a paid-up communist; Blunden, once war was declared, found his pacifist sympathies seriously in question and had his college rooms turned over by MI5.
The postwar years were less hospitable to the kind of literary culture that Walpole & Co had peddled in the era of Stanley Baldwin. Daniel George caught something of the changing atmosphere in his review of Brideshead Revisited in the Society's newsletter of May 1945. Evelyn Waugh, he noted, seemed 'determined to wring our hearts with lamentations for a past shared by a precious few'.
Recommended! is an engaging piece of publishing history, even if Wilson has an irritating habit of scrambling the names by which her subjects were known at the time. Thus Heinemann's majordomo A.S. Frere appears as 'Arthur S. Frere'; Margaret, Lady Rhondda, the feminist proprietor of Time and Tide, is 'Lady Margaret Rhondda'; and F.R. Leavis's redoubtable wife Q.D. masquerades as 'Queenie D. Leavis'. Critics often complain that books of this kind are too soberly academic for the general taste. This one could have done with more sepia and less gloss.