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Pleasing Themselves: Clive James, Peter Ackroyd and J M Coetzee Are among Numerous Writers to Have Published Collections of Literary Journalism This Year. but What Is the Point of Such Books? Does Anyone Read Them?
Beginning of article
One of the funniest scenes in Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish a Room (1971) - funny, that is, to anyone who writes about books for a living - takes place in the immediate postwar era at the party to launch the monthly magazine Fission. Among the guests are a brace of celebrated literary critics, Bernard Shernmaker and Nathaniel Sheldon. Shernmaker is a lofty grey eminence, a kind of lay version of Professor John Carey. Sheldon is a bouncing tabloid hack. Publishers, we are informed by Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins, debate endlessly the question of whether Shernmaker or Sheldon "sold" any of the books they discussed.
"The majority view was that no sales could take place in consequence of Sheldon's notices, because none of his readers read books. Shernmaker's readers, on the other hand, read books, but his scraps of praise were so niggardly to the writers he scrutinised that he was held by some to be an equally ineffective medium. It was almost inconceivable for a writer to bring off the double-event of being mentioned, far less praised, by both of them."
Neither Shernmaker (who offers young writers "guarded …
