This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Just over a quarter of a century ago, the Secret Author attended Malcolm Bradbury’s memorial service at Norwich Cathedral.
This was a grand affair, and also an edifying one, if only for the fact that the reception, held at the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Centre, offered a chance to inspect the old-style literary world at the height of its influence.
Four Booker winners conferred over the buffet, the Poet Laureate was in attendance, and on the minibus ride to the beano the Secret Author enjoyed a chat with a pre-fame Hilary Mantel.
No doubt about it, the people who assembled, or commemorated, on that long-ago Saturday afternoon as a chill northerly breeze blew in from Jutland over the Norfolk flat, wielded power. Bradbury himself had spent the past three and half decades running the celebrated UEA Creative Writing course.
There were publishers and critics milling about with the ability to make (or break) reputations, and a bomb dropped on the Sainsbury Centre would have been the arts world equivalent of a bus containing half the Cabinet veering over a cliff.
The Secret Author remembered this gathering last month when he turned up at Merton College, Oxford for John Carey’s memorial service. Here he discovered a highly distinguished company. There were academics who had taught with, or been taught by, the former Merton professor.
There were literary editors who had commissioned him, journalists who had interviewed him, all manner of book-world personages who had sat on judging panels with him or hob-nobbed with him at Sunday Times parties.
The great, the good and the merely raffish elegiacally commingled. But did any of them, to go back to Bradbury’s memorialists, actually have any power?
The straight answer is yes, albeit of a limited kind. After all, dons still mark exams, select students, decide what goes on syllabuses and hire and fire, and literary editors still commission reviews and dispense largesse.
Carey, as an Oxford don who reviewed for a Sunday newspaper for half a century, was a very different kind of academic to Bradbury, and yet his influence was arguably just as pervasive.
On the other hand, the audience assembled in Merton’s chapel were not like the audience assembled at the UEA back in 2001, and the discrepancy lay not so much in the personnel as in what might be called the absence of collective will.
Throughout recent literary history “writers” have tended to operate under a communal alias. Back in the 1840s there was Thackeray’s “Corporation of the Goosequill”. “Grub Street”, technically a synecdoche rather than a communal alias, has been going strong for a quarter of a millennium, even though its backdrop and material prospects bear not the slightest resemblance to the literary marketplace depicted by a Samuel Johnson or even a George Gissing.
Forty years ago, there were novelists living outside London who swore by, or rather at, the existence of an entity known as “the literary establishment” and really did believe that a cabal sat in judgement over each season’s catalogues with the aim of seeing that their own darling works never made it onto the review pages.
Easy as it is to smile at this bygone resentment, there was a literary establishment back in the 1990s — low-key and (generally) unambitious, but an establishment none the less, with its movers, shakers and influencers.
The Secret Author revered Malcolm Bradbury as a man who genuinely wanted to do his best for literature, but a word or a recommendation from him to an editor, or a publisher or an anthologist was worth the having, and the ghost of Edmund Gosse (Carey’s remote ancestor at the Sunday Times), who once observed of an up-and-coming young talent that he “hadn’t yet been invited to take an interest in him”, hung over the landscape like sea-fret.
What remains of the old-style literary world’s ability to organise itself, to promote talent, to look after its chosen sons and daughters and to ensure that a proper environment exists in which books can be written, published, read, reviewed and circulated?
The answer is: virtually nothing. The marketplace is too fractured, “taste” too diffuse and the gate left wide open. You can gauge the lack of collective purpose (and the terrible cultural uncertainty that lies behind it) simply from the scattershot nature of the weekend’s books pages, where — apart from the occasional focus on some grand old stager from times gone by — nobody really knows what to lead with or which novel might go down well with an increasingly detached public.
Is there an antidote to this drift into stasis? Here the Secret Author would like to register a nostalgic pang for his hot youth, where there were genuine literary movements, and long-running vendettas and critics got cross about the issues of the day and (occasionally) refused to shake hands at parties.
Not that the book world should operate in a constant state of animosity, but at least in those ancient days there was a sense that its denizens cared.
