D J Taylor
Caches in the Attic
Not long ago I had a telephone call from a somewhat distressed biography-writing friend. It had been his ambition to write a book about, well, let us call him X, a justly celebrated editor, poet and long-term ornament of the postwar literary scene who died some years ago. My friend’s difficulty lay not in finding a sponsor, for an enthusiastic publisher stood ready to sign him up, but in getting past Mrs X, his subject’s widow, who had expressed her opposition to the project. Was there anything he could do, he wondered? The straight answer, alas, was no, for Mrs X controlled her late husband’s copyrights. Without her say-so there would be no permission to quote and we would be in Eliot country, that debatable and problematic land in which Peter Ackroyd somehow managed to write his 1984 biography T S Eliot.
At the time I thought Mrs X’s prohibition wholly misguided, on the grounds that X was a great man whose achievements needed celebrating, that without a biography they might be in danger of being overlooked, and that my friend, on the evidence of his past work, would have done an
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’
@rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis made jazz cool.
Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way
Richard Williams: In Their Own Sweet Way - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lo...
literaryreview.co.uk
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner