Energised by war: the 'London' and 'New York Reviews'

Contemporary Review, Nov, 2004 by Neil Berry

FIXATED on the exploits of the tabloid press, the media pages of Britain's broadsheets seldom report on the 'higher journalism'--or even deign to notice its existence. You would hardly guess from reading them that intellectual publications such as the London Review of Books (LRB) and the New York Review of Books (NYRB), are likewise part of the media, purvey some of the sharpest comment on literature and politics and enjoy readerships that straddle the globe. Nor would you guess what prestige attaches still to this venerable field of journalistic endeavour. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, William Hazlitt hailed the first great politico-cultural periodical, the Edinburgh Review, as the 'highest rank of modern literary society', and its London and New York descendants retain more than a little of that old cachet.

Launched in October 1979 by the influential British literary editor, Karl Miller, and edited since 1992 by Miller's protegee Mary-Kay Wilmers, the London Review is twenty-five years old this autumn. Last November, the New York Review--still under the stewardship of its indefatigable founding editor, Robert Silvers, and his colleague, Barbara Epstein--reached the age of forty. The anniversaries of two such exceptional cultural institutions would deserve to be marked in any event. What makes them especially worth marking now is that with their intertwined careers and mix of British and American contributors they represent one of the more admirable aspects of the so-called 'special relationship' between Britain and the United States. In its early days, the London Review was actually distributed as an 'insert' of the New York Review, seeming like the spawn of an established American periodical which itself owed much to the historic example of British intellectual journalism. During a period, moreover, when the Anglo-American bond is widely seen as synonymous with British subservience to the US, these fortnightly Reviews are a reminder that it is capable of meaning something very different. With roots in the eighteenth-century tradition of cosmopolitan rationalism, they enshrine an approach to human affairs which prizes discussion, informed opinion and moral decency. It is in accordance with this high-minded heritage that each deplored the Anglo-American rush to invade Iraq, and that they have consistently condemned the brutal unilateralism of Israeli policy towards the Palestinian people.

Oddly enough, both Reviews owe their existence to newspaper strikes and the market gaps thus created for fresh publishing ventures. The NYRB made its debut during the New York Times strike of 1963, which had resulted in the suspension of the New York Times Book Review; in not dissimilar fashion, the LRB was launched at a time when, thanks to industrial action, publication of the Times--along with that of the Times Literary Supplement--had been halted. In a sense, both sprang from a cultural crisis on the part of their respective founders, a fear that the function of criticism was in danger of being betrayed. Transatlantic rivals with a contempt for mere commerce, Karl Miller and Robert Silvers shared the conviction that expansive argumentative journalism is a vital component of civilized existence, and their papers aped the lofty posture of the Edinburgh Review, treating books as the occasion for discursive essays which may say little about the books themselves.

The New York Review made its debut at a time when East Coast literati were still suffering from an inferiority complex vis-a-vis London, with its intellectual weeklies of world renown, such as the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Statesman. It was the latter's reputation of which Silvers was bound to be especially covetous. Celebrating its fiftieth birthday in 1963, the New Statesman of those days remained what its long-serving editor, Kingsley Martin, set out to make it: the most quoted journal of opinion in the world. Operating on the principle that 'influence is style', Martin had fashioned a socialist weekly that appealed not just to the left but to thinking people everywhere. At the beginning of the 1960s, this ethos was finding notable expression in the paper's eclectic cultural pages, then edited by Karl Miller. Miller's example was not lost on the single-minded editor of the New York Review of Books. Indeed, before long Silvers was busy poaching his leading reviewers--academics like Frank Kermode and Christopher Ricks, journalists like Conor Cruise O'Brien and Neal Ascherson--and paying them at rates undreamed of in literary London. As he ran his eye over the contributors' list in an early issue of Silvers' paper, Miller sardonically exclaimed: 'This is the best Review I ever edited!'

Great journals mirror the personalities of their editors. Far removed from President George W. Bush with his swaggering nationalism, the personality of Robert Silvers is that of an American man of letters who is also a citizen of the world. A University of Chicago graduate in politics and philosophy who lived in Paris in the 1950s, Silvers is steeped in British and European culture. While not lacking for American mentors, like the darling of the US liberal establishment, George Kennan, he nursed a special reverence for the late Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Russian-born philosopher who became an Oxford don, assuming the trappings of an old-style British Whig. Berlin's faith in rational argument and abhorrence of dogmatism were characteristic of the British patrician culture from which the 'higher journalism' emerged, and in honouring this 'British' sage and gentleman, Silvers could be said to have been honouring the wisdom of an older civilization. Silvers himself, with his eschewal of publicity and august insistence that the New York Review speak for itself, has been an exponent of the 'higher journalism' in the Victorian mould.