Jeremy Treglown

‘Book for book,’ John Banville is quoted as saying on the cover of this one, ‘[Graham] Swift is surely one of England’s finest novelists.’ This may be Irish for ‘but of course he hasn’t written all that much’, though eight novels and a collection of short stories isn’t bad going and it would be odd if work so ruminative and elegiac came out more quickly. If Swift seems costive by comparison with some of his contemporaries, in fact, it’s not that he has produced fewer novels but that he does very little other writing: hardly any journalism or criticism, no polemics.

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley ‘I can’t remember whether you said you liked Barbara Pym,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote to an old school friend around 1980, ‘but am sending Quartet in Autumn in case you haven’t got it, otherwise it can go to the Mothers’ Union Xmas sale. I do like her very much, the incidents look so trivial that there’s nothing in them and then you suddenly realise how much she’s said.’ The recommendation is typical in its lighthandedness and could also be mistaken for a fair summary of Fitzgerald’s own fiction at that time. But her work went further and deeper than Pym’s.

As in her brilliant study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm’s focus in Two Lives is on the writing of biography, especially the biography of a couple — here, the ebullient Gertrude Stein and her ugly, much exploited lover, Alice B. Toklas — and, behind that, the construction of identity itself. Like Stein’s own work, the book is vivid, elliptical and distrustful of artificial order. It’s un-Stein-like, though, in the lucidity of Malcolm’s underlying thesis: that life-writing often has a lot more in common with fiction than its practitioners have tended to admit. In the early 1930s, Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B.

If you are English and love the poetry of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Zbigniew Herbert or Czeslaw Milosz, you probably have Al Alvarez to thank, directly or indirectly. The unostentatiously brilliant, cosmopolitan reviews Alvarez contributed to the Observer over a decade from the mid- 1950s, together with his taste-changing 1962 anthology The New Poetry and his editorship of a Penguin series of modern European poetry in translation, made him at least as important to poetry-readers as Kenneth Tynan was to theatre-goers. Latterly, most of his work has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books (where he was one of the founding contributors), but in the 1950s and 1960s he was everywhere, including on radio programmes like The Critics.

‘The only novelist now writing in English whose works are likely to stand as literary classics...who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy or James.’ Verdicts like this American one on John Fowles were a lot more common in the 1960s and 1970s than they have been since, and in the USA more than the UK. Fortunately, you don’t have to agree with them to be absorbed by Eileen Warburton’s well-written, thoroughly researched and even-handed biography — her first book, and evidently a labour, if not of love, then of the queasy fascination which will also be most readers’ main response.

Despite many allusions to Virgil and a diligent summary of various interpretations of Poussin's 'Les Bergers d'Arcadie', Ben Okri's main sense of Arcadia, with its 'star-dust magic', seems to be derived from pop music lite. 'We are stardust, golden', sang Eva Cassidy in Woodstock, 'and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.' Anyone who has been tempted to replace this with 'We've got to get back to the weedin' ' will know what's missing from Okri's view of nature. Realism apart, In Arcadia has no narrative tension and the characters are ciphers.